Journal of the American Academy of Religion, XLV1/2

Supplement (June, 1978), A

Jesus the Salesman:

A Reassessment of
The Man Nobody Knows
Wayne Elzey

ABSTRACT
One of the most memorable images in American inspirational literature
is Bruce Barton's portrait of Jesus as the archetypal businessman who
"forged twelve men from the bottom ranks of business into an organization
that conquered the world " This essay analyzes Barton's best seller to
illustrate one method for understanding the appeal of images of Jesus and of
the truly Chnstlike life in popular religious literature. Critics and historians
are nearly unanimous in judging The Man Nobody Knows to be a prime
example of the materialism and "glorified Rotananism" of the Protestant
churches in the 1920s I argue that the appeal of Barton's book rested with his
articulation of a system of familiar stereotypes and symbols as a pattern for
thought Barton reminded readers of a classification system capable of
structuring experience on a continuum between opposite poles represented
by life in a small town (Nazareth) and life in a city (Jerusalem). He mapped a
moral or symbolic geography in which each pole symbolized sets of
admirable and dangerous qualities. The Sunday-school Jesus, caricatured by
Barton as a moralistic physical weakling, was the incarnation of the worst of
both worlds, Barton's Jesus combined the best. Advertising furnished many
more examples for demonstrating the accuracy of such a world view. In
conclusion-I suggest that while the content of these opposing worlds varies
from book to book, inspirational best sellers often organize experience in a
structurally similar manner.

Wayne Elzey (Ph.D., University of Chicago), Associate Professor in the Department

of Religion at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, has published essays on popular
religion in the Journal of Popular Culture and Soundings, in addition to JAAR

Copyright 1978 American Academy

152 Wayne Elzey

Nowhere is the quest for the "real" Jesus pursued

with more assurance and imagination than in inspirational
and devotional literature. Social worker or miracle
worker, civic reformer or group leader, revolutionary or
businessman, logotherapist or thanatologist, the life
and ministry of Jesus has been an inexhaustible source
of authority for baptising cultural movements and fads
/I/. Albert Schweitzer concluded that writers of ear-
lier and more scholarly lives of Jesus had "created Him
in accordance with their own image" (4) and it approaches
a truism to say the same about authors of inspirational
books in the modern United States.
Popular images of Jesus tell us little that is reli-
able about the historical Jesus. But perhaps more than
any other symbol, views of Jesus do offer valuable clues
for deciphering the mental universes and value systems
of different forms of popular religion, as I will try to
show by taking as one example Bruce Barton's memorable
"portrait" of Jesus as "the founder of modern business."
The wide appeal of Barton's book (and others like it), I
suggest, lay not only with what critics rightly charac-
terized as a self-serving description of Jesus, but with
an underlying, complex system of categories and stereo-
types which reminded readers of the structures of real-
ity and of human experience. The true character of the
Master was revealed and validated by the logic of every-
day life.
A crucial question in the analysis of any widely
popular religious book is one of focus. The revolution
in the study of religions exemplified in Emile Durkheim's
The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life rested to a
large extent on shifting the inquiry from the "big"
questionsconceptions of the gods, doctrines, creeds,
ethical ideals, religious experiences of awe or of the
Infiniteto the cultural systems for classifying "the
humble vegetables and animals,...ducks, rabbits, kanga-
roos, lizards, worms, frogs, etc." (105).
At best, there is only the roughest of analogies
between the symbolic classifications of "primitive" re-
ligions and the symbols and stereotypes of modern
Jesus the Salesman 153

religious literature. The popular book may draw on wide

cultural and religious movements, but it invariably dis-
torts, simplifies or even inverts them, as Charles M.
Sheldon did, for example, with respect to the Social
Gospel. Religious books are the works of individuals and
often autobiographical. They appeal only to limited seg-
ments of American society and there is no precise way to
determine exactly who reads any given book. Nonetheless,
the analogy is an illuminating one, for it shifts atten-
tion away from the message and doctrinal content of the
book and focuses on the many anecdotes, examples and
stories which typically make up the bulk of the content
of inspirational books like The Man Nobody Knows.
Barton admitted that the life of Jesus did not lend
itself to any one facile interpretation. Divinity, like
beauty, was in the eye of the beholder. "He was, as we
say, 'many sided,' and every man sees the side of his
nature which appeals to him most." To the doctor Jesus
was the Great Physician, to the literary critic the model
stylist. The "agitator" remembered Jesus' denunciation
of the rich and the "communist that his disciples carried
a common purse." But, Barton confessed, "I am not a doc-
tor, or a lawyer or a critic but an advertising man"
(1925:124-25). Advertising was only one of Barton's many
interests. His father, William E. Barton, was a Congre-
gationalist minister in Oak Park, Illinois, biographer of
Abraham Lincoln and a frequent contributor to The Chris-
tian Century during the 1920s with his "Parables of Safed
the Sage." Bruce Barton graduated Phi Beta Kappa from
Amherst College in 1907 and was voted "the man most likely
to succeed." After ventures in railroading and magazine
publishing, Barton founded an advertising firm with Roy
S. Durstine in 1919. In 1928 the agency merged with
George Batten Company to become Batten, Barton, Durstine
and Osborn, Inc. At the time of Barton's death in 1967
at age eighty, BBDO was the third largest advertising
agency in the world.

Barton served two terms (1938-1941) in the U. S.

House of Representatives as congressman from New York
City. He ran the publicity campaign for the Republican
154 Wayne Elzey

Party in the national elections of 1936 and was an arti-

culate spokesman for the party's "liberal" wing during
the 1930s. In an editorial on August 30, 1938, the New
York Daily News urged Barton to run for the presidency.
Barton had his share of critics. Roosevelt brack-
eted the leading opponents in the House to the New Deal
in the cry "Martin, Barton and Fish" in the campaign of
194 0. Others alleged that he was a "Republican in
Sheep's Clothing," crassly manipulating the press for
political advantage (Woodward). "Barton, Barton, Barton
and Barton," complained Gilbert Seldes, exasperated by
Barton's ability to gain consistently favorable attention
in the papers. "If you can put over five cents worth of
alcohol and castor oil as a dollar hair tonic which mil-
lions of fooled Americans believe grows hair, then why
not advertise Bruce Barton into the White House" (1938:
329) .
"Get it done and let them howl!" Barton responded
and ran (unsuccessfully) for the U. S. Senate in 1940.
He was a prolific writer, authoring nearly 100 articles
in popular magazines between 1922 and 1928 alone. In
addition to The Man Nobody Knows, he wrote several other
widely read religious books (What Shall It Profit a Man'',
What Can a Man Believe?, He Upset the World) and The
Book Nobody Known _.came a nationwide best seller in 1927.
Along with lending a much appreciated spiritual presence
to advertisers harassed by charges of manipulating the
public for profit, Barton was praised as one of the few
top executives who could write effective copy. He wrote
famous advertisements for *-he Alexander Hamilton Insti-
tute, the Harvard Classics, U. S. Steel, Forest Lawn
Cemetery and the Revised Standard Version of the Bible

When Barton took a fresh look at the career and

personality of Jesus, he discovered that the real Jesus
had been obscured for centuries, first by theologians
and more recently by Sunday-school teachers. Stripped
of all "dogma, creeds and sentiment," he announced,
the greatest advertising campaign since the world began
was conducted by Jesus Christ in the last three years of
Jesus the Salesman 155

his life. Jesus' skill in capturing the attention of

crowds of publicans and sinners, his "personal magnetism,"
his parables ("the greatest advertisements of all time"),
his pep and "executive ability" ranked the New Testament
as the best textbook on methods of salesmanship.
Jesus was good copy. "Reporters would have fol-
lowed him every single hour," Barton pointed out, "for
it was impossible to predict what he would say or do."
A typical day found Jesus making the front page of the
Capernaum News ("if there had been one") six times (1925:
126) ,

PALSIED MAN HEALED

JESUS OF NAZARETH CLAIMS RIGHT TO
FORGIVE SINS
PROMINENT SCRIBES OBJECT
"BLASPHEMOUS," SAYS LEADING CITIZEN
"BUT ANYWAY I CAN WALK," HEALED MAN
RETORTS.
Barton admitted that Jesus faced trials and setbacks,
even apparent defeat in the end. Faithful to the logic
of advertising, Barton came dangerously close to pictur-
ing the Crucifixion as the greatest public relations
stunt ever staged. Rejected on every side, Jesus con-
sidered a less hectic career in Jericho. "It is only
eighteen miles to Jericho, bright moonlight and downhill
all the way," he mused in the Garden. Downhill it would
have been. But Jesus resolved to face his enemies with
such dignity and courage and with such boldness that the
image of the "big man" forever impressed itself on the
public consciousness. Jesus' career took on new mean-
ing and relevance. "He would be a great national adver-
tiser today," Barton confidently predicted, "as he was
a great advertiser in his own day." "Wist ye not," read
the book's epigraph, "that I must be about my Father's
business?"
Although The Man Nobody Knows was widely reviewed,
serious studies of the book do not exist. The book is
nearly always mentioned in histories of American reli-
gion in the twenties, frequently only as an occasion to
reintroduce the familiar picture of American Protestantism
156 Wayne Elzey

sunk beneath smug and shallow materialism during the

"Babbittonian Captivity" of the churches, complete with
"jazzy advertising techniques, catchy sermon titles,
peppy promotion stunts, overly-costly church buildings,
go-getting good fellows in the pulpit, prodigious church
campaigns in such fields as bowling and basketball, the
equating of size with success, and the whole concept that
'religion pays'" (Miller: 35).
"Jesus for a vulgar age!" snorted Seldes, reviewing
the book in the New Republic. Not only was Barton "ig-
norant of the history of Christianity," his "slapdash
psychology" resurrected the Son of Man in the guise of
"Brother Rotarian" (1925:127). Barton's "Rotarian vi-
sion," complained the New York Times (April 10, 1925,
p. 11), "belittles the meaning and purpose of his sub-
ject1 s work. It is a picture in which the go-getter,
the worshipper of 'personality' and of the 'human dynamo,1
the mixer, the man who can 'put his message across,1 will
take comfort."
"Jesus, under Mr. Barton's hand, is in fact reduced
to the moral proportions which make him a kind of sub-
limated Babbitt," editorialized The Christian Century the
same year (May 21, p. 658). In The Popular Book, James
D. Hart charged tha4- Barton had "reconciled religion and
modern morality by iucing the former to the latter,
creating a Gospel according to the times of Coolidge
and a savior for supersalesmen" (241; cf. Schneider and
Dornbusch: 90-92). Walter B. Pitkin, reviewing The Man
Nobody Knows for the New York World (June 7, 1925, p. 4 ) ,
challenged readers to "try and consider this volume ob-
jectively and you will instantly be bewildered or else
infuriated. Later you may laugh. For, regarded as a
historical interpretation of Christ's personality, it is
probably the absurdest jumble ever put into type. And
when I say this, I speak with feeling as well as exper-
ience, having raad most of tne German, French and Italian
output on _ne subject as well as the English." Even to
critics less versed in "output" than Pitkin, the book
seemed little nr re than idolatrous fiction. Barton
preached "culture Protestantism" at its worst. The
Jesus the Salesman 157

command "Feed My Sheep!" had been updated to "Manage my

ranch!" and the Judgment Seat swapped for a comfortable
Morris chair.
While critics despaired the public rejoiced. Typi-
cal was a letter sent to Barton by the president of a
large corporation, congratulating him on the book's suc-
cess, appending a list of questions, and requesting
Barton to write another book answering them. "Consider
this an order for the first copy. The theologians may
shoot you at sunrise, but the questions I have asked are
what we ordinary fellows want to know" (Barton, 1927:iii).
Even the critics did not find the book boring. "It will
convince many," predicted the New York Times, "though
others will find it dropping into absurdity. But it
will interest everybody." And it very nearly did. The
Man Nobody Knows was a best seller in 1925 and 1926. It
was quoted by ministers, politicians and businessmen and
defended by Barton in American Magazine, Collier's and
Women's Home Companion. Barton revised the text sub-
stantially in 1952 and the book was reissued in paper-
back. The Man Nobody Knows ranks second only to Fulton
Oursler's The Greatest Story Ever Told as the most widely
read life of Jesus written in the United States and war-
rants reexamination.
Two points can be made at the outset. First, it
was clearly an exaggeration to seize on Barton's book
as an accurate reflection of the shape of American Pro-
testantism in the 1920s. Robert Moats Miller noted that
"the writings of Barton are almost invariably cited as
proof positive of the materialism of the churches in the
twenties. Is it perhaps not time that historians noted
the heavy criticism of these writings coming from within
Protestantism itself?...Reinhold Niebuhr and Fosdick,
nor Henry L. Mencken and Walter Lippmann, penned the
sharpest indictments of the churches. The Christian
Century and Zion's Herald, not the American Mercury and
the New Republic, carried the more acute criticisms of
Protestantism" (35).
Second, it was also inaccurate to charge Barton with
trying to recast religion in a Rotarian mold. The
158 Wayne Elzey

opposite was the case. The major failing of modern

churches, he stated at length in What Can A Man Believe9,
was precisely that they attempted to be social clubs,
offering "entertainment," "motion-picture shows" and
"bazaars." Too many modern ministers were well-meaning
but spiritually shallow individuals whose highest goals
were to "organize clubs, attend ball games and [be] good
fellows generally." Unnoticed by his critics was Barton's
complaint that the typical modern minister had nothing
of the "prophet" in him and that "faith" and not "reli-
gion" stood at the center of Jesus' teachings. "Jesus
asked: 'When the Son of Man cometh shall he find faith
on the earth?' He did not ask: 'Shall He find a mor-
ning service at eleven o'clock, an evening service at
seven, a mid-week prayer meeting and a young people's
society?' But 'shall He find faith?"1 (1927:226).
The vocation of advertising, it is true, symbolized
for Barton an ideal and style of life which could inform
and invigorate any socially useful role. But he did not
simply strain the Scriptures through a textbook on adver-
tising methods, as so many implied. Rather, the life of
Jesus presented one set of examples for illustrating the
structures of human experience. Advertising furnished
another set. And t'-e second set of examples matched the
first.
The rising status of the advertiser and salesman
during the twenties provided Barton and his readers with
a potent symbol. As ownership of businesses passed into
the hands of stockholders, many of whom were middle-class
employees with modest incomes, they in turn exerted con-
tinuous pressures for greater sales. Salesmen and adver-
tisers responded with a myriad of new gimmicks, promo-
tional campaigns and quasi-religious appeals (Sprague).
The large volume of goods turned out by increasingly
efficient methods of mass production lifted advertisers
and salesmen to even greater prominence. "Business had
learned ar never before- the immense impo.rtance of the
utlimate consumer," Frederick Lewis Allen wrote in Only
Yesterday.
Jesus the Salesman 159

Unless he could be persuaded to buy and buy

lavishly, the whole stream of six-cylinder cars,
super-heterodynes, cigarettes, rouge compacts,
and electric ice-boxes would be dammed at its
outlet. The salesman and advertising man held
the key to this outlet. No longer was it con-
sidered enough to recommend one's goods in
modest and explicit terms and place them on
the counter in the hope that the ultimate con-
sumer would make up his mind to purchase.
The advertiser must plan elaborate national
campaigns, consult the psychologists, and
employ the eloquence of poets to cajole, ex-
hort, or intimidate the consumer into buying.
(169)

As poet, psychologist, preacher, businessman, sociologist

and politician, the life of the advertiser seemed to many
the richest and fullest vocation imaginable.
Advertisers like Barton had come to regard their
work as a "profession" and a "science" which required
"training" and market "research." Less and less did
they work as evangelists breaking down the sales resis-
tance of hardened consumers. For Barton and others, the
customer was neither sinner nor saint but simply condi-
tioned by circumstances and force of habit. He was in-
different perhaps, or bored, or preoccupied. The adver-
tiser saw himself as holding considerable power. He not
only merchandised goods to consumers who might "want" or
"need" them, he created the "wants" and "needs" through
contagious and captivating advertisements. So did Jesus,
Barton noted. Christianity triumphed, "not because there
was any demand for another religion, but because Jesus
knew how, and taught his followers how to catch the atten-
tion of the indifferent and translate a great spiritual
concern into terms of practical self-concern" (1925:104).
If the advertiser saw himself as creating the market
or "demand," he believed he did so by creating the "sup-
ply." "We speak of the law of 'supply and demand1 but
the words have gotten turned around," Barton wrote.
"With anything which is not a basic necessity the supply
always precedes the demand" (1925:90). Chain stores,
mass production, refrigeration, rapid transportation,
standard packaging, national brand names and the require-
ments of pure food and drug laws all worked to level the
160 Wayne Elzey

real differences in the price, quality and availability

of products. The "personality" or "image" of a brand,
created by the advertiser, became the basis of consumer
loyalty. As advertiser David Ogilvy observed some years
later, "it is almost always the total personality of the
brand rather than any trivial product difference which
decides its ultimate position in the market" (Mayer: 58;
cf. Boorstin, 1973: 89-156).
To Barton then, advertising was the essence of power
and creativity. The successful advertiser created form
out of the void. By the same token, the greatest threats
to his success were formlessness and formalismthe in-
ability to create a vivid and distinctive personality for
the products he sold or the temptation to be overly par-
ticular about a product's values, thus restricting sales
to a limited and specialized market. Barton utilized
various sets of symbols to illustrate these dangers in
numerous anecdotes throughout The Man Nobody Knows.
From the one side came the threat of sameness and con-
formity; from the other came the danger of pettiness and
logic-chopping distinctions. And though the advertiser,
confronted with these dangers, was called to rise higher
than others, too often he fell far lower.
Donald Meyer was one of the few to dissent from the
opinion that Barton simply canonized the salesman. Not-
ing that nearly every reviewer assumed that Barton "was
not calling in Jesus to save an ailing world, but calling
Him in simply as business's supreme sanction," Meyer
countered that "this was not Barton's view. His whole
polemic turned on his insistence that business was ail-
ing. Something had been lost--some sense of excitement
and meaning work once had had when gathered under the
religious concept of the 'calling. ' All work is reli-
gious work. Barton cried. All business is our Father's
business. Business as an autonomous realm, unmeasured
from beyond itself, as a realm merely of efficiency, let
alone merely of money-making, suffered from a spread of
meaninglessness" (178).
What was the measure of business if not business it-
self? Barton's answer, though not entirely original,
Jesus the Salesman 161

was ingenious. He articulated a system of stereotypes

and symbols by mapping a social universe, a moral geog-
raphy of East and West, deserts and foreign lands, vil-
lages and cities. All virtues, all failings, all human
possibilities and styles of life were allocated their
proper places on this symbolic map. Barton showed,
through a wealth of examples, that the traditional "pro-
fessions"law, medicine, education, the ministryand
vocations which had only recently claimed the status of
professionsmotherhood, social work, public service,
farming, salesmanshipcould and ought to be measured
against this standard. And at the center of this world
stood the businessman.
Barton was not the first to grant the successful
businessman a prominent place in a popular religious
novel. Thirty years earlier one of the most beloved of
all popular Jesus novels, Sheldon's In His Steps (1897),
also had much to say about the world of business. But
Sheldon's businessman was very different from Barton's
salesman. Like the domestic and sentimental novels pre-
ceding it, In His Steps juxtaposed a male-dominated world
of businessmen, wealth, status and success to a softer and
more feminine world of mothers, children, religious sen-
timent and the home. For Sheldon, the world of business
and the professions was a "hard" world, devoid of feeling
and warmth. Hardhearted and uncaring, the businessman
lived in an emotionally empty world of utilitarian rela-
tionships. With sufficient shock--a providential bank-
ruptcy or a child expiring of tuberculosishe might be
led to a softening and feminization of his character.
But all in all, business and the professions scarcely
held in themselves the potential for a fully human
existence.

If the problem facing the businessman at the turn

of the century was that he felt too little, by the mid-
twenties it was that he thought too much. In chapter
after chapter, Barton drove home this point. Caught in
a complex bureaucracy of purchase notices to be filled
out in quadruplicate, the businessman felt restricted
and hemmed in by "little things." Life had become a
162 Wayne Elzey

"tangle of philosophic formulae." The businessman was

overwhelmed by regulations, options, advice and pres-
sures from every side. He had to gain the attention and
win the allegiance of customers and clients. He had to
keep those under him content and productive. And some-
how, through it all, the businessman had to maintain his
integrity and not be swayed by what others thought of
him. All to frequently he worried and feared taking
risks. And, Barton counseled, "to choose the sure thing
is treason to the soul." The businessman went through
life "mentally divided against himself." Evil resided
in the mind, in an improper way of thinking. By the
same token so did salvation, and The Man Nobody Knows
provided readers with a model exercise in proper
thinking.
This Barton did by contrasting the man nobody knows
with the man everybody always thought they knew, the
Jesus of the Sunday schools. Centuries of misunderstand-
ing had distorted the real Jesus into a "pale young man
with flabby forearms and a sad expression," a sissified
111
lamb of god1 who was weak and unhappy and glad to die."
The Sunday-school Jesus was as defective socially as he
was physically. Introverted and mean-spirited, Jesus
had been pictured as a "kill-joy" who "went around for
three years telling people not to do things." Unlike
"the Great Companion" and "the most popular dinner guest
in Jerusalem," the Sunday-school Jesus was "a man of
sorrows," humorless, ascetic, "meek and lowly." "They
have shown us a frail man, under-muscled, with a soft
face--a woman's face covered by a beard--and a benign but
baffled look, as though the problems of living were so
grievous that death would be a welcome release" (1925:42-
43) .
A large part of the appeal of the book was due to
Barton's skill in redrawing biblical characters in modern
dress. People in biblical times, he assured the reader,
were little different from people today. Judas was only
the familiar "small-bore businessman," "not really a bad
fellow at heart, hard-boiled and proud of it....It was
no easy job being treasurer for a lot of idealists."
Jesus the Salesman 163

David, Daniel and Samson must have been as formidable as

any modern prize fighter ("Could David whip Jim
Jefferies? Samson could! Say, that would have been a
fight!"). The "stern-faced" Prophets, despite their
lasting contributions, could be disagreeable. "You are
moved by their moral grandeur, but rather glad to get
away. They are not the kind of men you would choose as
companions on a fishing trip" /3/.
By rehearsing these and other stereotypes, Barton
reminded readers that although world war, immigration,
psychology, a revolution in morals and the automobile
had altered the surface of reality, the world ran essen-
tially as it had in the time of Jesus. Rural and small-
town people still feared the contaminating presence of
outsiders. Then as now, fathers (with the notable ex-
ception of Joseph) were distant and unresponsive to their
children. Tax collectors were still "despised," bankers
were fat and farmers were muscular and healthy.
Barton organized these social symbols into a system
which showed, by means of ordinary examples, the logic of
experience. Sheldon's earlier picture of Jesus drew on
somewhat similar stereotypes. But Sheldon chose a quite
different setting for the activities of Jesus and pic-
tured him with a very different personality. If Jesus
were to find himself in modern America, Sheldon believed,
he would descend from his mansion to minister in song,
sermons and social work to the poverty-stricken lower
classes of the city slums. Taking Sheldon literally, the
most Christlike life conceivable was that of a beautiful
and sentimental revival singer. "I want to suffer for
something," yearned Felicia Sterling, a debutante in the
story, and so did the other characters who gave up for-
tune and renown in self-sacrificing love for a life of
"service" to the poor. None was very successful in im-
proving the spiritual or material lot of the lower
classes, as it turned out. But the objective success of
Sheldon's urban missionaries was less important than the
tranformations wrought in their own lives. The natural-
ness, emotion, spontaneity and unstructured style of
lower-class social relationships rubbed off on them,
164 Wayne Elzey

making them more perfect human beings. The unfeeling

had learned to feel.
Where Sheldon's vision of Jesus had centered on the
social-working, sentimental revival singer, Barton fo-
cused on the opposite, the boostering, pragmatic and
self-assured salesman. Sheldon demonstrated how senti-
mental music could melt the hearts of hardened sinners;
Barton illustrated how good advertising copy enabled one
to gain power and influence over millions. Both books
utilized the figure of Jesus to show the necessity for
combining the virtuous qualities of two very different
worlds. The setting of Sheldon's book was a vertical
urban world, sharply divided between a sterile and un-
feeling class of wealthy businessmen or aristocrats, and
an overly fertile, overly natural class of laborers and
immigrants. In Barton's more horizontal universe,
"wealth" and "poverty" have receded as the central cate-
gories. "Village" and "city" have taken their place as
symbols of antithetical kinds of social relationships.
The Man Nobody Knows opened as Jesus was turned
away by the inhabitants of a small, unnamed "backwoods
village," much to the dismay of his disciples who urged
him to consume it with the fires of Heaven. Refusing
to be drawn into petty disputes, Jesus silently walked
away and gained his first triumph. The book ended on
an opposite yet similar note. Jesus was rejected again,
this time in the city of Jerusalem, but "a crucified
felon looked into his eyes and saluted him as king."
Jesus silently gained his greatest triumph as he "over-
came the world."
Between these two episodes, Barton developed the
personality of Jesus by selecting events from his life
and organizing them into seven chapters. Each chapter
illustrated a different dimension of Jesus' character
and career"The Executive," "The Outdoor Man," "The
Sociable Man," "His Method," "His Advertisements," "The
Founder of Modern Business" and "The Master." Jesus'
career, like that of the advertiser, was the synthesis
of several roles and vocations.
Jesus the Salesman 165

But the major device Barton employed to show the

perfection of Jesus was the contrast between the village
and the city. Each of the book's chapters found Jesus
traveling between his "home town" of Nazareth and the
"capital city," Jerusalem, or between other villages and
smaller cities in the area. Numerous anecdotes and ref-
erences to other successful men who came from the town
to the city--Amos, John the Baptist, Paul, Billy Sunday,
David Lloyd George and especially Abraham Lincolnfur-
ther illustrated the nuances of village and city life.
The world, Barton demonstrated, was organized so
that community bonds increased and social hierarchy
weakened as one moved from cities to less intensively
inhabited areas. Thus, towns and villages such as
Nazareth were places where the body (both physical and
social) was strong but internal social organization was
weak. Positively, the village was a realm of informal
and egalitarian relationships, of natural friendliness,
humor and health. "Life was a cheerful and easy-going
affair with them. The sun shone almost every day; the
land was fruitful; to make a living was nothing much to
worry about. There was plenty of time to visit. Fami-
lies went on picnics in Nazareth, as elsewhere in the
world; young people walked together in the moonlight and
fell in love in the spring. Boys laughed boisterously
at their games and got in trouble with their pranks"
(1925:10). The village fostered the physical and spiri-
tual qualities of life. Businesses in the village usu-
ally involved physical labor in a craft like, well,
carpentry.
Conversely, tolerance or openness of the community
to outsiders and utilitarian organizational skills in-
creased as one moved out of the villages and into the
cities. "Executive ability" flourished in Jerusalem as
nowhere else, as did other managerial abilitiesleader-
ship, financial acumen, analytical thinking, regard for
proprieties and for the hierarchical ranks conferred
through birth or lengthy training in the traditional
institutions, such as the schools or th~e church.
166 Wayne Elzey

Theologically, uninhabited areas and villages were

the realms of the spirit and the body; cities, of mind
and matter. At its widest, Barton's symbolic geography
encompassed the "East" and the "West." Where did Jesus
receive the vision of his calling? "The consciousness of
his divinity must have come to him in a time of solitude,
of awe in the presence of Nature. The western hemisphere
has been fertile in material progress, but the great
religions have all come out of the East. The deserts
are a symbol of the infinite; the vast spaces that divide
men from the stars fill the human soul with wonder.
Somewhere, at some unforgettable hour, the daring filled
his heart" (1925:12-13). Throughout the book, places
where there were no people (wildernesses, deserts, gar-
dens) or foreign cities where there were disinterested,
nonpolitical people (Tyre, Sidon) remained for Jesus
places of inspiration, vision or just relaxation. The
"religious" dimension of life was the solitary individ-
ual standing before something mysterious and unfathomable.
"One reason I like to go to the Catholic Church some-
times," Barton acknowledged in the Reader's Digest, "is
just because I do not understand what is being said"
(1937:97). "Nature" and solitude were the spiritual
filling stations to which Jesus retreated to "refill the
deep reservoirs of his strength and love" and to renew
the vision that enabled him to live purposefully in
society.

Life in the desert or the wilderness, nonetheless,

was unsatisfactory in itself. A solitary life spent
alone in "nature" produced anti-social and judgmental
individuals like the Prophets or John the Baptist.
"John was austere, harsh, denunciatorya lonely spirit"
who emerged from his frequent "fasts and vigils" with
"flaming eyeballs." "He drew crowds who were willing
to repent at his command," Barton observed, "but had no
program for them after their repentance. They waited for
him to organize them for effective service, but he was
no organizer" (1925:30).
Life in the village was deficient also. Although
the sense of common purpose and the loyalty of the
Jesus the Salesman 167

inhabitants of the village to one another were admirable,

these virtues easily turned into pressures to conform
and discouraged independence. Nazareth was emotionally
stifling. These "simple folk, uneasy among strangers"
were "prejudiced and reluctant" to welcome them, fearing
the polluting influence of outsiders. Life was insular
and parochial, motivated by an "ignorant self-sufficien-
cy." Lacking culture and sophistication, the citizens
of Nazareth were the butt of jokes in "the fashionable
circles of Jerusalem" for their "crudities of custom and
speech."
Any among their number who dared venture outside re-
turned to face the "pent up envy" of the town "for one
who has dared to outgrow it." Without adequate distance
from one another, the people of Nazareth were constantly
involved in one another's private lives. Nazareth was
filled with the "buzz of malicious gossip" and "ill-
concealed envy" at Jesus' success. "No man is a hero to
his valet." Nazareth, like Gopher Prairie, was dullness
made God. The village was and is simply "small." And
Jesus, responding to the calling, "knew that he was big-
ger than Nazareth."
Barton found remedies for all the problems of the
village in a city such as Jerusalem. With a weaker sense
of community, outsiders were tolerated, even welcomed.
With a stronger sense of internal ranks, the citizens of
Jerusalem avoided the smothering relationships of the
village. Taken alone, however, life in Jerusalem was as
defective as life in Nazareth or in the wilderness. Out-
siders may have been welcomed, but only to fleece them of
their money. Jerusalem was a "den of robbers." Citizens
of Jerusalem enjoyed considerable material benefits but
were spiritually bankrupt. The leaders, symbolized by
the Scribes and Pharisees, were "stern men, immune to
sentiment" and "supercilious" "hypocrites" who worried
about moving in circles of "proper people." They were
trapped in the "numbing grip of ancient creeds," moral-
istic and "painfully careful" to observe "formalities."
Educated in trivia, they engaged in "long arguments
backed up by many citations from the law."
168 Wayne Elzey

The formalism of city life was aggravated by the

absence of broad vision. Although city dwellers excelled
in analytical and organizational abilities, they lacked
the sense of common purpose which characterized life in
the closed community of the village. If the social body
was weak, so was the physical body of the typical urban
citizen. Many were "flabby" and like Pilate had "the
colorless look of indoor living." Like the blind man at
Bethsaida, city people tended to be hypochondriacs.
The unformulated argument of the book is that vil-
lages and cities represent extremes of social experience,
deficient in opposite ways. Nazareth had a strong sense
of community bonds and a weak sense of internal structure.
Jerusalem was the reverse. The "incarnational" structure
of The Man Nobody Knows illustrated the melding of these
opposite and seemingly incompatible worlds in two differ-
ent ways. When the failings of the citizens of the
village and city were combined, the result was the Sunday-
school Jesus, introverted and intolerant of diversity,
as physically unhealthy, afraid of risks and stuffy as
the Scribes and Pharisees. When the virtuous qualities
of the village and city were combined, the result was
Barton's Jesus, at home in the middle-sized city (suburb?)
of Capernaum, "Jesus'favorite city."
As "the perfect human being," Jesus combined the
best of the village and the city while avoiding the worst.
He was always the Mediator, "an overflowing fountain of
strength" in the Temple, still "The Outdoor Man." Infor-
mal and folksy in the company of Scribes and Pharisees,
he remained "The Sociable Man." Where villagers were
busy minding everybody's business and city dwellers
minded their own business, Jesus was about his Father's
business. Small towns were the homes of "idealistic men"
and cities the realm of "practicality." "Idealist he is,"
Barton wrote, "but there is nothing in the whole hard
world so practical as his ideals."
Was it still possible to live as Jesus had lived?
Barton believed so, for the categories of village and
city still served as the measure of existence. He re-
called a dinner in honor of David Lloyd George.
Jesus the Salesman 169

The food was good and the speeches were impres-

sive. But what stirred one's imagination was
a study of the men at the speaker's table.
There they weresome of the most influential
citizens of the present-day world; and who were
they? At the one end an international finan-
cierthe son of a poor country parson. Be-
side him a great newspaper proprietor--he came
from a tiny town in Maine and landed in New
York with less than a hundred dollars. A lit-
tle farther along the president of a world-wide
press associationa copy boy in a country
newspaper office. And, in the center, the boy
who grew up in the poverty of an obscure Welsh
village, and became the commanding statesman of
the British Empire in the greatest crisis of
history. (1925:11-12)

If the personality of Jesus stood as the measure

of existence, it was matched, potentially at least, by
the profession of advertising. As mediator between cli-
ent and consumer, the successful salesman avoided monot-
ony and formalism and exemplified the best of village
and city life. The salesman led by serving others. His
was a practical science of genial competition for cus-
tomers in which naturalness, open-faced friendliness and
physical attractiveness proved most efficient devices for
selling goods and organizing men. He educated the public
in practical and informal techniques for comforting the
body and uplifting the spirit. Advertiser Frank Presbrey
observed in 1929 that "the vacuum cleaner, the kitchen
cabinet, iceless refrigerator and many other labor-saving
devices which advertising has brought into the homes of
people of ordinary means" provided "physical comforts"
and were at the same time "good for the soul." They gave
the middle-class consumer "a pleasure which others get
only from the possession of a fine painting" (616).
Advertising, like the ministry of Jesus, conformed
to the laws of nature. "Nature" was a portfolio of
color advertisements where "the brilliant plumage of
the bird is color advertising addressed to the emotions
of its mate. Plants bedeck themselves with blossoms,
not for beauty only, but to attract the patronage of the
bee." Taken as a whole, Nature was one big advertisement
for God. "No one," Barton challenged, "can look up at
the first and greatest electric sign--the evening stars--
170 Wayne Elzey

and refuse to believe its message: There is a Cause: A

God" (1925:125).
Nothing expressed the combination of the natural
integrity of the village and the culturally effective
executive skills of the city so well as the call for
"sincerity" in advertising. "Why do two very different
advertisements work equally well?" asked Roy Durstine
in MAKING ADVERTISEMENTS and Making Them Pay (1921).
"Sincerity is the reason. Two advertisements may be as
different as a subway guard and an Episcopal bishop and
yet each one will make its appeal....There ought to be
something about an advertisement as contagious as the
measles. Without sincerity an advertisement is no more
contagious than a sprained ankle" (Watkins: 59). Why
were Jesus' parables "the most powerful advertisements
of all time"? "Sincerity," Barton answered, "glistened
like sunshine through every sentence he uttered."
"Sincerity" meant minimally that the advertiser
should not misrepresent the qualities of the products
he sold. Moreover, the "sincere" advertisement neither
smothered the reader in sentiment nor talked down to him
in a "literary" style. "Jesus hated prosy dullness."
Above all, perhaps, the sincere advertisement was the
memorable advertisement. "The best identification of a
great ad is that its public is not only strongly sold by
it," Raymond Rubicam of Young & Rubicam wrote, "but that
both the public and the advertising world remember it for
a long time" (Watkins: viii). "Because the advertise-
ments were unforgettable," Barton observed of the para-
bles, "the Idea lived."
The sincere advertisement subtly captured the rea-
der's attention. Like Barton's portrait of Jesus, it
jogged his memory and seemed to remind him of something
he already knew but had never taken time to think through.
In winning over customers, Barton advised, "you can't jump
directly at them and make an effective landing. You must
put yourself in the other man's place; try to image what
he is thinking....You encourage him to say 'yes' and 'yes'
and 'that's right' and 'I've noticed that myself,' until
he says the final 'yes' which is your favorable decision"
(1925:105)
Jesus the Salesman 171

Many of the most famous advertisements written in

the 1920s and judged "great" by veterans in the business
reflected a world organized much like that of Barton's
book. Introverted, dull or countrified individuals could
gain the useful tools of culture and sophistication while
at the same time avoiding the tedious and debilitating
formal training demanded by the Scribes and Pharisees in
the institutions of learning and culture.1 "Hugo's French
at Sight" guaranteed that foreign languages could easily
be mastered at home, without "going through a grammar
and learning innumerable rules and irregular verbs!"
Anyone, promised a famous advertisement for the Sherwin
Cody School of English, could quickly unlearn such "glar-
ing mispronunciations a 'for-MID-able,' 'ave-NOO,' and
KEW-pon'" and gain "a mark of breeding that is all too
rare." Second to none was the Pelman Institute, offer-
ing a three-month home-study plan for learning French,
Spanish or German (again without that "toilsome grammar")
and a briefer eight-week "Scientific Mind-Training" pro-
gram designed to "sweep away Forgetfulness, Inertia,
Mind-wandering, Procrastination, Indecision, Mental Con-
fusion, and all the other 'brain weeds.1"
One reader testifed about "What 15 Minutes a Day
Reading Dr. Eliot's Five-Foot Shelf of Books Has Done to
My Bank Account" (increased earnings by $15 per day) and
another ("One Year Married All Talked Out") found renewed
marital happiness on the same shelf. Perhaps the most
famous of all advertisements in the 1920s was written
by John Caples, later a vice president at BBDO. A young
man with no "inborn talent" or "formal training" wowed
his unbelieving audience in the same manner Jesus had
astonished the scornful Scribes and Pharisees in the
Temple. "They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano, But
Then I Began to Play!"
The advertiser informed the public of its shortcom-
ings and educated readers in the latest techniques and
informal methods for overcoming problems. Barton and
others justified advertising as "educational" and the
role of the advertiser as one of public-spirited "ser-
vice." "Service" no longer connoted a life of
172 Wayne Elzey

self-sacrificing love for the poor and down-trodden as it

had for Charles Sheldon. Service now referred to the
thoroughly enjoyable and rewarding harmony of mutual self-
interest, benefiting the manufacturer, the consumer and,
almost incidentally, the salesman.
To illustrate Jesus' demand for selflessness and
humility, Barton cited the "boast" of a famous shoe manu-
facturer: "We put ourselves at your feet and give you
everything you can possibly afford." This was the true
"spirit of modern business" discovered by Jesus. No iso-
lated religious virtue, it should be practiced in any
socially useful role. "No single kind of human talent or
effort can be spared if the experiment is to succeed.
The race must be fed and clothed and housed and trans-
ported, as well as preached to, and taught and healed.
Thus all business is his Father's business. All work is
worship; all useful service, prayer" (1925:180). The
universe, running smoothly according to the law of sup-
ply and demand, equally blest the recipients of service
and the salesmen who provided it.
The salesman made money, of course, but Barton was
careful to insist that profits and titles were secondary
to vision and a sense of well being. The spirit was in
control of the body and the mind was free from material
constraints. "In all the years that I was with the New
York Life Insurance Company," George W. Perkins told
Barton, "I never once asked what my salary was to be or
my title. None of us who made that Company ever wasted
much time over such questions. We had a vision of extend-
ing the Company's service throughout the world, of mak-
ing it the finest, most useful institution of its kind.
We made it that, and it made us rich" (1925:166).
In stressing the importance of "service," Barton
urged his readers to become professionals in every di-
mension of their lives. Selflessly involved in imper-
sonal "work," Jesus and the modern businessman "literally
lost their lives in it. And when they found their lives
again, they were all of them bigger and richer than they
ever supposed they could be." Informal techniques, pur-
sued with confidence and ambition, could change the
Jesus the Salesman . 173

world. "Nothing is impossible," Barton maintained, "if

your will power is strong enough."
The 1952 revised edition of The Man Nobody Knows
differs enough from the original version to warrant a few
words in conclusion. Many of the changes were relatively
insignificant. Jesus was referred to as "Him" and not
"him," quotations were from the RSV rather than the King
James translation of the Bible and the language was toned
down throughout. "Flabby" priests were now "angry" or
"dissipated." In 1924, Zacchaeus was "a despised little
Jew" but by 1952 he had been rehabilitated as "a greedy
little man." Other changes resulted from updating many
of the anecdotes and examples.
Most apparent, however, was Barton's attempt to
delete the passages referring to advertising and sales-
manship. Gone were chapter titles such as "His Adver-
tisements," the front page stories in the Capernaum News,
the reference to the stars as the first electric sign,
the description of the parable of the Good Samaritan as
"the greatest advertisement of all time" and most of the
other analogies drawn between Jesus and the advertiser.
Had Barton simply deleted the references to adver-
tising or replaced them with less specific terms, his
portrait of Jesus would have remained much the same as
before, if drawn in less bold strokes. Clearly, the
revisions went deeper. The hues and outlines of a dif-
ferent Jesus began to emerge. The emphasis shifted away
from the "big man" who took charge to organize and mani-
pulate others for higher purposes and their own good.
Jesus began to show an interest in making management
human, a more client-centered personality who now shared
the failings of others. Rather than conquering life,
Jesus taught ways of adjusting to it. Where the earlier
Jesus had been clever enough to "put himself in step"
with people to gain their allegiance, now he unhesitat-
ingly "identified with them" /A/.
The best advertisements, Barton concluded, "were
written by men who had an abiding respect for the intel-
ligence of their readers." Decoding the nature of this
"intelligence" (and the lack of it) is an important task
174 Wayne Elzey

for assessing the appeal of inspirational literature. I

have suggested that one dimension of the appeal of popu-
lar religious books lies with their reliance on a shared
reservoir of categories or social stereotypes.
The content and tension between sets of focal cate-
gories vary from book to book. Sheldon demonstrated how
status must be tempered with feeling and Barton showed
how natural friendliness must be combined with contrived
techniques of manipulation. Recent best-selling inspira-
tional books divide the world along other lines, melding
the salvageable virtues of street gangs and bureaucrats
(David Wilkerson, The Cross and the Switchblade), manage-
ment and sex appeal (Marabel Morgan, The Total Woman),
"smother mothers" and judgmental fathers (Ruth Carter
Stapleton, The Gift of Inner Healing), or concentration
camps and the free world (Richard Wurmbrand, Tortured
for Christ, and in a different way. C o m e Ten Boom, The
Hiding Place). The visions of Jesus and of the authen-
tically Christian life differ, of course. But the meth-
ods of revealing them remain much the same in each in-
stance. Consciously or unconsciously, elements from
everyday life are selected, systematically distorted and
organized into a coherent world view to remind readers
of an answer to the age-old question, "What manner of
man is this?"
Jesus the Salesman . 175

NOTES

/I/ Two anthologies of modern views of Jesus are

those of Anderson and Hayes. Martin gives a polemical
assessment of popular interpretations of Jesus.

/2/ Mayer (42) gives a brief account of the selec-

tion of BBDO's advertisement for the RSV ("Biggest Bible
News in 346 Years") along with some of the losers (e.g.,
"The Bible Jesus Would Have Loved"). During World War I,
Barton provided Evangeline Booth with what became the un-
official motto of the Salvation Army"A man may be down
but he's never out."

/3/ Barton found many other examples in The Book

Nobody Knows. Among the ten most memorable women in the
Bible was Eve, depicted as the original pioneer woman,
forging bravely westward out of the Garden of Eden with
her hard-working husband. The same mentality which pro-
duced the Sunday-school Jesus, he pointed out, also gave
us "doubting Thomas," "Jeremiah, the weeping prophet,"
and phrases like "the patience of job" and "as meek as
Moses."

/4/ Barton's 1925 portrait of Jesus was a quasi-

"behaviorist" one, corresponding closely to the "well-
integrated personality" popularized by John B. Watson's
child-rearing manual, Psychological Care of Infant and
Child. Watsonian behaviorism (and Watson himself) lent
support to the aims and methods of advertisers and sales-
men. Not only were the virtues exemplified by Barton's
Jesus and Watson's smoothly efficient "organic machine"
virtually identical (e.g., an extroverted personality,
self-reliance, outdoor living, vision, disinterested
relationships with others, industry, Power), but so was
the world each man pictured. One's character or person-
ality, neutral at birth, was almost totally the result
of training and environmental conditioning. Barton
warned of the dangers symbolized by the village and the
city, and Watson singled out the all-too-typical American
mother, a "sentimentalist," a lover not a leader, who
weakened her child for life by "coddling" and habituating
it to an unhealthy set of "nest habits" within the con-
fines of the home. Nearly as dangerous, Watson warned,
were "old and fussy nurses," the Scribes and Pharisees
of the nursery, who went around for three years badgering
the child with legalistic "Don'ts" and "Thou shalt not's."
What children needed, Watson argued, was a "professional
woman." Such a mother, he confessed in the first sen-
tence of the book, is a woman nobody knows.
176 Wayne Elzey

WORKS CONSULTED

Allen, Frederick Lewis

1931 Only Yesterday: An Informal History
of the Nineteen-Twenties. New York:
Harper and Row.
Anderson, Hugh
1967 Jesus. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice
Hall.
Babson, Roger W.
1920 Religion and Business. New York:
The Macmillan Company.
Barton, Bruce
1925 The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery of
the Real Jesus. Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill Company.

1926 The Book Nobody Knows. New York:

Grosset & Dunlap.
1927 What Can a Man Believe' Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill Company.
1937 "Must We Have Sermons?" Reader's
Digest 31, 186:97-99.
Boorstin, Daniel J.
1961 The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events
in America. New York: Atheneum.
1973 The Americans: The Democratic Exper-
ience. New York: Random House.
Douglas, Mary
1970 Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cos-
mology. New York: Pantheon Books.
Durkheim, Emile
1965 The Elementary Forms of the Religious
Life. Trans, by Joseph Ward Swain.
New York: The Free Press.

Hart, James D.
1963 The Popular Book: A History of Amer-
ica's Literary Taste. Berkeley:
University of California Press.

Hayes, John H.
1976 Son of God to Super Star: Twentieth
Century Interpretations of Jesus.
Nashville: Abingdon Press.
Martin, Malachi
1974 Jesus Now. New York: Popular Li-
brary.
Jesus the Salesman . 177

Mayer, Martin
1958 Madison Avenue, U.S.A. New York:
Harper.
Meyer, Donald
1965 The Positive Thinkers. New York:
Doubleday & Company, Inc.

Miller, Robert Moats

1958 American Protestantism and Social
Issues, 1319-1929. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press.
Presbrey, Frank S.
1929 The History and Development of Ad-
vertising. Garden City: Doubleday,
Doran S Company, Inc.
Schneider, Louis and Dornbusch, Sanford M.
1955 Popular Religion. Inspirational Books
in America. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.

Schweitzer, Albert
1961 The Quest For the Historical Jesus.
Trans, by W. Montgomery. New York:
The Macmillan Company.

Seldes, Gilbert
1925 "The Living Christ." New Republic
43, 551:127.
1938 "Barton, Barton, Barton and Barton."
New Republic 96, 1246: 327-29.

Sprague, Jesse Ramsford

1927 "Religion in Business." Harper's
Magazine 155: 431-39.
Watkins, Julian Lewis
1959 The 100 Greatest Advertisements Who
I/rote Them and What They Said. New
York: Dover.
Watson, John B.
1928 Psychological Care of Infant and
Child. New York: w". W. Norton and
Company, Inc.

Woodward, Helen
1938 "Republican in Sheep's Clothing."
The Nation 147, 19: 475-77.