All this will become clear if we read the gospels without prejudice.
When I was young it was impossible to read them without fantastic
confusion of thought. The confusion was so utterly confounded that it
was called the proper spirit to read the Bible in. Jesus was a baby;
and he was older than creation. He was a man who could be persecuted,
stoned, scourged, and killed; and he was a god, immortal and
all-powerful, able to raise the dead and call millions of angels to his
aid. It was a sin to doubt either view of him: that is, it was a sin to
reason about him; and the end was that you did not reason about him, and
read about him only when you were compelled. When you heard the gospel
stories read in church, or learnt them from painters and poets, you came
out with an impression of their contents that would have astonished a
Chinaman who had read the story without prepossession. Even sceptics who
were specially on their guard, put the Bible in the dock, and read
the gospels with the object of detecting discrepancies in the four
narratives to show that the writers were as subject to error as the
writers of yesterday's newspaper.
All this has changed greatly within two generations. Today the Bible is
so little read that the language of the Authorized Version is rapidly
becoming obsolete; so that even in the United States, where the old
tradition of the verbal infallibility of "the book of books"
lingers more strongly than anywhere else except perhaps in Ulster,
retranslations into modern English have been introduced perforce to
save its bare intelligibility. It is quite easy today to find cultivated
persons who have never read the New Testament, and on whom therefore it
is possible to try the experiment of asking them to read the gospels and
state what they have gathered as to the history and views and character
of Christ.