CHAPTER I_The Jesus of History

Contributed by Jonathon Love

THE JESUS OF HISTORY

FOREWORD

I regard it as a high privilege to be associated with this volume.

Many who know and value Mr Glover's work on The Conflict of

Religions in the Early Roman Empire must have wistfully desired to

secure from his graphic pen just such a book as is here given to the

world. He possesses the rare power of reverently handling familiar

truths or facts in such manner as to make them seem to be almost

new. There are few gifts more precious than this at a time when our

familiarity with the greatest and most sacred of all narratives is a

chief hindrance to our ready appreciation of its living power. I

believe that no one will read Mr Glover's chapters, and especially

his description of the parable-teaching given by our Lord, without a

sense of having been introduced to a whole series of fresh and

fruitful thoughts. He has expanded for us, with the force, the

clearness, and the power of vivid illustration which we have learned

to expect from him, the meaning of a sentence in the earlier volume

I have alluded to, where he insists that, "Jesus of Nazareth does

stand in the centre of human history, that He has brought God and

man into a new relation, that He is the present concern of every one

of us and that there is more in Him than we have yet accounted

for."[1]

In accordance with its title, the single theme of the book is "The

Jesus of History," but the student or exponent of dogmatic theology

will find abundant material in its pages.

I commend it confidently, both to single students and to those who

nowadays, in happily increasing numbers, meet together for common

study; and I congratulate those who belong to the Student Christian

Movement upon this notable addition to the books published in

connection with their far-reaching work.

RANDALL CANTUAR

LAMBETH

Advent Sunday, 1916

PREFACE

This book has grown out of lectures upon the historical Jesus given

in a good many cities of India during the winter 1915-16. Recast and

developed, the lectures were taken down in shorthand in Calcutta;

they were revised in Madras; and most of them were wholly

re-written, where and when in six following months leisure was

available, in places so far apart as Colombo, Maymyo, Rangoon,

Kodaikanal, Simla, and Poona. The reader will not expect a heavy

apparatus of references to books which were generally out of reach.

Here and there are incorporated passages (rehandled) from articles

that have appeared in The Constructive Quarterly, The Nation, The

Expositor, and elsewhere.

Those who themselves have tried to draw the likeness attempted in

this book will best understand, and perhaps most readily forgive,

failures and mistakes, or even worse, in my drawing. The aim of the

book, as of the lectures, is, after all, not to achieve a final

presentment of the historical Jesus, but to suggest lines of study

that will deepen our interest in him and our love of him.

T. R. G.

POONA, August 1916

THE JESUS OF HISTORY

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

THE STUDY OF THE GOSPELS

Modern study of religion

Historicity of Jesus

The gospels as historical sources

Canons for the study of a historical figure

A caution against antiquarianism here

CHAPTER II

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

References in Gospels

Utilisation of the parables to reconstruct the domestic life

Nature. The city. The talk of the market

CHAPTER III

THE MAN AND HIS MIND

Words and looks, as recorded in the gospels

Playfulness of speech

Movements of feeling

Habits of thought: e.g. Quickness. Feeling for fact.

Sympathy. Imagination

His use of the Old Testament

CHAPTER IV

THE TEACHER AND THE DISCIPLES

THE BACKGROUND

Hardness of the human life in those times

Uncertainness as to God's plans for the nation--specially

as to His purposes for the Messiah

Uncertainty as to the immortality of the soul, and its destinies

Re-action of all this upon life

THE PROBLEM BEFORE THE TEACHER

To induce people to try to re-think God

To secure the re-thinking of life from its foundations in view

of the new knowledge

THE TEACHER AND THE DISCIPLES

His personality, and his genius for friendship

The disciples--the type he prefers

Intimacy, the real secret of his method

His ways of speech

His seriousness

The transformation of the disciples

CHAPTER V

THE TEACHING OF JESUS UPON GOD

JESUS' OWN GOD-CONSCIOUSNESS

The Nearness of God

God's knowledge and power

God's throne

Jesus emphasizes mostly God's interest in the individual--the

love of God

THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD

The discovery of God

Parables of the treasure finder and the pearl merchant

Faith in God

Prayer

Life on the basis of God

CHAPTER VI

JESUS AND MAN

Jesus' sympathy with men and their troubles

His feelings for the suffering and distressed

His feeling for women and children

His emphasis on tenderness and forgiveness

The characteristics which he values in men

The value of the individual soul

Jesus and the wasted life

Zacchaeus. The woman with the alabaster box. The penitent thief

CHAPTER VII

JESUS' TEACHING UPON SIN

The problem of sin

John the Baptist on sin

Jesus' psychology of sin more serious

The outstanding types of sin which, according to Jesus,

involve for a man the utmost risk:

(a) Want of tenderness

(b) The impure imagination

(d) Indecision

Jesus' view of sin as deduced from this teaching

Implication of a serious view of redemption

CHAPTER VIII

THE CHOICE OF THE CROSS

What the cross meant to him

HIS REFERENCES TO THE GOSPEL AND ITS RESULTS

The kingdom of heaven

The call for followers

His announcement of purpose in his life and death

What he means by redemption

FACTORS IN HIS CHOICE OF THE CROSS

His sense of human need

His realization of God

His recognition of his own relation to God

His prayer life

VERIFICATION FROM THE EVENT

The Resurrection

The new life of the disciples

The taking away of the sin of the world

RE-EXAMINATION OF HIS CHOICE OF THE CROSS

As it bears on the problem of pain

and of sin

and on God

How a man is to understand Jesus Christ

CHAPTER IX

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE

THE ROMAN EMPIRE

One rule of many races

General peace and free intercourse the world over

Fusion of cultures, traditions, religions

"The marriage of East and West"

THE OLD RELIGION

(1) Its strength:

in its ancient tradition

in its splendour of art, architecture and ceremony

in its oracles, healings and theophanies

in its adaptability in absorbing all cults and creeds

(2) Its weakness:

No deep sense of truth

No association with morality

Polytheism

The fear of the grave

(3) Its defence:

Plutarch--the Stoics--Neo-Platonism--the Eclectics

THE VICTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH

(1) Its characteristics

(2) Persecuted because it refused to compromise

(3) The Christian "out-lived" the pagan

"out died" him

"out-thought him"

CHAPTER X

JESUS IN CHRISTIAN THOUGHT

The impulse to determine who he is, and his relation to God

The records of Christian experience

The Study of the personality of Jesus Christ

(a) The Gospels

(b) Christological theory a guide to experience

Knowledge gained by the experiment comes before explanation

JESUS TO BE KNOWN BY WHAT HE DOES

The forgiveness of sin, and the theories to explain it

Is a Theology of Redemption possible which shall not be

mainly metaphor or simile?

THE PROBLEM OF THE INCARNATION

The approach is to be "a posterioria"

In fact, God and man are only known to us in and by Jesus

Only in Christ is the love of God as taught in N.T. tenable

To know Jesus in what he can do, is antecedent to theory about him

APPENDIX

Suggestions for study circle discussions

THE JESUS OF HISTORY

CHAPTER I

THE STUDY OF THE GOSPELS

If one thing more than another marks modern thought, it is a new

insistence on fact. In every sphere of study there is a growing

emphasis on verification. Where a generation ago a case seemed to be

closed, to-day in the light of new facts it is reopened. Matters

that to our grandfathers were trivialities, to be summarily

dismissed, are seriously studied. Again and again we find the most

fruitful avenues opened to us by questions that another age might

have laughed out of a hearing; to-day they suggest investigation of

facts insufficiently known, and of the difficult connexions between

them. In psychology and in medicine the results of this new tendency

are evident in all sorts of ways--new methods in the treatment of

the sick, new inquiries as to the origin of diseases and the

possibilities of their prevention, attempts to get at the relations

between the soul and body, and a very new open-mindedness as to the

spiritual nature and its working and experiences. In other fields of

learning it is the same.

To the modern student of man and his history the old easy way of

excluding religion as an absurdity, the light prediction of its

speedy, or at least its eventual, disappearance from the field of

human life, and other dogmatisms of the like kind, are almost

unintelligible. We realize that religion in some form is a natural

working of the human spirit, and, whatever place we give to religion

in the conduct of our own lives, as students of history we reckon

with the religious instinct as a factor of the highest import, and

we give to religious systems and organizations--above all, to

religious teachers and leaders--a more sympathetic and a profounder

study. Carlyle's lecture on Muhammad, in his course on "Heroes and

Hero Worship," may be taken as a landmark for English people in this

new treatment history.

The Christian Church, whether we like it or not, has been a force of

unparalleled power in human affairs; and prophecies that it will no

longer be so, and allegations that by now it has ceased to be so,

are not much made by cautious thinkers. There is evidence that the

influence of the Christian Church, so far from ebbing, is

rising--evidence more obvious when we reflect that the influence of

such a movement is not to be quickly guessed from the number of its

actual adherents. A century and a quarter of Christian missions in

India have resulted in so many converts--a million and a quarter is

no slight outcome; but that is a small part of the story. All over

India the old religious systems are being subjected to a new study

by their own adherents; their weak points are being felt; there are

reform movements, new apologetics, compromises, defences--all sorts

of indications of ferment and transition. There can be little

question that while many things go to the making of an age, the

prime impulse to all this intellectual, religious, and moral

upheaval was the faith of Christian missionaries that Jesus Christ

would bring about what we actually see. They believed--and they were

laughed at for their belief--that Jesus Christ was still a real

power, permanent and destined to hold a larger place in the affairs

of men; and we see that they were right. Jesus remains the very

heart and soul of the Christian movement, still controlling men,

still capturing men--against their wills very often--changing men's

lives and using them for ends they never dreamed of. So much is

plain to the candid observer, whatever the explanation.

We find further, another fact of even more significance to the

historian who will treat human experience with seriousness and

sympathy. The cynical view that delusion and error in a real world

have peculiar power in human affairs, may be dismissed; no serious

student of history could hold it.

For those who believe, as we all do at heart, that the world is

rational, that real effects follow real causes, and conversely that

behind great movements lie great forces, the fact must weigh

enormously that wherever the Christian Church, or a section of it,

or a single Christian, has put upon Jesus Christ a higher

emphasis--above all where everything has been centred in Jesus

Christ--there has been an increase of power for Church, or

community, or man. Where new value has been found in Jesus Christ,

the Church has risen in power, in energy, in appeal, in victory.

Paul of Tarsus progressively found more in Christ, expected more of

him, trusted him more; and his faith was justified. If Paul was

wrong, how did he capture the Christian Church for his ideas? If he

was wrong, how is it that when Luther caught his meaning,

re-interpreted him and laid the same emphasis on Jesus Christ with

his "Nos nihil sumus, Christus solus est omnia"[2], once more the

hearts of men were won by the higher doctrine of Christ's person and

power, and a new era followed the new emphasis? How is it that, when

John Wesley made the same discovery, and once more staked all on

faith in Christ, again the Church felt the pulse of new life?

On the other hand, where through a nebulous philosophy men have

minimized Jesus, or where, through some weakness of the human mind,

they have sought the aid of others and relegated Jesus Christ to a

more distant, even if a higher, sphere--where, in short, Christ is

not the living centre of everything, the value of the Church has

declined, its life has waned. That, to my own mind, is the most

striking and outstanding fact in history. There must be a real

explanation of a thing so signal in a rational universe.

The explanation in most human affairs comes after the recognition of

the fact. There our great fact stands of the significance of Jesus

Christ--a more wonderful thing as we study it more. We may fail to

explain it, but we must recognize it. One of the weaknesses of the

Church to-day is--put bluntly--that Christians are not making enough

of Jesus Christ.

We find again that, where Jesus Christ is most real, and means most,

there we are apt to see the human mind reach a fuller freedom and

achieve more. There is a higher civilization, a greater emphasis on

the value of human life and character, and a stronger endeavour for

the utmost development of all human material, if we may so call the

souls and faculties of men. Why should there be this correspondence

between Jesus of Nazareth and human life? It is best brought out,

when we realize what he has made of Christian society, and contrast

it with what the various religions have left or produced in other

regions--the atrophy of human nature.

In fine, there is no figure in human history that signifies more.

Men may love him or hate him, but they do it intensely. If he was

only what some say, he ought to be a mere figure of antiquity by

now. But he is more than that; Jesus is not a dead issue; he has to

be reckoned with still; and men who are to treat mankind seriously,

must make the intellectual effort to understand the man on whom has

been centred more of the interest and the passion of the most

serious and the best of mankind than on any other. The real secret

is that human nature is deeply and intensely spiritual, and that

Jesus satisfies it at its most spiritual point.

The object before us in these pages is the attempt to know Jesus, if

we can, in a more intimate and intelligent way than we have done--at

least, to put before our minds the great problem, Who is this Jesus

Christ? and to try to answer it.

One answer to this question is that Jesus was nothing, never was

anything, but a myth developed for religious purposes; that he never

lived at all. This view reappears from time to time, but so far it

has not appealed to any who take a serious interest in history. No

historian of the least repute has committed himself to the theory.

Desperate attempts have been made to discredit the Christian writers

of the first two centuries; it has been emphasized that Jesus is not

mentioned in secular writers of the period, and the passage in

Tacitus ("Annals", XV:44) has been explained away as a Christian

interpolation, or, more gaily, by reviving the wild notion that

Poggio Bracciolini forged the whole of the "Annals". But such

trifling with history and literature does not serve. No scholar

accepts the theory about Poggio--and yet if the passage about Christ

is to be got rid of, this is the better way of the two; for there is

nothing to countenance the view that the chapter is interpolated, or

to explain when or by whom it was done--the wish is father to the

thought. Christians are twice mentioned by Suetonius in dealing with

Emperors of the first century, though in one passage the reading

"Chrestus" for "Christus" has suggested to some scholars that

another man is meant; the confusion was a natural one and is

instanced elsewhere, but we need not press the matter. The argument

from silence is generally recognized as an uncertain one. Sir James

Melville, living at the Court of Mary, Queen of Scots, does not, I

learn, mention John Knox--"whom he could not have failed to mention

if Knox had really existed and played the part assigned to him by

his partisans," and so forth. It might be as possible and as

reasonable to prove that the Brahmo Samaj never existed, by

demonstrating four hundred years hence--or two thousand--that it is

not mentioned in In Memoriam, nor in The Ring and the Book, nor in

George Meredith's, novels, nor (more strangely) in any of Mr.

Kipling's surviving works, which definitely deal with India. None of

these writers, it may be replied, had any concern to mention the

Brahmo Samaj. And when one surveys the Greek and Roman writers of

the first century A.D. which of them had any concern to refer to

Jesus and his disciples, beyond the historians who do? Indeed, the

difficulty is to understand why some of these men should have

written at all; harder still, why others should have wanted to read

their poems and orations and commonplace books. One argument,

advanced in India a few years ago, against the historical value of

the Gospels may be revived by way of illustration. Would not Virgil

and Horace, it was asked, have taken notice of the massacre at

Bethlehem, if it was historical? Would they not? it was replied,

when they both had died years before its traditional date.

But the distinction between Christian and secular writers is not one

that will weigh much with a serious historian. Until we have reason

to distinguish between book and book, the evidence must be treated

on exactly the same principles. To say abruptly that, because Luke

was a Christian and Suetonius a pagan, Luke is not worthy of the

credence given to Suetonius, is a line of approach that will most

commend itself to those who have read neither author. To gain a real

knowledge of historical truth, the historian's methods must be

slower and more cautious, he must know his author intimately--his

habits of mind, his turns of style, his preferences, his gifts for

seeing the real issue--and always the background, and the ways of

thinking that prevail in the background. An ancient writer is not

necessarily negligible because he records, and perhaps believes,

miracles or marvels or omens which a modern would never notice. It

is bad criticism that has made a popular legend of the unreliable

character of Herodotus. As our knowledge of antiquity grows, and we

become able to correct our early impressions, the credit of

Herodotus rises steadily, and to-day those who study him most

closely have the highest opinion of him.

We may, then, without prejudice, take the evidence of Paul of Tarsus

on the historicity of Jesus, and examine it. If we are challenged as

to the genuineness of Paul's epistles, let us tell our questioner to

read them. Novels have been written in the form of correspondence;

but Paul's letters do not tell us all that a novelist or a forger

would--there are endless gaps, needless references to unknown

persons (needless to us, or to anybody apart from the people

themselves), constant occupation with questions which we can only

dimly discover from Paul's answers. The letters are genuine

letters--written for the occasion to particular people, and not

meant for us. The stamp of genuineness is on them--of life, real

life. The German scholar, Norden, in his Kunstprosa, says there is

much in Paul that he does not understand, but he catches in him

again after three hundred years that note of life that marks the

great literature of Greece. That is not easily forged. Luther and

Erasmus were right when they said--each of them has said it, however

it happened--that Paul "spoke pure flame." The letters, and the

theology and its influence, establish at once Paul's claim to be a

historical character. We may then ask, how a man of his ability

failed to observe that a non-historical Jesus, a pure figment, was

being palmed off on him--on a contemporary, it should be marked--and

by a combination of Jesus' own disciples with earlier friends of

Paul, who were trying to exterminate them. Paul knew priests and

Pharisees; he knew James and John and Peter; and he never detected

that they were in collusion, yes, and to the point of martyring

Stephen--to impose on him and on the world a non-historical Jesus.

To such straits are we brought, if Jesus never existed. History

becomes pure nonsense, and knowledge of historical fact impossible;

and, it may be noted, all knowledge is abolished if history is

beyond reach.

But we are not dependent on books for our evidence of the

historicity of Jesus. The whole story of the Church implies him. He

is inwrought in every feature of its being. Every great religious

movement, of which we know, has depended on a personal impulse, and

has behind it some real, living and inspiring personality. It is

true that at a comparatively late stage of Hinduism a personal

devotion to Shri Krishna grew up, just as in the hour of decline of

the old Mediterranean paganism we find Julian the Apostate using a

devotional language to Athena at Athens that would have astonished

the contemporaries of Pericles. But Jesus, Buddha, and Muhammad

stand on a very different footing from Krishna and Athena, even if

we concede the view of some scholars that Krishna was once a man,

and the contention of Euhemerus, a pre-Christian Greek, that all the

gods had once been human. If we posit that Jesus did not exist, we

shall be involved other difficulties as to the story of the Church.

Mr. F. C. Conybeare, an Oxford scholar avowedly not in allegiance to

the Christian Church, has characterized some of the reconstructions

made by contemporary anti-Christian writers as more miraculous than

the history they are trying to correct.

We come now to the Gospels; and in what follows, and throughout the

book, we shall confine ourselves the first three Gospels. Great as

has been, and must be, the influence of the Fourth Gospel, in the

present stage of historical criticism it will serve our purpose best

to postpone the use of a source which we do not fully understand.

The exact relations of history and interpretation in the Fourth

Gospel--the methods and historical outlook of the writer--cannot yet

be said to be determined. "Only those who have merely trifled with

the problems it suggests are likely to speak dogmatically upon the

subject."[3] This is not to abandon the Fourth Gospel; for it is a

document which we could not do without in early Church History, and

which has vindicated its place in the devotional life in every

Christian generation. But, for the present, the first Three Gospels

will be our chief sources.

The Gospels have, of course, been attacked again and again. Sober

criticism has raised the question as to whether here and there

traces may be found of the touch of a later hand--for example, were

there two asses or one, when Jesus rode into Jerusalem? has the

baptismal formula at the end of Matthew been adjusted to the creed

of Nicaea? In the following pages the attempt will be made to base

what is said not on isolated texts, which may--and of course may

not--have been touched, but on the general tenor of the books. A

single episode or phrase may suffer change from a copyist's hand,

from inadvertence or from theological predilection. The character of

the Personality set forth in the Gospels is less susceptible of

alteration.

This point is at once of importance, for the suggestion has been

made that we cannot be sure of any particular statement, episode,

incident or saying in the Gospels--taken by itself. Let us for the

moment imagine a more sweeping theory still--that no single episode

incident or saying of Jesus in the Gospels is authentic at all. What

follows? The great historian, E. A. Freeman of Oxford, once said

that a false anecdote may be good history; it may be sound evidence

for character, for, to obtain currency, a false anecdote has also to

true; it must be, in our proverbial phrase, "if not true, well

invented." Even if exaggeration and humour contribute to give it a

twist, the essence of parody is that it parodies--it must conform to

the original even where it leaves it. A good story-teller will

hardly tell the same story of Mr. Roosevelt and the Archbishop of

Canterbury--unless it happens to be true, and then he will be

cautious. "Truth," to quote another proverb, "is stranger than

fiction"; because fiction has to go warily to be probable, and must

be, more or less, conventional. The story a man invents about

another has to be true in some recognizable way to character--as a

little experiment in this direction will show. The inventor of a

story must have the gift of the caricaturist and of the bestower of

nicknames; he must have a shrewd eye for the real features of his

victim. Jesus, then, was a historical person; and about him we have

a mass of stories in the Gospels, which our theory for the moment

asks us to say are all false; but they have a certain unity of tone,

and they agree in pointing to a character of a certain type, and the

general aspects and broad outlines of that character they make

abundantly clear. Even on such a hypothesis we can know something of

the character of Jesus. But the hypothesis is gratuitous, and

absurd, as the paragraphs that follow may help to show. The Gospels

are essentially true and reliable records of a historical person.

A survey of some of the outstanding features of the Gospels should

do something to assure their reader of their historical value. But

there is a necessary caution to be given at this moment. When

Aristotle discusses happiness, he adds a curious limitation--"as the

man of sense would define." He postulates a certain intelligence of

the matter in hand. Similarly Longinus, the greatest of ancient

critics, says that in literature sure judgement is the outcome of

long experience. In matters of historical and literary criticism, a

certain instinct is needed, conscious or unconscious, perhaps more

often the latter, which without a serious interest and a long

experience no man is likely to have.

The Gospels are not properly biographies; they consist of

collections of reminiscences--memories and fragments that have

survived for years, and sometimes the fragment is little more than a

phrase. Such and such were the circumstances, and Jesus spoke--a

story that may occupy four or five verses, or less. Something

happened, Jesus said or did something that impressed his friends,

and they could never forget it. The story, as such impressions do,

keeps its sharp edges. Date and perhaps even place may be forgotten,

but the look and the tone of the speaker are indelible memories. In

the experience of every man there are such moments, and the

reminiscences can be trusted. The Gospels are almost avowedly not

first-hand. Peter is said to be behind Mark; Mark and at least one

other are behind Matthew and Luke. Luke in his preface explains his

methods. They are collectors and transmitters; and the

indications--are that they did their work very faithfully. There is

a simplicity and a plainness about the stories in the Gospels, which

further guarantees them. It is remarkable how little of the

adjective there is--no compliment, no eulogy, no heroic touches, no

sympathetic turn of phrase, no great passages of encomium or

commendation. It is often said about the Greek historian,

Thucydides, that, among his many intellectual judgements, he never

offers a criticism of any act that implies moral approbation or

disapprobation; that he says nothing to show that he had feelings or

that he cared about questions of right and wrong. Page after page of

Thucydides will make the reader tingle with pity or indignation;

there is hardly in literature so tragic a story as the Syracusan

expedition--and the writer did not feel! Is it not the sternest and

deepest feeling, after all, when a man will not "unpack his heart

with words"? Something of this kind we find in the Gospels. There is

not a word of condemnation for Herod or Pilate, for priest or

Pharisee; not a touch of sympathy as the nails are driven through

those hands; a blunt phrase about the soldiers, "And sitting down

they watched him there" (Matt. 26:36)--that is all. (From a literary

point of view, what a triumph of awful, quiet objectivity! and they

had no such aim.) Luke indeed has one slight touch that might be

called irony[4]--"And he released unto them him that for sedition

and murder was cast into prison, whom they had desired; but he

delivered Jesus to their will" (Luke 23:25)--and yet the irony is in

the story itself. "Why callest thou me good?" So it is recorded that

Jesus once answered a compliment (Matt. 19:17); and it looks as if

the mood had passed over to his intimates, and from them to their

friends who wrote the Gospels. He meant too much for them to seek

the facile relief of praise. The words of praise die away, yes, and

the words of affection too; and their silence and self-restraint are

in themselves evidence of their truth; and more winning than words

could have been.

Here and there the Gospels keep a phrase actually used by Jesus, and

in his native Aramaic speech. The Greek was not apt to use or quote

foreign phrases--unlike the Englishman who "has been at a great

feast of languages and stolen the scraps." Why, then, do the

Evangelists, writing for Greek readers, keep the Aramaic sentences?

It looks like a human instinct that made Peter--if, as we are told,

he had some part in the origination of Mark's Gospel--and the rest

wish to keep the very words and tones of their Master, as most of us

would wish to keep the accents and phrases of those we love. Was

there no satisfaction to the people who had lived with Jesus, when

they read in Mark the very syllables they had heard him use, and

caught his great accents again? Is there not for Christians in every

age a joy and an inspiration in knowing the very sounds his lips

framed? The first word that his mother taught him survives in Abba

(Father)--something of his own speech to let us begin at the

beginning; something, again, that takes us to the very heart of him

at the end, in his cry: Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani (Mark 15:34).

Is it not true that we come nearer to him in that cry in the

language strange to us, but his own? Would not the story, again, be

poorer without the little tender phrase that he used to the daughter

of Jairus (Mark 5:41).

From time to time we find in the Gospels matters for which the

writers and those behind them have felt that some apology or at

least some explanation was needed. His friendship for sinners was a

taunt against him in his lifetime; so was his inattention to the

Sabbath (Mark 2:24, 3:2), and the details of ceremonial washing

(Mark 7:1-5). The faithful record of these is a sound indication

both of the date[5] and of the truth of the Gospels. But these were

not all. Celsus, in 178 A.D., in his True Word, mocked at Jesus

because of the cry upon the cross; he reminded Christians that many

and many a worthless knave had endured in brave silence, and their

Great Man cried out. It was from the Gospels that his knowledge came

(Mark 15:37). Even during his lifetime the Gospels reveal much about

Jesus that in contemporary opinion would degrade him--sighs and

tears and fatigue, liability to emotion and to pain, friendship with

women.

With these revelations of character we may group passages where

the Gospels tell of Jesus surprising or shocking his

disciples--startling them by some act or some opinion, for which

they were not prepared, or which was contrary to common belief or

practice--passages, too, where he blames or criticizes them for

conventionality or unintelligence.

It has been remarked that the frequency and fidelity of Jesus' own

allusions to country life, his illustrations from bird and beast and

flower, and the work of the farm, are evidence for the genuineness

of the tradition. Early Christianity, as we see already in the Acts

of the Apostles, was prevailingly urban. Paul aimed at the great

centres of population, where men gathered and from which ideas

spread. The language of Paul in his epistles, the sermons inserted

by Luke in the Acts, writings that survive of early Christians, are

all in marked contrast to the speech of Jesus in this matter of

country life. When we recall the practice of ancient historians of

composing speeches for insertion in their narratives, and weigh the

suggestion that the sermons in the Acts may conceivably owe much to

the free rehandling of Luke or may even be his own compositions,

there is a fresh significance in his marked abstention from any such

treatment of the words of Jesus. It means that we may be secure in

using them as genuine and untouched reproductions of what he said

and thought.

This leads us to another point. The central figure of the Gospels

must impress every attentive reader as at least a man of marked

personality. He has his own attitude to life, his own views of God

and man and all else, and his own language, as we shall see in the

pages that follow. So much his own are all these things that it is

hard to imagine the possibility of his being a mere literary

creation, even if we could concede a joint literary creation by

several authors writing independent works. Indeed, when we reflect

on the character of the Gospels, their origin and composition, and

then consider the sharp, strong outlines of the personality

depicted, we shall be apt to feel his claim to historicity to be

stronger than we supposed.

Finally, two points may be mentioned. The Church from the very start

accepted the Gospels. Two of them were written by men in Paul's own

personal circle (Philemon 24; Col. 4:10, 14). All found early

acceptance and wide use,[6] and after a century we find Irenaeus

maintaining that four Gospels are necessary, and are necessarily

all--there are four points of the compass, seasons and so forth;

therefore it is appropriate that there are four Gospels. The

argument is not very convincing; but that such an argument was

possible is evidence to the position of the Gospels as we have them.

We must remember the solidarity of that early Church. The

constituency, for which the Gospels were written, was steeped in the

tradition of Jesus' life, and the Christians accepted the Gospels,

as embodying what they knew; and there were still survivors from the

first days of the Gospel. When Boswell's Life of Johnson was

published, the great painter, Sir Joshua Reynolds, a lifelong friend

of Johnson, said it might be depended upon as if delivered upon

oath; Burke too had a high opinion of the book. In the same way the

Gospels come recommended to us by those who knew Jesus, though, it

is true, we do not know their names.

The Gospels do not tell us all that Christians thought of Jesus, but

they imply more than they say. The writers limited themselves. That

Luke, for years a friend of Paul's, so generally kept his great

friend's theology, above all his Christology, out of his Gospel, is

significant. It does not mean divergence of view. More reasonably we

may conclude something else: he held to his literary and other

authorities, and he was content; for he knew to what the historical

Jesus brings men--to new life and larger views, to a series of new

estimates of Jesus himself. He left it there. In what follows, we

must not forget in our study that behind the Gospels, simple and

objective as they are, is the larger experience of the ever-working

Christ.

There are three canons which may be laid down for the study of any

human character, whether of the past or of to-day. They are so

simple that it may hardly seem worth while to have stated them; yet

they are not always very easy to apply. Without them the acutest

critic will fail to give any sound account of a human character.

First of all, give the man's words his own meaning. Make sure that

every term he uses has the full value he intends it to carry,

connotes all he wishes it to cover, and has the full emotional power

and suggestion that it has for himself. Two quite simple

illustrations may serve. The English-born clergyman in Canada who

spoke of a meeting of his congregation as a "homely gathering" did

not produce quite the effect he intended; "home-like" is one thing

in Canada, "homely" quite another, and the people laughed at the

slip--they knew, what he did not, that "homely" meant hard-featured

and ugly. My other illustration will take us towards the second

canon. I remember, years ago, a working-man of my own city talking a

swift, impulsive Socialism to me. He was young and something of a

poet. He got in return the obvious common sense that would be

expected of a mid-Victorian, middle-aged and middle-class. And then

he began to talk of hunger--the hunger that haunted whole streets in

our city, where they had indeed something to eat every day, but

never quite enough, and the children grew up so--the hunger that he

had experienced himself, for I knew his story. With his eyes fixed

on me, he brought home to me by the quiet intensity of his

speech--whether he knew what he effected or not--that he and I gave

hunger different senses. He gave the word for me a new meaning, with

the glimpse he gave me of his experience. Since then I have always

felt, when men fling theories out like his--schemes, too, like

his--wild and impracticable: "Ah, yes! what is at the heart of it

all? What but this awful experience which they have known and you

have not--the sight of your own folk hungering, life and faculty

wasted for want of mere food, and children growing up atrophied from

the cradle"? It is not easy to dissociate the language and the terms

of others from the meaning one gives to them oneself; it means

intellectual effort and intellectual discipline, a training of a

strenuous kind in sympathy and tenderness; but if we are to be fair,

it must be done. And the rule applies to Jesus also. Have we given

his meaning to his term--force, value, emotion, and suggestion? In a

later chapter we shall have to concentrate on one term of

his--God--and try to discover what he intends that term to convey.

The second canon is: Make sure of the experience behind the thought.

How does a man come to think and feel as he does? That is the

question antecedent to any real criticism. What is it that has led

him to such a view? It is more important for us to determine that,

than to decide at once whether we think him right or wrong. Again

and again the quiet and sympathetic study of what a man has been

through will modify our judgement upon his conclusions; it will

often change our own conclusions, or even our way of thinking. We

have, then, to ask ourselves, What is the experience that leads

Jesus to speak as he does, to think as he does? In his case, as in

every other, the central and crucial question is, What is his

experience of God? In other words, What has he found in God? what

relations has he with God? What does he expect of God? What is God

to him? Such questions, if we are candid and not too quick in

answering, will take us a long way. It was once said of a man, busy

with some labour problem, that he was "working it out in theory,

unclouded by a single fact." Is it not fair to say that many of our

current judgements upon Jesus Christ are no better founded? Can we

say that we have any real, sure, and intimate knowledge of his

experience of God? The old commentator, Bengel, wrote at the

beginning of his book that a man, who is setting out to interpret

Scripture, has to ask "by what right" he does it. What is our right

to an opinion on Jesus Christ?

The third canon will be: Ask of what type and of what dimensions the

nature must be, that is capable of that experience and of that

language. One of the commonest sources of bad criticism is the

emphasis on weak points. The really important thing in criticism is

to understand the triumphs of the poet or painter, let us say, whom

we are studying. How came he to achieve poem or picture, so profound

and so true? In what does he differ from other men, that he should

do work so fundamental and so eternal? Lamb's punning jest at

Wordsworth--that Wordsworth was saying he could have written Hamlet,

if he had had the mind--puts the matter directly. What is the mind

that can do such things? The historian will have to ask himself a