The Lord of Glory; Counterfeit Miracles; Revelation and Inspiration

That wc may estimate the significance of the testimony to the Divine Christ which we have seen to be Significance borne by the Synoptists, we must bear of Synoptical in mind that it cannot be taken as merely Testimony individual opinion of three writers.

It must be recognized as reflecting the consentient conviction of the community which these three writers represent and for which they wrote. And this is equivalent to saying that we have here the conception of Jesus which prevailed in the primitive age of the Christian propaganda.^

This might not be so obvious if we could follow certain extremists who, largely in order to escape this

_.. very conclusion, have wished — formerly

Synoptics much greater numbers than more recently— to assign the composition of the Synoptic Gospels to a period somewhat late in the second century. It will be allowed by most reasonable men to-day that these Gospels- were all written before A. D. 8o, and belong at latest to the seventh and eighth decades of the first century. Our own conviction is very clear that they were all written before A. D. 70, and therefore belong to the seventh decade at the

^ Cf. O. Schmiedel, Die Hauptprohleine der Lehen-Jesu Forscliun^ 1906, p. 35: “The early Church in whose circles the narratives of the life of Jesus originated,.., was at one in its acknowledgment of Christ, its exalted Lord.”

latest. In the seventh decade of the first century, therefore, it was of faith in the Christian community that Jesus Christ was a divine person. And this evidence is retrospective. What was with such firmness universally believed of the nature of the founder of the Christian religion in the seventh decade of the first century, had not first in that decade become the faith of the Church. But only a short generation, as we conventionally count generations — something like five and thirty years — intervened between the death of Jesus and the composition of the Synoptic Gospels. It Is impossible to suppose that the conception of Jesus had radically altered In this brief Interval; that a primitive humanitarlanism for example had in the course of thirty or forty years been transformed into a universal conviction of the deity of Jesus, such as Is expressed with simplicity and unstudied emphasis In our Gospels. The witness of the Synoptic Gospels Is accordingly a witness to the aboriginal faith of Christians.

Nor is the force of this conclusion weakened by attempting to get behind our Gospels and appealing to Earlier ^^e yet earlier documents out of which Documentary they may be.thought to have been Basis framed. Grant that our Gospels belong to the second generation of documents; and that behind them He still earlier documents upon which they depend. These earlier documents cannot be presumed to have presented a portrait of Jesus radically different from that which all three of their representatives have derived from them. We have simply pushed back ten, fifteen, or twenty years our literary testimony to the deity of Jesus: and how can we suppose that the determinative expression of the Church’s faith In A. D.

50 or A. D. 40 differed radically from the Church’s faith in A. D. 30 — the year in which Jesus died? The assurance that our Gospels rest on earlier documentary sources becomes thus an additional assurance that the conception of the person of Jesus which they present in concert is the conception which held the mind and heart of the Church from the very beginning.

How fully justified this conclusion is may be illustrated by examining the conception of Jesus imbedded The Sources in the hypothetical sources which the of the several schools of criticism reconstruct

Synoptics £qj. gy^optics. In each and all of them is found the same portrait of the supernatural Christ. Probably the theory of the origin of the Synoptics most in vogue just now is still the so-called “ twosource ” theory, in some one or other of its forms. According to this theory, our three Synoptics in their main substance are compounded out of two important primitive documents, which may be conveniently called ‘ the original Mark ’ and ‘ the Matthean sayings.’ The former of these is supposed to be substantially and, in the view of many critics, very closely indeed, represented by our present Mark; while from the latter a good portion of the material in Matthew and Luke not also contained in Mark is thought to be derived,

' — certainly what is common to these two Gospels apart from Mark, and doubtless also something not reproduced in both of them. According to the present most fashionable form of this theory, then, we are reading K substantially a primitive evangelical document when > we read our present Mark. Some suppose the primitive Mark to have been a longer document than our present Mark, some suppose it to have been a shorter document, some suppose it to have differed from It not more than one textual recension may differ from another, — say a “ Western ” MS. of Luke from a “ Neutral ” one. But few would care to contend that the general portrait of Jesus drawn in it differed markedly from that which lies on the pages of our present Mark. The Jesus brought before us In our present Mark, however, is, as we have seen, distinctly and distinctively a supernatural person: and it must have been this same distinctly and distinctively supernatural Jesus, therefore, which was set forth in the primitive Mark.

Indeed, we can demonstrate this without difficulty. For it is easy to show that it is impossible to construct Christology a primitive Mark which will not contain of the this portrait of a supernatural Jesus.

Primitive Mark what is probably the most irra- tional hypothesis of the nature of the primitive Mark which has ever been suggested, — that which would confine its contents strictly to the matter common to all three Synoptics, as if each Gospel must be supposed to have transferred into its substance every word which stood in this common source of them all. Even in the broken sentences of the absurd “ telegraphese ” Gospel,* which on this hypothesis is supposed to represent the primitive evangelical document, the portrait of the divine Christ is ineffaceably imbedded. In it, as in the larger Mark, the stress of the presentation is laid

2Cf. E. A. Abbott and W. G. Rushbrooke, The Common Tradition of the Synoptic Gospels, etc., 1884, p. xi: “Is it not possible that the

condensed narrative which we can pick out of the three Synoptic records represents the ‘elliptical style’ of the earliest Gospel notes or Memoirs, which needed to be ‘expanded’ before they could be used for the purpose of teaching...? ”

on the Messiahship of Jesus, which is copiously and variously witnessed. Peter in his great confession declares Him the ‘Christ’ (8^^) and the declaration is accepted by Jesus Himself; as also, when adjured by the High Priest at His trial to say whether He is the ‘ Christ,’ He acknowledges that He is, in the highest sense (14®^’®-). The implied claim to kingly estate He also expressly makes (15-’^“); as also the involved claim of being the promised ‘ Son of David ’ ( 10^^’^^), — although His conception of the Messiahship was so little exhausted by this claim that He takes pains to point out that the Messiah was acknowledged by David himself to be his ‘ Lord,’ using the term obviously in a high sense. (12^^). That He was familiarly spoken of by His disciples as ‘ Lord ’ is also made evident ( 1 1^); and He Himself asserts that His Lordship is high enough to give Him authority over the religious ordinances of Israel (2-®). The tradition applies, indeed, the term ‘ Lord ’ to Him in citations from the Old Testament, where it stands for Jehovah Himself (i^). The evil spirits greet Him by the high title of ‘ Son of God ’ (5^), and the same title is suggested to Him as a synonym of the Messiah in His accusation (14^^), and in neither case is it repelled. He Himself indeed in a parable represents Himself as in a unique sense the ‘ Son ’ and ‘ Heir ’ of God, differentiated as such from all “ servants ” whatsoever (12®’'^); and receives the testimony of heaven itself that He is God’s ‘Son’ and His ‘beloved Son’ ( P' 9^). He speaks of Himself, however, with more predilection as the ‘Son of Man’; and under this self-designation He asserts for Himself power over the religious ordinances of Israel (2“®), and even the divine prerogative

The Synoptic Jesus Primitive 1 5 1 of forgiving sins (2^^), although He anticipates for Himself only a career of suffering, predicting that He will be betrayed (14^^) into the hands of men (9^^) who shall mock and scourge and kill Him (10^^). Afterwards, however. He shall rise again (10^^) and ascend to the right hand of power (14^“), whence He shall return in clouds with great power and glory (13-®), the glory of the Father and the angels (8^®). It is clear that the designation ‘ Son of Man ’ is derived from Daniel (13"^ 14^-) and the portrait presented under it is that of a being of more than human powers and attributes. In complete harmony with this portrait He is represented as calling Himself also ‘the Bridegroom’ (2^^’^^), charged as that term was with Old Testament associations with Jehovah (cf. ‘ Lord ’ of i^); and in immediate connection with this high designation, too. He speaks of His death, thus instituting a close parallel between this designation and that of the ‘ Son of Man.’ In both alike, indeed. He evidently is regarded as presenting Himself as a personage of superhuman, or rather of divine quality, who has come to earth (12^^) only on a mission and who suffers and dies here only to fulfill that mission.®

3 There may be compared with this sketch the minimizing account which von Soden {History of Early Christian Literature, 1906, p. 144), gives of the christology of the primitive “ Mark,” which according to him was of somewhat wider compass than what we have allowed it.

“ Somewhat more frequently,” he says, “ than in the Logia of St. Matthew, stress is laid upon the Messianic character of Jesus — for instance, in the narrative of the Baptism seq.)^ in the cry of the possessed

(i24), in the simile of the bridegroom (2^®), in the question concerning the Davidic sonship of the Messiah perhaps in the claim to forgive sin (2^®); again, on the part of the disciples in their confession (823), and in the petition of the sons of the Zebedee;

No doubt there are some striking phrases occurring in our present Mark which are lacking from this series Other Possible of broken extracts from it. But the Elements in the same figure is here outlined. And most Primitive Mark these Striking phrases are re- stored if we will attend also to passages common to Mark and one of the other evangelists, of which it would be hard to deny that they may therefore have had a place in the primitive document underlying all three. Thus, for example, in the fragments peculiar to Matthew and Mark, while Jesus is not addressed as ‘ Lord ' except by the Syro-Phoenician woman ( Mk 7“®, Mt 15^^), and is not spoken of at all by the general Messianic designation, ‘ the Christ,’ He yet does call Himself both the ‘ Son of Man,’ and undefinedly, ‘ the Son.’ As ‘ Son of Man,’ he asserts. He “ came ” to execute a great mission, not to be ministered unto but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many (Mk Mt 20“®), and therefore has a prospect

finally on the part of our Lord, the disciples, and the people, in the story of the entry into Jerusalem (ii^ seq.). However, the expression ‘Son of God’ never occurs except in the voice at the Baptism and in the utterance of 13®^, though elsewhere in the Gospel it forms the proper formula for profession of belief (i^ 3^^ 5'^ 9'^ 14®^ 15^®) i and the word ‘ Christ ’ only occurs in the Confession of the Twelve (8-^), and in the theological dispute of though it likewise is often employed elsewhere by the evangelist 1321 1461 15^2).

The term ‘ Son of Man ’ is found in 210.28 jo33,45^ as also in 1421. if indeed these parts of the story of the Passion belong to the group of which we are speaking; while in the sections due to the evangelist it occurs only in 99.12,31 after the pattern of 8®i and One cannot

help admiring the skill with which the attention of the reader is kept from dwelling on the fact that all the significant, high designations of Jesus are left in the fragment of the Gospel which is allowed to be primitive; but the fact cannot even so be totally obscured.

Mt 26^®), but dies only to rise again (Mk 9®, Mt 17^). As ‘Son’ He represents Himself as of superangelic dignity, and therefore above all creatures, standing next to God Himself (Mk 13^^, Mt 24^®). In the passages peculiar to Mark and Luke, we find Him testified to as the Messiah by the demons, who, although they know His earthly origin (‘Jesus of Nazareth’), profess to know Him also to be the ‘ Holy One of God,’ (Mk I2^ Lk 4^^) and the ‘Son of the Most' High God’ (Mk 5"^, Lk 8^^)T Not only does He not repel these ascriptions, but He speaks of Himself as the ‘ Son of Man,’ teaching that He is to suffer many things and be killed, but after three days to rise again (Mk Lk 9^^). A primitive gospel containing all this falls short in nothing of the testimony borne by our present Mark to our Lord’s higher nature.

It is not neccessary for our purpose to expend effort in endeavoring to ascertain the compass most com- Christology of monly attributed to the second hypothe ‘Primitive thetical document supposed to underlie Sayings* Synoptics, the so-called, and let us add, very much miscalled, “ Logia.”* We may as well at once direct our eyes to its minimum contents, — the

4 The reconstruction of these so-called “Logia” by Harnack in his SprUche und Reden Jesu, etc., 1907, PP- 88-102, provides one of the most convenient and accessible forms in which they may be studied, although Harnack (like Wellhausen) deprives them of the Passion story, and even eliminates the conception of the Passion from them (see to the contrary, Burkitt, The Gospel History and its Transmission, 1907). Their christology is minimizingly described by von Soden, History of Early Christian Literature, 1906, pp. 136, 137. While asserting that the claim advanced for Jesus in this document is “ scarcely more than any master might make on his disciples,” von Soden is yet constrained to allow that “ a higher self-consciousness may be clearly traced in the background.” “ The word ‘ Christ,’ ” he con- passages peculiar to Matthew and Luke, — even in the meager compass of which we shall find evidence enough that this document, whatever Its extent, presented Jesus as a Divine Being. That He was the Messiah He Is represented as Himself Indicating by pointing to His works (Mt ii^, Lk 7^^), which, He Intimates, evidently on the basis of Isaiah 6i\ accredit Him as the ‘ One who was to Come.’ It Is apparently as Messiah that He is addressed as ‘Lord’ (Mt Lk 7®), and He is represented as adverting to this customary mode of addressing Him in order to declare that It Is not merely verbal recognition of His authority but actual obedience to His v/ords alone which will constitute a claim upon His mercy (Mt 7“h Lk 6^®) — where. It is to be noted. He presents Himself as ‘ Lord ’ of the destinies of men, by their relations to whom men stand or fall. He is accordingly appropriately spoken V to by Satan as ‘ Son of God ’ (Mt 4^’^ Lk 4^’^); and currently calls Himself by the great Danielle title of ‘ Son of Man.’ He explains that this ‘ Son of Man ’ has come In the fashion of men, “ eating and drinking ” (Mt Lk 7^^), and living a hard life (Mt 8“^, Lk 9^^) — ending in betrayal and death (Mt 26^®, Lk 22^'^); but after death is to rise again (Mt 12^^, Lk But even while on earth He asserts for

Himself an unbroken communion with God, or rather a continuous Intercommunion of Himself as ‘ Son ’ with

tinues, “ which occurs twelve times elsewhere in St. Luke, together with the expression ‘ Son of God,’ which elsewhere occurs nine times, does not occur in our compilation of sayings. Messianic tone and coloring, however, declare themselves in the sayings (lyssseq., 26 iq22)^ and in the parable and, besides, the expression ‘Son of

Man.’ ” How inadequate this is as a representation of the teaching of

the material common to Matthew and Luke concerning our Lord’s self- the ‘ Father’ (Mt ii“h Lk I0“-); knowing the Father as perfectly as He Is known by the Father, and therefore able to make known the Father as His sole adequate revelation to men. In this great passage we have (what must be considered the culminating assertion on ■ our Lord’s part of His essential deity.

It Is clear, then, that the documents which, even In the view of the most unreasonable criticism, are sup- Resort to posed to underlie the structure of our

* Historical present Synoptics are freighted with the Criticism’ same teaching which these Gospels themselves embody as to the person of our Lord. Literary criticism cannot penetrate to any stratum of belief more primitive than this. We may sink our trial shafts down through the soil of the Gospel tradition at any point we please; it is only conformable strata that we pierce. So far as the tradition goes, it_.glves xonr. s^tlent testimony to an aboriginal faith In the deity of the founder of the religion of Christianity. In these circumstances It Is not strange that another mode of analysis Is attempted. Literary criticism Is abandoned for historical criticism: and we are Invited to distinguish In our Gospels not between later and older documentary strata, but between narrative and reportorial elements. We do not wish to know. It Is said, what Matthew, Mark or Luke thought, or what was thought by those represented by them or by any predecessor of theirs — the Christian community to wit, even the ^primitive Christian community. What we wish to Imow vis what Jesus Himself thought. We appeal from the ^representation of Jesus given by His followers to the self-testimony of Jesus. Let us have Jesus’ own conception of Himself.

It Is not necessary to spend much time upon this demand In Its simplest form, that, namely, which would The Reportorial merely separate out from the Synoptic Element in the Gospels as they stand the words attrlb- Gospels Jesus, and seek to ascertain from them Jesus’ witness to the nature of His person and the quality of His dignity. It must have been observed as we ran over the designations applied to our Lord In the Gospels and sought to estimate their significance, that the most remarkable of them are drawn from the words of Jesus. The fact Is too patent and striking to have failed to attract attention: the higher teaching of the Gospels as to our Lord’s person Is embodied very especially In His own words. It Is on His lips, for example, that the term ‘ Lord ’ appears when employed In its loftiest connections. It Is He alone who applies to Himself the significant title of ‘ Son of Man,’ the vehicle of the most constant claim for Him of a superhuman nature. It Is He alone who, speaking out of His own consciousness, proclaims Himself superior to those highest of God’s creatures, the! angels (Mk 13^^ Mt 24^^): represents Himself as living In continuous and perfect Intercommunion with the Father, knowing Him even as He Is known by Him and acting as the sole adequate mediator alike of the knowledge of God and of the grace of God to men (Mt ii^^, Lk 10^^): and In His great closing utterance places Himself, along with the Father and Holy Spirit and equally with them, even In the awful precincts of the Divine Name Itself (Mt 28^^). To separate between the narrative and reportorial elements of the Gospels, therefore, only brings home to us with peculiar poignancy the testimony they bear to the deity of our Lord, resting this testimony, as they do, on the firm basis of our Lord’s own self-testimony — a selftestimony In which He at times lays bare to us the Innermost depths of His divine self-consciousness.

There can be no question of the deity of our Lord, therefore. If we can trust the report which the evangelists give of His words. It Is at this point, however. Trustworthiness that the assault on the validity of their of the Evangel- representation Is made. We are not ical Report asked to distinguish between what the evangelists say In their own person and what they say In the person of Jesus. We are asked to distinguish (fttween what Is really theirs In their account of the life and teaching of Jesus and what Is really Jesus’ own transcribed Into their narratives. It Is suggested ^that they may have, or rather that they must have, and actually have, attributed much to Jesus which He never said; that they have read back their own Ideas Into His teaching, and unconsciously — or more or less consciously— placed on His lips what was In point of fact the dogmatic elaborations of the later Christian community. And It is demanded that we, therefore, subject the whole body of the evangelic representation of Jesus’ teaching to the most searchingly critical scrutiny with a view to sifting out from It what may really be depended upon as Jesus’ own. Thus only, we are told, will It be possible to find firm footing. Faith Is the foe of fact: and In the enthusiasm of their devotion to Jesus It was Inevitable that His followers should clothe Him in their thought of Him with attributes which He did not possess and never dreamed of claiming: and It was equally Inevitable that they should Imagine that He must have claimed them and have ended by representing Him as claiming them. We shall never know the truth about Jesus, therefore, we are told, until we penetrate behind the Jesus of the evangelists to the Jesus that really was.

The situation might not have been so bad, we are told, if the evangelists had been merely transmitters of a tradition, like, say, the rabbinical

Fact schools. But there is an essential difference between the two cases, a difference which casts us with respect to the evangelic tradition into graxe doubt. This difference is due to the unfortunate fact that the evangelists themselves believed in Jesus and loved Him. “ In our case,” there-

fore, we are told,® “ we have not merely pupils transmitting the teaching of their master, but a believing community speaking of one they honor as the exalted Lord. Even the oldest Gospel is written from the standpoint of faith; already for Mark Jesus is not only the Messiah of the Jewish people, but the miraculous eternal Son of God whose glory shone in the world.”® “ And it has been rightly emphasized that in this regard our three first Gospels are distinguished Jrom the fourth only in degree. Must there not, then, have taken place here a complete repainting from the standpoint of faith? For there Is a certain propriety in saying that faith Is the enemy of history. Where we believe and honor, we no longer see objectively.”

Accordingly we are told that the deepest longing of men’s hearts to-day Is to rediscover the real Jesus.

® Cf. p. 57: “ For the belief of the community, which is shared already by the oldest evangelist, Jesus is the miraculous Son of God, on whom men believe, whom men put wholly by God’s side.” And cf. Wrede, Das Messiasseheimnis in den Evans^elien, 1901, passim.

“ There Is a great desire to know Him at first hand,” It Is said,’' “not merely through the loving vision of His earliest interpreters, but as He looked and spoke and worked and thought.” Which Is as much as to say that the vision the evangelists give us of Jesus Is not conformable to the reality, but has been distorted by their love. If we wish the bald truth about Him and His claims we must go behind them.

This point of view, it will be observed. Is definite enough. The evangelists are not to be trusted In the Primary report they give of the teaching of Canon of Jesus about Himself. But embarrassing Criticism questions remain. Above all, these embarrassing questions: Why should we not trust the evangelists’ report of Jesus’ teaching as to His own nature? And, distrusting them, how are we to get behind their report? That the evangelists believed In Jesus and loved Him does not seem In itself an abso*- lutely compelling reason why we should distrust their report of His teaching concerning His own nature. Suppose we assume for the moment that Jesus did assert for Himself superhuman dignity. How does It throw doubt upon that fact that those who report It to us were led — possibly by overwhelming evidence of Its truth — to believe that In so asserting He spoke truly? Are we to lay It down as the primary canon of criticism that no sympathetic report of a master’s teaching Is trustworthy; that only Inimical reporters are credible reporters?

Absurd as it seems, this Is the actual canon of critical reconstruction upon which our would-be guides. In re- covering from the obscuring hands of the evangelists the real Jesus, would have us proceed. It has found somewhat notorious enunciation in Professor Schmiedel’s article “ Gospels ” in the Encyclopedia Bihlica.^ But it is so far from being peculiar to Professor Schmiedel that it is the common foundation stone upon which the whole school of criticism with which we are now concerned builds its attempt to penetrate behind the evangelical narratives and to recover from these an earlier and therefore presumably truer picture of Jesus and His claims.® Under its guidance we are set to searching diligently through the evangelical narratives (as if for hid treasures) for sentences or fragments of sentences in the reported words of Jesus, which appear, or may be made to appear, out of harmony with the high claims He is consentiently and constantly reported by all the evangelists to have made for Himself: and on these few broken passages, torn from their

® P. 1872: “When a profane historian finds before him a historical document which testifies to the worship of a hero unknown to other sources, he attaches first and foremost importance to those features which cannot be deduced merely from the fact of this worship, and he does so on the simple and sufficient ground that they would not be found in this source unless the author had met with them as the fixed data of tradition. The same fundamental principle may safely be applied in the case of the Gospels, for they also are all of them written by worshipers of Jesus.”

® Cf. e.g. Shailer Mathews, The Messianic Hope in the N. T., 1905, p. 58: “At this point we may safely use this canon: that saying is more probably genuine which treats of Messianic matters in any other way than that which characterized apostolic belief.” “ The trustworthiness of sayings which do not contradict, but agree with, apostolic belief must be decided on... more general critical grounds.” It is the same canon which Prof. N. Schmidt, The Prophet of Nazareth, 1905, lays down in the words (p. 235); “These sayings possess evidential value just in proportion as they contradict the notions current in the circles through which they were transmitted.”

The Sy nop tic J es us Pri mi live 1 6 1 context and shredded in their own contents, is erected, as on its foundation stone, a totally new portrait of Jesus, expressing a totally new self-consciousness, — which stands related to the Jesus of the evangelists and the self-consciousness which is ascribed to Him in their account, of course, as its precise contradictory, — seeing that it is precisely on the principle of contradiction that it has been concocted.

Surely we do not need to pause to point out that the procedure we are here invited to adopt is a prescription for historical investigation which must always issue in reversing the portraiture of the historical characters to the records of whose lives it is applied. The result of its universal application would be, so to speak, the writing of all history backwards and the adornment of its annals with a series of portraits which would have this only to recommend them, that they represent every historical character as the exact contrast to what each was thought to be by all who knew and esteemed him. The absurdity and wrong of invoking such a canon in the case of our Synoptic Gospels are peculiarly flagrant, inasmuch as these Gospels, as we have seen, and as these very critics are frank to allow, are themselves of very early date and rest on a documentary basis, quite at one with them in the portrait they draw of Jesus, which is naturally earlier than themselves; and therefore reflect the universal conviction of the first generation of Christians. It is really impossible to doubt that they bring to us the aboriginal testimony of the primitive Church — a Church which included in its membership a considerable number of actual eyewitnesses of Jesus and ear-witnesses of His teaching, — as to His claims and personality.

The absolute unanimity of that Church in its view of Jesus is very strikingly illustrated by the difficulty of Futility of discovering passages imbedded in our This Canon Gospels which Can be used as a foundation for the opposing portraiture of Jesus which the critics would fain draw. Professor Schmiedel can by the utmost sharpness of inquisition find only five, which by applying more exegetical pressure he can increase only to nine. The groundlessness of this assault on the trustworthiness of the portrait of Jesus presented in our Synoptics may fairly be said, therefore, to be matched by its resultlessness. Material cannot be gathered from our Gospels out of which a naturalistic Christ can be created. The method of criticism adopted being purely subjective, moreover, the assumed results naturally vary endlessly. We feel a certain sympathy, therefore, with the position assumed by those writers who frankly admit that, the evangelical portraiture of Jesus being distrusted, the real Jesus is hopelessly lost to our sight. Strive as we may, we are told, we cannot penetrate behind the Jesus of our first informants — the writers of the New Testament, upon whose palette had already been mingled, nevertheless, colors derived from Jewish prophecy. Rabbinic teaching. Oriental gnosis and Christian philosophy. “ All that can be d_etermined with certainty from these writings,” it is declared, “ is that conception of Christ which was the object of faith of the early Christian communities and their teachers”: the real Jesus is hopelessly hidden under the incrustations with which faith has enveloped it.^° Nor does there seem to be lacking a certain logical force In the reasoning of bolder souls^^ who drive the Inference one step further and ask what need there Is of assuming a real Jesus at all. The real Jesus ” whom the critics Invent certainly was not the author of the Christianity that exists. If the Christianity that actually exists In the world can get along without the Jesus which alone would account for It, why, they argue, must there be assumed behind It a Jesus which will not account for It; of whom this only may be said, — that He Is a useless figure, the assumption of whom Is so far from accounting for that great religious movement which we call Christianity, that It ri's certain that the movement did not arise In Him and did not derive Its fundamental convictions from Him? Let us, then, assume, they say, that there never was any such person as Jesus at all, and the picture drawn of Him In the evangelists Is pure myth.

It Is Interesting — almost amusing — to observe our disintegrating critics over against this more radical em- Can We ployment of their own methods, suddenly Save Any Jesus taking up the role of “ apologists at All? writing so In the spirit and with the adoption of so many of the exact arguments of the “ apologists,” whom they have been wont to despise, as to lead the reader to exclaim, “ Are these, too, among the prophets? ” It Is all, however. In vain. The fatal subjectivity which underlies their own view reasserts Itself In the end and leaves them without adequate defense against extremists, simply because whether one

E.g. Albert Kalthoff, Das Christus-Problem^ and Die Entstehung des Christentums, 1904; and William Benjamin Smith, Ne^ Testament Criticism, Status and Drift of. Art. in the “ Encyclopaedia Americana,” and, more fully, Der ‘vorchristliche Jesus, etc., 1906.

stops with.them or goes on with the others is not a matter of principle, but only of temperament. It is just as impossible that Christianity can have sprung from the Jesus which these critics give us, as that it should have sprung up without any Jesus behind it at all, as the radicals assert. There is just as little reason in a sound historical criticism to discover the Jesus of Bousset behind the Jesus of the evangelists, as there is for discovering with Kalthoff that there was no real Jesus at all behind the Jesus of the evangelists. The plain fact is that the evangelists give us the primitive Jesus, behind which there is none other; and the attempt to set the Jesus they give us aside in favor of an assumed more primitive Jesus can mean nothing but the confounding of all historical sequences. The real impulse for the whole assault upon the trustworthiness of the portrait of Jesus drawn in the Gospels lies not in the region of historical investigation but in that of dogmatic prejudice, — or to be more specific, of naturalistic preconception. The moving spring of the critical reconstruction is the determination to have a “ natural ” as over against the “ supernatural ” Jesus of the evangelists. There must be a more primitive Jesus than the evangelists’ — this is the actual movement of thought — because their Jesus is already a supernatural Jesus, — “ a miraculous Son of God, in whom men believe, whom men elevate to a place by the side of God.”^^ The plain fact, however, is that this supernatural Jesus is the only Jesus historically witnessed to us; the only Jesus historically discoverable by us; the only Jesus historically tolerable. We can rid ourselves of Him only by doing violence to the Wjhole historical testimony and to the whole historical development as well. Not only is there no other Jesus witnessed in the documents, but no other Jesus can have formed the starting point of the great movement which, springing from Him, has conquered to itself the civilized world.

What must absorb our attention immediately, however, Is the difficulty that Is found even on these naturalistic presuppositions In eliminating from the portrait of Jesus drawn In the Gospels all supernatural traits and' all claims on His own part to a supernatural personality. To be successful here, there Is required such a policy of thoroughgoing rejection as Kalthoff’s and W. B. Smith’s, who sweep away the whole figure of Jesus Itself as a myth, or at least as Wrede’s, who would have us believe that Jesus made no claim to even '^Messianic dignity, so that the entire picture drawn of His career in our Gospels Is false; or else such a policy of ignoramus as Pflelderer’s who declines to form any picture of the real Jesus at all. The majority of naturalistic critics recoil, however, from these extremes with an energy which seems to betray at least a‘ semiconsciousness that there may haply be found In them the reductio ad ahsiirdum of their whole method. Their position Is certainly a hard one between these extremes from which they recoil and the portrait of the evangelists toward which their recoil brings them back. In en- X deavoring to avoid conclusions recognized by them as Intolerable they are compelled to give recognition to facts as to the claims of the real Jesus which are fatal to their whole elaborately argued position.

They are forced, for example, to allow that Jesus did announce Himself as the Messlah.^^ And they are

i^Bousset, Jesus, 168, argues: “We have certain knowledge that the belief existed from the very beginning among the Christian commu-

forced to admit that, in developing His Messianic conception, He was wont to call Himself ‘ the