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 THE HISTORIC JESUS
 
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 THE, HISTORIC JESUS 
 
 BEING THE ELLIOTT LECTURES 
 DELIVERED IN THE WESTERN THEO- 
 LOGICAL SEMINARY, PITTSBURG, PA. 
 
 BY THE REV. 
 
 DAVID SMITH, M.A., D.D. 
 
 PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY IN THE MCCREA 
 MAGEE COLLEGE, LONDONDERRY 
 
 SECOND EDITION 
 
 HODDER AND STOUGHTON 
 
 LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO
 
 TO THE 
 
 PROFESSORS AND STUDENTS 
 
 OF THE WESTERN THEOLOGICAL, SEMINARY, PITTSBURC., 
 
 AND ALL THE FRIENDS WHO MADE MY FIRST VISIT 
 
 TO AMERICA A PLEASANT EXPERIENCE 
 
 AND A FRAGRANT MEMORY
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THE question of the historicity of the 
 evangelic narratives is more than aca- 
 demic ; and so I have endeavoured to eschew 
 technicalities and make my argument intelligible 
 to those who, unversed in the science of criti- 
 cism, are yet troubled by its pronouncements. 
 In truth it is less an argument than a personal 
 confession. It indicates the path by which my 
 own mind has travelled, and my hope is that 
 it may help others to a braver faith in our Lord 
 Jesus Christ. 
 
 D. s. 
 4, THE COLLEGE, 
 
 LONDONDERRY.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE CRITICAL CONTENTION . . 1 
 
 II 
 
 APOCRYPHAL IDEALISATIONS . . . .23 
 
 III 
 
 RIVALS OF THE EVANGELIC JESUS . . .43 
 
 IV 
 
 THE SELF-EVIDENCE OF THE EVANGELIC PORTRAITURE . 61 
 
 V 
 
 THE EVIDENCE OF EXPERIENCE . . . .95 
 
 A LATIN HYMN ...... 119 
 
 INDEXES . 121
 
 THE CRITICAL CONTENTION
 
 ' They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where 
 they have laid Him ' 
 
 ST. MARY MAGDALENE.
 
 THE CRITICAL CONTENTION 
 
 AT the outset of his work on The Agreement 
 of the Evangelists, ere addressing himself 
 to his proper task of discussing the Jesu8known 
 discrepancies of the fourfold narra- JJ^^J 118 
 tive, St. Augustine deals with a pre- believers - 
 liminary and more vital problem. ' It is needful,' 
 he says, * first to discuss that question which is 
 wont to disturb not a few : why the Lord wrote 
 nothing Himself, so that it is necessary to 
 believe the writings of others regarding Him. 
 This is said by those, mostly pagans, who dare 
 not impeach or blaspheme the Lord Jesus Christ 
 Himself, and attribute to Him a most excellent 
 wisdom only, however, as a man ; but His 
 disciples, they say, attributed to their Master 
 more than He was ; insomuch that they said 
 He was the Son of God, and the Word of God 
 by which all things were made, and He and 
 
 The Historic Jesus
 
 4 THE CRITICAL CONTENTION 
 
 God the Father were one, and all else of like 
 sort in the apostolic literature whereby we have 
 learned that He should be worshipped as God 
 one with the Father. For they deem that He 
 should be honoured as a most wise man ; but 
 that He should be worshipped as God they 
 deny.' 
 
 And their contention was by no means irra- 
 tional. What they conceived to have happened 
 Hero _ in the case of our Lord has frequently 
 
 worship. happened in the evolution of religion. 
 ' How the man Odin,' says Carlyle,* * came to 
 be considered a god, the chief god ? that surely 
 is a question which nobody would wish to 
 dogmatise upon. I have said, his people knew 
 no limits to their admiration of him ; they had 
 as yet no scale to measure admiration by. 
 Fancy your own generous heart 's-love of some 
 greatest man expanding till it transcended all 
 bounds, till it filled and overflowed the whole 
 field of your thought ! . . . And then consider 
 what mere Time will do in such cases ; how if a 
 man was great while living, he becomes tenfold 
 greater when dead. What an enormous earner a- 
 obscura magnifier is Tradition ! How a thing 
 
 * On Heroes : The Hero as Divinity.
 
 THE CRITICAL CONTENTION 5 
 
 grows in the human Memory, in the human 
 Imagination, when love, worship and all that 
 lies in the human Heart, is there to encourage 
 it. And in the darkness, in the entire ignorance ; 
 without date or document, no book, no Arundel- 
 marble ; only here and there some dumb monu- 
 mental cairn. Why, in thirty or forty years, 
 were there no books, any great man would 
 grow mythic, the contemporaries who had seen 
 him being once all dead.' 
 
 And so it happened in the case of Jesus 
 according to those early critics, * mostly pagans,' 
 who were no wanton blasphemers but 
 
 L . . The evangelic 
 
 earnest men, willing to do all justice picture not 
 
 ... . portraiture 
 
 to Christianity yet refusing to recog- but 
 
 ' . . , idealisation. 
 
 mse a miracle where a natural expla- 
 nation would suffice. It was a reasonable con- 
 tention, and its reasonableness is proved by this 
 that it has held its ground and is maintained 
 in our own day with stronger cogency and 
 greater persuasiveness. The Jesus of the 
 Gospels, it is alleged, is not the Jesus of 
 history. The picture which the Evangelists 
 have painted is not portraiture but idealisation. 
 It depicts our Lord, not as He actually was in 
 the days of His flesh, but as He appeared to
 
 6 THE CRITICAL CONTENTION 
 
 a later generation, glorified by reverence and 
 magnified by superstition. 
 
 The transformation was effected mainly by 
 
 the operation of two causes. One was the 
 
 Messianic expectation of the Jewish 
 
 Two trans- 
 forming people. ' The Messianic time,' says 
 
 influences: 
 
 Strauss, anticipating much that has 
 
 (1) the *. 
 
 Messianic since been written,* 4 was expected 
 
 expectation; . . 
 
 generally as a time of signs and 
 wonders. The eyes of the blind should be 
 opened, the ears of the deaf should be un- 
 stopped, the lame should leap, and the tongue 
 of the dumb extol God.f This, in the first 
 instance quite figuratively intended, was soon 
 understood literally J and hereby the figure of 
 the Messiah, ere ever Jesus appeared, was 
 always sketched more in detail. Thus many 
 of the tales regarding Jesus had not to be newly 
 invented, but had only to be transferred to Jesus 
 from the figure of the Messiah living in the 
 people's hope, into which, with manifold trans- 
 formations, they had come from the Old Testa- 
 ment, and to be harmonised with his personality 
 
 * Leb. Jea., Einleit., p. 92 f. 
 
 t Isa. zxxv. 6 f., xlii. 7 ; cf. xxxii. 3, 4. 
 
 I Matt. xi. 6 ; Luke vii. 21 f.
 
 THE CRITICAL CONTENTION 7 
 
 and teaching. And so it could never have been 
 easier for the man who introduced such a trait 
 into the description of Jesus, to believe himself 
 that it actually belonged to him, in accordance 
 with the following syllogism : So and so must 
 have happened to the Messiah ; Jesus was the 
 Messiah ; therefore that will have happened to 
 him.' Given the belief that Jesus was the 
 Messiah, then it was inevitable that the 
 Messianic programme should be assigned to 
 Him. Whatever the Messiah was to be or do, 
 that Jesus must have been and done. And 
 thus prophecy became history. 
 
 But even apart from the Messianic Hope the 
 transformation was inevitable. The Evangelists 
 wrote at least a generation after the (2 ) the view- 
 events which they record, and they 
 beheld and interpreted the past hi the 
 light of the present. And what followed ? It 
 has been stated thus : * To realise that the 
 central materials of the gospels were mainly 
 drawn up and collected during the three or four 
 decades which followed the death of Jesus, and 
 that the gospels themselves were not composed 
 until the period 65-105 ; to realise these facts 
 will show (i.) that the gospels are not purely
 
 8 THE CRITICAL CONTENTION 
 
 objective records, no mere chronicles of pure 
 crude fact, or of speeches preserved verbatim ; 
 (ii.) that they were compiled in and for an age 
 when the church required Christ not as a 
 memory so much as a religious standard, and 
 when it reverenced him as an authority for its 
 ideas and usages ; (iii.) that they reflect current 
 interests and feelings, and are shaped by the 
 experience and for the circumstances of the 
 church ; (iv.) that their conceptions of Christ 
 and Christianity are also moulded to some 
 extent by the activity and expansion of the 
 church between 30 and 60, by its tradition, 
 oral and written, and by its teaching, especially 
 that of Paul.'* 
 
 Thus the task of criticism is to work back 
 from the evangelic idealisation to the historic 
 rue taak of reality, and discover the actual Jesus 
 criticism. fry divesting Him of those alien wrap- 
 pings, unearthing Him from those legendary 
 accumulations, and clearing away the mist 
 which has gathered round Him and hidden 
 Him from view. And the question is : What 
 remains after the work has been accom- 
 plished ? 
 
 * Moffatt, Hiat. N. T., p. 46, n. 2.
 
 THE CRITICAL CONTENTION 9 
 
 It has been answered with frank precision by 
 Professor Schmiedel of Zurich in his cataclysmic 
 article on the Gospels in the Encyclo- ^ & test of 
 pcedia Biblica. There the test of his- *&**>*** 
 toricity is first of all defined on this wise: '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 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 fixed data of tradition.' And what is 
 the residuum of historic material after ^ hiatoric 
 the application of this test to the residuum - 
 evangelic narratives ? Only nine fragments, a 
 series of negations, emphatic repudiations of 
 supernatural attributes and miraculous powers: 
 
 1. Our Lord's answer to the Young Ruler : 
 * Why callest thou Me good ? None is good 
 save one, even God.'* 
 
 2. His saying to the Pharisees that 'blas- 
 phemy against the Son of Man can be for- 
 given.' t 
 
 * Mark x. 17 f. t Matt. xii. 31 f. 
 
 The Historic Jesus 3
 
 10 THE CRITICAL CONTENTION 
 
 8. The supposition of His relations that He 
 was 'beside Himself.'* 
 
 4. His saying : ' Of that day or that hour 
 knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, 
 neither the Son, but the Father.' t 
 
 5. His cry on the Cross : * My God, My God, 
 why hast Thou forsaken Me ? ' J 
 
 6. His refusal of a sign to that generation. 
 
 7. The statement that He ' was able to do no 
 mighty work (save healing a few sick folk) in 
 Nazareth, and marvelled at the unbelief of its 
 people.' || 
 
 8. His warning to the disciples after the 
 miracles of the loaves and fishes,H which proves, 
 it is alleged, that the feeding of the multitudes 
 was not a historical occurrence, but a parable 
 having this as its point, that the bread with 
 which one man in the wilderness was able to 
 feed a vast multitude signifies the teaching 
 with which he satisfied their souls. 
 
 9. His answer to the messengers of John the 
 
 * Mark iii. 21. Keim (Jea. von Nae., iii. p. 181, E.T.), on 
 the contrary, discredits this passage, and suggests that it 
 may be derived from 2 Cor. v. 13 ; Acts xxv. 24. 
 
 f Mark xiii. 32. J Mark xv. 34. 
 
 Mark viii. 12. || Mark vi. 5 f. 
 
 11 Mark viii. 14-21.
 
 THE CRITICAL CONTENTION 11 
 
 Baptist : * ' The blind receive their sight, and 
 the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the 
 deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the 
 poor have the Gospel preached to them ' 
 the last clause counteracting the preceding 
 enumeration and proving that Jesus was speak- 
 ing not of the physically but of the spiritually 
 blind, lame, leprous, deaf, dead. 
 
 These fragments Schmiedel pronounces 'abso- 
 lutely credible,' 'the foundation-pillars for a 
 truly scientific life of Jesus.' And this is all 
 that is left this shattered remnant of that 
 precious heritage, the Evangelic Tradition, ' the 
 fairest memorial,' as Weizsacker terms it,t 
 ' which the primitive Church has raised in its 
 own honour.' 
 
 It is hardly possible to exaggerate the 
 seriousness of the issue. The foundation of 
 the Church's faith and hope is her 
 
 . The serious- 
 
 Lord Jesus Christ, according to the 
 
 issue. 
 
 ancient definition,! 'God of God, 
 
 Light of Light, very God of very God ; be- 
 
 gotten, not made ; of one essence with the 
 
 * Matt. xi. 5 ; Luke vii. 22. 
 t Urchristenthum, p. 696. 
 | Creed of Constantinople.
 
 12 
 
 Father ; through whom all things were made ; 
 who for us men and for our salvation descended 
 from heaven, and was made flesh of the Holy 
 Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and became man ; 
 was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and 
 suffered, and was buried, and rose again on the 
 third day, according to the Scriptures ; and 
 ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right 
 hand of the Father; and cometh again with 
 glory to judge quick and dead : of whose 
 Kingdom there shall be no end.' All this she 
 believes on the testimony of the Evangelists ; 
 and if it be proved that their testimony is a 
 dream, then her faith is whistled down the 
 wind. ' Christ, it is true,' says Bishop Mar- 
 tensen,* ' is not present in the Scriptures alone ; 
 it is true, the image of Christ lives in a manner 
 relatively independent of Scripture, in the heart 
 of the Church, and in the heart of each indi- 
 vidual believer ; but the inward Christ of the 
 heart presupposes the Christ manifested in 
 history, and without the latter soon fades into 
 a mystic cloud. The manifold representations 
 of Christ which exist in the Christian Church 
 as a whole, in the various confessions and sects, 
 
 * Christian Dogmatics, pp. 239 f.
 
 THE CRITICAL CONTENTION 13 
 
 in the various forms of Christian art and science, 
 all spring from the one grand fundamental form 
 which is sketched in the Gospels ; and they 
 must all be judged and tested thereby. If we 
 had not such a representation, no really essential 
 feature of which is absent or incorrect ; if Christ 
 were simply the half-apocryphal person to which 
 one-sided critics love to reduce Him, by en- 
 veloping Him in an impenetrable mist ; we 
 must give up speaking of a Christian revela- 
 tion in the sense that Christ Himself is its 
 fundamental feature.' 
 
 It has, however, been maintained that the 
 disaster is not inevitable. A way of escape 
 has been sought along the line of Green . S way 
 the Hegelian philosophy ; and by no of esca P e 
 one has it been more persuasively commended 
 than by that brilliant teacher, the late Mr. 
 T. H. Green of Oxford, the ^prototype of 
 Langham hi Mrs. Humphry Ward's Robert . rv 
 Elwiere. 
 
 His argument is that it matters not at all 
 whether the evangelic portraiture of Jesus be 
 historical. In point of fact it is not sufflciencyof 
 historical. It is a beautiful ideal, the *** idea1 ' 
 creation partly of St. Paul, but still more of
 
 14 THE CRITICAL CONTENTION 
 
 one even greater ' the writer whom the church 
 calls St. John.' ' More, probably, than two 
 generations after St. Paul had gone to his 
 rest, there arose a disciple, whose very name 
 we know not (for he sought not his own glory 
 and preferred to hide it under the repute of 
 another), who gave that final spiritual inter- 
 pretation to the person of Christ, which has 
 for ever taken it out of the region of history 
 and of the doubts that surround all past events, 
 to fix it in the purified conscience as the 
 immanent God.'* Wherefore inquire after the 
 historic Jesus ? It is sufficient that this perfect 
 ideal of the relation between God and man has 
 dawned on the world, and it matters neither 
 whence it came nor how it arose. 
 
 The thought which Green would 
 
 Immateriality . 
 
 of historic here enforce is expressed by Brown- 
 evidence. . . 
 
 ing in these familiar lines : t 
 
 1 Ye know there needs no second proof with good 
 Gained for our flesh from any earthly source : 
 We might go freezing, ages, give us fire, 
 Thereafter we judge fire at its full worth, 
 And guard it safe through every chance, ye know ! 
 
 * Green's Works, in. p. 242. 
 t A Death in the Desert.
 
 THE CRITICAL CONTENTION 15 
 
 That fable of Prometheus and his theft, 
 How mortals gained Jove's fiery flower, grows old 
 (I have been used to hear the pagans own) 
 And out of mind ; but fire, howe'er its birth, 
 Here is it, precious to the sophist now 
 Who laughs the myth of ^Eschylus to scorn, 
 As precious to those satyrs of his play, 
 Who touched it in gay wonder at the thing.' 
 
 It is sufficient that the idea is here ; and indeed 
 it is an impure sort of faith which concerns itself 
 about historic evidence. ' It is not on any 
 estimate of evidence, correct or incorrect, that 
 our true holiness can depend. Neither if we 
 believe certain documents to be genuine and 
 authentic, can we be the better, nor if we 
 believe not, the worse. There is thus an inner 
 contradiction in that conception of faith which 
 makes it a state of mind involving peace with 
 God and love towards all men, and at the same 
 time makes its object that historical work of 
 Christ, of which our knowledge depends on 
 evidence of uncertain origin and value. '* 
 
 According to this argument it is in the idea 
 alone that all the value lies. The 
 
 Objections : 
 
 history which enshrines it is mere 
 scaffolding, a needless encumbrance once the 
 
 * Green's Works, iii. p. 260.
 
 16 THE CRITICAL CONTENTION 
 
 structure is complete. It may seem an easy 
 and effective solution, facilitating our disem- 
 barrassment and lifting our faith to a secure 
 and serene vantage-ground ; yet it is beset by 
 insurmountable difficulties. 
 
 One is that it imputes to the Apostles an 
 
 alien attitude, and an attitude, more- 
 CD the 
 Apostles over, which they expressly repudiate. 
 
 built upon . . 
 
 a historic Christianity was tor them no mere 
 
 idea. It rested on a historic basis. 
 It is true that St. Paul says to the Corin- 
 thians that, ' though he had known Christ after 
 the flesh, yet now he knew Him so 
 
 St. Paul 1*1 
 
 no more ;* but this means that Christ 
 was for him more than a historic personage. He 
 was the Living Lord 
 
 ' No dead fact stranded on the shore 
 Of the oblivious years ; 
 
 ' But warm, sweet, tender, even yet 
 
 A present help is he ; 
 And faith has still its Olivet, 
 And love its Galilee.' 
 
 He was far from rejecting the historic basis or 
 regarding it as unimportant. What does he 
 
 * 2 Cor. v. 16.
 
 THE CRITICAL CONTENTION 17 
 
 say when he recapitulates to the Corinthians 
 the Gospel which he had preached unto them, 
 which also they had received ; wherein also they 
 stood, by which also they were saved? *I 
 delivered unto you first of all that which also 
 I received, how that Christ died for our sins 
 according to the Scriptures; and that He was 
 buried ; and that He hath been raised on the 
 third day according to the Scriptures ; and that 
 He appeared to Cephas ; then to the Twelve ; 
 then He appeared to above five hundred 
 brethren at once, of whom the greater part 
 remain until now, but some are fallen asleep ; 
 then He appeared to James ; then to all the 
 Apostles ; and last of all, as unto one born out 
 of due time, He appeared to me also.'* The 
 Death and the Resurrection of Jesus were the 
 theme of St. Paul's preaching, and these were 
 historic facts attested by the evidence of eye- 
 witnesses. It is simply flying in the face of 
 his explicit testimony to assert that 'there is 
 no reason to think that he knew anything of 
 the details of the life of Jesus of Nazareth.' 
 
 And as for St. John, his theme is not a 
 subjective idea of the immanence of God in 
 
 * 1 Oat. xv. 3-8. 
 The Historic Jesus 4
 
 18 THE CRITICAL CONTENTION 
 
 man, but an objective revelation enacted on the 
 
 stage of history. 'The Word,' he says in his 
 
 Prologue, * was made flesh, and dwelt 
 
 St. John. 
 
 among us (and we beheld His glory, 
 glory as of the Only Begotten from the Father), 
 full of grace and truth.' And he begins his 
 first Epistle, which is, in Lightfoot's phrase, 
 a 'commendatory postscript' to his Gospel, 
 with an elaborate assurance that the Incarna- 
 tion was an actual and historic fact. ' That 
 which was from the beginning, that which we 
 have heard, that which we have seen with our 
 eyes, and our hands handled concerning the 
 Word of life (and the life was manifested, and 
 we have seen, and bear witness, and declare 
 unto you the life, the eternal life, which was 
 with the Father, and was manifested unto us) ; 
 that which we have seen and heard declare we 
 unto you also, that ye also may have fellowship 
 with us.' 
 
 Thus, while faith was indeed for St. Paul 
 and St. John ' a state of mind involving peace 
 with God and love towards all men,' it rested 
 for them both on 'the historical work of 
 Christ' 
 
 Moreover, in his attempt to save Christianity
 
 THE CRITICAL CONTENTION 19 
 
 Green sacrifices it. He resolves it into a meta- 
 physical idea, 'the worship, through love and 
 knowledge, of God as a spiritual (2) A Chris _ 
 being immanent hi the moral life of 
 man.'* This, however, is not Chris- 
 tianity, nor is it even religion. 'A 
 religion,' says Coleridge,! 'that is a true re- 
 ligion, must consist of ideas and facts both ; 
 not of ideas alone without facts, for then it 
 would be mere Philosophy ; nor of facts alone 
 without ideas of which these facts are the 
 symbols, or out of which they arise, or upon 
 which they are grounded, for then it would be 
 mere History.' 
 
 The truth is that the Christianity of Green 
 is a mere phantom, and whatever be its specu- 
 lative validity, it has nothing of the 
 
 ... inefficacious 
 
 efficacy of a Gospel. ' Logicians,' it with tne 
 
 ' multitude. 
 
 has been said, J 'may reason about 
 abstractions. But the great mass of men must 
 have images. . . . The history of the Jews is 
 the record of a continued struggle between pure 
 Theism, supported by the most terrible sanc- 
 
 * Green's Works, p. 215. 
 
 t Table Talk, December 3, 1831. 
 
 | Macaulay, Essay on Milton.
 
 20 THE CRITICAL CONTENTION 
 
 tions, and the strangely fascinating desire of 
 having some visible and tangible object of 
 adoration. Perhaps none of the secondary 
 causes which Gibbon has assigned for the 
 rapidity with which Christianity spread over 
 the world, while Judaism scarcely ever acquired 
 a proselyte, operated more powerfully than this 
 feeling. God, the uncreated, the incomprehen- 
 sible, the invisible, attracted few worshippers. 
 A philosopher might admire so noble a con- 
 ception : but the crowd turned away in disgust 
 from words which presented no image to their 
 minds. It was before Deity embodied in a 
 human form, walking among men, partaking 
 of their infirmities, leaning on their bosoms, 
 weeping over their graves, slumbering in the 
 manger, bleeding on the cross, that the pre- 
 judices of the Synagogue, and the doubts of 
 the Academy, and the pride of the Portico, 
 and the fasces of the Lictor, and the 
 swords of thirty legions, were humbled in 
 the dust.' 
 
 ' And so the Word had breath, and wrought 
 With human hands the creed of creeds 
 In loveliness of perfect deeds, 
 More strong than all poetic thought ;
 
 THE CRITICAL CONTENTION 21 
 
 'Which he may read that binds the sheaf, 
 Or builds the house, or digs the grave, 
 Or those wild eyes that watch the wave 
 In roarings round the coral reef.'
 
 APOCRYPHAL IDEALISATIONS
 
 'Look here, upon this picture, and on this.' 
 
 SHAKSPEABB.
 
 II 
 
 APOCRYPHAL IDEALISATIONS 
 
 critical contention with which we 
 -L have to do is that the evangelic por- 
 traiture of Jesus is unhistorical. It Recap^^. 
 depicts Him, not as He actually was tion - 
 in the days of His flesh, but as He appeared 
 to the faith of the Church in the succeeding 
 generation; and all His worshipful attributes 
 are merely so much Aberglaube. And we have 
 seen how ruinous is the issue. If that conten- 
 tion be allowed, then the Church has been bereft 
 of her Lord. Jesus, so far as He can be known 
 if indeed He can be known at all was no 
 Divine Saviour ; and all down the centuries 
 the Church has been lavishing her faith and 
 adoration on a creation of her own fancy. 
 
 And there is no evasion of the issue. The 
 sole foundation of the Faith is the Historic 
 Jesus, and the Gospels are the only sources of 
 
 The Historic Jenus 5 ^
 
 26 APOCRYPHAL IDEALISATIONS 
 
 our knowledge of Him. If they fail us, He is 
 irrecoverably lost. 
 
 Our need, then, is to reassure ourselves of the 
 trustworthiness of the evangelic records, that we 
 our line of may enjoy the certainty that their 
 testimony is true, exhibiting our Lord 
 as He appeared to the eyes of His 
 idealisations, contemporaries ; and to this end my 
 purpose is, not to deal with the intricate and 
 fascinating problems of New Testament Criti- 
 cism, but to pursue a line of argument which, 
 it seems to me, is at once simple and effective, 
 instituting a comparison between the evangelic 
 portraiture as it stands and the pictures which 
 the devout imagination of the second century 
 produced. And when we have seen what 
 idealisation has actually accomplished, it will 
 then appear whether it be conceivable that the 
 evangelic portraiture is a product of the same 
 process. 
 
 For this purpose there lies to hand a suf- 
 ficiency of material. Our Evangelists are not, 
 occasion of m tne proper sense, biographers of 
 idealisation. j esus> forasmuch as they do not 
 
 narrate the full story of His earthly life. St. 
 Mark and St. John begin with His manifes-
 
 APOCRYPHAL IDEALISATIONS 27 
 
 tation as the Messiah, and narrate His brief 
 ministry of only three years' duration ; and as 
 for St. Matthew and St. Luke, they begin 
 indeed with the story of His Birth, but there- 
 after, save for that solitary incident which the 
 diligence of the latter has rescued from oblivion 
 the Holy Child's visit to Jerusalem during 
 the season of the Passover* there is a long 
 hiatus of thirty years in their narratives, and 
 they resume where St. Mark and St. John 
 begin. 
 
 It was inevitable that the mystery of the 
 Silent Years should excite curiosity, and in the 
 complete absence of information the 
 myth-forming genius of the primitive 
 Church found its opportunity. It set ChurclL 
 to work very early. St. Luke has told us that, 
 ere he composed his Gospel, many others had 
 essayed the task ; and it was their lack of 
 discrimination that moved him to investigate 
 the Evangelic Tradition and publish an accu- 
 rate version of it. t And from the Pastoral 
 Epistles to Timothy it appears how seriously 
 the Tradition was imperilled in those days. 
 It was in danger, on the one hand, of being 
 * Luke ii. 41-51. t Luke i. 1-4.
 
 28 APOCRYPHAL IDEALISATIONS 
 
 mutilated by heretical teachers, ' consenting not 
 to sound words, even those of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ, and to the doctrine which is according 
 to godliness, puffed up, knowing nothing, but 
 doting about questionings and logomachies ' ; * 
 and, on the other hand, of being corrupted by 
 an admixture of * profane and oldwifish myths.' t 
 And it was this twofold danger that necessitated 
 the committal of the precious Tradition, * the 
 genuine deposit,' J to a permanent and authori- 
 tative record. 
 
 Of this profuse literature, innocent in its 
 T9ro intention yet subversive of the very 
 
 specimen^ foundations of the Faith, two inte- 
 resting specimens have survived. 
 
 One is the apocryphal Gospel known as the 
 Protevangelium Jacobi. It is the story of Mary, 
 the Mother of our Lord, and it pro- 
 fesses to be the work of His brother 
 
 James. Of course the latter claim is 
 groundless, nevertheless the book is demon- 
 strably very ancient. In his commentary on 
 St. Matthew (c. A.D. 246) Origen refers to it 
 in conjunction with the Gospel according to 
 
 * 1 Tim. vi. 8, 4. t 1 Tim. iv. 7. J 2 Tim. i. 14. 
 
 Cf. The Days of Ilia Flesh, Introd., pp. xv f.
 
 APOCRYPHAL IDEALISATIONS 29 
 
 Peter, plainly ranking them together in notoriety 
 and authority.* And the Gospel according to 
 Peter is of high antiquity. In his letter to the 
 Church of Rhossos, Serapion, Bishop of Antioch 
 (A.D. 190-203), defends the sanction which he 
 had given to the reading of it in the Church, 
 inasmuch as, notwithstanding Doketic additions, 
 most of it belonged to the right doctrine of the 
 Saviour, t Since time was required for its cir- 
 culation and recognition, this testimony carries 
 the Gospel according to Peter, and with it our 
 Protevangelium, well into the second century. 
 Further, the Protevangelium is thrice quoted, 
 as though possessed of full authority, by St. 
 Justin Martyr twice in his Dialogue with 
 Trypho (c. A.D. 136), J and again in his first 
 
 * x. 17 : rove Se d^tX^ove 'Ij/<rou 0a<rt rtvee elvai, CK 
 ewe opfJiaifJLEVoi rov eTriycypayu/ievov Kara Tierpov tvay- 
 yeX/ou 17 rije fiifiXov 'Iaicw/3ou, vlovg 'Iwff>)0 e/c Trporepag yvvaticoe 
 trvv^KTjKviag avry npo rijs 
 
 t Euseb., H. E., vi. 12. 
 
 t Dial. 78 (Jesus born in a cave near Bethlehem) : ET 
 'Iwov^ OVK ix ev * v T & ^A 1 ? tKf.ivri ITOV naraXvyai, kv 
 (rtri)\aiy Tivl avveyyvs rr]Q K&priG KareXvtre' KOI TOTE avriav 
 OVTW KEI ereroKei ft Mapt'a rov Xpto-rov. Of. Protev, xviii. 
 Dial. 100 : X a l av Xa/3ov<ra Mapia % wapQivog ei/ayye\io/zf vov 
 TafipirjX dyyeXou. Of. Protev. xii. 2 : x a P av ^ \a/3ovcra 
 Maptaju a7r/i Trpoc '
 
 30 APOCRYPHAL IDEALISATIONS 
 
 Apology, addressed to Antoninus Pius (c. A.D. 
 146).* It could hardly have acquired such 
 recognition in less than a generation, and this 
 carries it back to the beginning of the second 
 century, t 
 
 The other book which claims our attention 
 is the Evangelium Thomas, and its 
 
 (2) Evan- 
 
 folium antiquity can scarcely be less, since 
 
 it is quoted, though in terms of repro- 
 bation, by St. Irenaeus in his great work on 
 Heresies (A.D. 182-188). J 
 
 Whatever be the precise date of these two 
 apocrypha, they originated in the period which, 
 it is contended, produced the evangelic por- 
 traiture of Jesus ; and it is thus legitimate to 
 compare their representation with it, and judge 
 whether they belong to the same order in 
 respect of historicity. 
 
 * Apol. i. 33 : iSov o-i/XA^v//i iv yatrrpt CK Hvtvparoc 'Ayiov, 
 Kal rtet v'tov, not Ttoc T^/orou K\t)6i]<rtrai' KCLI KaXfirttc TO 
 orofia 'lijffovv' avroc yap <rw<m TOV \aov airrov atru ruv upaprLwv 
 avrwv. Similarly Protev. xi. (1) substitutes Vt'oc 'Y\^ltrrov for 
 Yioc &iov (Luke i. 35), and (2) includes in the Annunciation 
 to Mary the angel's words to Joseph (Matt. i. 21). It is 
 evident that St. Justin had the Protevangelium before him. 
 
 t Cf. Tischendorf, Ev. Apocr., pp. xii ff., xxxviii f. ; Zahn. 
 N. T. Kan., i. 914 f., ii. 774 ff. 
 
 I I. xiii. 1. Cf. Ev. Thvm. vi.
 
 APOCRYPHAL IDEALISATIONS 31 
 
 The Protevangelium is a Tendenzsckrift, and 
 it is dominated by a twofold apologetic pur- 
 pose, being directed, in the first place, 
 against the Doketic heresy which was 
 maintained by Cerinthus, the contem- & ellum ' 
 porary of the Apostle John at Ephesus, * that 
 Jesus was the son of Joseph and Mary by ordi- 
 nary generation, and, moreover, against the 
 Jewish calumny that He was the illegitimate 
 offspring of Mary and the soldier Panthera. t 
 
 It meets the former by representing Joseph 
 as a widower of great age when he was en- 
 trusted with the guardianship of Mary, against 
 From infancy she had been a ward of 
 the Temple, and she was not married 
 to Joseph but committed to his care when she 
 attained the age of twelve years, ' lest she should 
 defile the Sanctuary of the Lord.' He was 
 reluctant to undertake the charge. * I have 
 sons,' he remonstrated, ' and I am an old man, 
 and she is a girl. I shaU become a laughing- 
 stock to the children of Israel.' However, he 
 was overborne by the insistence of the priests 
 and their threat of judgment should he disobey ; 
 and so he conveyed her to his house, and went 
 
 * Iren. I. xxi. t Orig., C. Cels. i. 28, 32.
 
 32 APOCRYPHAL IDEALISATIONS 
 
 abroad in prosecution of his calling, and saw 
 her no more for six months. * Behold,' he said 
 to her at his departure, ' I received thee from 
 the Temple of the Lord ; and now I leave thee 
 in my house and go away to work at my build- 
 ings, and I shall come back to thee. The Lord 
 will keep thee safe.' 
 
 And as for the Jewish calumny, this is met 
 by attesting the perpetual virginity of Mary. 
 It is related, with somewhat un- 
 tion savoury elaboration, how she brought 
 
 of Mary. forth the Holy ^^ ^ m ^y^?^^ 
 
 arid Salome's hand was blasted when she would 
 not credit the midwife's story without such 
 tangible evidence as Thomas craved of the 
 reality of the Resurrection.* And Mary's vir- 
 ginity remained, for the brethren of Jesus were 
 not her children but the fruit of Joseph's 
 former marriage. 
 
 All this stands in striking contrast to the 
 stories of the Birth of Jesus in the Gospels 
 contrast with according to St. Matthew and St. 
 the aospeis. Luke The distinction of the latter 
 lies hi their fearlessness, their freedom from 
 apologetic solicitude. The Evangelists must 
 
 * John xx. 26.
 
 APOCRYPHAL IDEALISATIONS 33 
 
 have been aware what would be said, what 
 actually had been and was being said, of 
 the Virgin Birth ; yet they evince no con- 
 cern to safeguard the story and obviate mis- 
 construction. They report it simply as they 
 had it from the lips of their informants, who 
 would seem from internal evidence to have 
 been no other than Joseph and Mary; and 
 they never attempt to buttress it by legendary 
 accretions. There is not a touch of the gro- 
 tesque in their narratives. 
 
 The explanation is certainly not that" they 
 were superior to their apocryphal rival in 
 literary instinct and aesthetic discrimi- Reason of the 
 nation, and disdained the 'profane and difference : 
 oldwifish myths ' in which he revelled. ^l^Syof 
 For in truth he was no mean artist. t^e Gospels, 
 There is hardly anything in early literature 
 more impressive than the passage where he 
 describes how at the moment of the Saviour's 
 birth a hush fell upon creation, and all things, 
 animate and inanimate, paused as in amazement 
 and adoration. Mary had found a shelter, and 
 Joseph had gone forth in quest of succour, when 
 suddenly the wonder befell. ' I walked,' he 
 says, 'and I walked not. And I looked up 
 
 The Historic Jesus 6
 
 34 APOCRYPHAL IDEALISATIONS 
 
 to the air, and 1 saw the air astonied. And 
 I looked up to the vault of heaven, and I saw 
 it standing still and the fowls of heaven keeping 
 quiet. And I looked upon the earth, and I 
 saw a dish set and labourers at their meat, and 
 their hands were in the dish ; and they that 
 were chewing chewed not, and they that were 
 lifting their morsel brought it not up, and they 
 that were putting it to their mouth put it 
 not, but all their faces were looking up. And 
 I saw sheep being driven, and the sheep stood 
 still ; and the shepherd lifted his hand to smite 
 them, and his hand stopped up. And I looked 
 upon the stream of the river, and I saw the 
 mouths of the kids laid unto it and not drink- 
 ing. And all things for the moment were 
 driven from their course.' 
 
 This is a fine imagination, worthy of Dante 
 
 or Raphael, and comparable with that other 
 
 legend that, when the Saviour died 
 
 but their 
 
 niBtoric on the Cross, every green thing in 
 
 fcitWulnesB. / 
 
 the world withered. It was not for 
 lack of art that the writer failed, but rather for 
 this that he attempted the impossible task of 
 dealing imaginatively with the supernatural. 
 The fiction of that ethereal personage, the
 
 APOCRYPHAL IDEALISATIONS 35 
 
 White Lady of Avenel, is a fatal blot upon 
 the tale of The Monastery, and Sir Walter 
 acknowledged the justice of the disfavour with 
 which it was received, and pleaded only the 
 extreme difficulty of managing the machinery 
 of the supernatural.* It is indeed an impossible 
 achievement, and as Sir Walter failed, so did 
 the author of the Protevangelium before him. 
 And how did it come to pass that, where others 
 with every resource of genius and art have dis- 
 astrously failed, our Evangelists have so con- 
 spicuously succeeded ? The reason is simply 
 this that they were not creators but historians ; 
 they were not dealing imaginatively with the 
 supernatural but reporting an actual manifesta- 
 
 tion, 17 TOV Swrrjjooe rifjiuv 'Iijtrov XjOttrrov evtra/oicoe 
 
 Turn now to the EvangeUum Thomas. It is 
 a tissue of Doketic legends of the 
 
 ~, .. , -f . TT . Doketism of 
 
 Child Jesus, and it depicts Him as EvangeUum 
 a veritable Wunderkind. 
 
 * Of. Horace's counsel concerning the Deus ex mochina 
 (A. P. 191 f.) : 
 
 ' Nee deus intersit nisi dignus vindice nodus 
 Incident.'
 
 36 APOCRYPHAL IDEALISATIONS 
 
 (1) Even in those early days He was en- 
 (i) miracu- dowed with miraculous power, and 
 oTtkr*" tne miracles which He wrought were 
 Holy child; o f tne most startling sort. 
 
 One Sabbath Day, when He was five years 
 of age, He was playing by a stream, and He 
 gathered the running water into pools and 
 cleared them of mud by a word of command. 
 Then He made clay and moulded twelve 
 sparrows. His playmates went and told Joseph 
 how He was profaning the Sabbath, and Joseph 
 came and remonstrated with Him ; whereupon 
 the Child clapped His hands and shouted to 
 the sparrows * Away ! ' and off they flew twitter- 
 ing. The son of Annas the Scribe was standing 
 by, and he took a branch and broke down the 
 pools. * Villain 1 ' cried Jesus, * impious and 
 foolish 1 wherein did the pools and the water 
 harm thee? Behold, now, thou also shalt be 
 withered like a tree, and never bear leaves nor 
 root nor fruit.' And immediately the child was 
 all withered. 
 
 Again, as He was passing through a village, 
 He was jostled by a boy. This angered Him, 
 and He said : * Thou shalt not go thy way ' ; 
 and the boy fell down and died.
 
 APOCRYPHAL IDEALISATIONS 37 
 
 Such, according to this apocryphal legend- 
 monger, was the Boy Jesus not the sweet 
 child of whom we catch a glimpse in St. 
 Luke's narrative, * subject unto His parents ' 
 and ' advancing in favour with God and men,' * 
 but lawless, passionate, and vindictive, a terror 
 to the neighbours. 'With such a child,' they 
 said to Joseph, ' thou canst not dwell with us 
 in the village ; or else teach Him to bless and 
 not to curse ; for He kills our children.' But 
 He scorned Joseph's admonition ; ' and no one 
 durst anger Him, lest He should curse him, 
 and he should be maimed.' 'And Joseph was 
 grieved, and charged His mother: "Let Him 
 not go out of doors, because those that anger 
 Him die." ! Of course this representation stands 
 in glaring contrast to the evangelic narratives. 
 It is in protest against such contemporary 
 legends that St. John observes so pointedly 
 that the miracle at Cana was the first which our 
 Lord ever wrought.! And there is a wide dif- 
 ference between these legendary miracles and the 
 wonderful works which, according to our Evan- 
 gelists, He wrought during the years of His 
 
 * Luke ii. 51, 52. t John ii. 11.
 
 38 APOCRYPHAL IDEALISATIONS 
 
 ministry, when He went about continually 
 doing good, 
 
 ' the shadow of Him Love, 
 The speech of Him soft Music, and His step 
 A Benediction.' 
 
 The evangelic miracles were always works of 
 mercy and compassion ; and whatever we may 
 think of their theoretical possibility, our hearts 
 approve them. We would like them to be 
 true, and they 'have our vote to be so if 
 they can.' 
 
 (2) As He appears in the Evangelium Thomce, 
 
 the Holy Child was endowed with superhuman 
 
 wisdom. He was omniscient in His 
 
 (2) His 
 
 superhuman very cradle. At the age of five years 
 He was sent to school, and His 
 teacher, Zacchasus, repeated the Alphabet to 
 Him from Alpha to Omega. * Thou hypo- 
 crite 1 ' cried the Child, ' when thou knowest 
 not the Alpha according to its nature, how 
 dost thou teach others the Beta?' And then 
 He began to catechise the teacher, and ex- 
 pounded to him the mystical significance of 
 Alpha, after the manner of the Jewish sect of 
 the Cabbalists and the Gnostic sect of the
 
 APOCRYPHAL IDEALISATIONS 39 
 
 Marcosians as they appear on the pages of St. 
 Irenseus. Zacchasus was confounded. ' Take 
 Him away, I beseech thee, brother Joseph. I 
 cannot bear the austerity of His look. This 
 Child is not earth-born. Belike He hath been 
 born ere the creation of the world.' 
 
 At the age of six years another teacher took 
 Him in hand, and proposed to instruct Him 
 first in Greek and then in Hebrew. Jesus, 
 however, would answer none of his questions. 
 ' If thou art really a teacher/ He said, ' and if 
 thou knowest the letters well, tell Me the force 
 of the Alpha, and I will tell thee that of the 
 Beta.' The exasperated teacher struck Him on 
 the head, and Jesus cursed him and laid him 
 dead on the ground. 
 
 Another teacher, a friend of Joseph's, under 
 took the perilous task of His tuition. 'Bring 
 Him to me,' he said ; ' perhaps I may be able 
 by dint of flattery to teach Him the letters.' 
 Jesus went to the school, and, finding a book 
 on the desk, took it and would not read its 
 letters, but He opened His mouth and spake 
 by the Holy Spirit and taught the Law to the 
 bystanders. 'I received the Child,' exclaimed 
 the astonished teacher, 'as a disciple, but He
 
 40 APOCRYPHAL IDEALISATIONS 
 
 is full of much grace and wisdom 1 ' The 
 flattery succeeded. The Child laughed. 'For 
 thy sake,' said He, ' the other teacher who was 
 stricken shall be healed.' 
 
 Of course all this is rank Doketism, and it 
 is a denial of the Incarnation. Our Lord in 
 the days of His flesh was not God walking the 
 earth in the semblance of a man ; He was the 
 Eternal Son of God become man, and 'in all 
 things made like unto His brethren.'* He 
 was like them in weakness and weariness, and 
 in nescience too ; and in His human childhood 
 He 'advanced in wisdom and stature' a 
 normal growth at once physical and intel- 
 lectual. 
 
 And now consider the bearing of this on 
 
 the problem of the historicity of the Evangelic 
 
 Jesus. The point is that the apocry- 
 
 Argrumentfor . . . 
 
 historicity of phal picture is precisely the sort ot 
 
 the Gospels. 7, . . , . , , . . . 
 
 idealisation which the imagination of 
 those days must have produced. And this for 
 two reasons. The first is that it was a doctrine 
 of Jewish theology that the Messiah would be 
 a miracle-worker, and would thus attest His 
 * Heb. ii. 17.
 
 APOCRYPHAL IDEALISATIONS 41 
 
 Messiahship. It was on this account that the 
 Pharisees were continually challenging our Lord 
 to show them a sign, that they might believe. 
 And thus it was inevitable that the legend- 
 creators, partly with a deliberate apologetic 
 purpose, partly by the unconscious instinct of 
 faith, should crowd His life with miracles, the 
 more stupendous the better. And then there 
 was the prevailing conception of God, Jewish 
 and Pagan alike, as jealous and vindictive. 
 You remember the Greek motive for humility ? 
 ' The Deity,' said Solon, * * is all envious and 
 troublous,' grudging that mortals should be too 
 happy, and, when they recklessly exulted, 
 smiting and crushing them. Therefore wisdom 
 lay in walking softly, lest one should provoke 
 the divine envy. And similar was the Jewish 
 conception. It was perilous to have to do with 
 Jehovah. Think how the people were warned 
 off from Sinai and bounds were set about the 
 mount, ' lest the Lord should break forth upon 
 them.' t And there is the grim story of Uzzah 
 who, when the Ark was being fetched home 
 from Kirjath-jearim, put forth his hand to 
 steady it on the cart, 'for the oxen shook it. 
 
 * Herod, i. 32. t Exod. xix. 21-24. 
 
 The Historic Jean* 1
 
 42 APOCRYPHAL IDEALISATIONS 
 
 And the anger of the Lord was kindled against 
 Uzzah ; and God smote him there for his error ; 
 and there he died by the Ark of God.' * And 
 you remember the Rabbinical phrase for 
 canonicity? The canonical books were said 
 to ' defile the hands,' the idea being that they 
 were sacred, and handling them lightly was an 
 impiety involving ceremonial uncleanness and 
 demanding ceremonial ablution, t It was in 
 accordance with this principle that the Pharisees 
 inferred from our Lord's miracles of mercy that 
 He was in league with the Devil. Had they 
 been wrought by the power of God, they must 
 needs have been terrible. 
 
 Such was the prevailing conception of God, 
 and the evangelic conception was novel, un- 
 dreamed of, incredible. And this is the argu- 
 ment: If the evangelic portraiture of Jesus 
 were a second-century idealisation, it would be 
 in no wise what it is but precisely the reverse. 
 The Incarnate Son of God would have been 
 conceived, not as a gentle, gracious Friend of 
 Sinners, but as a terrible and wrathful Avenger. 
 And it is even so that He actually appears in 
 those indubitable idealisations. 
 
 * 2 Sam. vi. 6-11. 
 
 t Cf. Robertson Smith, O. T. in Jew. Ch., p. 173.
 
 RIVALS OF THE EVANGELIC JESUS
 
 irov vvv rijc 'EXXaSoc o TV((>CC ', irov T&V 'AdqviJv TO 
 irov rSiv tyiXotrixfiuv b Xfipos ', o awo FaXtXat'ac, o OTTO 
 b &ypotKOt, TTO.VTUV ixtivw irepitytvtTO. 
 
 ST. CHBYSOSTOM, In Act. Apost. Horn. IV.
 
 m 
 
 RIVALS OF THE EVANGELIC JESUS 
 
 FROM those two apocrypha, the Protevan- 
 gelium Jacobi and the EvangeUum Thomce, 
 we have learned what the faith of the Recapitula _ 
 primitive Church did in the way of tion - 
 idealising the historic Jesus ; and it seems an 
 inevitable inference that the evangelic por- 
 traiture cannot possibly be a product of the 
 same process : it is so unlike what the myth- 
 forming genius of those days actually created 
 and, in view of its presuppositions, could not 
 help creating. And now let us pursue the 
 argument along another line. 
 
 At the outset of its career Christianity was 
 laughed to scorn by the intellectual world. In 
 the phrase of the Apostle,* it was 'unto the 
 
 * 1 Cor. i. 23. Of. the sneer of the philosopher Celsus 
 (Orig., C. Cels. iii. 44) at the terms of admission to the 
 Church : ' Let no educated person approach, no wise, no 
 
 10
 
 46 RIVALS OF THE EVANGELIC JESUS 
 
 Greeks foolishness.' Presently, however, this 
 attitude was abandoned. Ere the middle of 
 TWO pagan the second century Christianity had 
 to^fy* proved itself no mere folly to be 
 
 Christianity: l aughed at> but & force to be rec koned 
 
 with; and it was then dealt with after two 
 methods. One was argument, and 
 
 (1) argument, 
 
 the protagonist was the philosopher 
 Celsus, whose clever attack, The True Word, 
 reinforced the Faith by evoking Origen's bril- 
 liant apology. The other method was more 
 
 subtle and elusive. It was the method 
 
 (2) rivalry. . 
 
 to which St. Augustine alludes in that 
 passage which engaged us at the outset. It did 
 not openly assail Christianity, but sought rather 
 to undermine it by proving that whatever was 
 true and beautiful in it was found also no less 
 but even more in Paganism. By a just instinct 
 those champions of the ancient order recognised 
 that there is no Christianity apart from Christ, 
 and they sought to compass its destruction by 
 robbing Him of His unique distinction. Un- 
 able and, perhaps, unwilling to deny His excel- 
 lence, they set themselves not to depreciate 
 
 prudent ; but if any be illiterate, if any be foolish, if any be 
 uneducated, if any be a babe, let him boldly come.'
 
 RIVALS OF THE EVANGELIC JESUS 47 
 
 but to match it. They painted ideal pictures 
 of prophets of their own, and exhibited those 
 rivals of Jesus, making no mention of Him but 
 allowing the obvious comparison to present 
 itself and suggest the intended inference. They 
 said nothing, but their meaning was : * See ! 
 here is something nobler and wiser than your 
 Galilean.* 
 
 Of this method there are extant TWO speci- 
 mens of the 
 
 two conspicuous examples Lucian's itter. 
 Life of Demonax and Philostratus' Life of 
 Apollowus of Tyana. 
 
 Lucian, that brilliant man of letters, the last 
 of the great Greek writers, was born at Samo- 
 sata on the Euphrates during the Lncian . 8 
 reign of Trajan (A.D. 98-117) ; and, Demonax. 
 according to the Byzantine lexicographer, 
 Suidas, he followed the legal profession for 
 a time at Syrian Antioch, but, failing hi it, 
 he abandoned it for literature. Suidas says 
 that he was designated ' the Blas- 
 
 Lucian's 
 
 phemer,' and that he was torn in attitude to 
 
 . . religion. 
 
 pieces by dogs for his madness against 
 
 the Truth. This notion of him is traditional 
 
 and still prevails but it is far from just. In
 
 48 RIVALS OF THE EVANGELIC JESUS 
 
 those days the ancient religions were at a sorry 
 pass. * The various modes of worship which 
 prevailed in the Roman world,' says Gibbon 
 in one of his pregnant epigrams, * ' were all 
 regarded by the people as equally true ; by the 
 philosopher, as equally false ; and by the magis- 
 trate, as equally useful.' Religion was a mass 
 of ridiculous and too often immoral supersti- 
 tions, the jest and scorn of reasonable men; 
 and it is to the credit of Lucian that he would 
 fain have rid humanity of the baleful incubus. 
 It was a blunder, but it was no crime, that, 
 imperfectly acquainted with Christianity, he 
 regarded it as merely the latest phase of the 
 ever-shifting phantasmagoria and pelted it with 
 the artillery of his satire. 
 
 His ideal wise man is the eclectic philosopher 
 Demonax, who was born of good parentage in 
 me areek tne island of Cyprus, and taught at 
 Bpirit. Athens towards the close of the first 
 
 century and well into the second ; and in every 
 feature of his portraiture one recognises a tacit 
 comparison with ' that gibbeted sophist,' as 
 Lucian elsewhere terms our Lord, t What 
 
 * Decline and Fall, chap. ii. 
 t De Mort. Peregr. 13.
 
 RIVALS OF THE EVANGELIC JESUS 49 
 
 was it in Jesus that chiefly offended the Greek 
 spirit ? It was His gravity, His constancy of 
 purpose and His strenuous devotion thereto, 
 so alien from the eurpaTrcXia* of the jocund 
 Greeks, so contrary to their maxim /uijSev ayav, 
 ne quid nimis, which Socrates called 'a young 
 man's virtue.' t He took life so seriously, 
 always, as the Greek proverb puts it, * carrying 
 things to the sweating-point,' J and never dis- 
 arming opposition by a timely jest. It was 
 this temper that involved Him in so many 
 embarrassments, and finally brought Him to 
 the Cross. 
 
 To Lucian this seemed the extremity of 
 folly, and he set in contrast the sanity of his 
 Demonax, an eclectic philosopher who ^ ideal 
 addicted himself to neither of the * ifleman: 
 dominant and antagonistic schools of his day 
 the Stoic and the Epicurean but appro- 
 priated the good of both, and regarded the 
 follies of men with an easy and amused 
 tolerance. 'He did not,' says his biographer, 
 ' indulge in the irony of Socrates, but his con- 
 
 * The word translated ' jesting ' in Eph. v. 4. 
 t Diog. Laert. ii. 32. 
 I Marc. Antonin. i. 16 : cwc 
 The Historic Jesus 8
 
 50 RIVALS OF THE EVANGELIC JESUS 
 
 versations were full of Attic grace, insomuch 
 that, when those who had held intercourse 
 with him went away, they neither despised 
 him as vulgar nor fled from the churlishness 
 of his rebukes, but were transported by merri- 
 ment, and were far more orderly and cheerful, 
 and had good hope for the future. Never was 
 he seen crying aloud or straining unduly or 
 irritated, even when censure was needed ; but, 
 while he was down upon the sins, he had indul- 
 gence for the sinners, and thought it meet to 
 take example from the physicians, who, while 
 they heal the sicknesses, show no anger against 
 the sick ; for he deemed it the part of a god 
 or a godlike man to correct the error. . . . And 
 such aid had he from the Graces and Aphrodite 
 herself in doing and saying all this that, as the 
 comedy has it, " Persuasion sate ever on his 
 lips." ' 
 
 In illustration of this quality in his hero 
 
 Lucian produces a collection of his bons mots 
 
 caustic criticisms, like his remark 
 
 his sanity, 
 
 on a futile disputation between two 
 philosophers, that * one of them was milking a 
 he-goat, and the other holding the pail ' ; or 
 shrewd precepts, like his answer to a newly-
 
 RIVALS OF THE EVANGELIC JESUS 51 
 
 appointed provincial governor who asked him 
 how he would govern best : ' Never lose your 
 temper; talk little; and hear much.' These 
 things make excellent reading, but it is not for 
 their own sake that Lucian quotes them. Their 
 use is to point the underlying contrast between 
 Jesus and His rival. They exemplify the wise 
 man's sanity. He was no ascetic, glorifying 
 poverty, privation, persecution. He appreciated 
 the good things of life, and held that if a man 
 were wise, he had the better right to enjoy 
 them. ' Do you eat sweet cakes ? ' he was 
 once asked. ' Yes,' he replied ; ' do you sup- 
 pose it is for the fools that the bees store their 
 honeycombs ? ' He had no fancy to play the 
 martyr needlessly. Once, when he was stepping 
 into the bath, he shrank back because the water 
 was too hot, and, being twitted with cowardice, 
 he retorted: 'Tell me, was it for my country 
 that I was going to suffer it ? ' And he made 
 no preposterous claims to superiority over the 
 great men of the past. ' Behold,' said Jesus, 
 'a greater than Solomon is here.'* But once, 
 when Demonax visited Olympia and the 
 magistrates proposed to erect a statue in his 
 
 * Matt. xii. 42.
 
 52 RIVALS OF THE EVANGELIC JESUS 
 
 honour, ' On no account, gentlemen,' said he. 
 'Do not reproach your ancestors for not 
 erecting a statue either of Socrates or of 
 Diogenes.' 
 
 * Such was the manner of his philosophy 
 
 meek, gentle, and blithe ' ; and the book closes 
 
 with a description of the peace of 
 
 his felicity. . r 
 
 his latter days and his passing hence 
 a charming picture in striking contrast to 
 the tragic close of the Gospel story. ' He 
 lived for nigh a hundred years without sick- 
 ness, without pain, never troublesome to any 
 nor beholden to any, serviceable to his friends, 
 never having made a single enemy. . . . Un- 
 bidden, he would sup and sleep in any house 
 he passed, the inhabitants accounting that it 
 was a visitation of God and a good divinity 
 had entered into their house.' And what did 
 Jesus say ? * The foxes have holes, and the 
 birds of the air have nests ; but the Son of 
 Man hath not where to lay His head.' * * He 
 was despised and rejected of men ; a man of 
 sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and as one 
 from whom men hide their face He was 
 despised, and we esteemed Him not.' t When 
 
 * Matt. viii. 20. t laa. liii. 8.
 
 RIVALS OF THE EVANGELIC JESUS 53 
 
 Demonax died the Athenians gave him a public 
 funeral and mourned him long ; and the stone 
 seat where he had been wont to rest, they wor- 
 shipped and wreathed with garlands ; and philo- 
 sophers carried him to his burial. But what of 
 Jesus ? * They plaited a crown of thorns, and 
 put it on His head, and a reed in His right 
 hand ; and they kneeled down before Him, 
 and mocked Him, saying, Hail, King of the 
 Jews ! And they spat upon Him, and took 
 the reed and smote Him on the head. And 
 when they had mocked Him, they took off 
 from Him the robe, and put on Him His 
 garments, and led Him away to crucify 
 Him.'* 
 
 There are the rival pictures, and the heart 
 of humanity has judged between Lucian and 
 the Evangelists. It has chosen the Man of 
 Sorrows, and has found in Him all its salva- 
 tion and all its desire. 
 
 'Is it not strange, the darkest hour 
 That ever dawn'd on sinful earth 
 Should touch the heart with softer power 
 For comfort, than an angel's mirth ? ' 
 
 * Matt, xxvii. 29-31.
 
 54 RIVALS OF THE EVANGELIC JESUS 
 
 At the first, however, the Man of Sorrows 
 was an offence both to the Jew and to the 
 Greek ; and here once more it appears how 
 alien was the evangelic portraiture from the 
 ideal of that generation, how remote from its 
 imagination. 
 
 We pass into a different and less wholesome 
 
 atmosphere when we turn to the consideration 
 
 of that other rival of the Evangelic 
 
 PMlOBtratua' . 
 
 Apoiionius Jesus Apollomus of Tyana. Side 
 by side with the literary movement 
 which had Lucian for its most distinguished 
 representative and which aimed at the suppres- 
 sion of superstition, another movement was in 
 progress during the second century. Its most 
 Neo-pytna- remarkable phase was the Neo-Pytha- 
 goreaniBm. goreanism which arose in the reign of 
 Augustus, and which essayed to revive the 
 philosophy of Pythagoras by infusing into it 
 the new life of Oriental theosophy. It is 
 interesting to recall how St. Justin Martyr 
 resorted to a teacher of this school in the 
 course of his long and fruitless search after 
 truth and happiness.* 
 
 * Dial. o. Tryph. 2.
 
 RIVALS OF THE EVANGELIC JESUS 55 
 
 Apollonius, the hero of the somewhat pon- 
 derous romance which the elder Philostratus 
 compiled from the memoranda of 
 
 T-V / -XT* i t Apolloniua, 
 
 Damis of Nineveh at the instance 
 of Julia Domna, the Syrian empress of Sep- 
 timius Severus, was a Neo-Pythagorean. The 
 story runs that he was born in the same year 
 as our Lord of an ancient and wealthy family 
 in the Cappadocian town of Tyana ; and his 
 birth, like our Lord's, was supernatural, since 
 he was an incarnation of the Egyptian deity, 
 the changeful Proteus. He studied a while 
 at Tarsus, contemporary with Saul the future 
 Apostle, and then betook himself to the neigh- 
 bouring town of Mgee, where he acquired a 
 knowledge of medicine in the school of the 
 temple of Asklepios, and embraced Pytha- 
 goreanism. On the death of his father he 
 divided his inheritance among his poorer rela- 
 tives and set out on his travels. He visited 
 India, and there conversed with the Brahmans 
 and was initiated into their magical lore. Then 
 he journeyed westward again, and visited 
 Greece, Egypt, Rome, and Spain, attended 
 everywhere by a band of disciples. Wherever 
 he went he wrought wonders and was revered
 
 56 RIVALS OF THE EVANGELIC JESUS 
 
 as a god. He settled eventually at Ephesus, 
 where St. John ministered contemporaneously, 
 and vanished from the earth at the age of nigh 
 a hundred years, still hale and fresh as a youth. 
 
 Philostratus no more than Lucian announces 
 his purpose of setting up a rival to Jesus, but 
 a rival of ^ was unmistakable and was at once 
 jesuB. perceived. About the year 305 there 
 
 appeared an anti-Christian work entitled the 
 Pkilalethes, now lost and known chiefly by the 
 replies which it elicited from Eusebius and 
 Lactantius. Its author was Hierocles, who as 
 a judge at Nicomedia distinguished himself 
 by his activity in Diocletian's persecution, and 
 in recognition of his zeal was promoted to the 
 governorship of Alexandria. The Philalethes 
 was an elaborate comparison of Jesus and 
 Apollonius and a demonstration of the latter's 
 superiority. And the extravagance was re- 
 peated by the English Deist, Charles Blount, 
 who in the year 1680 published a translation 
 of the first two books of the Life of Apollonius 
 with significant annotations. 
 
 Here is an instance of the method of this 
 covert attack upon our Lord. It is related 
 that during his sojourn at Rome Apollonius
 
 RIVALS OF THE EVANGELIC JESUS 57 
 
 encountered a funeral procession. A young 
 lady of rank had died, and her bridegroom 
 was attending her remains to the 
 
 Examples of 
 
 tomb with a numerous retinue of tne method : 
 mourners. Apollonius bade them set a) a resurrec- 
 
 j A u v j 4.1. tionatRome, 
 
 down the bier and, inquiring the 
 lady's name, took her hand, spoke into her 
 ear, and awoke her from the seeming death. 
 She uttered a cry and returned to her father's 
 house, like Alkestis restored to life by Herakles. 
 It is Damis, the Boswell of Apollonius, who 
 narrates the incident, and he adds : * Whether 
 it was that he had found a spark of the soul 
 in her which had escaped the notice of the 
 physicians for it is said that drops of rain fell 
 and she exhaled a vapour from her face or 
 that he had warmed the extinct soul and re- 
 covered it, is beyond the decision alike of me 
 and of the bystanders.' * 
 
 There is here plainly a reference to St. Luke's 
 story of the Raising of the Widow's Son at 
 Nain,f and the purpose is to suggest the un- 
 reality of our Lord's miracle, after the manner 
 of the rationalistic explanation of the 'raisings 
 from the dead ' as merely ' deliverances from 
 premature burial.' 
 
 * iv. 45. t Luke vii. 11-17. 
 
 The Historic Jesus 9
 
 58 RIVALS OF THE EVANGELIC JESUS 
 
 There is indeed much in the story of Apol- 
 lonius that is admirable and profitable. He 
 was a powerful preacher, and discoursed excel- 
 lently to the thronging multitude on mutual 
 service and public spirit,* wisdom, courage, 
 temperance,! and other goodly virtues. And 
 his accustomed formula of prayer is worth 
 remembering : * O ye gods, give me the things 
 that are due.'| But there is much also in the 
 story that is dark and horrible. It is told how 
 a pestilence had visited Ephesus, and the de- 
 spairing citizens summoned Apol- 
 demoniac lonius from Smyrna to succour them. 
 He assembled them, young and old, 
 in the theatre, and among them was an 
 aged beggar, ragged and foul, with blinking 
 eyes, carrying a wallet with a crust of bread 
 in it. Apollonius set him in the midst, and 
 bade the crowd gather stones and pelt the 
 enemy of the gods. They hesitated, thinking 
 it a cruel thing to kill a stranger in so miserable 
 a plight, and pitying the wretch's entreaties. 
 Apollonius, however, urged them on, and as 
 the first stones smote him, fire flashed from the 
 
 * iv. 3, 8. t iv. 81. 
 
 I i. 11 : i Qtol, So/i/re ftoi ra 6<(>ti\6ueva. Cf. iv. 40.
 
 RIVALS OF THE EVANGELIC JESUS 59 
 
 victim's eyes and the demon was revealed. He 
 was promptly despatched and covered by a 
 hillock of stones. * Take away the stones,' said 
 ApoUomus, 'and discover the wild beast you 
 have killed.' They obeyed, and, behold, the 
 old beggar had vanished, and in his place lay 
 the battered carcase of a hound, huge as the 
 hugest lion, its mouth a-foam like a mad dog's.* 
 
 Now we have seen what manner of ideals 
 sprang up and flourished in the 
 
 . . Argument for 
 
 imagination ot that generation ; and historicity of 
 
 i . . . ., -. the Gospels. 
 
 here is the question is it possible 
 
 to believe that the Evangelic Jesus is a growth 
 
 of the same rank soil ? 
 
 It is told that after the death of the Danish 
 sculptor Thorwaldsen his handiworks were con- 
 veyed from his studio at Rome to the museum 
 at Copenhagen, and soon after their arrival 
 there sprang up and bloomed in the courtyard 
 of the museum sweet plants unknown in that 
 northern clime. They were plainly no native 
 products. Whence had they come ? The 
 creations of the master had been swathed in 
 
 * iv. 10. Cf. Ev. Infant. Arab, xxxv, where Satan leaves 
 the child Judas in the form of a mad dog.
 
 60 RIVALS OF THE EVANGELIC JESUS 
 
 straw and grass which had grown on the Roman 
 Campagna, and when the packing-cases were 
 opened the seeds had been scattered and had 
 taken root. Presently the flowers appeared, and 
 there was no mistaking their alien origin. 
 
 And it is even so with the evangelic por- 
 traiture. It stands unique, unrivalled, sui 
 generis, amid the rank growths, the religious, 
 literary, and philosophic imaginations of the 
 second century, proclaiming itself no earth- 
 born dream but a heaven-sent revelation. This 
 is the evidence of its historicity the impossi- 
 bility of its imagination by the mind of that 
 generation.
 
 THE SELF-EVIDENCE OF THE 
 EVANGELIC PORTRAITURE
 
 ' THEY dried up all my Jacob's wells ; 
 They broke the faithful shepherd's rod 
 They blurred the gracious miracles 
 Which are the signature of God. 
 
 'In trouble, then, and fear I sought 
 The Man who taught in Galilee, 
 And peace unto my soul was brought, 
 And all my faith came back to me. 
 
 'Oh times of weak and wavering faith 
 That labour pleas in His defence, 
 Ye only dim Him with your breath : 
 He is His own best evidence.' 
 
 WALTER 0. SMITH.
 
 IV 
 
 THE SELF-EVIDENCE OF THE EVANGELIC 
 PORTRAITURE 
 
 IN the opening chapter of the Fourth Gospel, 
 which tells the story of the Messiah's manifes- 
 tation unto Israel at Bethany beyond 
 
 . . ... . The sight of 
 
 Jordan, it is written how Philip, in the Jesus c<m- 
 
 /> T vincingin 
 
 wonder and joy or his great discovery, the days of 
 sought out Nathanael and told him 
 the glad tidings. 'Him,' he cried, jerking it 
 out in disjointed eagerness, 'whom Moses in 
 the Law wrote of, and the Prophets, we have 
 found Jesus the son of Joseph the man 
 from Nazareth 1 ' Nathanael would not believe 
 it. Himself a Galilean, he knew the ignorance 
 of the northern province and the evil reputation 
 of that rude town. ' Out of Nazareth,' said he 
 disdainfully, ' can there be anything good ? ' 
 Philip eschewed argument, preferring a surer
 
 64 THE SELF-EVIDENCE OF 
 
 way. He answered simply : ' Come and see. 
 They went to Jesus, and presently Nathanael's 
 incredulity was conquered, and his heart leaped 
 up in adoring recognition. * Rabbi,' he cried, 
 * Thou art the Son of God, Thou art the King 
 of Israel ! ' 
 
 And it was ever thus with those who ap- 
 proached Jesus in the days of His flesh. He 
 seldom asserted His claims; He never argued 
 them. He simply manifested Himself, and such 
 as had eyes to see and hearts to understand 
 hailed Him as their Lord. He was * His own 
 best evidence.' 
 
 Now if the evangelic portraiture be indeed 
 
 a faithful delineation of Jesus as He appeared 
 
 to His contemporaries, it should still 
 
 His por- ... . 
 
 traiture,if cast a spell upon those who ap- 
 
 authentic, . . 
 
 should be proach it with open eyes and un- 
 prejudiced minds. It should silence 
 their doubt and compel their faith. The trouble 
 is that it is difficult in these days to approach it 
 thus. It is so obscured by traditional interpre- 
 tations that we can hardly see it in its simple 
 reality, its native beauty. Suppose that the 
 Gospels had been lost in early times, and were 
 discovered among those papyri which are being
 
 THE EVANGELIC PORTRAITURE 65 
 
 unearthed from the Egyptian sand ; or suppose 
 that, like the old shoemaker in Tolstoy's story, 
 Where Love is, there God is also, we had never 
 seen them, and chanced upon a copy of them 
 and read them for the first time: imagine the 
 surprise, the wonderment, the fascination which 
 would take possession of our minds. This ex- 
 perience is denied us ; yet it is possible to attain 
 it in some measure by resolutely dismissing the 
 preoccupations alike of faith and of unbelief and 
 contemplating without prejudice the picture 
 which the Evangelists have painted, and allow- 
 ing it to produce its inevitable impression upon 
 our minds. And this is the experiment which 
 we shall now essay. Let us survey the evan- 
 gelic portraiture of Jesus as it stands before us, 
 and consider what meets our eyes. 
 
 It is a singular picture, and the first peculiarity 
 which arrests our attention is this that it por- 
 trays a sinless man. The Evangelic Surveyofthe 
 Jesus is completely human, sharing JJJJJJ^. 
 all our common infirmities and restric- L A sinlees 
 tions. He suffers weariness, hunger man> 
 and thirst, and pain. His knowledge is limited, 
 and He confesses its limitations. Once He ap- 
 
 The Historic Jesus 10
 
 66 THE SELF-EVIDENCE OF 
 
 preaches a barren fig-tree, expecting to find fruit 
 on it ; * and again He says : * Of that day or 
 that hour knoweth no one, not even the angels 
 in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father. 't 
 And He is subject to temptation, being * in all 
 points tempted like as we are.'J Yet He is 
 never worsted in the moral conflict. He is ' in 
 all points tempted like as we are, yet without 
 sin.' He passes through the daily ordeal stain- 
 less and blameless. He is among sinners, yet 
 He is not of them. 
 
 The marvel of this representation is twofold. 
 On the one hand, Jesus claimed to be sinless. 
 He claims to Searched by a multitude of curious 
 and critical eyes, He issued His 
 confident challenge : * Which of you convicteth 
 me of sin ?' He often felt the pang of hunger, 
 but never the sting of remorse ; He was often 
 weary, but He was never burdened by guilt ; He 
 abounded in prayer, but in His prayers there 
 was no contrition, no confession, no cry for 
 pardon. Not only before the world but before 
 God He maintained His rectitude unfalteringly 
 to the last. With the shadow of death closing 
 
 * Mark zi. 13. t Mark xiii. 82. 
 
 J Heb. iv. 15. John viii. 46.
 
 THE EVANGELIC PORTRAITURE 67 
 
 round Him, He could lift up His eyes to heaven 
 and say : * I have glorified Thee on the earth : I 
 have finished the work which Thou gavest Me 
 to do. ... And now come I to Thee.'* 
 
 This is a unique representation. A lively and 
 keen sense of sin is a constant characteristic of 
 the saints. It is related of Juan de Avila 
 (A.D. 1500-69) that, as he lay dying, the rector 
 of his college approached him and said : ' What 
 joy it must be to you to think of meeting the 
 Saviour ! ' * Ah ! ' said the saint, ' rather do I 
 tremble at the thought of my skis.' Such has 
 ever been the judgment of the saints upon 
 themselves ; but as for Jesus, no word of self- 
 condemnation ever passed His lips, no lamenta- 
 tion over indwelling corruption, no sigh for a 
 closer walk with God. It was not that He 
 closed His eyes to the presence of sin or made 
 light of its guilt. Renan, being asked what he 
 made of sin, answered airily : ' I suppress it ! ' 
 but that was not the manner of Jesus. His 
 assertion of the equal heinousness of the sinful 
 thought and the sinful deed t has immeasurably 
 extended the sweep of the moral law and 
 infinitely elevated the standard of holiness. No 
 
 * John xvii. 4, 13. t Matt. v. 21-30.
 
 68 THE SELF-EVIDENCE OF 
 
 soul has ever been so sensitive as His to the 
 taint of impurity ; no heart has ever been so 
 oppressed by the burden of the world's guilt. 
 His presence was a rebuke and an inspiration ; 
 and to this hour the very thought of Him has 
 the value of an external conscience. His spot- 
 less life is a revelation at once of the beauty 
 of holiness and of the hideousness of sin. 
 
 And not only does the Evangelic Jesus claim 
 to be sinless, but His claim was universally 
 ms claim allowed. It appears that the first to 
 challenge it was the philosopher 
 Celsus, who puts an indefinite charge in the 
 mouth of his imaginary Jew that Jesus 'did 
 not show Himself clear of all evils.'* His 
 enemies in the days of His flesh would fain have 
 found some fault in Him, and they searched 
 Him as with a lighted candle ; yet they dis- 
 covered only one offence which they might lay 
 to His charge ; and they did not perceive that it 
 was in truth a striking testimony to His perfect 
 holiness. They saw Him mingling freely with 
 social outcasts, conversing with them and going 
 
 * Orig., C. Cela. ii. 41 : trt 5' eyvaXct r 'Iqyov b Ke'Xo-oc &a 
 TOV 'lovSdtKOv irpoffutrov <&c p.i) Seilavrt iavrov iravruv i) KUKWV 
 KaQaptvovra.
 
 THE EVANGELIC PORTRAITURE 69 
 
 to their houses and their tables ; and they ex- 
 claimed : This man receiveth sinners, and 
 eateth with them ! ' * It would have been no 
 surprise to those Scribes and Pharisees had He 
 associated with sinners, being Himself a sinner. 
 Their astonishment was that He should do this, 
 being Himself, apparently, so pure ; and their 
 outcry was a covert suggestion that, for all 
 His seeming holiness, He must be a sinner at 
 heart. The fault, however, lay not with Him 
 but with themselves. ' In judging the Lord for 
 receiving sinners,' says St. Gregory, * it was 
 because their heart was dry that they censured 
 Him, the Fountain of Mercy.' They did not 
 understand that true holiness is nothing else 
 than a great compassion. Such was the holiness 
 of Jesus, and it was a new thing on the earth, 
 an ideal which the human heart had never 
 conceived. The Pharisee was the Jewish ideal 
 of a holy man, and it is an evidence of the 
 historicity of the Evangelic Jesus that He is so 
 widely diverse from that ideal. 
 
 It is very significant that our Lord's claim to 
 sinlessness should have been thus allowed and 
 unwittingly attested by those who were bent 
 
 * Luke xv. 2.
 
 70 THE SELF-EVIDENCE OF 
 
 upon disproving it. Bronson Alcott once said 
 to Carlyle that he could honestly use the words 
 of Jesus, * I and the Father are one.' * Yes,' was 
 the crushing rejoinder, * but Jesus got the world 
 to believe Him.' 
 
 Another arresting feature of the evangelic 
 portraiture is the claim which Jesus constantly 
 2. ma unique maa *e and persisted in to the last 
 relation j-j^ ff e S f 00( i i n a unique relation 
 
 alike toward God and toward man. 
 
 He identified Himself with God. ' Therefore 
 
 the Jews sought the more to kill Him, because 
 
 He said God was His peculiar (t<W) 
 
 toward Qod, 
 
 Father, making Himself equal to 
 God.' * ' He that receiveth you,' He says in 
 His charge to the Twelve, t ' receiveth Me, and 
 he that receiveth Me receiveth Him that sent 
 Me.' He sets Himself forth as greater than the 
 Prophets. They were ' slaves ' ; He is ' the Son,' 
 * the Heir.' J They had spoken of Him, and 
 seen His day afar off, and longed to see Him- 
 self ; and He announces Himself as the fulfil- 
 ment of their prophecies and the satisfaction of 
 
 * John v. 18. t Matt. x. 40. 
 
 } Matt. xxi. 34-38. Of. Heb. i. 2.
 
 THE EVANGELIC PORTRAITURE 71 
 
 their desire.* ' Beginning from Moses and all 
 the Prophets, He interpreted unto them in all 
 the Scriptures the things concerning Him- 
 self.' t 
 
 Moreover, He claimed to be at once the 
 Saviour and the Judge of men. He had ' come 
 to give His life a ransom for many ' ; 1 
 
 , , toward men. 
 
 He bade the weary and heavy laden 
 come unto Him and find rest for their souls ; 
 and He spoke of a day when * the Son of Man 
 shall come in His glory and all the angels with 
 Him, and shall sit upon His throne of Glory, 
 and before Him shall be gathered all the 
 nations.' || How tremendous His demands on 
 His followers ! He points to the dearest, 
 tenderest, and most sacred of human relation- 
 ships, and claims for Himself a prior devotion. 
 ' He that loveth father or mother more than 
 Me is not worthy of Me, and He that loveth 
 son or daughter more than Me is not worthy 
 of Me.' 1 * If any man cometh unto Me and 
 hateth not his own father, and mother, and 
 wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, 
 
 * Matt. xiii. 16, 17. t Luke xxiv. 27. 
 
 t Matt. xx. 28. Matt. xi. 28, 29. 
 
 || Matt. xxv. 31, 32. 1T Matt. x. 37.
 
 72 THE SELF-EVIDENCE OF 
 
 yea and his own life also, he cannot be My 
 disciple.' * 
 
 It is not merely for God, nor yet merely for 
 the Kingdom of Heaven, that He makes these 
 stupendous claims : it is for Himself. Conceive 
 such language on the lips of a Galilean peasant I 
 On the lips of Socrates or Julius Caesar it would 
 have seemed the language of insanity, and would 
 have been greeted with ridicule and reprobation. 
 * If Christ,' says S. T. Coleridge, t ' had been a 
 mere man, it would have been ridiculous in him 
 to call himself " the Son of man " ; but being 
 God and man, it then became, in his own 
 assumption of it, a peculiar and mysterious title. 
 So, if Christ had been a mere man, his saying, 
 " My Father is greater than I " (John xv. 28), 
 would have been as unmeaning. It would 
 be laughable enough, for example, to hear me 
 say, " My * Remorse ' succeeded, indeed ; but 
 Shakspeare is a greater dramatist than I." But 
 how immeasurably more foolish, more mon- 
 strous, would it be for a man, however honest, 
 good, or wise, to say, " But Jehovah is greater 
 than I " 1 ' Yet this was the language, the 
 habitual language, of Jesus, and to those who 
 
 * Luke xiv. 28. t Table Talk, May 1, 1823.
 
 THE EVANGELIC PORTRAITURE 73 
 
 knew Him best and could judge most truly of 
 the justice of His claims, it seemed natural and 
 fitting on His lips. It was the blinded Jews who 
 pronounced Him mad and sought to slay Him.* 
 
 Again, we observe the words which the Evan- 
 gelists ascribe to Jesus. There are no words 
 in the Scriptures or elsewhere com- 
 
 3. The words 
 
 parable to them. They have a ofjesus: 
 peculiar fragrance. They sparkle on their 
 
 .1 V1 . ... distinction, 
 
 the page like gems in a setting ot 
 base metal. We recognise instinctively where 
 Jesus ceases and the Evangelist begins. My old 
 teacher and friend, the late Professor A. B. 
 Bruce, once told me how in the early days of 
 his ministry it chanced that he was studying the 
 miracle of the Healing of the Lunatic Boy, and 
 he stumbled over the verse : ' Howbeit this kind 
 goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.' t The 
 mention of ' fasting ' struck him as so alien 
 from the spirit of Jesus. He referred to his 
 Tischendorf, and what did he find ? The verse 
 is absent from the authentic text of St. Mat- 
 thew, being an importation from the parallel 
 narrative of St. Mark ; \ and in the latter, 
 
 * John x. 20. t Matt. xvii. 21. I Mark ix. 29. 
 
 The Historic Jesus 11
 
 74 THE SELF-EVIDENCE OF 
 
 furthermore, ' and fasting ' is a gloss. Thus was 
 his instinct justified. And the incident is an 
 instance of a principle. The genuine sayings 
 of Jesus are always self-attesting. They are 
 distinguishable from counterfeits by simple 
 inspection.* 
 
 And their vitality is perennial. They still 
 
 throb, still kindle, still make our hearts burn 
 
 within us, reminding us how He said : 
 
 their reality. 
 
 ' The words that I have spoken unto 
 you are spirit, and are life.' t ' The impression 
 the Jesus of the Gospels produces on us,' says 
 Hermann Kutter, J 'is one of unapproachable 
 reality. As we listen to His striking words, we 
 have no desire to study their grammatical con- 
 struction or philosophical content we are so 
 amazed at their reality. Whether we under- 
 stand them or not, we find ourselves asking if 
 
 * So Luke viii. 46 ascribes to Jesus the crude idea that the 
 woman's touch drew power out of Him, as though His person 
 were magnetic ; Mark v. 30 slimy < that it is no saying of 
 Jesus but a comment of the Evangelic Tradition. Similarly 
 Matt. xii. 40 is not only savourless but irrelevant, since the 
 ' sign ' to the Ninevites was the preaching of Jonah, not his 
 adventure with the whale, of which they knew nothing ; and 
 its absence from Luke xi. 29, 30 proves it a homiletic gloss. 
 C'f . The Days of His Flesh, Introd., pp. xxx f. 
 
 t John vi. 63. \ Soc. Democr., pp. 54 f.
 
 THE EVANGELIC PORTRAITURE 75 
 
 they are not the keys of life's mysteries, and 
 whether through them we shall not know the 
 truth the whole truth. . . . Whether spoken 
 to the crowd or in the presence of the ques- 
 tioning Scribes, His words displayed the same 
 judgment there was nothing to retract, no 
 mistake to correct.' 
 
 Another characteristic of the Evangelic Jesus 
 is His superiority to the distinctions ^ ^ 
 of the world He lived in the distinc- J^tSSS 
 tions of class, sect, and nation. limitations: 
 
 Class distinctions were strongly marked in 
 Jewish society. At one extreme stood the 
 ' Sinners,' the social outcasts ; and at 
 
 (1) class : 
 
 the other, condemning these and 
 shunning the pollution of contact with 
 them, the Pharisees, the holy men of Israel. 
 With the former Jesus had much to do. They 
 were the special objects of His solicitude, inso- 
 much that He was nicknamed the 'Friend of 
 Sinners ' ;* and when the Pharisees blamed Him 
 and accused Him of secret sympathy with sin, 
 His defence was that He was the Physician of 
 Souls, and therefore it was fitting that He should 
 
 Matt. xi. 19.
 
 76 THE SELF-EVIDENCE OF 
 
 take to do with the morally diseased : * They 
 that are whole have no need of a physician, but 
 they that are sick.' * 
 
 He was the Friend of Shiners, but the 
 
 singular fact is that He was the Friend of 
 
 Pharisees too. Those ' holy men ' 
 
 Pharisees, 
 
 were not all His enemies. Many of 
 them, despite their prejudices, were earnest 
 seekers after God, and they were well disposed 
 to the Prophet of Galilee, t They would invite 
 Him to their houses and their tables, and He 
 gladly went and talked with them of the things 
 of His Kingdom.J 
 
 Another despised class was womankind. ft 
 
 * Matt. ix. 12. Cf. Diog. Laert., Antisth. vi. 6: o>'&- 
 6p.tvo irore tTTt T<f TTOVTjpo'ic (TvyytvfffQai, KOI ol iarpol, <f>r)<rl, ptra 
 TU>V VOOOVVTUV elvlv a\\' ov irvpirrovoiv, Bunyan, Jerusalem- 
 Sinner : ' Christ Jesus, as you may perceive, has put himself 
 under the term of a Physician, a Doctor for curing of 
 diseases : and you know that applause, and a fame, is a 
 thing that physicians much desire. That is it that helps 
 them to patients, and that also that will help their patients 
 to commit themselves to their skill for cure, with more con- 
 fidence and repose of spirit. And the best way for a doctor 
 or physician to get themselves a name, is in the first place to 
 take in hand, and cure some such as all others have given off 
 for lost and dead.' 
 
 t Of. Acts xv. 6. 
 
 i Cf. Luke vii. 36 ff., xi. 87 if., xiv. 1 ff. 
 
 See The Days of His Flesh, p. 77.
 
 THE EVANGELIC PORTRAITURE 77 
 
 was accounted unseemly for a Jew to salute a 
 woman, or to converse with her openly, even 
 if she were his wife or his daughter 
 
 . T , . Women; 
 
 or his sister. Hence the surprise 
 of the disciples at the beginning of His ministry 
 when, unfamiliar as yet with the Master's 
 manner, they returned from Sychar and found 
 Him sitting on Jacob's Well and ' talking with 
 a woman.'* And in the Morning Prayer the 
 men bless God for not making them Gentiles, 
 slaves, women, f In Jesus womankind found a 
 friend. Women were numbered among His 
 disciples, and they proved nobly worthy of 
 His grace, ministering to the necessities of 
 His homeless condition J and continuing faithful 
 unto death. 
 
 He was exempt also from the distinctions of 
 sect. Think what it means that 'the Apostle 
 
 * John iv. 27, B.V. 
 
 f A similar sentiment is ascribed to Plato. Lact. III. 
 xix. 17 : ' Aiebat se gratias agere naturae, primum quod 
 homo natus esset potius quam mutum animal, deinde quod 
 mas potius quam femina, quod Graecus quam barbarus, 
 postremo quod Atheniensis et quod temporibus Socratis.' 
 Cf. Plut., Mar. xlvi. 1. The sentiment was ascribed also to 
 Thales (Diog. Laert. i. 33). 
 
 \ 7^uke viii. 2. 
 
 Matt, xxvii. 55, 56 ; Mark xv. 40, 41 ; Luke xxiii. 48, 49.
 
 78 THE SELF-EVIDENCE OF 
 
 choir' included Matthew the Taxgatherer and 
 
 Simon the Zealot. The taxgatherers were 
 
 hated as agents of the Roman op- 
 
 (2) sect : -r i 
 
 pressor, and a Jewish taxgatherer was 
 and Tax- peculiarly odious. He was a hireling 
 traitor to his country and his God. 
 There was a wide gulf between the taxgatherers 
 and the Zealots, those desperate patriots who 
 had sworn relentless enmity against the imperial 
 domination, and were ever kindling the flame 
 of insurrection. Yet a taxgatherer and a Zealot 
 met in brotherhood at the feet of Jesus. His 
 heart had room for both. 
 
 Furthermore, He exhibited no national 
 characteristics. And this is the more remark- 
 able inasmuch as He belonged to a 
 
 (3) nation- . . . 
 
 nation notorious for its intense, ex- 
 elusive, almost ferocious patriotism. 
 
 excluBivenesa, ^i T j j 'iU 
 
 The Jews were designated, not with- 
 out justice, 'enemies of the rest of mankind,' 
 and, according to the Roman satirist, they would 
 not show the road to a wanderer unless he were 
 a fellow-worshipper and would not guide thirsty 
 travellers to a well unless they were circum- 
 cised.* A Jew was always recognisable. Could 
 
 * 1 Thess. ii. 15. Tac., Hist. v. 5 : ' Apud ipsos fides
 
 THE EVANGELIC PORTRAITURE 79 
 
 St. Paul ever have been mistaken for a Greek or 
 a Roman ? Whatever sympathetic disguises he 
 might assume, becoming 'all things to all men, 
 that he might by all means save some,' he never 
 ceased to be a Jew, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, 
 proud of his nationality,* and overflowing with 
 love for his people even while he pronounced 
 their condemnation.! 
 
 It was otherwise with Jesus. He was purely 
 human, and to this the Evangelists have borne a 
 testimony all the more impressive that 
 it is undesigned. There were four 
 distinct types of nationality at that Evangelists, 
 period the Jewish type, the Roman, the Greek, 
 and the Alexandrian ; and to these the four 
 Gospels correspond. St. Matthew's is the 
 Jewish Gospel, St. Mark's the Roman, St. 
 Luke's the Greek, and St. John's the Alex- 
 andrian. Each has interpreted Jesus for a race, 
 and shown how He satisfied its peculiar need ; 
 but in so far each has belittled Him. ' Moses 
 
 obstinata, misericordia in promptu, sed adversus omnes alios 
 hostile odium.' Juv. xiv. 103 f. : 
 
 ' Non monstrare vias eadem nisi sacra colenti, 
 Qusesitum ad fontem solos deducere verpos.' 
 
 * Phil. iii. 4-7. t Rom. ix. 1-8.
 
 80 THE SELF-EVIDENCE OF 
 
 for a people,' says Blaise Pascal ; * Jesus Christ 
 for all men.' And this is the reason why there 
 was need of four Gospels, that each nation 
 might see Him as its own Saviour, and that 
 humanity might recognise its unity in Him. 
 
 He was for all mankind. He bore no racial 
 mark, insomuch that Renan, arguing from the 
 
 universality name of the province, Gelil kaggoyim, 
 of Jesus. < the circle of the Gentiles,' that the 
 
 Galileans were a mixed race, pronounces it 
 impossible 'to ascertain what blood flowed in 
 the veins of him who has contributed most 
 to efface the distinctions of blood in humanity/ 
 This is a perverse fancy, nevertheless it serves 
 to emphasise an indubitable and truly remark- 
 able fact. Jesus, though a Jew after the flesh,* 
 was purely human. He recognised all the 
 children of men as children of one Heavenly 
 Father ; He owned kinship with all, whether 
 Jews or Gentiles, who did the Father's will ; 
 and He pronounced Jerusalem no whit more 
 sacred than the mountain where the Samaritans 
 worshipped. And all met in Him. He was 
 to employ an exquisite mistranslation * the 
 Desire of all nations,'! the Saviour for whom 
 
 * Of. Rom. lx. 6. t Hagg. ii. 7.
 
 THE EVANGELIC PORTRAITURE 81 
 
 the age-long hunger of the human heart had 
 been an unconscious yearning, a blind groping. 
 
 One other feature of the Evangelic Jesus 
 must be noted His singular attitude 5 ^ de tach- 
 toward the opinions of His day, His 
 absolute detachment from current 
 theories. 
 
 Apollonius of Tyana was a child of his age. 
 He breathed its spirit and shared its beliefs ; 
 and as for his original ideas, though 
 
 . contrast with 
 
 they seemed to his biographer pro- Apoiionius 
 digies of supernatural wisdom, they 
 simply amuse us by their childishness. It is 
 related, for instance, that on reaching the 
 western coast of Spain he observed the pheno- 
 menon of the ocean's ebb and flow, so surprising 
 to one accustomed to the tideless Mediter- 
 ranean ;* and he accounted for it by the theory 
 that there are vast caverns at the bottom of 
 the sea, and when the wind which fills these 
 rushes out, it forces the water back upon the 
 land ; then, when it returns like a great respira- 
 tion, the water subsides, t 
 
 * Of. the astonishment of the crews of Alexander (Arrian, 
 Anxb. vi. 19) and Caesar (De Bell. Gall. vi. 29). 
 t Vit. Apoll. v. 2. 
 
 T)w Historic Jesus 12
 
 82 THE SELF-EVIDENCE OF 
 
 There is nothing like this in the Gospels. 
 * One of the strongest pieces of objective evi- 
 dence in favour of Christianity,' says 
 
 ' One of the . 
 
 strongest the late Dr. G. J. Romanes,* *is not 
 objective sufficiently enforced by apologists. 
 Indeed, I am not aware that I have 
 ever seen it mentioned. It is the absence from 
 the biography of Christ of any doctrines which 
 the subsequent growth of human knowledge 
 whether in natural science, ethics, political 
 economy, or elsewhere has had to discount. 
 This negative argument is really almost as 
 strong as the positive one from what Christ 
 did teach. For when we consider what a large 
 number of sayings are recorded of or at least 
 attributed to Him, it becomes most remark- 
 able that hi literal truth there is no reason why 
 any of His words should ever pass away in the 
 sense of becoming obsolete. . . . Contrast Jesus 
 Christ in this respect with other thinkers of 
 like antiquity. Even Plato, who, though some 
 four hundred years before Christ in point of 
 time, was greatly in advance of him in respect 
 of philosophic thought, is nowhere in this respect 
 as compared with Christ. Read the Dialogues, 
 
 * m T?ioughta on Religion, p. 157.
 
 THE EVANGELIC PORTRAITURE 83 
 
 and see how enormous is the contrast with the 
 Gospels in respect of errors of all kinds, reaching 
 even to absurdity in respect of reason, and to 
 sayings shocking to the moral sense. Yet this 
 is confessedly the highest level of human reason 
 on the lines of spirituality, when unaided by 
 alleged revelation.' 
 
 Whatever its explanation, the fact stands that, 
 so far as the record extends, there is nothing in 
 the teaching of Jesus which implicated it with 
 the notions of His day or which is still more 
 remarkable has brought it into collision with 
 the later discoveries of Science or Criticism. 
 It was to the Book of Joshua and not to the 
 Gospels that appeal was made in vindication 
 of the Ptolemaic astronomy ; when the Evolu- 
 tionary Hypothesis was propounded, it was with 
 the cosmogony of Moses and not with the 
 teaching of our Lord that it seemed to conflict ; 
 and there is no pronouncement of His which 
 prohibits Criticism from determining on proper 
 evidence the date or authorship of the docu- 
 ments of the Old Testament. 
 
 It were, however, endless to exhibit all the 
 wonder of the picture which the Evangelists
 
 84 THE SELF-EVIDENCE OF 
 
 have painted, and what we have seen is sufficient. 
 There are three results which have 
 
 Results: 
 
 clearly emerged from our scrutiny. 
 The first is the superiority of the Evangelic 
 Jesus to His biographers. He is not their 
 creation. He always stands above 
 
 (1) the Evan- 
 
 geiic Jesus them, and they look up to Him and 
 
 superior . TT . 
 
 to His seek to interpret Him. And fre- 
 
 biographera ; . , . TT- j.u 
 
 quently they misconstrue Him, thus 
 unconsciously attesting His transcendence. 
 * Jesus himself,' says Matthew Arnold,* 'as 
 he appears in the Gospels, and for the very 
 reason that he is so manifestly above the heads 
 of his reporters there, is, in the jargon of modern 
 philosophy, an absolute ; we cannot explain him, 
 cannot get behind him and above him, cannot 
 command him.' And it is very wonderful how 
 the teaching of Jesus is ever in advance of the 
 human intellect in its onward march. ' I venture 
 to think,' says Dr. S. D. McConnell,t 'that 
 Darwin and the martyrs of natural science 
 have done more to make the word of Christ 
 intelligible than have Augustine and the theo- 
 logians. It is little less than marvellous, the 
 
 * Preface to Literature and Dogma. 
 t Evolution of ImmortaUty, pp. 135 f .
 
 THE EVANGELIC PORTRAITURE 85 
 
 way in which the words of Jesus fit in with 
 the forms of thought which are to-day current. 
 They are life, generation, survival of the fit, 
 perishing of the unfit, tree and fruit, multiplica- 
 tion by cell growth as yeast, operation by 
 chemical contact as salt, dying of the lonely 
 seed to produce much fruit, imposition of a 
 higher form of life upon a lower by being born 
 from above, grafting a new scion upon a wild 
 stock, the phenomena of plant growth from the 
 seed through the blade, the ear, and the matured 
 grain, and, finally, the attainment of an indi- 
 vidual life which has an eternal quality.' Thus 
 Science and Philosophy proclaim their inter- 
 pretations of the Universe, and sometimes these 
 seem subversive of things most surely believed ; 
 and, behold, it presently appears that they are 
 in truth no novel discoveries but principles 
 which have all along been lying unobserved 
 in the Christian revelation. 
 
 The Evangelic Jesus is independent of His 
 environment. It is impossible to analyse Him 
 and distinguish the influences which 
 
 (2) inclepen- 
 
 went to the making of Him. He is dent of 
 
 T environment; 
 
 a debtor neither to the Jews nor to 
 
 the Greeks. He is not a child of His age, else
 
 (3) stands 
 for God. 
 
 86 THE SELF-EVIDENCE OF 
 
 He would have been, in every particular, other 
 than He is. His is the one perfectly original 
 and absolutely self-determined life in the history 
 of mankind. 
 
 He stands for God. Apart from every meta- 
 physical theory of His person, He has for all 
 time ' the value of God.' In Him 
 humanity finds evermore its highest 
 conception of the character of God and His 
 relation to the world. ' Religion,' says J. S. 
 Mill,* * cannot be said to have made a bad 
 choice in pitching on this man as the ideal 
 representative and guide of humanity ; nor, 
 even now, would it be easy, even for an un- 
 believer, to find a better translation of the rule 
 of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, 
 than to endeavour so to live that Christ would 
 approve our life.' 
 
 Now, what must be said of this picture ? Two 
 answers have been given. One is that it is a 
 insufficient creation of some religious genius; 
 
 explanations: and the other> that ft i ft pro d u ct 
 
 of the myth-forming genius of the primitive 
 Church. 
 
 * Three Essays on Religion, pp. 254 f.
 
 THE EVANGELIC PORTRAITURE 87 
 
 The former is, as we have seen, the answer 
 of Green, who ascribes to St. John the ' final 
 spiritual interpretation of the person 
 
 . . (1) a creation 
 
 of Christ,' which has ' fixed it in the of religious 
 
 -n j - 4.u L 
 
 purified conscience as the immanent 
 
 God.' And it is the answer also of Pfleiderer. 
 His theory is that St. Paul was the creator of 
 Christ, and this is the manner of his proof: he 
 first ascertains from the recognised epistles what 
 was the Apostle's conception of Christianity, 
 and then he proceeds to demonstrate that it is 
 reflected in the evangelic narrative.* It is not 
 the Jesus of history that the Evangelists portray 
 but the Christ of the Pauline theology. 
 
 A theory of this sort, however, simply creates 
 a difficulty greater than that which it seeks to 
 remove. When men make themselves a god, 
 they always fashion him in their own likeness. 
 The Ethiopians, said Xenophanes long ago in 
 derision of the anthropomorphic deities of the 
 Homeric poems, t made their gods black and 
 snub-nosed like themselves ; the Thracians made 
 
 * Urchristenthum, p. 520. 
 t Theodoret. Grcec. Affect. Cur. iii. 780 : 
 e rotate <f>7}ffiv' 
 
 a\\' 01 flporoi SoKOVfft ytvvaaQai 
 TTJV ir(f>TfpT)v 5' iffdrjr
 
 88 THE SELF-EVIDENCE OF 
 
 theirs blue-eyed and ruddy ; so, too, the Medes 
 and Persians and the Egyptians also made theirs 
 after their own image ; and if horses and oxen 
 had hands, they would make themselves gods in 
 the likeness of horses and oxen. St. Paul was a 
 Pharisee, and, had he been the creator of the 
 Evangelic Jesus, he would have made Him in 
 the likeness of a Pharisee. It is unthinkable, 
 and contrary to all our knowledge of him, that 
 he should have risen so far above himself as to 
 conceive that transcendent ideal. And the issue 
 is clear. If St. Paul were the creator of Jesus, 
 then he was far greater than we have ever 
 thought. To conceive so divine an ideal he 
 must have been himself no less than divine, and 
 it remains that we should transfer to him the 
 adoration which we have paid to Jesus. 
 
 Kcii TraXtv' 
 
 a\X* et rot xEloac ^X ov fi f $* \fovref 
 f) ypa^/ai yf.(piaai KOI tpya reXctv fiVeo urCptr, 
 t7nrot pAv ff firiroiffi, fiotf 2e re flovtTtv ofjioiaf, 
 Kal Kf OetMty t^f'ac eypa^oi' KO! aw/iar' iiroiovv 
 roiavQ' oToV irep Kavrol tiffins el^ov op.oiov. 
 
 . . . rove /*>' yap Atdloirac [itXavac /cat ffipovc ypaQttv t<f>r)ffe 
 rove otKtlovf dcovf, OTTotot e teal avroi irttyvKaotv' rove &t yt 
 Qpy.Kat y\avicovf TC rat ipvdpovc, ical fuvrot xal M^ovc Kal 
 ffQifftv avrotc eottcdYae' Kal Atyvirrt'ovc w<ravrwc 
 
 Of. Clem. Alex., Str. v. 109.
 
 THE EVANGELIC PORTRAITURE 89 
 
 Neither can the Evangelic Jesus be a creation 
 of 'the spontaneous productivity of the Chris- 
 tian spirit in the primitive Church.' 
 
 (2) a product 
 
 Humanity cannot transcend itself. oftne 
 
 myth-forming 
 
 Surely scepticism has its credulity no genius of 
 
 . . * the Church. 
 
 less than faith when it is gravely 
 maintained that so radiant an ideal dawned upon 
 'nearly the most degraded generation of the 
 most narrow-minded race that the world has 
 ever known, and made it the birthplace of a new 
 earth.' * It arose in a land barren of wisdom 
 and religiously bankrupt, and it has continued 
 for more than sixty generations the wonder and 
 inspiration of mankind. It must have been 
 more than a dream : it must have been a mani- 
 festation. ' I cannot understand the history of 
 the Christian Church at all, if all the fervent 
 trust which has been stirred by faith in the 
 actual inspirations of a nature at once eternal 
 and human, has been lavished on a dream.' t 
 That matchless Life, in which the Divine and 
 the human meet, must have been actually lived 
 upon the earth, else the ideal of it would never 
 have entered into the heart of man. 
 
 * Hutton, Theol. Ess. viii. p. 290. 
 t Ibid., p. 285. 
 The Historic Jesus 13
 
 90 THE SELF-EVIDENCE OF 
 
 And thus the Evangelic Jesus is Himself the 
 
 supreme evidence at once of the historicity 
 
 of the evangelic records and of His 
 
 Conclusion: . 3 ... 
 
 own Deity. No criticism can shake 
 of the Evan- this sure foundation. It may be that 
 
 the Gospels exhibit inaccuracies and 
 inconsistencies though it were well for such 
 as love to dwell on these to lay to heart Rothe's 
 warning against being so taken up with the 
 sun-spots as to overlook the sun.* It may 
 be that the Evangelists were liable to error 
 and subject to the deflections of contemporary 
 opinion and personal prejudice though the 
 more one studies their writings, the surer does 
 one grow that untenable as every theory of 
 Inspiration may and indeed must be, some 
 singular aid was vouchsafed to those un- 
 learned men who 'carried so much aether in 
 their souls.' t It will hardly be disputed by 
 any intelligent believer in the Deity of our 
 Blessed Lord that He was imperfectly com- 
 prehended and incompletely represented by His 
 
 * Stille Stunden, p. 22 : ' Wer iiber den Sonnenflecken 
 die Sonne iibersieht, sieht der richtig?' 
 
 t Philostr., Apoll. Tyan. i. 33 : roaovrov lv rjj 
 alOipa.
 
 THE EVANGELIC PORTRAITURE 91 
 
 biographers what human mind could perfectly 
 comprehend or what human hand completely 
 represent the vision of His glory ? It is 
 impossible to gainsay such contentions, but 
 they may be the more cheerfully allowed 
 inasmuch as they furnish no inconsiderable 
 argument for the historicity of the evangelic 
 narratives and the Deity of Him they tell of. 
 The fact that Jesus is so manifestly 'above 
 the heads of His reporters' is a conclusive 
 proof that, when they wrote of Him, they 
 were not dealing with imagination but relating 
 in honest simplicity 'things which they had 
 seen and heard.' And the very imperfection 
 of their narratives is an involuntary testimony 
 to His ineffable glory. After every deduction 
 the Evangelic Jesus remains a wonderful por- 
 traiture. Blurred though it may be by the 
 unskilfuhiess of the artists, it is still a picture 
 limned in light of One fairer than the children 
 of men ; and if a picture painted by weak 
 human hands be so transcendently beautiful, 
 what must have been the glory of the Divine 
 Original ? 
 
 And thus we turn from the strife of criticism 
 and, with quiet assurance, rest our souls on the
 
 92 THE SELF-EVIDENCE OF 
 
 Evangelic Jesus as on a strong rock standing 
 firm amid 'the removing of the things that 
 me end of aii are shaken.' It is the end of all 
 controversy, controversy, the death of aU doubt 
 and fear, when He is recognised as the In- 
 carnation of the Eternal God, the manifestation 
 of the Unseen Father. 
 
 4 1 say, the acknowledgment of God in Christ, 
 Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee 
 All questions in the earth and out of it.'* 
 
 It settles every dispute. Is it the existence of 
 God that is disputed ? Then Jesus is God 
 manifest in the flesh, Dei inaspecti aspectabilis 
 imago.} Is it immortality that is doubted ? 
 Then He has given us His word for it : * If 
 it were not so, I would have told you'; and 
 He is the Lord of Eternity who left His glory 
 to tell us what lies behind the shadow, that 
 our hearts might be glad. Is it miracles that 
 are in question? Then Jesus is Himself the 
 Miracle of miracles. ' A sinless Christ,' says 
 Professor Bruce, \ 'is as great a miracle as a 
 
 * Browning, Death in Desert. 
 
 t Grotius on Col. i. 15. 
 
 J Humiliation of Christ, p. 208, n. 1.
 
 THE EVANGELIC PORTRAITURE 93 
 
 Christ who can walk on the water.' In view 
 of the miraculousness of His person His 
 miraculous operations appear not merely 
 credible but inevitable. The wonder were if, 
 being what He was, He had not wrought 
 these. 
 
 In truth there is no certainty apart from Him. 
 ' Other foundation,' says St. Paul,* * can no man 
 lay than that which is laid, which is 
 
 The service 
 
 Jesus Christ.' The objects of faith ofjesusto 
 do not admit of demonstration. ' All 
 first principles,' says Romanes,! ' even of scien- 
 tific facts are known by intuition and not by 
 reason. No one can deny this. Now if there 
 be a God, the fact is certainly of the nature of 
 a first principle ; for it must be the first of all 
 first principles. No one can, dispute this. No 
 one can therefore dispute the necessary con- 
 clusion that, if there be a God, He is knowable 
 (if knowable at all) by intuition and not by 
 reason.' So long as we rest on demonstration 
 we can never attain to more than probability, 
 and our faith lies at the mercy of each subtle 
 logomachist. That is a significant confession 
 
 * 1 Cor. iii. 11. 
 
 t Thoughts on Religion, p. 146.
 
 94 THE EVANGELIC PORTRAITURE 
 
 which one of the persons in Cicero's Tusculan 
 Disputations makes that while he was reading 
 Plato's splendid argument he felt sure of the 
 Immortality of the Soul, but whenever he laid 
 the dialogue aside his assurance slipped away 
 from him. And this is the priceless service 
 that Jesus has rendered to our souls, which 
 were made for God and are restless until they 
 find rest in Him: He has lifted faith for ever 
 out of the domain of reason into that of intui- 
 tion, and has made it sure and abiding for every 
 one who has eyes to behold His glory and a 
 heart to understand His love.
 
 THE EVIDENCE OF EXPERIENCE
 
 4 1 heard certain say : " Unless I find it in the archives, I 
 do not believe it in the Gospel." And when I said to them : 
 11 It is written," they answered me : " That is the question." 
 For me, however, the archives are Jesus Christ, the inviolable 
 archives His Cross and Death and His Resurrection and the 
 Faith that is through Him ; wherein I would be justified by 
 your prayer.' 
 
 ST. IGNATIUS, Epistle to the Philadelphiana, viii.
 
 THE EVIDENCE OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 IT must be confessed that the appeal to 
 experience is a somewhat perilous ex- 
 pedient, nor should it be employed 
 
 T . Peril of 
 
 without much circumspection. It is appeal to 
 commonly no better than an asylum 
 ignorantice, the refuge of hard-pressed enthusi- 
 asts and obscurantists when they are asked a 
 reason concerning the hope that is in them, and 
 find themselves unready to give an answer. * It 
 is absurd,' says St. Chrysostom,* 'that, while 
 the physician contends with precision for his 
 craft, and the currier, and the weaver, and every 
 sort of craftsman, the Christian should allege 
 that he cannot furnish a reason for his faith.' 
 In its popular use the appeal to experience is 
 too often a riot of unreason ; and even in the 
 hands of a philosopher it is apt to be nothing 
 
 * In Ev. Joan. Horn. xvi. 
 The Historic Jesus 14 97
 
 98 THE EVIDENCE OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 else than a reversion to the Protagorean homo 
 viensura 'that man is the measure of all 
 things: of the existent, that they exist; and 
 of the non-existent, that they do not exist.'* 
 1 He means by that,' says Socrates, t ' that, 
 as everything appears to me, such is it to me ; 
 and, as it appears to you, such again is it to 
 you.' And the consequence is that there is no 
 objective certainty, nothing but the illusory 
 impressions of the senses. There was, according 
 to Protagoras, no soul beyond the senses, and 
 all things alike were true ; and he ' could know 
 nothing about gods, either that they existed or 
 that they did not exist ; for there were many 
 things that hindered knowledge the lack of 
 certainty and the brevity of the life of man.'! 
 It is to this conclusion that the appeal to 
 experience is apt to lead ; nevertheless there is 
 Itg a legitimate use of the argument. 
 
 legitimacy, indeed it is necessary ; for apart from 
 experience there can be no certitude, and it is 
 the only final test. Was not Diogenes' appeal 
 to experience reasonable and incontrovertible 
 
 * Diog. Laert. ix. 61 : iravrwv ^p^fiaruv fitrpov &v6pu)iroc' 
 
 TUV fJitf OVTWV (if IffTl' TUV &i ottK OVTUV WC OVK IffTi. 
 
 t Plat., Tluxet. 151 E. J Diog. Laert., ibid.
 
 THE EVIDENCE OF EXPERIENCE 99 
 
 when, unable to expose the fallacy of Zeno's 
 paralogism of the impossibility of locomotion, 
 he rose and walked ? Solvitur ambulando. 
 
 The argument then is valid, if only its 
 conditions be observed. And what are its 
 conditions? The question resolves 
 
 . , ,. . . Its conditions. 
 
 itself ultimately into the distinction 
 between faith and superstition, and Romanes 
 defines the criteria which differentiate these 
 as 'the spiritual verification' and 'the moral 
 ingredient.'* The spiritual verification is sub- 
 jective, the moral ingredient is objective ; and 
 where the latter is lacking, the former is invalid. 
 It is told, for example, how an impostor, one 
 Lacey of the sect of ' the Prophets,' once 
 visited the Lord Chief-Justice Holt and 
 demanded the release of a brother fanatic who 
 had been thrown into Newgate for seditious 
 talk. He announced himself as 'a prophet 
 of the Lord God.' ' He has sent me to thee, 
 and would have thee grant a nolle prosequi for 
 John Atkins, His servant, whom thou hast 
 sent to prison.' Lacey 's revelation was, for 
 him, a spiritual verification. The subjective 
 condition was present, but what of the objective 
 
 * Thoughts on Religion, p. 139.
 
 100 THE EVIDENCE OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 condition, the moral ingredient? It was lack- 
 ing, and therefore the appeal to experience 
 was disallowed. * Thou art a false prophet,' was 
 his lordship's reply, ' and a lying knave. If the 
 Lord God had sent thee, it would have been to 
 the Attorney General, for He knows that it 
 belongeth not to the Chief-Justice to grant a 
 noUe prosequi, but I, as Chief- Justice, can grant 
 a warrant to lay a lying knave by the heels.' 
 
 The test of the argument then is pragmatic : 
 
 it must work. The experience to which appeal 
 
 is made must be actual and verifi- 
 
 Pragmatism. 
 
 able, not subjective and personal but 
 objective and demonstrable. Thus conditioned, 
 it is the surest of all arguments, and it bears 
 powerfully on the question of the historicity 
 of the Evangelic Jesus. 
 
 You remember that principle which our 
 Lord is reported in the Fourth Gospel to have 
 
 enunciated to the Jewish rulers when 
 
 The appeal 
 
 sanctioned they were disputing about His teach- 
 ing in the court of the Temple : * 
 * My teaching is not Mine, but His that sent 
 Me. If any man willeth to do His will, he 
 shall come to know (yiwereraO of the teaching, 
 
 * John vii. 16, 17.
 
 THE EVIDENCE OF EXPERIENCE 101 
 
 whether it be of God, or whether I speak from 
 Myself.' 
 
 St. Augustine entirely misses the significance 
 of this principle when, in his beautiful exposition 
 of the Gospel, he thus explains it: No . fool . s 
 'Understanding is the reward of faith. 6 ^ 1 ^^' 
 Never seek to understand in order that you may 
 believe, but believe in order that you may 
 understand.'* Our Lord is not recommending 
 what Romanes terms the ' fool's experiment ' of 
 stifling one's doubt and blindly accepting an 
 unintelligible creed in the hope of coming to 
 believe it. On the contrary, He challenges 
 honest investigation and proposes a method. 
 And it is precisely the method which is pur- 
 sued in every other domain. 
 
 It is the method of Science. The first step 
 toward discovery is a theory ; then follows the 
 testing of the theory by the pheno- 
 
 , . , : . . . The method 
 
 mena, and if these bear it out, it is of: 
 forthwith established. It is mere loss a> scientific 
 of breath to reason about the theory. 
 ' Do not think ; try ' that celebrated physician 
 John Hunter was accustomed to say to his 
 
 * Cf. Anselm, Proslog. i. : ' Neque enim qusero intelligere, 
 ut credam ; sed credo, ut intelligam.'
 
 102 THE EVIDENCE OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 students ; meaning : * Do not waste time on 
 a priori discussion of the theory : put it to the 
 test and ascertain the verdict of the facts.' * 
 
 Again, it is the method for the practice of 
 Art. What was Rembrandt's counsel to his 
 
 (2) the prac- P u pil Hoogstraten when the latter 
 ticeofArt; teased him with questions? 'Try,' 
 he said, 'to put well in practice what you already 
 know. In so doing you will, in good time, dis- 
 cover the hidden things which you now inquire 
 about.' 
 
 And so in the domain of speculation. It was 
 
 a shrewd observation of Dr. Samuel Johnson 
 
 that 'so many objections might be 
 
 (3) specu- J 
 
 lative made to everything, that nothing 
 
 could overcome them but the neces- 
 sity of doing something.' And Carlyle has 
 proclaimed the same truth in his impassioned 
 discourse on The Everlasting Yea : ' All 
 speculation is by nature endless, formless, a 
 vortex amid vortices : only by a felt indubitable 
 certainty of Experience does it find any centre 
 to revolve round, and so fashion itself into a 
 system. Most true it is, as a wise man teaches 
 us, that " Doubt of any sort cannot be removed 
 
 * Romanes, Tlioughta on Religion, p. 167.
 
 THE EVIDENCE OF EXPERIENCE 103 
 
 except by Action." On which ground, too, let 
 him who gropes painfully in darkness or un- 
 certainty, and prays vehemently that the dawn 
 may ripen into day, lay this other precept well 
 to heart, which to me was of invaluable service : 
 "Z)o the Duty which lies nearest thee" which thou 
 knowest to be a Duty ! The second Duty will 
 already have become clearer.' 
 
 In all these domains the principle is recog- 
 nised ; and when our Lord says : ' If any man 
 willeth to do His will, he shall come 
 
 So in faith. 
 
 to know of the teaching, whether it 
 be of God, or whether I speak from Myself,' 
 He simply carries it into the domain of Religion 
 with its peculiar perplexities, and insists that it 
 be applied to these also. It is no ' fool's experi- 
 ment ' that He requires, no irrational acceptance 
 of something unintelligible after the manner of 
 St. Augustine's crede ut intelligas. His * willing 
 to do the will of God ' corresponds in the domain 
 of Religion to Rembrandt's ' trying to put well 
 in practice what you already know' in the 
 domain of Art, and Carlyle's ' doing the Duty 
 which lies nearest thee, which thou knowest to 
 be a Duty,' in the domain of Morals. He bids 
 us assume the right attitude toward life with
 
 104 THE EVIDENCE OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 its manifold perplexities, toward our fellow- 
 creatures, and toward the mysteries which 
 encompass us. Face these insistent and ever- 
 present actualities gently and faithfully; be 
 patient ; be brave ; be kind ; be large-hearted ; 
 seek the ends which you know to be best and 
 highest. This is 'willing to do the will of 
 God ' ; and the assurance is that in so doing 
 we shall ' come to know of the teaching ' of our 
 Lord. We shall recognise its reasonableness ; 
 and it will fit in with our experience, and thus 
 irresistibly attest its truth. It will prove itself 
 the right key by opening the door. 
 
 This is the only and the infallible way to find 
 the clue of the labyrinth and emerge into the 
 me due of broad light of day. It is the under- 
 tue labyrinth, lying reason of that wise counsel of 
 Coleridge : * ' The best way to bring a clever 
 young man who has become sceptical and 
 unsettled to reason, is to make him feel some- 
 thing in any way. Love, if sincere and 
 unworldly, will, in nine cases out of ten, bring 
 him to a sense and assurance of something real 
 and actual ; and that sense alone will make 
 him think to a sound purpose, instead of 
 
 * Table Talk, May 17, 1830.
 
 THE EVIDENCE OF EXPERIENCE 105 
 
 dreaming that he is thinking.' Such is the 
 method. It is like following the narrow and 
 often hardly distinguishable track through a 
 mountain-gorge. You are hemmed in on either 
 hand by beetling crags, and you see no pass 
 before you ; but follow the track, and by and 
 by you will gain the height, and the broad, 
 sunlit landscape will break upon your view. 
 
 And it may be observed in passing that this 
 is the principle which underlies the Reformed 
 doctrine that the ultimate evidence 
 
 Of. the 
 
 for believers that the Holy Scripture Reformed 
 
 o.u TXT j jf r^ j -O.U j.1. Testimonium 
 
 is the Word 01 God is neither the Spiritus 
 udgment of the Church nor the force 
 of reason, but the Testimony of the Holy 
 Spirit in their own hearts. ' Though,' 
 
 & Calvin. 
 
 says Calvin,* * one vindicate the Holy 
 Word of God from the gainsayings of men, he 
 will not thereby fix in their hearts the certitude 
 which piety requires. Because religion seems 
 to profane men to stand merely in opinion, 
 they desire and demand that, lest they believe 
 anything foolishly or lightly, it should be proved 
 to them by reason that Moses and the Prophets 
 spoke by divine inspiration (divinities). But I 
 
 * Instit. I. vii. 4. 
 
 The Historic Jesus 15
 
 106 THE EVIDENCE OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 answer that the testimony of the Spirit is 
 superior to all reason. For, as God alone is 
 a fit witness concerning Himself in His Word, 
 so also the Word will not find faith in the 
 hearts of men until it is sealed by the inner 
 testimony of the Spirit.' ' This fact,' 
 
 ZwinglL J . 
 
 says Zwmgli,* 'only pious minds 
 know ; for it does not depend on the disputa- 
 tion of man, but is seated most firmly in men's 
 souls. It is an experience ; for all the pious 
 have experienced it. It is not a doctrine ; for 
 we see that very learned men are ignorant of 
 a fact so very salutary. It is therefore in vain 
 that we are so anxious for some because they 
 will not receive the Word ; but it will not be 
 in vain that we should anxiously pray God that 
 He may deign to bestow the grace of His Spirit 
 and draw them to the recognition of His Word.' 
 
 Application Such is the Argument from Ex- 
 ev^geiic pericncc ; and now see how it bears 
 problem: upon the question of the historicity 
 of the evangelic records. 
 
 They profess to depict Jesus as He appeared 
 in the days of His flesh; but this is not their 
 
 * De Vera et Falsa Religione Commentariua : De Ecdeaia.
 
 THE EVIDENCE OF EXPERIENCE 107 
 
 whole claim. For Jesus is not merely a historic 
 personage. He is the Living Lord, 'the same 
 yesterday and to-day, yea and for ever';* and 
 His promise to His disciples ere He 
 
 i P. i 11 ITT 11 Uie Evangelic 
 
 leit the world was that He would Jesus the 
 be ' with them all the days even unto 
 the consummation of the age.'t As He was 
 manifested in the days of His flesh, so is He 
 evermore ; and we know Him as He is by the 
 memory of His manifestation. And the Gospels 
 are the record of that manifestation : we know 
 it only through them. Hence it follows that, 
 if they be a true record, they must bring us into 
 present and personal contact with the Living 
 and Eternal Lord. And this is the ultimate 
 and decisive test of their truth : Do they fulfil 
 that function ? If they do, then their historicity 
 is attested by experience. 
 
 And they do. In a letter from Paris in 1826 
 Erskine of Linlathen writes of his meeting with 
 a little company of French Protes- present 
 tants. ' The characteristic of all these S^SS 
 persecuted Christians is reality, and the Gos P els 
 oh reality is everything ! They have found re- 
 ligion to be a thing worth suffering for, they have 
 
 * Heb. xiii. 8. t Matt, xxviii. 20.
 
 108 THE EVIDENCE OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 found it a support under suffering; and they 
 speak of it to others, not as of a logical system, 
 but as of a new life, a heavenly strength, a very 
 present help in trouble, and a medicine and a 
 remedy for every evil under the sun.' Have we 
 not all met believers of this sort? people who 
 could say with St. Paul :* ' I have been crucified 
 with Christ ; yet I live ; and yet no longer I, 
 but Christ liveth in me : and that life which 
 I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith 
 which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and 
 gave Himself up for me.' For such Christ is an 
 experience. They ' know Him whom they have 
 believed,'t and they need no other evidence. 
 It chanced to me once to witness an encounter 
 between a sceptical physician and a young 
 woman, poorly educated but taught of God. 
 Regardless of the dictates of chivalry, he plied 
 her with his infidel arguments. Her feeble 
 attempts to answer these only exposed her to 
 his mockery, and at last her eyes filled, and she 
 said : ' Well, doctor, I cannot argue with you ; 
 but there is one thing I am sure of: I have 
 found peace. Have you ? ' His face fell, and 
 he kept silence and troubled her no more. 
 
 * Gal. ii. 20. t 2 Tim. i. 12.
 
 THE EVIDENCE OF EXPERIENCE 109 
 
 Faith is impregnable when it is fortified by 
 experience. To one who has passed through 
 the Gospels into fellowship with the Living 
 Saviour of whom they testify, it matters nothing 
 though criticism denies their historicity. He 
 believes in them because he believes in Jesus ; 
 and he believes in Jesus because he knows Him. 
 
 ' Whoso hath felt the Spirit of the Highest 
 
 Cannot confound nor doubt him nor deny : 
 Yea with one voice, oh world, tho' thou deniest, 
 Stand thou on that side, for on this am I.' 
 
 Experience is personal and individual, yet 
 it carries conviction even to those who are 
 strangers to it. It was an alien ex- 
 
 force of alien 
 
 penence, which he had never felt experience: 
 and could not understand, that first case of 
 
 , r i i Bunyan. 
 
 arrested John Bunyan and never let 
 him go. He has told the story in his immortal 
 autobiography : ' Upon a day the good provi- 
 dence of God called me to Bedford to work 
 at my calling, and in one of the streets of that 
 town I came where there were three or four 
 poor women sitting at a door in the sun, talking 
 about the things of God ; and being now willing 
 to hear their discourse, I drew near to hear 
 what they said, for I was now a brisk talker in
 
 110 THE EVIDENCE OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 matters of religion : but they were far above 
 my reach. Their talk was about a new birth, 
 the work of God in their hearts, as also how 
 they were convinced of their miserable state by 
 nature. They talked how God had visited 
 their souls with his love in the Lord Jesus, 
 and with what words and promises they had 
 been refreshed, comforted, and supported against 
 the temptations of the devil. . . . And me- 
 thought they spake with such pleasantness of 
 Scripture language, and with such an appear- 
 ance of grace in all they said, that they were 
 to me as if they had found a new world as 
 if they were a people that dwelt alone, and 
 were not to be reckoned among their neigh- 
 bours.' The memory haunted him, and he 
 could never rest until he had discovered the 
 blessed secret and made the experience his 
 own. 
 
 There is profound truth in Neander's maxim 
 that * it is the heart that makes the theologian,' 
 
 Experience pCCtUS 6St CJUod theologUIH factt. A 
 
 "JJI/J 1 * 1 * 1 theologian should always be a preacher 
 
 too. Experience is an essential matena 
 
 critica ; and this is, to my mind, the fatal defect 
 
 of much that is written in these days, that it is
 
 THE EVIDENCE OF EXPERIENCE 111 
 
 purely academic and has never been submitted 
 to the test of experience. You will realise this 
 when you enter the blessed service of the Holy 
 Ministry, and are summoned to a chamber 
 where the shadow of death is falling. The 
 fitting words will not be lacking ; they will rise 
 unbidden to your lips those immortal words 
 which, according to the Fourth Gospel, our 
 Lord spoke to His disciples when He was 
 bidding them farewell in the Upper Room : 
 ' Let not your heart be troubled. In My 
 Father's house are many mansions ; if it were 
 not so, I would have told you : I go to prepare 
 a place for you. And if I go and prepare a 
 place for you, I will come again, and receive you 
 unto Myself, that where I am, there ye may be 
 also. Peace I leave with you, My peace I give 
 unto you : not as the world giveth, give I unto 
 you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither 
 let it be afraid.'* And as you repeat them, you 
 will see the dying lips murmuring them with 
 you, and a light, like the dawning of the glory 
 which shall be revealed, breaking on the wasted 
 face. In presence of such an experience much 
 that has been written on the Johannine problem 
 
 * John xiv. 1-3, 27.
 
 112 THE EVIDENCE OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 will appear to you strangely futile. You will 
 be very sure that, whatever criticism may say, 
 those are the words of Jesus, as strong and 
 fragrant at this hour as when they fell from 
 His lips into the troubled hearts of the Eleven 
 in the Upper Room. 
 
 It may, however, be objected that all this is 
 
 nothing more than illusion. You remember 
 
 the poet's picture of the hapless 
 
 Not illusion. . r 
 
 maiden whose lover was lost at sea, 
 and who would not believe it but haunted the 
 cliff, watching for his lingering sail on the far 
 horizon and, as each night fell, still hoping for 
 the morrow. Her faith was an illusion, benign 
 yet unsubstantial. 
 
 ' Mercy gave, to charm the sense of woe, 
 Ideal peace, that Truth could ne'er bestow.' 
 
 And the thought of Jesus has indeed brought 
 peace to many a troubled heart, but may it 
 not be an * ideal peace,' born of a beneficent 
 illusion ? 
 
 4 While we believed, on earth he went, 
 And open stood his grave. 
 Men call'd from chamber, church, and tent ; 
 And Christ was by to save.
 
 THE EVIDENCE OF EXPERIENCE 113 
 
 ' Now he is dead ! Far hence he lies 
 
 In the lorn Syrian town ; 
 And on his grave, with shining eyes, 
 The Syrian stars look down.' 
 
 Carry the argument a little farther. An ideal 
 can do much. It can inspire wonder, ^ object 
 admiration, desire, worship. But there oflove: 
 is an emotion, deeper, warmer, and atan ideal . 
 sweeter, which no ideal can stir. An ideal 
 cannot enkindle love. 
 
 The only possible object of love is a person. 
 And what manner of person? Not an ideal 
 person. Is not this taught by the 
 Greek fable of Pygmalion ? His person, real, 
 
 /-i i j j j i,' living, near. 
 
 Galatea was indeed his own crea- 
 tion, but it was not until his ideal took visible 
 shape that it enkindled love in his heart, and 
 the responsive marble breathed and moved. It 
 is impossible to love an ideal person ; nor is it 
 possible to love one who, though real, is merely 
 historic. We cannot love Moses or Isaiah or 
 St. Paul or St. Augustine or Martin Luther 
 or John Knox or Sir Walter Scott. Nor can 
 we love even a contemporary personage whom 
 we know only afar off. A king has the 
 reverence and loyalty of his subjects, but 
 
 The Historic Jesus 16
 
 114 THE EVIDENCE OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 it is his kinsfolk and friends that love 
 him. 
 
 The object of love, then, is a person, and a 
 person who is real, living, and near. There is 
 me lore of only O ne * whom not having seen we 
 JCSUB : love.' * And there is no love com- 
 
 parable to the love which He has inspired in 
 the breasts of the children of men. Think of 
 at muds St. Francis of Assisi. It was a vision 
 ofABidBi, Q f j esus t na t transformed him; and 
 
 it is told how * from that hour his heart was 
 wounded and melted at the remembrance of 
 at Thomas the Lord's Passion.' f Think of St. 
 Aquinas, Thomas Aquinas. * Thou hast written 
 well of Me, Thomas,' said the voice from the 
 Crucifix as he bowed in prayer: 'what recom- 
 at. Bernard pense dost thou desire ? ' ' None 
 ofciairvaux. o ther,' answered the saint, 'than 
 Thyself, O Lord.' Think of St Bernard of 
 Clairvaux : 
 
 'Jesus, the very thought of Thee 
 
 With sweetness fills my breast; 
 But sweeter far Thy face to see, 
 And In Thy presence rest. 
 
 * 1 Peter i. 8. 
 
 ' Ab Ilia hora vulneratum et liquefactum est cor ejus ad 
 memoriam Dominican pasaionis. '
 
 THE EVIDENCE OF EXPERIENCE 115 
 
 'O Hope of every contrite heart, 
 
 O Joy of all the meek, 
 To those who fall how kind Thou art ! 
 How good to those who seek I 
 
 ' But what to those who find ? Ah ! this 
 
 Nor tongue nor pen can show ; 
 The love of Jesus what it is 
 None but His loved ones know.'* 
 
 Jesus, Thou Joy of loving hearts, 
 
 Thou Fount of Life, Thou Light of men, 
 
 From the best bliss that earth imparts 
 We turn unfilled to Thee again. t 
 
 * 'Jesu dulcis memoria 
 Dans vera cordi gaudia : 
 Sed super mel et omnia 
 Ejus dulcis praesentia. 
 
 'Jesu spes pcenitentibus, 
 Quam pius es petentibus, 
 Quam bonus te quserentibus, 
 Sed quid invenientibus ? 
 
 'Nee lingua valet dicere, 
 Nee litera exprimere : 
 Expertus potest credere 
 Quid sit Jesum diligere.' 
 
 t 'Jesu dulcedo cordium, 
 Fons vivus, lumen mentium, 
 Excedens omne gaudium, 
 Et omne desiderium.
 
 116 THE EVIDENCE OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 'Our restless spirits yearn for Thee, 
 
 Where'er our changeful lot is cast, 
 Glad when Thy gracious smile we see, 
 Blest when our faith can hold Thee fast.'* 
 
 
 Think of Samuel Rutherfurd : 
 
 'Oh! Christ He is the fountain, 
 
 The deep sweet well of love ! 
 The streams on earth I've tasted, 
 
 More deep I'll drink above. 
 There to an ocean fulness 
 
 His mercy doth expand, 
 And glory, glory dwelleth 
 
 In Immanuel's land.' 
 
 John Niwton. Think of John Newton : 
 
 'How sweet the name of Jesus sounds 
 
 In a believer's ear ! 
 
 It soothes his sorrows, heals his wounds, 
 And drives away his fear. 
 
 ' It makes the wounded spirit whole, 
 
 And calms the troubled breast ; 
 Tis manna to the hungry soul, 
 And to the weary rest.' 
 
 ' Quocunque loco fuero, 
 Mecuin Jesum desidero : 
 Quam Iffltus cum invenero ? 
 Quam felix cum tenuero?'
 
 THE EVIDENCE OF EXPERIENCE 117 
 
 Was there ever a love like this this passion 
 of desire, this ecstasy of devotion ? And its 
 object is Jesus the Evangelic Jesus, 
 
 . Conclusion. 
 
 for He is the only Jesus whom we 
 know. See, then, what follows. The Evan- 
 gelic Jesus cannot be a mere ideal ; for an 
 ideal cannot enkindle love. He is a historic 
 person, and He lived among men as the 
 Evangelists have portrayed Him. But He 
 is more than that. It is impossible to love 
 one who is remote from us, and has never 
 been in present and personal contact with 
 us ; and therefore Jesus is more than a 
 historic person who dwelt in Palestine long 
 ago. He is the Living Lord, the Eternal 
 Saviour, who was manifested, according to 
 the Scriptures, in the days of His flesh 
 and still, according to His promise, visits 
 the souls that put their trust in Him and 
 makes His abode with them. 
 
 Here lies the supreme and incontrovertible 
 evidence of the historicity of the Gospels. The 
 final decision rests not with the critics 
 
 The final 
 
 but with the saints ; and their verdict verdict of 
 
 the saints 
 
 is unanimous and unfaltering. They 
 
 know the Divine Original, and they attest the 
 
 faithfulness of the portrait.
 
 A LATIN HYMN 
 
 The Sighs of St. Aloysius 
 
 O CHRIST, Love's Victim, hanging high 
 
 Upon the cruel Tree, 
 What worthy recompense can I 
 
 Make, mine own Christ, to Thee? 
 
 All my life's blood if I should spill 
 
 A thousand times for Thee, 
 Ah, 'twere too small a quittance still 
 
 For all Thy love to me. 
 
 My sweat and labour from this day, 
 
 My sole life let it be, 
 To love Thee aye the best I may, 
 
 And die for love of Thee.
 
 INDEXES 
 
 The Historic Jesus 17
 
 NAMES AND SUBJECTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PAGE 
 
 ALCOTT 70 
 
 Celsus 45, 46, 68 
 
 Aloysius 119 
 
 Childhood of Jesus (apocry- 
 
 Anselm 101 
 
 phal) 36 ff. 
 
 Apollonius of Tyana ...54ff. 
 
 Chrysostom ... 44, 97 
 
 Arabic Gospel of Infancy 59 
 
 Cicero 94 
 
 Arnold, Edwin 38 
 
 Class distinctions 75 ff. 
 
 Matthew ... 84, 112 
 
 Clement of Alexandria ... 88 
 
 Arrian 81 
 
 Coleridge 19, 72, 104 
 
 Augustine 8, 101 
 
 Constantinople, Creed of... 11 
 
 
 Contemporary opinion, 
 
 BERNARD of Clairvarux ... 114 
 
 Jesus and 81 ff. 
 
 Blount 56 
 
 
 Brahmans ... 55 
 
 DAMIS 55, 57 
 
 Browning 14, 92 
 
 " Defile the hands " ... 42 
 
 Bruce 78, 92 
 
 Demonax 47 ff. 
 
 Bunyan 76, 109 
 
 Demoniac 58 
 
 
 Diogenes 98 
 
 CABBALISTS 38 
 
 Diogenes Laertius 49, 76, 77, 98 
 
 Caesar 81 
 
 Doketism 35 ff. 
 
 Calvin 105 
 
 Doubt 103 f. 
 
 Campbell, Thomas ... 112 
 
 
 Canonicity (Rabbinical) ... 42 
 
 Encyclopedia BibUca ... 9 
 
 Carlyle 4,70,102 
 
 Erskine of Linlathen ... 107 
 
 123
 
 INDEXES 
 
 PAGE 
 
 
 PAOE 
 
 Eusebius 29, 56 
 
 JEALOUSY, divine ... 
 
 ... 41 
 
 ii'rpairtXia ... ... ... 49 
 
 Jewish exclusiveness 
 
 ...78. 
 
 Evangelium Thomce ...85ft. 
 
 Johnson, Dr. 
 
 ... 102 
 
 Experience, argument from 97 ff. 
 
 Juan de Avila 
 
 ... 67 
 
 
 Judas, legend of ... 
 
 ... 69 
 
 FASTING 78 
 
 Julia Domna 
 
 ... 56 
 
 Francis of Assisi 114 
 
 Justin Martyr 
 
 29,54 
 
 
 Juvenal 
 
 ... 79 
 
 GALILKK ... ... ... 80 
 
 
 
 
 KBBLB 
 
 ... 68 
 
 Gibbon 20, 48 
 
 
 
 
 Reim 
 
 ... 10 
 
 God , created in man* s image 87 
 
 Kutter 
 
 ... 74 
 
 Gospels and types of na- 
 
 
 
 tionality 79 
 Green, T. H 18 ff. 
 
 LACBY the Prophet 
 Lactantius 
 
 ... 99 
 56,77 
 
 Gregory 69 
 
 Lightfoot, J. B. ... 
 
 ... 18 
 
 
 Love of Jesus 
 
 114 ff. 
 
 HERODOTUS 41 
 
 only object of 
 
 ... 118 
 
 Hicrocles 56 
 
 Lucian 
 
 ... 47 
 
 Holiness 69 
 
 
 
 Holt, Chief-Justice ... 99 
 
 MAOAULAY 
 
 ... 19 
 
 Homo mensura 98 
 
 Marcosians 
 
 ... 89 
 
 Hoogstraten 102 
 
 Marcus Antoninus . . . 
 
 ... 49 
 
 Horace 86 
 
 Martensen 
 
 ... 12 
 
 Hunter, John 101 
 
 Mary 
 
 ...81f. 
 
 Hutton 89 
 
 McConnell 
 
 ... 84 
 
 
 fiijdlv dyav ... ... 
 
 ... 49 
 
 IGNATIUS 96 
 
 Messiah, a miracle -worker 40 
 
 Illusion and faith 112 
 
 Messianic expectation 
 
 ... 6 
 
 Immortality 92 
 
 Mill, J. 8 
 
 ... 86 
 
 Inspiration 90 
 
 Miracles 
 
 ... 92 
 
 Intuition and reason ... 98 f. 
 
 a test of Messiah- 
 
 Irenseus 80, 81, 89 
 
 ship ... 
 
 ...40 ff.
 
 INDEXES 
 
 125 
 
 PAGE 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Moffatt 7 
 
 SAINTS, testimony of the 
 
 ... 117 
 
 Myers, F. W. H 109 
 
 Schmiedel 
 
 ... 9ff. 
 
 NATIONALITY 78 ff. 
 
 Science and the Gospel 
 Scott 
 
 ...84f. 
 ... 35 
 
 Neander 110 
 
 Sect 
 
 77 f 
 
 Neo-Pythagoreanism ... 54 
 
 Serapion 
 
 ... 29 
 
 Newton, John 116 
 
 Shakspeare 
 
 ... 24 
 
 
 Sin 
 
 67 
 
 ORIGBN ... 28, 81, 45, 46, 68 
 
 Sinlessness of Jesus 65 
 
 ff., 92 f. 
 
 PAGAN attitude to Chris- 
 
 "Sinners" 
 
 ... 75 
 
 tianity 46 
 
 Smith, W. C. 
 
 ... 62 
 
 Pascal 80 
 
 W. R. 
 
 ... 42 
 
 Paul and Christ 87 f. 
 
 Socrates 
 
 49,98 
 
 Peter, Gospel according to 28 
 
 Solon 
 
 ... 41 
 
 Pfleiderer 87 
 
 Strauss 
 
 ... 6 
 
 Pharisees 76 
 
 Suidas 
 
 ... 47 
 
 PTvilalethes 56 
 
 Supernatural, difficulty 
 
 of 
 
 Philo stratus 55 
 
 imagining the ... 
 
 ... 35 
 
 Plato 77,82,98 
 
 
 
 Plutarch 77 
 
 TACITUS 
 
 ... 78 
 
 Pragmatism 100 
 
 Taxgatherers 
 
 ... 78 
 
 Prayer of Apollonius ... 58 
 
 Tennyson 
 
 ... 20 
 
 Protagoras'" 98 
 
 Testimonium Spiri 
 
 \U9 
 
 ProtevangeUwm Jacob* ...28ff. 
 
 Sancti 
 
 105 f. 
 
 Pygmalion 118 
 
 Thales 
 
 ... 77 
 
 
 Theodoret 
 
 ... 87 
 
 RAISING from the dead ... 67 
 
 Thomas Aquinas ... 
 
 ... 114 
 
 Religion 19, 48 
 
 Thorwaldsen 
 
 ... 59 
 
 Rembrandt 102 
 
 Tides 
 
 ... 81 
 
 Renan 67, 80 
 
 Tischendorf 
 
 ... 30 
 
 Romanes ... 82, 98, 99, 102 
 
 Tolstoy 
 
 ... 65 
 
 Rothe 90 
 
 Tradition, Evangelic 
 
 ...27f. 
 
 Rutherfurd 116 
 
 Tyana 
 
 ... 55
 
 126 
 
 INDEXES 
 
 UNIVERSALITY of Jesus 
 
 VIBGIN Birth 
 Virginity of Mary ... 
 
 WABD, Mrs. Humphry 
 
 Weizsacker 
 
 White Lady of A vend 
 Whittier 
 
 PAGE 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 ... 80 
 
 Women 
 
 ...761 
 
 
 Words of Jesus ... 
 
 ...78ff. 
 
 ...82f. 
 
 
 
 ... 82 
 
 XKNOPHANBS 
 
 ... 87 
 
 ... 18 
 
 ZAHN ... 
 
 80 
 
 ... 11 
 
 Zealots 
 
 ... 78 
 
 ... 85 
 
 Zeno 
 
 ... 99 
 
 ... 16 
 
 Zwingli 
 
 ... 106
 
 II 
 
 PASSAGES OF SCRIPTURE 
 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Exodus xix. 21-24... 
 
 ... 41 
 
 St. Matthew xxi. 34-38 . 
 
 .. 70 
 
 2 Samuel vi. 
 
 6-11 ... 
 
 ... 42 
 
 xxv. 31, 32 . 
 
 .. 71 
 
 Isaiah xxxii. 
 
 3,4 ... 
 
 ... 6 
 
 xxvii. 29-31. 
 
 .. 53 
 
 XXXV. 
 
 5,6 ... 
 
 ... 6 
 
 xxvii. 55, 56. 
 
 .. 77 
 
 xlii. 7 
 
 ... 
 
 ... 6 
 
 xxviii. 20 
 
 .. 107 
 
 liii. 3 
 
 ... 
 
 ... 52 
 
 St. Mark iii. 21 ... 
 
 .. 10 
 
 Haggai ii. 7 
 
 ... 
 
 ... 80 
 
 v. 30 
 
 .. 74 
 
 St. Matthew 
 
 i. 21 ... 
 
 ... 30 
 
 vi. 5, 6 ... 
 
 .. 10 
 
 
 v. 21-30 
 
 ... 67 
 
 viii. 12 ... 
 
 .. 10 
 
 
 viii. 20 
 
 ... 52 
 
 viii. 14-21 
 
 .. 10 
 
 
 ix. 12 
 
 ... 76 
 
 ix. 29 ... 
 
 .. 73 
 
 
 x. 37... 
 
 ... 71 
 
 x. 17, 18... 
 
 .. 9 
 
 
 x. 40... 
 
 ... 70 
 
 xi. 13 ... 
 
 .. 66 
 
 
 xi. 5 ... 
 
 6,11 
 
 xiii. 32 ... 
 
 10,66 
 
 
 xi. 19 
 
 ... 75 
 
 xv. 34 ... 
 
 .. 10 
 
 
 xi. 28, 29 
 
 ... 71 
 
 xv. 40, 41 
 
 .. 77 
 
 
 xii. 22-24 
 
 ... 42 
 
 St. Luke i. 1-4 
 
 .. 27 
 
 
 xii. 31, 32 
 
 ... 9 
 
 i. 35 
 
 .. 30 
 
 
 xii. 40 
 
 ... 74 
 
 ii. 41-51 ... 
 
 .. 27 
 
 
 xii. 42 
 
 ... 51 
 
 ii. 51, 52... 
 
 .. 87 
 
 
 xiii. 16, 17 
 
 ... 71 
 
 vii. 11-17 
 
 .. 57 
 
 
 xvii. 21 
 
 ... 73 
 
 vii. 21, 22 
 
 .. 6 
 
 
 xx. 28 
 
 ... 71 
 
 vu. 86-50 
 
 .. 76 
 
 127
 
 128 
 
 INDEXES 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 St. Luke viii. 2 
 
 ... 77 
 
 Acts xxv. 24 
 
 ... 10 
 
 viii. 46 ... 
 
 ... 74 
 
 Romans ix. 1-8 ... 
 
 ... 79 
 
 xi. 29, 80 
 
 ... 74 
 
 ix. 6 
 
 ... 80 
 
 xL 87-48... 
 
 ... 76 
 
 1 Corinthians i. 28... 
 
 ... 45 
 
 xiv. 1-24... 
 
 ... 76 
 
 iii. 11 
 
 ... 98 
 
 xiv. 26 ... 
 
 ... 72 
 
 xv. 8-8 
 
 ... 17 
 
 xv. a 
 
 ... 69 
 
 2 Corinthians v. 18 
 
 ... 10 
 
 xxiii. 48, 49 
 
 ... 77 
 
 v. 16 
 
 ... 16 
 
 xxiv. 27 ... 
 
 ... 71 
 
 Galatians ii. 20 
 
 ... 108 
 
 St. John i. 1-18 ... 
 
 ... 18 
 
 Ephesians v. 4 
 
 ... 49 
 
 i. 48-61 ... 
 
 ... 68 
 
 Fhilippians iii. 4-7 
 
 ... 79 
 
 ii. 11 
 
 ... 87 
 
 1 Thessalonians ii. 15 
 
 ... 78 
 
 iv. 27 ... 
 
 ... 77 
 
 1 Timothy iv. 7 ... 
 
 ... 28 
 
 v. 18 
 
 ... 70 
 
 vi. 8, 4... 
 
 ... 28 
 
 vi. 68 ... 
 
 ... 74 
 
 2 Timothy i. 12 ... 
 
 ... 108 
 
 vii. 16, 17 
 
 ... 100 
 
 i. 14 ... 
 
 ... 28 
 
 viii. 46 ... 
 
 ... 66 
 
 Hebrews i. 2 
 
 ... 70 
 
 x. 20 
 
 ... 78 
 
 ii. 17 
 
 ... 40 
 
 xiv. 1-8, 27 
 
 ... Ill 
 
 iv. 15 ... 
 
 ... 66 
 
 xvii. 4, 18 
 
 ... 67 
 
 xiii. 8 ... 
 
 ... 107 
 
 xx. 18 ... 
 
 ... 2 
 
 1 Peter i. 8 
 
 ... 114 
 
 xx. 26 ... 
 
 ... 82 
 
 1 John i. 1-8 
 
 ... 18 
 
 Acts xv. 5 
 
 ... 76 
 
 
 
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