}

The Historical Bible

THE LIFE AND TEACHINGS

OF JESUS

ACCORDING TO THE EARLIEST RECORDS

BY

CHARLES FOSTER KENT, PH.D., LITT.D.

WOOLSEY PROFESSOR OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE IN YALE UNIVERSITY

WITH MAP AND CHART

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Published February, 1913

PREFACE

WITHIN the past few years a rapidly increasing body of thoughtful men and women, inside and outside the church, have learned to appreciate and appropriate the practical results that have come from a thorough, constructive application of modern historical and literary methods of study to the Old Testament. Time is demonstrating more and more clearly that these methods, instead of destroying, are revealing anew the beauty and permanent significance of those ancient records.

What is eminently true of the Old is destined, in even larger measure, to prove true of the New Testament. The gospels, like the historical books of the Old Testament, embody older oral and written sources which reflect the earliest impression that Jesus' personality and words made on the minds of his followers. The first step, therefore, in the quest of the real Jesus is to distinguish and to separate these oldest records from the later variant accounts which blur or conceal the original portrait. The more vital the questions involved, the more important is it that the records be carefully studied and tested by the most thorough methods known to modern historical research. Men rightly demand to-day a definite rational basis for their faith. Before Christianity can make the appeal which it should to the individual and to society, it must rest on firm, unassailable historical foundations.

Jesus was so many-sided that no one of the gospels gives a complete or proportionate portrait of him. A harmony of the gospels, with its widely divergent readings, is a most unsatisfactory text-book for a constructive study of the life and teachings of Jesus. Even more confusing and misleading is a composite gospel which, like Tatian's Diatessaron, combines all the variant statements of the four gospels. Practical experience is demonstrating that what is demanded to-day is a single narrative that will embody the oldest records embedded in the four New Testament gospels. This must be so arranged that it will give a simple, logical, and, as far as possible, a chronological view of Jesus' life and teachings.

The primary aim of the present volume is to meet this need in the most direct and practical way. The vividness and consistency of the