HOW

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.

OW well the Hebrew Priest, but especially the Prophet, had done his work, may best be seen in that moral element which made Judaism to religion what the Greek spirit had been to the intellectual life of the world. Nowhere out of Judæa were to be found such passionate moral fervor and such intense spiritual yearnings. But this spirit had spent itself as a formative power; it had already overshot the multitude, while higher natures were goaded by it to excess. There was need of a new religious education. This was the desire and expectation of the best men of the Jewish Church. How their spiritual quickening was to come, they knew not. That it was coming was generally believed, and also that the approaching deliverance would in some mysterious way bring God nearer to men. "Of the day and of the hour" knew no man. The day had come when a new manifestation of God was to be made. A God of holiness, a God of power, and a God of mercy had been clearly revealed. The Divine Spirit was now to be clothed with flesh, subjected to the ordinary laws of matter, placed in those conditions in which men live, become the subject of care, weariness, sorrow, and of death itself.

The history of this divine incarnation we are now to trace, in so far as the religious knowledge which has sprung from it can be carried back to its sources, and be made to illustrate the sublime truths and events of the Lord's earthly mission.

Since there are four inspired lives of our Lord,

-two of them

by the hands of disciples who were eye-witnesses of the events recorded, namely, those by Matthew and John, and two, those of Mark and Luke, by men who, though not disciples, were yet the companions of the Apostles, and derived their materials, in part, from them,

why should it be necessary to frame other histories

of Jesus, the Christ? Since the materials for any new life of Christ must be derived from the four Evangelists, is it likely that uninspired men, after a lapse of nearly nineteen hundred years, can do better than they did who were either witnesses or contemporaries of the Lord, and who were appointed and guided by the Divine Spirit to make a record of truth for all time?

The impression produced by such suggestions will be materially modified upon a close examination of the Gospels.

1. The very fact that there are four lives, which strikes one as a fourfold blessing, and which surely is an advantage, carries with it also certain disadvantages. For a clear view of the life and teachings of our Lord, four fields are to be reaped instead of one.

The early ages needed testimony; our age needs teaching. Four witnesses are better for testimony. But for biography one complete narrative, combining in it the materials of the four, would have given a picture of our Lord more in accordance with the habits and wants of men in our day.

This diversity of witnesses subserves other important ends. No single man could have represented all sides of the Saviour's teaching. A comparison of Matthew's Gospel with that of John will show how much would have been lost, had there been only a single collector and reporter of Christ's discourses.

It is not easy, even for one trained to investigation, to gather out of the four Evangelists a clear and consistent narrative of our Lord's ministry; and still less will unstudious men succeed in doing it.

No one will deny that every Christian man should seek a comprehensive, and not a fragmentary, knowledge of his Lord. In other words, every Christian reader seeks, for himself, out of the other four, to weave a fifth life of Christ. Why should not this indispensable work be performed for men, with all the aids of elaborate investigation?

2. The impression derived from this general view is greatly strengthened by a critical examination of the contents of the Gospels.

It is one of the striking facts in history, that One whose teachings were to revolutionize human ideas, and to create a new era in the world's affairs, did not commit a single syllable to paper, and did not organize a single institution. An unlimited power of

acting upon the world without these subsidiary and, to men, indispensable instruments, viz. writing and organization, and only by the enunciation of absolute truths in their relation to human conduct, is one of the marks of Divinity.

There is no evidence that Jesus appointed any of his disciples to perform the work of an historian. None of them claim such authorization. Only Luke' makes any reference to the motives which led him to undertake the task of writing, and he claims no other than a personal desire to record a knowledge which he deemed fuller than that of others.

The four Gospels are evidently final and authoritative collections of oral histories and compilations of narratives which were already circulating among the early Christians. In the cases of Matthew and John, these materials were wrought upon the fabric of their own personal observation and experience.

There is in none of them any consistent regard to the order of time or of place. The principle of arrangement evidently is to be found in the moral similarities of the materials, and not in their chronological sequences. Different events are clustered together which were widely separated. Whole chapters of parables are given as if they had been delivered in a single discourse. We should never have known from Matthew, Mark, or Luke, that our Lord was accustomed to go up to Jerusalem to the great Jewish feasts; but we do get it from John, who is mainly concerned with the history and discourses of his Master in Judæa. Matthew, on the other hand, bestows his attention upon that part of the Saviour's life which was spent in Galilee. Moreover, he seldom enters, as John does, upon interior and profoundly spiritual experiences. John almost as little notices the merely external facts and events of the Lord's life, which Matthew habitually regards.2

1 Luke i. 1-4. "Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us, even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word; it seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, that thou mightest know the certainty of those things wherein thou hast been instructed.”

"The first three Evangelists describe especially those things which Christ did in our flesh, and relate the precepts which He delivered on the duties to be performed by us, while we walk on earth and dwell in the flesh. But St. John soars to heaven, as an eagle, above the clouds of human infirmity, and reveals to us the mysteries of Christ's Godhead, and of the Trinity in Unity, and the felicities of Life Eternal, and gazes on the Light of

In their structure the Evangelical narratives have been well compared to Xenophon's Memorabilia of Socrates. They are clusters of events, parables, miracles, discourses, in which the order of time is sometimes obscure, and sometimes wholly inverted.

In every age of the Church it has been deemed wise to attempt to form a harmony of the four Gospels. Since the year A. D. 1500, there have been more than fifty harmonies made by most eminent Christian scholars. Of Lives of Christ and Harmonies there have been more than one hundred and fifty.

But for some such help, the difficulties arising from a comparison of the different narratives would be insoluble. Many obstacles are thus removed, many apparent contradictions are congruously explained, many apparent inconsistencies are harmonized; and it is shown that, of the inexplicable facts remaining, none are important, — certainly not as respects the great truths or the essential events of the narrative.

3. It is probable that no equal amount of truth was ever expressed in a mode so well fitted for universal circulation. And yet, as the Gospels were written by Jews, and with primary reference to certain wants of the age in which the writers lived, they are full of allusions, references, customs, and beliefs, which have long since passed away or have become greatly modified. There are also in the New Testament allusions to customs of which there is no knowledge whatever preserved.

But far more important is it to observe the habits of thought, the whole mental attitude of the Apostolic age, and the change which has since come upon the world. Truths remain the same; but every age has its own style of thought. Although this difference is not so great as is the difference between one language and another, it is yet so great as to require restatement or, as it were, translation. The truth which Paul argues to the Romans is as important for us as it was for them. But we are not Jews.1 We care nothing for circumcision. The Hebrew law has never

Immutable Truth with a keen and steady ken.". St. Augustine, translated by Dr. Wordsworth. Introduction to Commentaries on the New Testament.

1 Jews were dispersed through all the civilized world, and in general, both in Greek and Roman cities, there were synagogues, in which the Old Testament Scriptures were read, and in which the Apostles made known to their own countrymen the fulfilment of those Scriptures in the history of our Lord. See Acts xxviii. 16 - 24.