treason-setting up another rule. Herod knew that John shared the hopes then uppermost in the minds of his race, shared therefore their bitter hatred of the power that drained them of their young men for soldiers, and of their goods for taxes. So he silenced the bold man who had wandered into his territory, fearful that he might excite a rebellion, the slightest success of which imperilled Herod's favour with the emperor.

No doubts crossed the mind of Jesus on hearing this cheerless news as to the course which he should take. It was to carry on John's work, if not in exactly the same way, for they were men of unlike temperament, with the same unflagging zeal; and breaking new ground he returned to Galilee, fixing his preaching-centre at the little town of Capernaum, situate on the busy shores of the lovely Lake of Tiberias, "the eye of Galilee," and dwelling as a guest in the house of two brothers, Simon Peter and Andrew, who gained their living by fishing, and whose friendship he may have made in earlier days.

II.

Sources of Knowledge about Jesus.

BEFORE attempting any sketch of the public life of Jesus it is needful to say somewhat concerning the materials from which it is drawn, and thus justify the uncertainty with which one must speak about all that attaches to him. These materials are found mainly in the "gospels with which the New Testament begins, for although certain " epistles " or letters in that collection were written earlier, they supply no account of the life of Jesus. Their author, the apostle Paul, who did not know him, was addressing people supposed to be acquainted with the traditions then current, and moreover his main object was to set forth the relation in which he believed Jesus, as ascended into heaven, from whence he was expected to return, stood towards his disciples.

Testament the references

Outside the New

are very scanty.

Josephus, who was born two years after the

death of Jesus, makes mention of him in two places in his celebrated history, but the longer passage1 has been altered by a Christian hand, so as to make it appear that Josephus regarded Jesus as more than a man. In the Talmud he is spoken of with contempt and stupid rancour, while among the few passages in pagan writers the most precious is that of Tacitus, who alludes to the death of Jesus under the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, in a way that shows what little stir that event created at the time. Indeed, he, like other observing men of his day, did not realize what a tremendous power the Christian religion was to become in the world. To them it was only an offshoot of Judaism, and the remarks even of noble-minded men like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius are pitched in the same tone of contempt in which they spoke of the Jewish religion. The pagan faiths were decaying, and they knew it, yet failed to see in the Christian religion that which most surely answered to the aims and emotions of men, and 1 Antiq. xviii. 3, 8. 2 Annals, xv. 44.

to that feeling of world-wide brotherhood which the loftier minds were expressing. We must not blame them that they could not read aright "the signs of the times," for such insight is given to few, and to the many the noisiest force is the strongest.

Of the four gospels, those "according to" Matthew, Mark, and Luke, although written from different standpoints, are on the whole in fair agreement concerning what they narrate, and are for that reason called the "synoptics," from a Greek word, meaning "seeing together; but the fourth and latest, that "according to John, is so clearly the work of a man full of the views of a certain school about Jesus, and more intent on setting these forth than on writing a narrative about him, that although it is of exceeding beauty it is of small value for our purpose.

Jesus wrote nothing himself, and these lives of him are based solely upon traditions which were preserved in the memories of his disciples, and handed down by word of mouth. They believed

Q

so fully in his speedy return to them after his death that all motive for writing down his sayings was taken away, and they were suffered to float in unfixed form for some years, until the circle of the earlier disciples growing smaller, and the hope of his coming back fainter, danger arose lest the treasured words should be lost, and so little sayings of the Lord" were made by one and another, and passed current among the believers, receiving additions from time to time. From these and oral traditions "in the air" were compiled the memoirs out of which grew the gospels, the earliest trace of which in their present form is in the latter half of the second century.1

From this we see that any record of a man so remarkable as Jesus of Nazareth has been left to chance alone. No disciple attended him to note down the warm words as they fell, and guard every utterance with jealous care; no one took up the pen directly after his death to tell the beautiful and moving story, and we are left

1 Note E.