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Page 19
In such documents we must expect some events to be supported by more
historic proof than others. The evidence for Jesus' resurrection (to
take a typical case), is far weightier than that for His birth of a
virgin-mother. There is probably no scrap of primitive Christian
literature which does not assume the risen Christ; and the origin of the
Christian Church, and the character of its message and life, cannot be
explained apart from the Easter faith in the Lord's victory over death
and presence with His people in power. The virgin-birth rests on but two
records (possibly on only one), neither of which belongs to the earlier
strata of the tradition, and which are with difficulty reconciled with
the more frequently mentioned fact that Jesus is the Son of David (an
ancestry traced through Joseph). But in discussing the historicity of
the narratives, it is just to the evangelists to recall that their main
purpose was not the writing of history as such, but the presentation of
material (which undoubtedly they considered trustworthy historically)
designed to convey to their readers a correct religious estimate of
Jesus Christ. "These are written that ye may believe that Jesus is the
Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye may have life in His
name." They do not often take the trouble to tell us on what evidence
they report an event or a saying; they either did not know, or they did
not care to preserve, the sequence of events, so that it is impossible
to make a harmony of the gospels in which the material is
chronologically arranged. But they spare themselves no pains to give
_the truth of the religious impression of Jesus_ which they had
received.
And when one compares all our documents, it is significant that they do
not give us discordant estimates of the religious worth of Jesus. The
meaning for faith of the Christ of _John_ is not at variance with the
meaning for faith of the Christ of _Mark_ or of the Christ of the
supposed _Collection of Sayings_. The Church put the four gospels side
by side in its Canon, and has continued to use them together for
centuries, because it has found in them a religiously harmonious
portrait of its Lord. This is also true of the portraits of Jesus to be
found in the _Acts_ and the epistles. The Christ of the entire New
Testament makes upon us _a consistent religious impression_; and the
unity of His significance for faith is all the more noteworthy because
of the different forms of thought in which the various writers picture
Him. Behind the primitive Church stands an historic Figure who so
stamped the impress of His personality upon believing spirits, that,
amid puzzling discrepancies of historical detail and much variety of
theological interpretation, a single religious image of Him remains. We,
whose aim is not primarily to reconstruct the figure of Jesus for
purposes of scientific history, but to arrive at an intelligent
conviction of His spiritual worth, are entirely satisfied with a
portrait which correctly represents the religious impression of the
historic Jesus.
Two diametrically opposed classes of scholars have denied that in the
Christ of the gospels we possess such a trustworthy report. A very few
have held that the evangelists do not record an historic life at all,
but describe a Saviour-God who existed in the faith of the Church of the
First Century. The allusions, however, in the letters of Paul alone to
definite historical associations connected with Jesus are sufficient to
confute this view. There undoubtedly was a Jesus of Nazareth. Moreover,
the divine redeemers of mythology, of whom this theory makes so much,
are most unlike the Jesus of the gospels in moral character and
religious power; and the old argument is still pertinent that it would
have required a Jesus to have imagined the Jesus of the evangelists'
story.
A much larger number of scholars, determined beforehand by their
philosophic views to reject all elements in the records which transcend
usual human experience, have for several generations sought to
reconstruct the figure of Jesus on an entirely naturalistic basis.
Instead of the Jesus of the gospels, they give us, as the actual Man,
Jesus the Sage, or the Visionary, or the Prophet, or the Philanthropist,
who, they think, was subsequently deified by His followers. Such
reconstructions handle the sources arbitrarily, eliminating from even
the earliest of them that which clashes with their preconceptions. They
fail to do justice to Jesus' consciousness of Himself, of His unique
relation to God, of His all-important mission to men, as the critically
investigated documents disclose it. Historically, they do not give us a
Figure sufficiently significant for faith to account for the Christian
Church; scientifically, their portraits do not long prove satisfactory,
and are soon discarded on further investigation of the facts; and
religiously, they do not appeal to Christian believers as adequate to
explain their own life in Christ.
It is not surprising that these attempts have failed. The historic Jesus
did not make the same impression upon everybody who met Him; men's
judgments of Him varied with their spiritual capacities, and their
spiritual capacities affected what He could do for them. There is enough
historicity in the narratives to convince sober historians, whatever
their faith or unfaith, that Jesus existed as a man among men, and that
He was conscious of a relationship to God and a significance for men
which transcend anything in ordinary human experience. It requires
something more than sound historic judgment to see in Jesus what He saw
in Himself, or what Peter saw in Him when he called Him "the Christ of
God." We can never prove to any man on the basis of historical research
alone that the portrait of Jesus in the gospels correctly represents the
_religious_ impression of the historic Jesus. When we deal with
anything religious, a subjective element enters and determines the
conclusion, exactly as the artistic spirit alone can appreciate that
which has to do with art. The gospels as appreciations appeal only to
the similarly appreciative. We can show that the earliest stratum of the
gospel tradition, according to the most rigorous methods of critical
analysis, gives us a Jesus who possessed a meaning for His followers
akin to the meaning the Jesus of our four gospels possessed for the
Church of the First Century, and possesses for the Church of our day.
Only as Jesus comes to have a supreme worth to any man can he believe
that the estimate of their Master in the minds of the first disciples
can be the accurate impression of a real man.
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