towards Him, we should feel that Christian faith, historically speaking, had an insecure foundation. The New Testament estimate of Christ can only be vindiIcated if we can show that the historical Person, whose resurrection is attested by the apostles, explicitly or virtually asserted for Himself, during His life in the world, a place in the relations of God and man as incommunicable and all-determining as that which we have seen bestowed upon Him in the primitive Christian books. The question, therefore, we have now to answer is, What do we know of Jesus? In particular, what place-in His own apprehension-did Jesus fill in the relations of men to God? II THE SELF-REVELATION OF JESUS (a) Preliminary critical considerations. In proposing this question for discussion, at least in the second and more definite form, we encounter the same preliminary objections which confronted us in dealing with the resurrection. There are those for whom it is not a question at all, and who therefore will not seriously raise it. To ask what place Jesus filled in the relations of God and men contemplates the possibility of finding that He did fill some place of peculiar interest and importance-the possibility, to put it extremely, that He was and is to both God and man what no other can be, and that all divine and human relations are determined by Him; and this is a possibility which principle does not allow them to contemplate. Jesus was a historical character, they argue; and there cannot be in history a man whose relations to God and his kind are essentially different from those of other men. A man may be a great spiritual genius, through whom the realities and possibilities of the spiritual life are revealed to others, but no man can be so identified with the truth which he reveals as that if he were lost it would be lost also. Plausible as this may seem, it is an à priori settlement of a question which insists on being settled otherwise. The only reason we have for raising the question is that Jesus has, in point of fact, from the very beginning, had a place assigned to Him by Christian faith which is distinct in kind from that assigned to other men; He has been believed to be, both to God and to the human race, what no other is or can be. After what has been said in the earlier part of this discussion, we cannot think this statement of the facts open to question, and we do not feel at liberty to decide à priori that the Christian faith from the beginning was a complete mistake. There may have been grounds for giving Jesus His incomparable place. It may not have been an irrational enthusiasm, but the irresistible compulsion of fact in His character, His personality, His attitude and claims, that made His followers exalt Him as they did. No dogmatic preconception as to what is possible or impossible in the field of history can exempt us from the duty of inquiring into the facts. The very men who were the first to have their religious life so absolutely determined by Jesus once thought of Him as only a neighbour, another like themselves. But they came to think of Him very differently, and it is not for the historian to decide peremptorily and off-hand that they were wrong; his function is rather to inquire what it was in Jesus which changed their attitude to Him. Even if he could not find out, he would have no right to say that the change was gratuitous or irrational. He could only say it awaited explanation. What we have to do, therefore, is to get at the facts in the most unprejudiced way we can. The difficulties in the way of doing so are not to be ignored, but neither are they to be exaggerated. Exaggerated they undoubtedly are by those who point to the general character of the gospels, and infer from it the impossibility of using them with confidence for any historical purpose. History, as Quintilian says, is written ad narrandum, non ad probandum-to tell a story, not to make out a case. But the gospels are written to make out a case. This is avowed by the writer of the fourth; his case is that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and he writes that men may believe this, and that believing they may have life in His name (John 201). It is the case of the others also, and though they do not state it so explicitly, they are none the less under the influence of it while they write. It is not so much that they deliberately misrepresent facts, as that facts are unconsciously transformed in their minds to suit their case. Stories grow, are amplified, heightened, illumined, made demonstrative. Jesus, in the only documents to which we can appeal, is presented in a rôle, that of the Messiah, and in every situation He acts up to the part. All the gospels represent stages in the idealising of their hero, a process which began, no doubt, in the imagination of His enthusiastic disciples even while He lived, but which received an irresistible and incalculable impulse when He rose from the dead. The glory of His exaltation was reflected upon His earthly career; it was manifested in works, words, and experiences answering to the greatness of the Messiah, and of the hopes associated with Him. What, therefore, we are enabled to trace by the help of the gospels, is not so much the history of Jesus as 'the history of the faith of ancient Christendom during the first half century of its existence.' The gospels are not historical sources; they 1 J. Weiss, Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments, 36. 1 1 are documents which reflect 'the faith and the religious imagination of the early churches.' It is more than seventy years now since Strauss in his Life of Jesus gave the first systematic expression to this general mode of appreciating the evangelic narratives, and it has been echoed in writers whose name is Legion down to the present hour. In the precise form which its author gave it, the mythical theory may have been dissipated or reduced to insignificant proportions; but in the mental attitude to the gospel history which is here in view-an attitude which has prevailed widely for two generations, and is at the present moment perhaps more prevalent than ever-we have an extraordinary testimony to its power. As long as this mental attitude prevails we cannot get our question fairly considered. Men's temperaments may vary, and with them the spirit in which they address themselves to the study of the gospels. One man's treatment may be poetic, or possibly sentimental; the gospels for him are the finest flowering of the Christian imagination; of course they cannot be taken for truth, but they must always be delicately and even reverently handled. Another is mocking and unsympathetic; another still dispassionate, not to say unfeeling. But the result is always the same. Jesus remains out of our reach. The figure which we see in the gospels is the Christ of the Church's faith, not a historical person. That figure did not create the Church, it was created by it. As we have them, the gospels are not the foundation of the Christian religion, they are its fruit. They show us the Christian consciousness, not the consciousness of Christ. Those who thus remind us that the gospels are not historical but religious books-that their motive is not to provide materials for the scientific biographer or historian, but to evoke and to build up faith-might perhaps 1 ask themselves whether the contrast which is here implied is as real or as complete as they suppose. It is quite true that it is one thing to tell a story, and another to make out a case; but if a man has a sound case, the simplest way to make it out is to tell his story. It is surely conceivable that his case may be constituted by the facts. It is only if he has a bad case that he is under any temptation to misrepresent, or colour, or suppress, or produce facts. The attitude to the gospel narratives which has just been described, and of which Strauss's mythical theory is the most consistent and far-shining example, is prescribed beforehand by the assumption that the evangelists have a bad case. Jesus, it is assumed, cannot really have that place in the relations of God and man which the primitive Church assigned Him, and therefore everything in the gospels which is congruous with that place, which conditions it or is conditioned by it, must have some other explanation than that it is true. But this assumption forecloses the question, and is one which we are not entitled to make. Why should not the evangelists, or the primitive Church for which they wrote, have had a good case? Why must it have been something else than reality which made them give to Jesus the place they did? And if it is conceivable-as surely it is-that the New Testament attitude to Jesus is right, it is as conceivable that the attitude we have been considering to the narratives of His life is wrong. In spite of protestations made in the name of 'scientific' history, the possibilities of history are not to be dogmatically determined beforehand. If we could have such a thing as Christianity on the basis here exhibited, it would manifestly be Christianity without Jesus. It would be a religion which in some way was connected with Him when it made its entrance into history; but the connexion would be partly undiscoverable, and so far as it was discovered it would be illegiti |