that which it denotes. It leaves room for the possibility that in the mind of Jesus about Himself there may be not only the consciousness that He is one with us, but such a consciousness as justifies the transcendent place apart given to Him in the faith of the Church. Hence it is the mind of Christ about Himself-His self-consciousness in the technical sense-and not His inner life or spiritual experiences in general, which must be our principal subject of inquiry; and to investigate this subject satisfactorily we must go beyond the vague impressions in which the life of Jesus first proves its reality to us, and study the gospel evidence in detail.

The second of the two summary ways of getting into contact with the reality in the gospels is the polar opposite of the one just discussed. It is that which is illustrated in the well-known article of Schmiedel in the Encyclopædia Biblica. 'When a profane historian,' says Schmiedel, 'finds before him a historical document which testifies to the worship of a hero unknown to other sources, he attaches first and foremost importance to those features which cannot be deduced merely from the fact of this worship, and he does so on the simple and sufficient ground that they would not be found in this source unless the author had met with them as fixed data of tradition. The same fundamental principle may safely be applied in the case of the gospels, for they also are all of them written by worshippers of Jesus.' We only put this more simply when we say that anything in the gospels may be regarded as signally true if it is inconsistent with the worship of Jesus. If we could not find such things at all, Schmiedel holds 'it would be impossible to prove to a sceptic that any historical value whatever was to be assigned to the gospels; he would be in a position to declare the picture of Jesus contained in them to be purely 1 Encyclopædia Biblica, 1872 ff.

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a work of phantasy, and could remove the person of Jesus from the field of history.' If we accepted this canon of criticism, it might be reassuring to us as historians to find that there are passages in the gospels which no worshipper of Jesus could have invented, passages, consequently, which were data to the evangelists, and which we are safe in counting historical. Of these the article referred to mentions five, which along with four others, all the latter being connected with the miracles and employed to discredit them, 'might be called the foundation pillars for a truly scientific life of Jesus.' The five passages in question are worth repeating. They are

(1) Mark 10 17: Why callest thou Me good? None is good save God only. (2) Mark 3: He is beside Himself. (3) Matt. 1232: Whoso speaketh a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him. (4) Mark 13 32: Of that day and of that hour knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son but the Father. And (5) Mark 15 34: My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me? It is a curious comment on the things most surely believed among profane historians, that of these foundation pillars the third and fifth have since been found by some decidedly shaky. This, however, does not matter to us at present. What does matter is that Jesus is only admitted to be real in a sense which, avowedly, leaves the whole phenomenon of New Testament religion not only unjustified but inexplicable. We have no testimony to Jesus at all, as Schmiedel points out, except that of men who worshipped Him; but though some of that testimony, as will be afterwards shown, comes from intimates and contemporaries, the only part of it which we can receive as true is that which is inconsistent with such worship. The idea that there should be reality in Jesus of such a kind as to justify worship is summarily excluded ab initio: its exclusion, indeed, is

the first principle of this criticism. It is one way of criticising this to point out that it takes for granted that the worship of Jesus is wrong, that the Christian attitude to Him is unjustifiable, and that the Christian religion was from the beginning a mistake; it is another, and not a less relevant one, to point out that it leaves the Christian religion, in the only form in which it is known to history, without any historical explanation. It is impossible to rest seriously in such a situation, and it is as impossible to suppose seriously that we have got out of it when Schmiedel tells us that 'the thoroughly disinterested historian, recognising it to be his duty to investigate the grounds for this so great reverence for Himself which Jesus was able to call forth, will then first and foremost find himself led to recognise as true the two great facts that Jesus had compassion for the multitudes and that he preached with power, not as the scribes.' The importance of these two great facts is not to be disputed, but few will find in them the whole explanation of the New Testament attitude to Jesus. There must be a more intelligible proportion than we can discover here between the cause and the effect; and while it may relieve some anxious minds to know that the most rigorous scepticism is obliged to admit the existence of Jesus, inquirers with an eye on all the facts to be explained may find that a more searching investigation brings them into contact with a still greater reality in Jesus than this paradoxically sceptical criticism has discovered. We cannot admit beforehand, nor can we allow others to assume, that there is a complete breach of continuity between the Jesus who can be discovered in history and the Christ who has had from the first the transcendent place, with which we are familiar, in Christian faith; whether there is or is not a true continuity between them, such a continuity that the historical Jesus justifies the attitude of believers to their Lord and

Saviour, is a question which has to be tested by examination of the evidence in our hands. That evidence is contained in the gospels, and it is to an examination of these documents we now proceed.

For reasons on which it is needless to enlarge, our attention will be confined to the synoptic gospelsMatthew, Mark, and Luke. It is so difficult in the gospel according to John to distinguish between the mind of the writer and that of the subject-between the seed of the word and that to which it grows in the soul-between what John heard in Galilee or the upper room and what the Lord by the Spirit said in His heart in later days-that it could only be used inconclusively in the present discussion. Even the first three gospels cannot be used without reflection; and though this is not the place to make any contribution, were one capable of it, to the solution of the synoptic problem, it is necessary to indicate the position from which one writes, and to justify it so far as the case requires.

The criticism of the gospels, literary and historical, has now gone on for more than a hundred and fifty years, and, much as remains and perhaps must ever remain uncertain, there are one or two important conclusions on which experts are agreed. To begin with, it is agreed that the gospels of Matthew and Luke are based upon Mark.

With a very few slight omissions, the whole of Mark is embodied in the other evangelists. He has provided for them the framework of their narrative, and it is indeed the strongest proof of his priority that while Matthew and Luke frequently diverge from each other in respect to the order of events in the life of Jesus, they never agree against Mark in such divergences. In other words, where divergence in the order of incidents occurs, either Matthew supports Mark against Luke, or Luke sup

ports him against Matthew: a clear proof that his is the original order underlying both, and that no authority common to both can be pleaded against it.

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The priority of Mark to the other gospels being established, it becomes a question of importance who Mark was, and what was his relation to the events which, as far as we know, first obtained from his hand that literary representation through which we are familiar with them. Mark, the author of the gospel, was assumed till yesterday to be identical with the John Mark of the book of Acts (1212) and the Mark mentioned by Peter (1st Epist. 513) and Paul (Col. 410, Philemon ", 2 Tim. 4"), and in spite of recent suspicions there is no solid ground for questioning this view. A very ancient tradition, quoted by Eusebius from Papias, who was bishop of Hierapolis before the middle of the second century, is all the external help we have to define more precisely the relation of Mark to the facts with which he deals. It runs as follows: 'And the Elder said this also: Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately everything that he remembered, without, however, recording in order what was either said or done. by Christ. For neither did he hear the Lord, nor did he follow Him; but afterwards, as I said, [attended] Peter, who adapted his instructions to the needs [of his hearers], but had no design of giving a connected account of the Lord's oracles. So then Mark made no mistake, while he thus wrote down some things as he remembered them; for he made it his one care not to omit anything that he had heard, or to set down any false statement therein. Such then is the account given by Papias concerning Mark.' This brief statement has been put upon the rack a thou

1 See J. Weiss, Das älteste Evangelium, 385 ff.

See Eusebius, Hist. Eccl., iii. 39. The translation is taken from Professor Gwatkin's Selections from Early Christian Writers, p. 43 ff.