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THE 
 
 Memoirs of Jesus 
 
 ROBERT F. HORTON, M. A. 
 
 «^ 
 
 PHII^ADELPHIA 
 
 HENRY ALTEMUS 
 
COPYRIGHTED 1896 
 
 BY HENRY ALTEMUS 
 
 Henry Altemus, Manufacturer 
 philadelphia 
 
THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS. 
 
 " I esteem the Gospels to be thoroughly genuine, for there 
 shines from them the reflected splendor of a sublimity, pro- 
 ceeding from the person of Jesus Christ, of so Divine a 
 kind as only the Divine could ever have manifested upon 
 earth."— Goethe. 
 
 BETWEEN thirty and forty years after 
 the Crucifixion of Jesus — the exact date 
 it is not possible to ascertain — the apostles 
 and apostolic men perceived the necessity of 
 writing down the memorials of their Master's 
 life and death. At first the things which He 
 had said and done seemed so vivid in their 
 memory, and the call to be constantly pro- 
 claiming them seemed so good a security of 
 their preservation, that written records would 
 appear superfluous.* According to the earliest 
 tradition it was Matthew who took the initia- 
 
 •'•"It is necessary to remind ourselves that to publish a book 
 was not so obvious an undertaking in the peasant circles of 
 Galilee or Jerusalem as it is to us. The notes of the Lord's 
 doings and sayings had, we may surmise, been long put down 
 by the apostles for their private use before any one of them 
 thought of collecting and editing them in a connected form. 
 
4 THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS. 
 
 tive in compiling memoirs of his Master ; he 
 had preached chiefly to Jews, and when he 
 saw his way to proclaim the gospel amongst 
 people of a different kind he committed the 
 substance of his preaching to paper in the 
 Hebrew language. He wrote out, we need 
 not question, the way in which he was accus- 
 tomed to preach Christ from the Ancient 
 Scriptures by showing how this and that 
 prophecy had been fulfilled in Him, and he 
 wrote out a number of the Lord's discourses 
 which were imprinted almost word for word 
 on his own memory and on the minds of 
 many others who had seen and heard the 
 Lord. We may surmise that Matthew's 
 preaching had never attempted to set forth 
 a chronological account of the life, nor had it 
 marked very distinctly the occasion or cir- 
 cumstances of each event or discourse. It 
 was such an utterance or series of utterances 
 as one might expect from a fervent disciple 
 who was neither a profound student of the 
 ancient Scriptures nor an accomplished 
 literary workman, but was overwhelmingly 
 charged with the spirit and power of the Lord 
 who had commissioned him to preach. It is 
 generally supposed that our Gospel according 
 to St. Matthew is the Greek version of this 
 
THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS. 5 
 
 first evangelic narrative. It certainly bears 
 some marks of such an origin as is here 
 suggested. 
 
 Our second Gospel had, we may gather 
 from the fragment of Papias quoted by Euse- 
 bius, a similar origin. Its author was one who 
 served the Apostle Peter as an interpreter, 
 and jotted down his reminiscences of the 
 Lord's life as he was in the habit of narrating 
 them in his preaching. The interpreter prob- 
 ably translated the Apostle's Aramaic ver- 
 nacular into the Hellenistic dialect; which was 
 the lingua frajica of the time. 
 
 Our third Gospel sufficiently describes its 
 own origin in its opening sentences ; it is a 
 painstaking compilation of the several memoirs 
 and reminiscences of those who had seen and 
 known Jesus, made by one who had enjoyed 
 good opportunities of communication with 
 these earliest witnesses. The fourth Gospel 
 may be left for a later stage in our investi- 
 gation. 
 
 We see, then, what the three Synoptic 
 Gospels are -according to their own claims 
 and the assertions made about them by prim- 
 itive writers. They are, as Justin Martyr 
 generally calls them in his apologetic writings, 
 Memoirs of the Lord. They do not profess 
 
6 THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS. 
 
 to be accurate in a chronological or a histori- 
 cal sense, still less do they lay claim to be 
 divinely guaranteed against error ; nay, they 
 do not even make any pretence to inspiration 
 in any special sense. They present them- 
 selves to us as authentic memoirs written, as 
 Justin Martyr says, by the Apostles or their 
 immediate successors. 
 
 All the difficulties which have been found 
 in the Gospels during the last half-century of 
 stormy criticism, and all the scepticism which 
 has been excited concerning them, must be 
 attributed to the well-meant endeavors of the 
 Church to represent the Gospels as some- 
 thing more than they claim to be. The evan- 
 gelists have been represented as the mere 
 amanuenses of the Spirit of God ; their infal- 
 libility has been made a point of faith ; to 
 question it has been represented as under- 
 mining the Gospel itself. The intention was 
 good ; the idea was that in honoring the 
 writers we should be honoring Him of whom 
 they wrote, and that by artificially surround- 
 ing their authority with a mysterious sanc- 
 tion of inspiration we should protect and es- 
 tablish the truth which they deliver. It is as 
 if some ardent Cromwellians, eager to secure 
 the reputation of their hcio, had insinuated 
 
THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS. 7 
 
 the dogma that Carlyle's life of him was in- 
 fallibly inspired. But the well-meant en- 
 deavor has entirely failed of its object. Well 
 meant, no doubt it was, but it was unneces- 
 sary, and has proved to be mischievous. For 
 every fault of the narratives, every obscurity, 
 or trivial contradiction, has thus been charged 
 upon the Holy Ghost, and antagonists of the 
 faith, instead of being confronted with the 
 obvious truths contained in the Gospels, have 
 been encouraged to lay hold of the difficulties 
 in them, and to rest their rejection of the 
 whole on their dubiety concerning a part. In 
 our own day a well-known scientific writer 
 has been allowed to draw the attention of 
 multitudes from the essential issues by criti- 
 cising the possession of the swine at Gadara, 
 and orthodoxy, committed to its great dogma, 
 has felt bound to vindicate the story against 
 the criticism with the desperate feeling that, 
 if one statement in the Gospels is challenged, 
 Christ and His salvation are called in ques- 
 tion. Indeed, few dogmas could have been 
 more unfortunate than this dogma about the 
 infallible inspiration of the evangelists. For 
 at last the quiet question is put, even by rev- 
 erent believers. What proof have you of this 
 infallible inspiration .? Do the writers claim 
 
8 THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS, 
 
 it themselves ? No. Do other writers of the 
 New Testament, St. Paul, or St. Peter, claim 
 it for them } No. On what, then, does it 
 rest .-^ And at last the poor and insufficient 
 answer is forced to come out. We have no 
 reason to give except the arbitrary dogma of 
 the Church, and we suppose the dogma was 
 invented as a security for the truth of Jesus. 
 Now, the simple fact seems to be this : the 
 record of Jesus, His Person, His ways. His 
 words, His works, is so marvellous, so unique, 
 so Divine, that it has cast its glory over the 
 recorders. Writings which tell so mighty a 
 tale must themselves be mighty. The vehicle 
 of such a revelation must surely be itself a 
 revelation. This is where the mistake has 
 arisen. But the wisdom of God has decided 
 far otherwise. The greatest revelation of all, 
 the Person and Life and Death of Jesus, the 
 Son of God, requires for its record nothing 
 but the simple witness of those who saw and 
 heard. There is no need of an Isaiah, nor 
 even of a Paul. The splendor of human ge- 
 nius, the interposition of exceptional gifts, 
 would here be out of place, and would 
 obscure rather than illustrate the matter in 
 hand. Let the great Fact — so the wisdom of 
 God seems to say — be simply reflected in the 
 
THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS. 9 
 
 unimaginative, uncreative minds of a few un- 
 lettered men; let their limited intelligence 
 be burdened only with the task of remember- 
 ing, and let their memories find a way into 
 writing as time goes on, so that the portrait 
 of the Saviour, taken, as it were, unconscious- 
 ly, may in this artless way pass down to pos- 
 terity. That portrait shall not be the work 
 of great painters, but rather a photographic 
 impression, drawn by the finger of light on 
 the hearts of those who were exposed to His 
 loveliness, holiness, power, and love. 
 
 In taking this view of our Synoptic Gos- 
 pels, in placing them on the plane of unso- 
 phisticated and unreflective historical memoir, 
 we are, it is to be observed, only following 
 such indications as they give themselves. In 
 surrendering the far more imposing dogmatic 
 assumptions which have come down to us by 
 tradition, we not only return from tradition 
 to Scripture, but we quietly slip by all those 
 criticisms and questions which have in recent 
 years been directed, not against the Gospels 
 themselves, but against the theory of the 
 Gospels gradually developed by the Church. 
 But those who slumber in the lethargy of 
 dogmatism start up with a cry. If the evan- 
 gelists are not divinely inspired, we have lost 
 
lo THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS. 
 
 our Lord ; we know Him only in these records ; 
 how shall we be assured that the records 
 are true unless we are first convinced that 
 they are written by God ? The answer to 
 this cry of alarm, which it is the object of 
 the present chapter to give, may be summed 
 up in three brief statements, afterwards to be 
 enforced and developed. 
 
 First, the Lord is not taken away, but truly 
 presented in authentic contemporary records. 
 Second, the truth of the picture is guaranteed 
 not by the writers, but by the picture itself. 
 Third, the whole gist of the testimony given 
 by these records is that the subject of them 
 is alive and is among His people now, and 
 therefore we are brought to a very plain issue, 
 which is this : if He is alive and active and 
 recognized among us now, how can it be said 
 that His reality rests on the authority of any 
 ancient writers } And if He is not alive and 
 active and recognized among us now, of what 
 avail is a writing, even infallibly inspired, 
 which bears it as its constant burden, that He 
 should live and be with His people to the end 
 of the world .<* 
 
 In a word, the answer to the terrified cry 
 of a disturbed dogmatism is briefly this : the 
 Gospels are a historical witness to a Living 
 
THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS. \\ 
 
 Christ ; their revelation consists of the pic- 
 ture which they present of Him ; they are 
 verified by Him, not He by them. 
 
 First of all, then, let us steadily realize that 
 we claim nothing for the Three Gospels now 
 under consideration, but that they are the 
 honest reports delivered to posterity by those 
 who saw it of the most memorable life ever 
 lived upon earth. There is in them, as all 
 readers who are not hardened against them 
 by dogmatic presuppositions have observed, a 
 simplicity and directness which admit of only 
 one explanation. There is no trace of the art 
 which is constructing a work of the imagina- 
 tion ; there are none of the familiar marks of 
 legend ; the idea that the stories were the 
 gradual growth of legend had to yield to the 
 hard fact that between the events and the 
 records there was no time for a legend to 
 grow. Never was there a more sober histor- 
 ical document than the Gospel of Luke. 
 Using all the materials which are in his 
 hands, the author sits down to compile as 
 complete a record of the life as he possibly 
 could. The Gospel of Mark — we may well 
 challenge the judgment of every unbiassed 
 mind — is transparently drawn from the life. 
 Let any one sit down in a quiet hour and read 
 
12 THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS, 
 
 through without stopping this brief harmon- 
 ious story of the pubhc life lived by Jesus 
 during the three years of His ministry, and 
 the impression cannot be avoided — not only 
 the subject matter, but the very modes of 
 expression, the minute touches of versimili- 
 tude, the little flashes of observation that 
 occur only to those who have been present 
 and have seen, confirm it — that this is a faith- 
 ful tale drawn from the facts themselves. And 
 though Matthew has neither the vividness of 
 Mark, nor the historical manner of Luke, it 
 carries an unmistakable authenticity of its 
 own ; it teems with Xoyta, as Papias called 
 them, the utterances of Jesus, and we may 
 well ask of any critic. How could these dis- 
 courses have come into existence ? Could 
 they be invented by a writer of the calibre 
 of this evangelist ? Are they ingenious pro- 
 ducts of the study and of the literary hack ? 
 The question answers itself. The very sub- 
 stance of the first Gospel is the proof that 
 the writer is simply the recorder of what was 
 said and done. 
 
 Indeed the authenticity of these unsophisti- 
 cated biographies would never have been chal- 
 lenged if we had not asserted of them that 
 they are something more than they are. They 
 
THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS. 13 
 
 would have stood on the same unquestioned 
 footing as the other biographical notices which 
 have come down to us from antiquity, if we 
 would have left them occupy that ground, and 
 they would have delivered their witness to 
 Him of whom they speak without distracting 
 any attention from Him to themselves ; they 
 would have remained in their joyful self- 
 effacement, anonymous, unpretentious, point- 
 ing with simple unanimity of heart to Him. 
 Nothing better could be wished for them than 
 that they might come to us afresh, among the 
 writings of Josephus and Philo, or side by side 
 with Seneca and Suetonius, asking us simply 
 to examine them as writings of antiquity ; and 
 immediately the surpassing splendor of their 
 contents would take captive this present age, 
 as it did that Second Century in which they 
 first became widely known. 
 
 But it may be said, apart from all extrava- 
 gant claims which have been made for the 
 verbal and infallible inspiration of the writ- 
 ings, the miraculous element in them would 
 have ensured their rejection by modern scien- 
 tific minds. Is this, however, quite so certain 
 as it seems t When a scientifically trained 
 man is asked in a bare and bald way to ac- 
 cept a miracle like that of feeding the Five 
 
14 THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS. 
 
 Thousand on the ground that a document is 
 divinely inspired, it is quite possible that he 
 may inquire very severely into the inspiration 
 of the document, and when it appears that the 
 belief in its inspiration rests only on an un- 
 supported dogma, may impatiently push aside 
 the document and the miracle which it records. 
 But supposing he is asked to take up these 
 biographical documents and to form a fair 
 conception of the Person described in them, 
 to piece together His teaching, His conduct, 
 the effect of His work. His influence in sub- 
 sequent history, and then to consider whether 
 He is not Himself a Supernatural Fact, a 
 Being who in His uniqueness presents Him- 
 self as a revelation of God, it is by no means 
 a foregone conclusion that our scientific man, 
 supposing him to be perfectly candid and 
 logical, will dismiss the miracles in that sum- 
 mary way ; it is not impossible that he may 
 regard the miracles, in the light of the Per- 
 son, not only as probable, but as inevitable. 
 
 The settled a priori conviction that a super- 
 natural manifestation of God to His creatures 
 is impossible cannot of course be met by any 
 argument or any proof. If a man has once 
 accepted it as an axiom his mind is no longer 
 open to any processes of reasoning, and even 
 
THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS. 15 
 
 tangible facts presented to him as proof 
 would only be thrust aside as illusions. It 
 is a condition of mind parallel to that of one 
 who has set his heart against his own child, 
 and is further exasperated by every attempt 
 at reconciliation, interpreting every advance 
 of affection or desire as an added proof of 
 perversity, and a new ground of displeasure. 
 But the point to be remembered is this, that 
 where the scientific mind is still open and not 
 committed to this irrational prejudice, the 
 most probable way of convincing it is to pre- 
 sent these records of the life of Jesus simply 
 as records, on the ground of their admitted 
 authenticity of date and scope and authorship, 
 claiming for them nothing more than they 
 claim for themselves, and then to leave the 
 story to produce its own effect. Immediately 
 the candid and logical mind is struck by the 
 Person presented in the records. Following 
 out the influence of the life in the history of 
 the world, he feels the necessity of explaining 
 the results which flowed from a cause so ap- 
 parently simple. And as he comes to grapple 
 seriously with the problem he is led to admit 
 the supernaturalness of Jesus, and incident- 
 ally the possibility of His miraculous works 
 and His Resurrection, in order to escape the 
 
i6 THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS. 
 
 hopeless mental predicament in which he must 
 be landed if he denies them. 
 
 But while we may fearlessly contend for 
 the authenticity and historical veracity of 
 these three memoirs, it is obvious to any 
 reader who carefully compares them with one 
 another that they are subject to many of the 
 infirmities which are incident to all human 
 compositions and to all human testimony. 
 Even in so vital a matter as the Beatitudes 
 of the Kingdom the first and third evangel- 
 ists give decidedly different versions. In de- 
 scribing the cure of a blind man at Jericho 
 one account represents the single blind man 
 as two. The very inscription on the Cross is 
 differently worded by the different writers. 
 And, when we come to the records of the 
 Resurrection, every careful student is aware 
 how difficult it is to piece the several versions 
 together into anything like a consistent nar- 
 rative. But when we have frankly admitted 
 and firmly grasped the fact that these are 
 memoirs, such recollections of the events as 
 would be current among the disciples of the 
 first and second generation after Jesus, these 
 marks of ordinary biographical and historical 
 writings will occasion the believer no diffi- 
 culty, and will not allow the unbeliever to 
 
THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS. 17 
 
 question the substantial truth of the record 
 as a whole. Here is an illustration ready to 
 hand. Archibald Forbes, the great war cor- 
 respondent, who was present at the battle of 
 Sedan on September i and 2, 1870, mentions 
 how completely at variance the several ac- 
 counts of the battle are. After the lapse of 
 twenty-two years it is impossible to deter- 
 mine with accuracy innumerable points of 
 detail. The eye-witnesses, the official reports, 
 the notes of correspondents, disagree. The 
 order of events, the precise time of the sev- 
 eral incidents, the exact number of people 
 present on a given occasion, cannot be deter- 
 mined. And yet what person would be fool- 
 ish enough to question the historic fact of 
 Sedan because of these divergent testimo- 
 nies } The battle was fought ; the German 
 Empire of to-day, and the sore feeling in 
 France about Alsace and Lorraine, are wit- 
 nesses which would outweigh a thousand dis- 
 crepancies in the narrative. And so it is 
 with the accounts of the Resurrection. The 
 great fact is -not disturbed by the somewhat 
 incoherent description of its incidents. The 
 power of the Risen One ; the world trans- 
 formed by His influence ; myriads of living 
 persons who are conscious of being risen 
 
i8 THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS. 
 
 with Christ through faith in His resurrection 
 which happened centuries ago, would out- 
 weigh many more difiiculties than are actually 
 found in the narrative. 
 
 We may regard with a certain detachment 
 of feeling the fierce discussions about points 
 of detail in the Gospels. It is quite possible 
 we may say that St. Luke, for example, may 
 have made a blunder about the date of Qui- 
 rinius' procuratorship of Syria,* and have 
 supposed that, because he was commissioner 
 for the enrolment of names in the year when 
 
 *Mommsen {Res gestcB Augusti, 125) indulges in a sneer 
 at the theologians who try to show that this census took place 
 at all in the year 4 B.C. And for this a recent writer in 
 France, Pere Didon, takes him to task (see Jesus Christ, 
 App. A,, p. 817) ; but this brilliant Catholic author furnishes 
 fresh material for the historian's sarcasm when he tries to 
 show the clause in Luke ii. i, meant, "When Quirinius was 
 the special commissioner for the enrolment in Syria." No 
 doubt, as Meyer shows in his commentary on the passage, 
 that is the actual fact, but that is not what St. Luke says. He 
 says that the enrolment was made while Quirinius was the 
 presses of Syria ; and that position he did not hold till ten years 
 afterwards. It is the perversity of the false dogmatism, on the 
 subject of inspiration which leads even a candid mind like 
 Pere Didon to rescue the historical accuracy of Luke by main- 
 taining that his words, which say one thing, distinctly mean 
 another. On this method of interpretation all writers are in- 
 fallible. If one attributes an event of 1834 to Queen Victoria's 
 reign, it may be justified as meaning that it means the fifteenth 
 year of her age, though King William was on the throne. 
 
THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS. 19 
 
 Q. Sentius Saturninus was the presses of 
 Syria, he was already presses himself, though 
 history shows us that he did not occupy that 
 position until ten years later, viz., 6-1 1 A.D. 
 The birth of our Lord at the time of that en- 
 rolment is not discredited because an author, 
 writing half a century later, had forgotten, or 
 had no document at hand to show, that Qui- 
 rinius was not at the time Augustus' legatiis 
 for the government of Syria, but only his 
 agent for the holding of a provincial census. 
 The idea that the Holy Ghost would supply 
 a writer with an accurate chronology, and 
 would make careful historical research un- 
 necessary, or correct the errors where the 
 research had been insufficient, is one entirely 
 imported into the question by irresponsible 
 dreamers. The preface of St. Luke's own 
 Gospel shows that he never entertained such 
 an idea ; and we may surmise that if he him- 
 self were confronted with the facts which are 
 known to us, and asked to explain his state- 
 ment, "this enrolment was made when Qui- 
 rinius was governor of Syria," he would say at 
 once, " I made a mistake ; of course his pree- 
 sieiium of Syria did not begin till ten years 
 later." 
 
 But we may pass now to the second point 
 
20 THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS. 
 
 which may be advanced to reassure the 
 trembling believer who thinks that we are 
 taking away his Lord because we have no 
 ground for asserting that the evangelists are 
 infallible. The truth of the picture is guar- 
 anteed not by the writers who depict the life 
 of Jesus, but by the picture itself. A few 
 flaws in the plate or in the printing of the 
 cartes do not affect the image which the light 
 draws in a photograph. No fallibility of the 
 witnesses, no infirmity of their memory or of 
 their pen, can materially affect the picture 
 which, as it seems almost involuntarily, they 
 present of their Lord. Their simplicity, their 
 artlessness — nay, we might almost say their 
 rusticity, against which clever critics have fre- 
 quently railed, are themselves the guarantee 
 that they are simply telling what they saw 
 and handled. They could not have invented, 
 for it is all they can do to imperfectly depict, 
 that Person, His matchless beauty and good- 
 ness, and the power which breathed from His 
 word and work. The supreme value of these 
 very humble witnesses is that with all their 
 minor divergences, and with all their obvious 
 limitations of understanding and expression, 
 they do put us at a point of view from which 
 we can with unclouded eyes see Jesus, as He 
 
THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS. 21 
 
 came and passed through the few brief years 
 of His earthly life. Thanks to them and 
 to God's Spirit, working through them, im- 
 pelling them to write and quickening their 
 memory, we find ourselves at small disad- 
 vantage as compared with those who saw 
 with their eyes and heard with their ears 
 Jesus in the flesh. 
 
 Now it is this Person, the tout ensemble of 
 His life and character, which is the great 
 Revelation of God. It is this Person who, 
 patiently studied and understood, seems to 
 step out of the simple pages and approach 
 the reader with a majesty which commands, 
 and a tenderness which allures, all but the 
 hardest and most corrupt of human hearts. 
 Men brought up like John Stuart Mill in a 
 traditional contempt for the religion of Jesus 
 have even in a time of most unimaginative 
 materialism been arrested by the Person in 
 these Gospels and constrained to say that 
 they could think of no better rule of life than 
 so to act as would win the approval of Jesus. 
 Light-hearted litterateurs like Ernest Renan 
 have, along the lines of simple historical in- 
 quiry, met the Person in these Gospels and 
 been compelled to utter a cry of admiration 
 and love, and to sing His praises in prose, 
 
22 THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS. 
 
 which owing to the subject seems to rise into 
 verse, with an ardour which would evidently 
 pass into faith but for the arbitrary presup- 
 position in the mind of the investigator that 
 whatever in the great Person is Divine and 
 therefore saving, must be quietly put aside as 
 incredible. And men who have not been 
 poisoned by the baseless dogma of Science 
 that the Supernatural does not exist, and 
 therefore all that is supernatural in Jesus is 
 fiction, men who with open heart have sub- 
 mitted themselves to the impression which 
 the Person of the Gospels makes have found 
 themselves obliged to exclaim with one or 
 another of the disciples in the record, now, 
 " Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O 
 Lord ; " now, " Thou art Christ, the Son of 
 the living God ; " now, ** Lord, to whom shall 
 we go ? for thou hast the words of eternal 
 life;" now, after a moment of misgiving or 
 doubt, " My Lord and my God ; " and now in 
 a passion of surrender, " Lord, thou knowest 
 all things, thou knowest that I love thee." 
 It would be vain to make an attempt to 
 enumerate all the people on whom the Gospels 
 have produced this powerful effect. The Per- 
 son in the written pages speaks to them as a 
 real and living voice, and sways them as a 
 
THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS. 23 
 
 seen and acknowledged Lord. The words are 
 read — " Come unto me, all ye that labor and 
 are heavy laden, and I will give you rest " : 
 we lose sight of the book and of the writer, 
 we attend only to Him who speaks. We come 
 to Him, and He gives us rest. 
 
 Now it is not a little extraordinary that a 
 vehicle apparently so inartistic and so incom- 
 plete should produce such an effect on follow- 
 ing generations of men. We can point to no 
 other records of a life, even though they may 
 be far more finished, more detailed, more ex- 
 act, which have the vital result of bringing us 
 into spiritual contact with the Person of 
 whom they speak. Many of us have read 
 with tearful eyes the Memorabilia of Socrates, 
 or the great description which the gifted 
 disciple gives of his master's death in the 
 Phcedo ; but while we lovingly admire the 
 noble and indomitable sage, it does not occur 
 to us to come to him ; indeed, it did not occur 
 to him to invite us. Or to take a much more 
 modern instance, we have studied that curious 
 and fascinating picture of a beautiful soul 
 drawn from within, th.Q Journal of Aniiel ; his 
 exquisite words haunt the ear, and the story 
 of his pensive life, his pure meditations, his 
 wise and critical observations, the tragic over- 
 
24 THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS. 
 
 clouding of his declining days, touches us 
 with a tender human sympathy, and makes 
 us reach out yearning hands of brotherhood 
 to his melancholy shade ; but which of us 
 thinks of coming to him? Wise counsellor 
 and sober teacher in many delicate issues of 
 life we may admit him to be, but he does not 
 draw us. He dies a kind of silent martyrdom, 
 but it gives us no hope in our hours of need. 
 The marvellous and inexplicable fact about 
 the Person of the Gospels is, that it draws 
 us; we find ourselves unconsciously in the 
 crowd trying to touch the hem of His gar- 
 ment ; we involuntarily take a place at His 
 feet and feel that we have chosen the good 
 part which can not be taken away ; His death 
 told in simple but impressive detail holds us 
 with a singular spell ; like the little children 
 to whom Robert Elsmere tells the story of 
 the Cross, we break into sobs and tears — we 
 know it is for us ; we go to the tomb, and un- 
 like the curiously insensible disciples, we feel 
 that it was not possible for Him to be holden 
 of death ; the brief cry, " He is risen," pen- 
 etrates our heart with a subtle hope ; He 
 seems risen for our justification, and a quick- 
 ening faith enables us to be crucified and 
 buried with Him, and to rise also with Him 
 to newness of life. 
 
THE BiEMOIRS OF JESUS. 25 
 
 We take up these dear records of His life 
 and death again and again ; we read and re- 
 read the words that He spoke; we meditate 
 afresh upon His many works of healing and 
 mercy, His few works of severity and judg- 
 ment. What is there in them ? We thought 
 we knew them almost by heart ; they are 
 familiar to us as the sky and the woods and 
 the sea ; but they are always new. Some 
 miracle or sign which once seemed difficult to 
 believe is constantly passing into the category 
 of the credible as our understanding of Him 
 rounds and grows. If there are some things 
 which still seem to us incredible we can leave 
 them cheerfully aside, for we count it an 
 irreverence to attribute to the Person whom 
 we are getting to know anything which is out 
 of harmony with the character as we know it. 
 The Cross is always breaking upon us in new 
 aspects and new phases, like a mountain peak 
 which is eternal, but never the same for two 
 hours together in the passing of cloud or the 
 outbreak of sunshine, the gathering of the 
 treasures of the snow or the unsealing of the 
 fountains which are to water the vale. His 
 words too — they are spirit and life, and we are 
 always saying with a fresh emphasis, " Never 
 man spake like this man." Some simple 
 
26 THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS. 
 
 apophthegm of His is constantly piercing 
 down to the roots of our life, or some lovely 
 parable will quietly unveil a spacious land- 
 scape of unnoticed truth. We study the 
 Sermon on the Mount for a lifetime, and in 
 the second sight and brightening intuition of 
 an old age which has passed from godliness 
 to godliness, we begin to perceive with awe 
 that we have understood but the surface of 
 it, and have never sounded its depths. We 
 turn back again and again to His summary 
 of the Law and the Prophets, and with every 
 sorrowful failure, every painful discovery how 
 little we love, how little we seem capable of 
 loving, we come back to Him and say. Master, 
 Thou hast well said : to love God with all our 
 hearts and our neighbor as ourselves is the 
 clearness and joy of heaven; Lord, teach us 
 to love. And how often, when with a foolish 
 optimism and a shallow misconception of the 
 solemn facts which form the underground of 
 life, we have thought to minimize or explain 
 away some of His searching severities, His 
 words about the fire which is not quenched 
 and the worm which does not die, we have 
 been constrained to come humbly back to 
 His feet with the surprised confession that 
 He knew best ! 
 
THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS. 27 
 
 Now it is this Person of the Gospels — and 
 not merely the sketchy portrait of Him^- 
 which is the great revelation of God. " All 
 things have been delivered unto me of my 
 Father, and no one knoweth the Son save the 
 Father ; neither doth any know the Father 
 save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son 
 willeth to reveal him " (Matt. xi. 27). It is 
 the Person who could say this, who could 
 realize, too, what He said, that strikes all 
 criticism dumb. All that is told about Him 
 gathers round what He is. Miracle and sign 
 are not given as proofs of what He is, but 
 they seem to flow by a kind of inner neces- 
 sity from Him who uttered those wonderful 
 words. We do not believe in the Divinity of 
 Jesus because of the miraculous conception 
 mentioned in the first chapter of Matthew ; 
 rather we are forced by the conviction of His 
 Divinity to believe in that manner of His 
 birth. If He was born in the common way 
 of human generation the miracle of what He 
 is seems too transcendent for human faith. 
 
 It is indeed a strange conceit that any arti- 
 ficial guarantee is needed for the Person pre- 
 sented in these Gospels. To prop His au- 
 thenticity by a dogma about the infallibility 
 of the evangelists is like trying to shore up 
 
28 THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS. 
 
 Mont Blanc, and to keep it from falling with 
 a few pine logs hewn from its ridges. We 
 may joyfully anticipate the day when Chris- 
 tians will surrender their puerile apologetics, 
 their attempts to verify the eternal Truth by 
 a paltry fiction which is pricked like a bubble 
 by the first touch of inquiry. 
 
 Non tali auxilio, non defensoribus istis 
 Tempus eget. 
 
 Some day we shall let the evangelists again 
 teM their own tale, without our impertinent 
 prelude of tales about them ; and an aston- 
 ished world will see again in these Memoirs 
 of Jesus the unmistakable reflection of the 
 Jesus whom the disciples saw. 
 
 But still the strongest answer to a timor- 
 ous belief remains. The abiding reason why 
 the frank admission of what the Gospels are 
 cannot take away our Lord is this : the Per- 
 son of whom the Gospels tell is nothing if 
 He is not a living and active presence now. 
 All that is said of Him, and all that He is 
 reported to have said, is naught unless He 
 gave the distinct promise that wherever two 
 or three were gathered in His name there 
 He would be in the midst of them. The 
 Gospels are mere waste-paper, or at least of 
 no more practical religious value than the 
 
THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS. 29 
 
 Memorabilia of Xenophon or the Journal of 
 Amid, unless we may accept literally the as- 
 sertion, " Lo, I am with you always, even to 
 the end of the world." Did He say that ? 
 Does He fulfil that saying ? That is the 
 vital question, and not, whether Matthew 
 was a sacred penman miraculously guaran- 
 teed against the possibility of error. Now we 
 may conceive the three Gospels as in effect 
 three witnesses from the age after the Res- 
 urrection, eagerly asserting that the Lord 
 had risen, had appeared to one or another of 
 His disciples, had finally disappeared, but 
 only on such terms that His presence with 
 His people would be perpetual and unbroken. 
 If the Gospels in asserting this are main- 
 taining a lie, let them be ruthlessly thrown 
 aside. Some good Christians seem to think 
 that the only proof they have of the asser- 
 tion is the statement of the evangelists, and 
 their timid anxiety to maintain the infalli- 
 bility of the Gospels arises from a fearful 
 conviction that if those books were lost the 
 Living Chris-t would be lost. Orthodoxy of 
 this type, it is almost unnecessary to repeat, i 
 rests on a profound and radical unbelief. Its 
 champions are sceptics who can attach no 
 meaning to the great saying, " I am with 
 
30 THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS. 
 
 you," except this, that a written word is 
 with them, a Book infallibly inspired and 
 miraculously preserved. But what we may 
 call the orthodoxy of the first Christian cen- 
 tury — the century before the New Testament 
 was written — is becoming again the ortho- 
 doxy of the Nineteenth Century, the century 
 in which the cramped doctrine of Biblical 
 infallibility has become doubtful. Men are 
 beginning to believe . again the mighty truth 
 that Jesus lives and is with them even now. 
 A hard and incredulous materialism, created 
 largely by a hard and essentially sceptical 
 Christianity, says still with a sneer, Where 
 is your Lord .-* Show Him to us if He in- 
 deed be alive. And we answer not by an 
 appeal to documents which unbelief will not 
 accept as an authority, but by an appeal to 
 facts which unbelief itself may ignore but 
 cannot deny. We may boldly venture all on 
 the fact \\s2.\. Jesiis lives a7id is among tcs nozv. 
 If the doubter will not take the trouble to 
 examine the details of religious history, if he 
 will not test the reality of Christ's saving 
 presence in the lives which have been re- 
 deemed by Him, in the miserable rescued by 
 Him from their misery, in the bad turned 
 by Him into the good — we must at least in- 
 
THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS. 31 
 
 sist upon it that he should try for himself 
 whether Jesus lives before he commits him- 
 self to his arbitrary negation. The first apos- 
 tles went to convert the world not with a 
 New Testament in their hands, for it was 
 only their labors which resulted in the pro- 
 duction of the New Testament, but with the 
 risen Christ in their hearts, and with a power 
 not their own, which was able to bring Jews 
 and Gentiles alike into a personal contact 
 with this living Saviour. That is precisely 
 the method which is needed to-day. If these 
 pages fall under the eye of an unbeliever, of 
 one who is a stranger to Christ, they have a 
 message for him, direct and simple as that 
 which Peter preached at Pentecost. This 
 message thrusts aside as irrelevant the thou- 
 sand and one pleas and objections which un- 
 belief is accustomed to urge, and comes at 
 once to the point. Jesus, the living Saviour, 
 bids you come unto Him with the promise 
 that He will save you. ''But how?" you 
 say; "I cannot see Him." No, but as a 
 spiritual presence He is at hand and acces- • 
 sible to your spirit. " But," you object, " I 
 do not believe in His Divinity." No, but 
 what He asks is that you should believe in 
 Him, and He puts no metaphysical tests in 
 
32 THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS. 
 
 the way of your accepting Him. "But I do 
 not believe in the miracles, the story of the 
 birth, and the rest." He is here, not speak- 
 ing of these, but of His power to save you; 
 will you come unto Him that you may re- 
 ceive life ? If you will^ he gives you life ; 
 if you will not, you are without life. " But," 
 still you exclaim, " I do not believe in the 
 atonement." When He bids you come unto 
 Him He does not demand a theological defi- 
 nition or the acceptance of a religious form- 
 ula. He says that He came to serve, and 
 to give His life a ransom for many. He says 
 that His blood was shed for you and for many 
 for the remission of sins. The question is> 
 will you trust the love of God, will you ac- 
 cept the remission of sins which Jesus offers, 
 will you take your position as a pardoned 
 and reconciled child of God in Jesus Christ t 
 Where a man has learned his own weakness 
 and sinfulness and need, where in conse- 
 quence he humbles himself as a little child, 
 he comes to Jesus in one brief and heartfelt 
 prayer. Jesus is unseen, but His presence is 
 acknowledged, and He is received. And as 
 many as receive Him get power to become 
 the sons of God, even as many as believe on 
 His name. Now, the whole of our subse- 
 
THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS. 33 
 
 qiient investigation of the New Testament 
 writings will tend to show that the very es- 
 sence of this Gospel was the proclamation 
 of a living Christ, whose living power was 
 ordinarily manifested in the persons of men 
 and women who gave admission to Him. If 
 the value of these first three memoirs of the 
 Lord is that they present us with a tolerably 
 accurate picture of Jesus as He lived and 
 died upon earth, and rose again from the 
 grave, and ascended into heaven, they are 
 only the introduction to a series of writings 
 which derive all their value from the witness 
 they give to this resurrection life of Jesus. 
 " And it came to pass, while He blessed them 
 he parted from them, and was carried up into 
 heaven. And they worshipped him, and re- 
 turned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were 
 continually in the temple, blessing God." 
 That is how the third and latest of the three 
 closes the narrative. The Risen One has left 
 His disciples, and yet He has not left them 
 disconsolate. There is an attitude of expec- 
 tation ; there rs a breathless pause. He has 
 gone, but He is not far away ; He will be 
 with us still. The following books of the 
 New Testament show in a variety of ways 
 how this expectation is fulfilled. If the first 
 
34 THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS. 
 
 three Gospels are a revelation of God in the 
 person, the human person, of Jesus, they lead 
 immediately up to the revelation of Jesus 
 Himself, prolonged in the work, the experi- 
 ence, the faith of His chosen disciples and 
 their successors. The memoirs of Jesus were 
 closed, nothing more could be added ; noth- 
 ing has been added except a few trifling rec- 
 ollections preserved by St. Paul, and the 
 treasure of reminiscence in the Gospel of 
 St. John. The brief beautiful life on earth 
 was rounded and set like a triple cameo-image 
 in a simple frame, to last as long as man is on 
 the earth. But the saving life of Jesus was 
 only just beginning ; it manifested itself in 
 certain normal and sufficient v/ays in the 
 apostolic days, and the New Testament writ- 
 ings are the record of it. It still manifests 
 itself, for the most part strictly along the 
 lines of that New Testament literature, but 
 by no means necessarily confined to them. 
 The revelation of God in the face of Christ 
 Jesus is perpetuated in the life of the Church, 
 the saints in whom He has dwelt, the teachers, 
 the martyrs, the heroes, whom He has in- 
 spired. And by a not unnatural figure the 
 whole sum total of redeemed beings in whom 
 He has manifested, or will still manifest. 
 
THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS. 35 
 
 Himself to the end of time, may be treated 
 as the body, the limbs, of which He is the 
 head. 
 
 ■ Perhaps it was with some glimmering con- 
 sciousness of this that one of the evangelists, 
 the one who echoed Peter's teaching, gave to 
 his brief record of the human life the singu- 
 lar title, ''The begiiining of the Gospel of 
 Jesus Christ, the Son of God." A beginning 
 indeed, and yet if we may be pardoned the 
 paradox, a complete beginning. 
 
 In closing this chapter it may be permissi- 
 ble to appeal to the guardians of the letter of 
 Scripture, and to ask them whether the truth 
 does not begin to dawn upon them that God 
 has provided a more substantial protection of 
 His revelation than the traditional dogmat- 
 isms which once seemed strong, but now are 
 sufficiently worm-eaten and insecure. Would 
 not believers in Christ commend Him best 
 to the world if they really believed in Him, 
 and ventured to fall back on the promises 
 which He has given.? Are believers quite 
 sure that they are not themselves the main 
 cause of the world's unbelief } Have they 
 not demanded faith in a book, where Christ 
 meant them to demand faith in a Person } 
 Have they not led the world astray in a weary 
 
36 THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS, 
 
 conflict about literary details, with dull reiter- 
 ation declaring that that is the word of God 
 which is not the word of God, so that men 
 have not seen the true Word of God that was 
 with God from the beginning, and became 
 flesh, and tabernacled amongst us ? If they 
 would only understand that Jesus lives, and 
 present Him living to the weary and sinful 
 humanity around them, would not all men be 
 drawn to Him ? 
 
BS2569.8.H82 
 
 The memoirs of Jesus, 
 
 Princeton Theological Seminary-Speer Library 
 
 1 1012 00013 5642