THE CENTURY BIBLE HANDBOOKS 
 
 Life and Teaching of 
 Jesus Christ 
 
 REV. W. a SELBIE, M. A. 
 
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 Selbie, W. B. 1862-194A. 
 The life & teaching of Jesus 
 Christ 
 
CENTURY BIBLE HANDBOOKS 
 
 General Ebitor 
 Pkincipal WALTER F. ADENEY, M.A., D.D. 
 
 THE LIFE AND TEACHING 
 OF JESUS CHRIST 
 
. THE LIFE & TEACHING OF 
 
 JESUS CHRIST 
 
 :::.Z''^^ 
 
 * DEC 12 1910 * 
 
 W. B. SELBIE, M.A. ""^~ 
 
 HODDER AND STOUGHTON 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 1909 
 
AUTHOR'S PREFACE 
 
 This little book makes no claim to an exhaustive treat- 
 ment of its great subject, nor even to be an original 
 contribution to it. It is intended as an outline or intro- 
 duction for those who are beginning the study, and who 
 have no special critical or theological knowledge. The 
 aim throughout has been to summarise the results of 
 modern investigation from the constructive standpoint, 
 and to show that when criticism has had its perfect 
 work enough remains for faith and devotion. The 
 subject is one which raises many problems of which 
 no final solution is possible in the present state of 
 our knowledge. The writer would acknowledge his 
 obligations to many modern writers on the period, to 
 some of whom reference is made in these pages, and 
 among them especially to his old teacher, Dr. Sanday 
 of Oxford, to whom all students of the New Testament 
 owe an incalculable debt. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTION I. — THE SOURCES ... I 
 
 INTRODUCTION II. THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL 
 
 CONDITIONS l6 
 
 CHAP- 
 
 I. THE BIRTH, BOYHOOD, AND EDUCATION OF 
 
 JESUS 23 
 
 II. THE BEGINNING OF THE MINISTRY . . 34 
 
 III. THE CALL AND COMMISSION OF THE TWELVE 46 
 
 IV. THE MIRACLES . . . . • -57 
 V. THE TEACHING ...... 69 
 
 VI. THE TEACHING {continued) . . . .82 
 
 VII. THE TEACHING {concludcd) .... 94 
 
 VIII. THE ACTIVE MINISTRY .... I07 
 
 IX. THE ACTIVE MINISTRY {continued) . .121 
 
 X. THE TRIAL AND DEATH OF JESUS . • I36 
 
 XI. THE RESURRECTION AND ASCENSION . . 147 
 
 XII. THE CHARACTER AND WORK OF JESUS . 157 
 
 INDEX 171 
 
 viii 
 
THE LIFE AND TEACHING 
 OF JESUS CHRIST 
 
 INTRODUCTION I 
 
 THE SOURCES 
 
 To write a life of Jesus Christ is an almost impossible 
 task. We do not possess the necessary materials. The 
 New Testament records are not a " life," but a Gospel. 
 The purpose of the writers was not strictly biographical, 
 but evangelical. They were concerned, not so much 
 with the details of Christ's earthly career as with the 
 interpretation of them — with the moral to be drawn from 
 tnem. This was all that their circumstances required them 
 to do, and it was sufficient for their immediate purpose. 
 But it is apt to be embarrassing to those whose modern 
 passion for facts leads them to judge of every ancient 
 record by the scientific accuracy of its statements. 
 The science of Biblical criticism has shown us how 
 impossible it is to judge the New Testament writings 
 
LIFE OF CHRIST 
 
 from this standpoint, and has at the same time vindicated 
 their claim to give a sufficient and credible account of 
 the facts. 
 
 Our materials for the life of Jesus are derived from 
 the four canonical Gospels. Their witness is con- 
 firmed by other New Testament writings, but outside 
 of these little or nothing of importance is to be found. 
 The Gospels themselves have for many years been 
 subject to criticism and scrutiny of the most searching 
 kind. This is not over yet, and it may have further 
 and unexpected developments ; but at the present 
 moment it is true to say that the Gospels have 
 emerged from the ordeal in a far stronger position 
 than was at one time to ought possible, and that their 
 general historicity and credibility have not been shaken, 
 at least in the eyes of those who will approach the 
 whole investigation with an open mind. There is a 
 certain advantage in the fact that the writers were 
 simple, untutored men, who set down their impressions 
 not by any means as trained observers, but rather as 
 believers who wished to convey to others the message 
 they had themselves received. They knew nothing of 
 historical science or of the value of evidence, but their 
 very naivete enabled them to draw a picture the 
 verisimilitude of which, in its main outlines at least, 
 cannot be questioned. 
 
THE SOURCES 
 
 It is now generally agreed that the earliest of the 
 first three Gospels, commonly called the Synoptics, is 
 that which goes by the name of St. Mark. Both the 
 others are based upon it as their main source, though 
 each of them uses other material drawn from a lost 
 common source, now known as Q — Quelle^ the German 
 for source. There is no sufficient reason for doubt- 
 ing the tradition that the author of this Gospel was 
 John Mark, the companion of Peter. It may be 
 dated in the period between a.d. 70 and 80, and in 
 the forty years between the death of Jesus and the 
 earlier of these dates there was probably no written 
 Gospel. To that time, however, may be assigned 
 many of the writings of St. Paul, and probably certain 
 fugitive portions of Evangelic narrative, such as the 
 collection of Messianic prophecies in St. Matthew, 
 which are supposed to have formed a document in 
 themselves, written originally in Hebrew. The charac- 
 teristics of St. Mark's Gospel are familiar to every 
 reader of the New Testament. It bears every sign of 
 being " primitive," in its frank and rapid narrative and 
 its use of uncommon and unconventional expressions. 
 The internal evidence drawn from its style and language 
 makes it very unlikely that the Gospel, as we have it, 
 is a recension of any older literary source. For this 
 reason St. Mark may be regaided as an historical 
 
LIFE OF CHRIST 
 
 document of considerable value. This impression is 
 enhanced by detailed study of it, which shows that it 
 gives a consistent and credible account of the appear- 
 ance and ministry of Jesus Christ, that it fits in with 
 the known social and political history of the time, and 
 that it is more concerned with setting forth the facts 
 in regard to the life and teaching of Jesus, than with 
 forming theories or conclusions with regard to them. It 
 is on such grounds as these that Professor Burkitt, one 
 of the latest and most illuminating writers on the sub- 
 ject, concludes that " In St. Mark we are appreciably 
 nearer to the actual scenes of our Lord's life, to the 
 course of events, than in any other document which 
 tells us of Him, and therefore, if we want to begin at 
 the beginning and reconstruct the portrait of Christ 
 for ourselves, we must start from the Gospel of Mark. 
 The other Gospels, even the Gospels according to 
 Matthew and Luke, give us an interpretation of Jesus 
 Christ's life. An interpretation may be helpful, illumi- 
 nating, even inspired, but it remains an interpretation. 
 The thing that actually occurred was the life which 
 Jesus Christ lived, and our chief authority for the facts 
 of that life is the Gospel according to Mark." ^ Thus 
 
 1 " The Gospel History and its Transmission," by F. Crawford 
 Burkitt, M.A. 
 
THE SOURCES 
 
 a critical examination of this Gospel discovers nothing 
 inconsistent with the ancient saying, quoted by Eusebius 
 from Papias, to the effect that " Mark, having become 
 the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately, but not 
 in order, whatever he remembered of the things said 
 or done by Christ." 
 
 St. Matthew's Gospel stands on a somewhat different 
 footing, and may be described as an interpretation of 
 Jesus rather than a life. It may be dated from a.d. 90 
 to 100, and it is coloured by the fact that the writer has 
 an aim beyond that of simply setting forth the story of 
 Jesus. The Gospel contains practically the whole of St. 
 Mark, with some few omissions and changes of order, 
 and a considerable number of alterations in style and 
 phrase. These changes are mostly such as would be 
 natural in any attempt to re-write so homely and un- 
 studied a story as that in St. Mark, and everywhere 
 testify to the greater accuracy of the earlier account. 
 The original contribution of St. Matthew to the story of 
 Jesus consists of what is termed a collection of Logia 
 or Sayings. This is generally regarded as an Apostolic 
 record of the teaching of Jesus. It was written at 
 first in Aramaic, may be dated not later than a.d. 70, 
 and is of the utmost value as a record of the teach- 
 ing of our Lord. In all probability St. Mark had 
 access to a Greek translation of it, or of parts of it, but 
 
LIFE OF CHRIST 
 
 it appears in much fuller form in Matthew. The say- 
 ings in their original dress were probably preserved 
 in connection with parable or miracle, or as short, 
 detached oracles. In Matthew many of these latter 
 have been pieced together into set discourses. In 
 addition to these there are also peculiar to Matthew 
 the narratives of the Infancy, and the account of the 
 appearances of our Lord after the Resurrection, with 
 certain other minor incidents. These represent tradi- 
 tion at a later stage than we find it in Mark, and bear 
 traces of the tendency to lay stress on the Divine 
 elements in the story of Jesus and to minimise the 
 purely human. Matthew also represents more clearly 
 than Mark the atmosphere and thought of the early 
 Church, especially on its Jewish side. This is seen 
 chiefly in the desire to find a fulfilment of Hebrew 
 prophecy in many of the incidents of the life of Jesus. 
 It is not, however, sufficient to warrant the summary 
 conclusion that all such narratives are merely the 
 creation of the consciousness of the Church, and have 
 no basis in actual history. It may be said, on the 
 other hand, that those portions of Matthew which do 
 not belong either to Mark or the Logia are later, and 
 therefore not of the same historical value as those which 
 are found in the two main sources. They point us to 
 traditions of the Church which were already becoming 
 
THE SOURCES 
 
 fixed, and therefore had, in all probability, history 
 behind them. 
 
 One of the chief gains of more recent New Testament 
 criticism has been the success of the attempt to 
 rehabilitate the historicity of Luke. Without accepting 
 all that is claimed for him by Professors Ramsay and 
 Harnack, we may confidently say that the work of 
 St. Luke is that of an expert writer, and one who, 
 so far as his materials allowed him, was a painstaking 
 and accurate historian. We need have no hesitation 
 in assigning the Third Gospel to the companion of 
 St. Paul, " the beloved physician," who was also the 
 compiler of the Acts of the Apostles. A large part 
 of the material for this latter work was found in a 
 diary of his own, written in early life, and known to us 
 as the " We sections " of the book. So far as the 
 Gospel is concerned, St. Luke follows largely the order 
 of Mark, with certain additions and interpolations of 
 his own, e.g. the two introductory chapters, and some 
 additions to the appearances of our Lord after the 
 Resurrection, also the passages chap. vii. 20 to chap. viii. 
 3, and chap. ix. 51 to chap, xviii. 14. From these 
 latter it is assumed that, in addition to Mark and the 
 Logia, St. Luke had before him a third source peculiar 
 to himself, sometimes called the Perean Gospel, and 
 that to this source belong not only the special sections 
 
8 LIFE OF CHRIST 
 
 of his Gospel, but much of the early portion of the 
 Acts of the Apostles. This gives us a third main 
 source for the Synoptic Gospels, and one of great value 
 especially for the teaching of Jesus. The date of Luke 
 may be placed roughly about a.d. igo. 
 
 We pass now to the consideration of the Fourth 
 Gospel, which presents an historical and critical pro- 
 blem more complex and difficult even than that of 
 the Synoptics. Opinions are still divided with regard 
 to it, and on some fundamental points the division is 
 complete. The date of the Gospel is probably between 
 A.D. ICO and no. This would not be incompatible 
 with the traditional authorship by John the Apostle, 
 supposing that he wrote in extreme old age. There 
 is external second-century testimony for this authorship 
 to which some weight has to be attached, and there 
 may be added to it the internal evidence that the writer 
 was a Jew, and was probably connected with a Saddu- 
 cean or priestly family, that he was well acquainted 
 with Jerusalem, and that he had either first-hand 
 knowledge himself of many of the events which he 
 relates, or had access to sources which possessed such 
 knowledge. He writes also as one to whom the 
 Synoptic Gospels are familiar, and who is in a position 
 to take for granted on the part of his readers a know- 
 ledge of certain leading persons and events in the life 
 
THE SOURCES 
 
 of Jesus. On the other hand is to be set the fact that 
 the picture of Jesus and His teaching given in the 
 Fourth Gospel is altogether different from that of the 
 three other Evangelists. Instead of that gradual unfold- 
 ing of the Messianic consciousness which we find in the 
 Synoptic writers, the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel shows 
 at the outset that He regards Himself as the Son of 
 God and the destined Saviour of the World. The long 
 discourses which the Gospel contains have as their 
 theme not the kingdom of heaven, as in Matthew 
 and Luke, but rather the Person of the Christ Himself, 
 and the various relations in which He stands to His 
 disciples and to the world. At times this teaching 
 is cast in a form which can only come from one 
 who was at least acquainted with that type of Alex- 
 andrian speculative philosophy which we find in the 
 writings of Philo. The general impression produced 
 by all this is that we have here the writing of one who 
 was looking back upon the career and teaching of Jesus 
 Christ from a distance, and who was concerned not so 
 much to give a history of events as an explanation of 
 them, and who wrote in order to persuade those who 
 should read his words that Jesus was indeed the Christ, 
 and that a certain conception of His Person, and only 
 one, could be legitimately held by those who called 
 themselves Christians. It is urged by some that all this 
 
lo LIFE OF CHRIST 
 
 is sufficiently explained on the supposition that the 
 Apostle John lived to an extreme old age, and wrote his 
 Gospel with a long experience of the history of the 
 Church behind him, and in view of certain special 
 conditions and difficulties at Ephesus in his own day. 
 Many scholars, on the other hand, consider that the gulf 
 which separates John the beloved disciple from the 
 philosopher and theologian who wrote the Gospel is 
 too wide to be thus easily bridged. The question is 
 still sub jiidice, and will be settled by each student of 
 the Gospel for himself according to his training and 
 predilections. 
 
 Important and interesting as this question of author- 
 ship is, it does not vitally affect our conception of the 
 Fourth Gospel as a source for the life and teaching of 
 Jesus. Historically the material here is not so valuable 
 as that which we find in the Synoptic writers. But, as 
 has been noted above, there are incidents where the 
 writer betrays a first-hand knowledge which enables us 
 to supplement and even correct the Synoptic narrative 
 with his help. As a whole, however, the Gospel is 
 rather valuable for the evidence it gives of the exalted 
 place which Jesus had come to occupy in the thought of 
 the Christian Church at a very early stage in its history. 
 The idea of His work and Person here put forth, though 
 different from that in the earlier Gospels, is really a 
 
THE SOURCES 
 
 development from it. There is nothing radically in- 
 compatible between the two. The roots of the fourth 
 are to be found in the first three. It is important to 
 remember this in studying the discourses, especially where 
 the distinction between the actual words of Jesus and the 
 thought of the writer is not easy to maintain. It must be 
 admitted that, though the thought may be the thought of 
 Jesus, the words are the words of the Evangelist. The 
 presentation of our Lord's character and aims recalls 
 the Pauline Christology, and is most useful for deter- 
 mining the thought of the Church on these great themes. 
 It was because this Gospel satisfied the Church's require- 
 ments in this respect that it found its way into the Canon. 
 Professor Burkitt well sums up the whole position as 
 follows : " The Fourth Gospel is the work of one to 
 whom belief in Jesus Christ w^as not a new external 
 condition impressed upon him from without, after his 
 mind had already acquired its individual characteristics. 
 He had long been conscious, we may be sure, of the 
 presence of the Paraclete within him, guiding him into 
 all truth as to the inner meaning of the life and light 
 which came into the w^orld when the Word of God was 
 manifested, not perhaps without some admixture of 
 ancestral disdain for the materialistic superstition of the 
 masses, both of believers and unbelievers. And now in 
 his old age, when the popular expectations had proved 
 
LIFE OF CHRIST 
 
 false, as he knew they would, and the Antichrist that was 
 to come and set up his impious kingdom a little before 
 the end had not, after all, made his appearance, he finds 
 himself confronted by new dangers from the other side. 
 Other thinkers, more spiritual (as they would consider) 
 than he, are saying that the Son of God was not a real 
 man at all, for flesh and blood cannot inherit the king- 
 dom of God. This to the Evangelist was the greatest 
 error; to deny the coming of Jesus Christ in the 
 flesh was the doctrine of Antichrist. The Fourth 
 Gospel is written to prove the reality of Jesus Christ. 
 But the Evangelist was no historian : ideas, not events, 
 were to him the true realities, and if we go to his 
 work to learn the course of events we shall only be 
 disappointed in our search." 
 
 There is very little material for the history of Jesus 
 Christ outside the canonical Gospels. References in 
 Pagan historians are scanty in the extreme, and do no 
 more than indicate that such a person as Jesus existed, 
 and was put to death under Pilate. The remaining 
 books of the New Testament throw some light on the 
 teaching of Jesus, but their chief function is to testify to 
 the impressions and opinions regarding Him and His 
 work which were held by His followers in the early Church. 
 The same is true of those fragments of the teaching of 
 Jesus which have been recovered by the archaeological 
 
THE SOURCES 13 
 
 researches of recent years. While it is possible that 
 they may preserve some of the actual sayings of Jesus, 
 their main value is as a monument of the interpreta- 
 tions of His teaching which were regarded as authori- 
 tative in certain quarters and at certain times. 
 
 The question remains as to the trustworthiness of our 
 sources for the life of Jesus. The earliest of them was 
 not put together in its present form till nearly a genera- 
 tion after the Crucifixion. What guarantee is there that 
 we are not dealing with legend, tradition, and hearsay, 
 rather than with the record of facts ? What is there to 
 set against the extreme view of Professor Schmiedel, who 
 holds that the Evangelic records are utterly unhistorical, 
 and that they have preserved for us nothing that is 
 really credible about Jesus Christ save nine fragmentary 
 sayings ? Can we go back into those forty years pre- 
 ceding the compilation of St. Mark's Gospel and find 
 anything there that brings us nearer to the facts ? The 
 answer to this is that we can. There are traces of 
 earlier documents containing records of the things done 
 and said by Jesus. There is the preaching of the 
 Apostles, which was uniformly reminiscent of the life of 
 Jesus. There is the fact that the Gospels were written 
 in order to preserve and transmit a " deposit " and a 
 " witness '* which had already reached fixed proportions 
 and which had carefully to be preserved from the corrup- 
 
14 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 tion of alien elements. Further, the fact must not be 
 overlooked that in the Apostolic circle there were special 
 means of keeping alive the " deposit " of the memorials 
 of Jesus Christ. Oral tradition was a thing familiar to 
 the men of Palestine, and the preservation of it had been 
 carried in their schools to a high pitch of perfection. 
 The very contrast between the Synoptic Gospels and the 
 Johannine and Pauline interpretations of Jesus is high 
 testimony to the historicity and verisimilitude of the 
 former. They content themselves with reporting what 
 had been handed down to them. Their business is not 
 to speculate or explain, but to give such evidence as 
 they possess. And they give it with a simplicity, and 
 sometimes even with an absence of understanding, that 
 proves their trustworthiness. Due stress must also be 
 laid on the character of the picture of Jesus drawn by 
 the Evangelists. In spite of the differences between 
 them, there is a fundamental agreement which is most 
 impressive. Nothing could be less like the growth of 
 tradition and imagination than their sane and unadorned 
 narrative. The obvious gaps in it only serve to show 
 that where they knew nothing they said nothing. They 
 reflect the bewilderment which Jesus caused among His 
 contemporaries, and there is the very accent of truth in 
 their record of the development of His Messianic con- 
 sciousness along lines that were neither welcome nor 
 
THE SOURCES 
 
 15 
 
 intelligible. That they could have invented the teaching 
 of Jesus in the form in which they relate it is frankly 
 incredible. It is much that they should so have recorded 
 it that the only possible comment is, " Nunquam sic 
 locutus est homo." 
 
INTRODUCTION II 
 
 THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CONDITIONS 
 
 In the time of Jesus Christ Palestine was a Roman 
 province, and was broken up into three administrative 
 districts, Judaea and the tetrarchies of Herod Antipas 
 and Philip. Judaea was made up of Judaea proper, 
 Samaria, and Idumaea, and was reckoned as an imperial 
 province of the second class, and was governed by a 
 procurator of equestrian rank. This official was vested 
 with full powers, fiscal, military, and judicial. He was 
 himself responsible for collecting the taxes, part of 
 which were spent on pubHc improvements in the province 
 itself and the remainder remitted to the imperial treasury. 
 Besides these direct taxes large sums were obtained from 
 the people by customs duties. These, however, were 
 farmed out to speculators, who sold the rights of col- 
 lection. The collectors were the "publicans" of the 
 Gospels, and were exposed to strong temptations to 
 abuse their position by extorting more than their due, 
 and were cordially hated by the common people. The 
 procurator had at his disposal sufficient troops to keep a 
 
 i6 
 
SOCIAL CONDITIONS 17 
 
 firm hand over the populace. These consisted of a 
 few legionaries with a number of mercenaries, chiefly 
 Samaritans. He had the power of life and death, appeal 
 to Rome being only possible in the case of one who 
 had the status of a Roman citizen. ' All crimes involv- 
 ing capital punishment were in his hands, but minor 
 offences were usually tried in the local courts or in the 
 Great Court (Sanhedrin) at Jerusalem. These courts 
 had considerable powers both of jurisdiction and of 
 administration. However little acceptable the Roman 
 dominance might be to the more patriotic Jews (Zealots 
 and the like), it probably affected the every-day life of 
 the people very little, and certainly involved nothing in 
 the way of oppression. There was complete religious 
 tolerance, and the sanctity of the Temple was respected. 
 This was quite in accordance with the general policy of 
 Rome, and even special favours (e.g. the omission of 
 the emperor's head from the copper coinage and the 
 recognition of the Sabbath) seem to have been granted 
 to the Jew^s on account of their known religious zeal. 
 The Jerusalem Sanhedrin under the Roman rule be- 
 came a very important body. It had judicial powers 
 throughout Judaea, could arrest, try, and condemn 
 offenders to any punishment except death. It met 
 twice in the week in a building of its own, and was com- 
 posed of seventy-two members of pure Hebrew blood. 
 
LIFE OF CHRIST 
 
 The men of the high-priestly families naturally took the 
 most important place in its councils, and the high priest 
 for the time being was President. The other members 
 were called scribes or elders. The distinction between 
 these two classes strongly corresponds to that between 
 Sadducees and Pharisees. 
 
 The tetrarchy of Philip comprised the districts of 
 Batanea, Gaulonitis, Trachonitis, Auronitis, and Ituraea, 
 but the exact geographical boundaries of it are unknown. 
 The population was mixed, but prevailingly Syrian and 
 Greek. Philip was the best of the sons of Herod, and 
 was a mild and just ruler. Josephus draws a pleasant 
 picture of his visits to the towns of his dominion for 
 judicial purposes. He was a staunch friend to Rome, and 
 aimed at being the Father of his people. He rebuilt the old 
 town of Panias, and gave it the name of Caesarea Philippi. 
 After hisdeath inA.D. 37 his tetrarchy was given by Caligula 
 to Agrippa, and raised to the dignity of a kingdom. 
 
 Herod Antipas was a man of very different stamp. 
 He was a true son of his father, crafty, ambitious, and 
 ostentatious, the very type of an Oriental ruler. His 
 territory embraced Pergea and Galilee, and was split into 
 two parts by the region called Decapolis. Very little is 
 known of Herod's long reign from B.C. 4 to a.d. 39. 
 Josephus confirms the story in the Gospels in regard to 
 his relations with John the Baptist and Jesus. Though 
 
SOCIAL CONDITIONS 19 
 
 he gives political reasons and the fear of sedition as the 
 ground for his imprisonment and beheading of John, 
 this is not inconsistent with the story that it was John's 
 objection to the marriage with Herodias that first roused 
 the tetrarch's hostility. Galilee of the Gentiles, over 
 which Antipas ruled, was the richest region of Palestine. 
 The upper part is mountainous, but Lower Galilee con- 
 tains undulating country and fine fertile plains. These 
 were thickly populated, and studded with vineyards and 
 gardens, villages and towns. Its capital in our period 
 was Tiberias, a fine city built by Antipas after the Greek 
 model. Its inhabitants were Gentiles and Jews, the latter 
 predominating, and were a vigorous, brave, and freedom- 
 loving folk. Their moral standard was higher than that 
 in other parts of Palestine, and though mainly farmers 
 and fishermen, they were not without ideals, and had 
 learnt much from contact with Graeco-Roman civilisation. 
 The region called Decapolis w^as not in any sense a 
 geographical area, but rather a confederation for military 
 and commercial purposes of Grseco-Roman cities. Its 
 capital was Scythopolis, and all round it were Pella, 
 Gadara, Hippos, Dium, Gerasa, Philadelphia, Raphana, 
 Kanatha, and for a time Damascus. The sites of most 
 of these towns are still know^n.^ Each of them possessed 
 
 1 Cf. G. A. Smith, "Historical Geography of the Holy Land," 
 chap, xxviii. • 
 
20 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 considerable territory, and was a little state in itself, 
 independent of procurators and tetrarchs alike. These 
 towns, and many others like them throughout Palestine 
 mentioned by Josephus, were Hellenistic in thought, 
 feeling, language, and organisation, and some of them 
 at least became active centres of anti-Semitism in the 
 later troubles. 
 
 For any clear understanding of New Testament times 
 it is important to realise how the whole Jewish world 
 was interpenetrated with Hellenistic religion, customs, 
 and ideals. Most Palestinian Jews could speak Greek 
 even if they did not read it, and the Hellenism which 
 made itself felt in architecture, music, commerce, and 
 coinage touched their lives at every point. Ever since 
 the time of the Maccabees, Hellenistic civilisation had 
 impressed its stamp on every department of human 
 activity. In most of the great towns were temples to 
 Greek gods, and public games connected with religious 
 festivals were celebrated. Herod had built a theatre 
 and an amphitheatre even in Jerusalem. We have the 
 mention of stadia, basilica, porticoes, tribunes, banquet- 
 ing halls, and baths after the Grseco-Roman fashion in 
 different towns. In Herod's Temple at Jerusalem the 
 Greek style of architecture was largely followed. The 
 same influence was strongly felt in commerce and the 
 currency, in connection with which most of the names 
 
SOCIAL CONDITIONS 21 
 
 that have come down to us are Greek, as are also many 
 names for clothing, furniture, and domestic utensils. 
 
 This close and constant contact with heathen influences 
 had a twofold effect on the Jewish life of the period. On 
 the one hand it meant a certain liberalising tendency, 
 but on the other it led to a rigid and exclusive form of 
 nationalism. These heathen surroundings made the 
 danger of weakening the Jewish ceremonial law infinitely 
 greater than it would be in a purely Jewish community. 
 In view of such a danger it is not difficult to understand 
 the punctilious insistence of the Pharisees on every jot 
 and tittle of the Law. What to us seems merely an ex- 
 cessive scrupulosity was to them the very condition of 
 maintaining the national life and hope. Among the 
 rank and file of the populace their antagonism to the 
 heathen powers kept alive that expectation and antici- 
 pation of the future which we call Messianic. In Judaea 
 and in the priestly circles in Jerusalem this antagonism 
 took a strongly political complexion. Outside Judaea it 
 was perhaps less political but no less real. Throughout 
 the whole country the chief guardians of the Law were 
 the scribes. They developed, systematised, and ad- 
 ministered the ordinances of Moses, and taught them 
 in every local synagogue. They were regarded with 
 extraordinary reverence, and obtained a real hold of the 
 popular mind. To them, perhaps, more than to any 
 
LIFE OF CHRIST 
 
 other single influence is to be attributed the fact that 
 Judaism did not entirely disappear. 
 
 The study of these external conditions of the life of 
 Jesus is important and useful in view of the fact that 
 the historicity of the Gospels is still roundly denied by 
 some scholars. Men like J. M. Robertson in this 
 country, and Kalthoff of Bremen, and others, seek to 
 explain away the whole historical foundation of Chris- 
 tianity, and resolve the story of Jesus into a mere collec- 
 tion of myths. But the Gospels are too deeply rooted 
 in contemporary history to give such an attempt the 
 least chance of success, except with those who allow 
 their prejudices to blind them to the facts. The Gospels 
 are open to criticism, as are all ancient documents, and 
 must be judged by the canons applied to all contem- 
 porary literature. They do not need to fear any such 
 tests, which, though they may modify some of our pre- 
 conceptions regarding them, cannot destroy their local 
 colouring or their historical background. The more 
 closely they are studied in relation to the period of 
 which they speak and the period at which they were 
 composed, the more impossible does it become to 
 regard them as productions of the imagination. The 
 foundation of fact on which they are built cannot be 
 concealed. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 THE BIRTH, BOYHOOD, AND EDUCATION 
 OF JESUS 
 
 The story of the Nativity is not found in the earliest 
 record of the life of Jesus Christ. St. Mark's Gospel 
 knows nothing of it, it is not mentioned by St. Paul, 
 and even the Fourth Gospel, which insists strongly on 
 the Divine origin and pre-existence of Jesus, makes 
 no allusion to it. The two accounts given in the Gospels 
 of St. Matthew and St. Luke do not agree in all parti- 
 culars and present some very remarkable features. The 
 genealogies trace the descent of Jesus through Joseph 
 and not through Mary. But both accounts represent 
 Jesus as born of a Virgin, and born according to promise, 
 though in the one case the promise is made to Joseph 
 and in the other to Mary. Attempts to harmonise 
 these discrepancies are altogether useless. The situation 
 is best understood by considering the way in which the 
 stories arose, and the circumstances which gave rise to 
 them. 
 
24 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 There can be no doubt that, through the whole cf 
 His public career, Jesus was regarded as the son cf 
 Joseph and Mary. " Is not this the carpenter's son? '' 
 " Is not this Jesus, whose father and mother we 
 know?" St. Luke speaks more than once of "His 
 parents," and makes His mother say, "Thy father anc 
 I have sought thee sorrowing." ^ A very little reflection 
 will show that no other view was possible to the con- 
 temporaries of Jesus. At the same time it is evident 
 that within the circle of the Holy Family there was a 
 consciousness of mystery surrounding Jesus, and of a 
 mystery that had to do with His birth. We are told 
 that His mother " kept all these sayings, pondering 
 them in her heart " (Luke ii. 19, 51), and she had reason 
 for doing so. It must have been from her in the first 
 instance that the true story of the birth of Jesus came ; 
 and Professor Ramsay is probably right in assuming 
 that St. Luke's account of the Nativity was obtained 
 from Mary herself. As he says, " There is a womanly 
 spirit in the whole narrative, which seems inconsistent 
 with the transmission from man to man, and which, 
 moreover, is an indication of Luke's character ; he had 
 a marked sympathy with women." St. Matthew's account 
 represents more strictly the man's point of view, and is, 
 no doubt, that which was more generally current among 
 ^ Cf. Matt. xii. 23 ; Mark iii. 21, 32, xii. 35; John i. 13. 
 
THE BIRTH OF JESUS 25 
 
 the friends and contemporaries of Jesus. It must be 
 remembered that the great problem of the life of Jesus 
 Christ is the fact that the men who consorted with Him 
 during His days on earth came to so sure and strong 
 a belief in His Divine nature and power, and that this 
 belief took so firm a hold in the very earliest days of 
 the Christian Church. To these men the fact that 
 Jesus should have come into the world in a fashion 
 different from that of the ordinary children of men, was 
 a natural and even necessary thing. Their account of 
 it is altogether higher than those of other theogonies. 
 There is a reticence, and so a verisimilitude, about it 
 which these do not possess. And, to-day, belief in the 
 Virgin Birth, while it may not be necessary to belief in 
 the Divinity of Christ, is to many a natural concomitant 
 of this latter belief — a lesser wonder covered by the 
 greater. It is from this standpoint that the world still 
 gathers in awe round the cradle in the stable at 
 Bethlehem, and still Hstens with adoration to the angels' 
 song. 
 
 It is needless to do more than summarise the well- 
 known narrative. Jesus came in the fulness of the 
 times, and there were hints and anticipations of His 
 coming. Zacharias and Elizabeth, Anna and Simeon, 
 were but types of the devout souls who looked for 
 the consolation of Israel. It is true that hope often 
 
26 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 becomes the father of events and shapes them to its 
 own liking. But there was little scope for that here. 
 Indeed, one marvels at the insight and penetration which 
 could discover the Divine purpose in such unpromising 
 surroundings. Simple folk like Joseph and Mary may 
 well have been bewildered by what happened to them ; 
 and it is safe to say that the birth in Bethlehem, the 
 visit of the wise men, the testimony of the shepherds, 
 the wrath of Herod, and the flight into Egypt, all became 
 more significant in retrospect. The Evangelic records 
 abound in suggestions that even those who were nearest 
 to Jesus failed to understand Him during His lifetime, 
 and were quite unable even to take Him at His own 
 valuation. To them the proof of His Divine claims 
 was cumulative, and the wonders of the childhood of 
 Jesus were only appreciated by those who looked back 
 upon them in the light of His maturer years. The 
 impelling motive in all these stories is, as Neumann 
 says, " the idea that there was in Jesus's character, so 
 far as we can rediscover it, an underivable element 
 which throws us back upon God — the great original 
 element of religious genius. In this sense the cradle 
 of the child who to-day is claimed as belonging to the 
 whole world, was overshadowed by God." 
 
 Of the boyhood of Jesus we know very little, and 
 no attempts to pierce the haze that surrounds His earlier 
 
THE BOYHOOD OF JESUS 27 
 
 years can be very successful. What little is told us 
 in the Gospels stands in vivid contrast to those apocryphal 
 stories found in writings outside the New Testament. 
 Those who believe that there is a large legendary 
 element in the Gospels themselves, have always to settle 
 the problem presented by the contrast between the 
 Gospel narratives and those other, later, and obviously 
 legendary accounts of Jesus. In the one case are to be 
 found the wildest and most fantastic imaginings ; in the 
 other a simple, reticent, straightforward tale.^ That Jesus 
 grew and waxed strong, that the grace of God was upon 
 Him, and that He increased in favour with God and 
 men (Euke ii. 40, 52), sums up all that we know of 
 His early years. That He met with the doctors in the 
 Temple, and astonished them with His wisdom, and 
 felt Himself some foretaste of His future work in 
 doing so, is a natural enough episode, and one that 
 we most probably owe to the fond pride of the mother 
 who " kept all these sayings in her heart." It is possible, 
 however, to do something to fill in the bare outlines 
 of the New Testament narrative. There is a legitimate 
 function for the historical imagination, and in the 
 physical surroundings of His home, and in the general 
 
 ^ The fact that some length of time separates the two classes 
 of narrative is all in favour of the historicity of the Gospels. 
 Legends take time to grow. 
 
28 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 conditions of Jewish life in His time, much may be 
 found that throws light on the early years of Jesus. 
 No careful student of His teaching can be blind 
 to the fact that He had lived with eyes wide open 
 to the various influences of His day. He could meet 
 the scribes on their own ground and speak to them 
 in their own tongue, but He was equally at home with 
 the common people. He had shared their experiences, 
 and they '-' heard Him gladly." Nor can we doubt 
 that His soul was keenly sensitive to those physical 
 influences which play so large a part in moulding 
 thought and character. The Galilee in which Jesus 
 was brought up was a fair and fertile land — a very 
 garden for beauty and delight. But it was populous 
 too, full of cities and villages, so that wherever one 
 journeyed it was easy to gather a crowd. And every 
 place in it was instinct with historical associations. 
 Nazareth, where the boyhood of Jesus was spent, 
 in spite of its evil name among the people of Galilee, 
 was a lovely spot. With its white limestone houses 
 nestling amid the vine-clad hills, it has been aptly 
 compared to a jewel in its setting. From those hills 
 was visible a scene, which to every Jew suggested 
 stirring memories of undying hopes. A modern 
 scholar and traveller describes it thus : " Before us 
 lay the great plain of Megiddo, and opposite us, from 
 
THE BOYHOOD OF JESUS 29 
 
 the southern edge of the plain, rose the mountain-land 
 of Central Palestine. Away to the right we saw Mount 
 Carmel closing the valley on the west and dividing it 
 from the plain of Sharon. On the left the eastern 
 view was closed and the plain was narrowed by Mount 
 Tabor, Mount Moreh (round whose slopes lay Nain, 
 Endor, Shunem, and Jezreel), and Mount Gilboa. 
 Nowhere, not even from the summit of the Mount 
 of Olives, with Jerusalem before and the Dead Sea 
 behind, has the historian or the philosophic thinker a 
 more inspiring and impressive view than that from 
 the brow south of Nazareth." ^ The valley of Megiddo 
 w^as one of the natural highways of Palestine, the great 
 road from the coast eastward. There, close by Nazareth, 
 Jesus as a boy must have "watched the Roman 
 travellers, merchants, messengers, soldiers, officials, 
 going east and returning west. He heard much about 
 the glory and power of the great empire, the oppressor 
 of the Hebrews, which kept its garrison even in the 
 Holy City, and made the high priests of Jerusalem 
 its slaves. Nazareth was to Him like a hermitage 
 beside a great centre of life. He could pass in a 
 few moments from the quiet seclusion of His home 
 into full view of the busy world, and then retire 
 again to peace." ^ To these impressions must be 
 1 Sir W. M. Ramsay, " The Education of Christ," p. 49. ^ ib. p. 53. 
 
30 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 added those which would be obtained from the annual 
 journeys to Jerusalem. There Jesus was brought 
 into contact with the life of the Temple and the schools, 
 and the Gospels contain many suggestions as to His 
 intimate familiarity with these things and with the 
 surroundings of the city itself. 
 
 The education of Jesus would be that of an ordinary 
 Jewish boy of His time. As Joseph and Mary were 
 devout people, it would be begun in the home with 
 that scrupulous care which the Law enjoined. At six or 
 seven years of age Jesus was sent to the " house of the 
 book," the elementary school attached to the synagogue. 
 There He learnt to read (Luke iv. i6) and to write 
 (John viii. 8). There too, and in the synagogue itself, 
 He would be instructed in the Law, and become 
 familiar with the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings — 
 practically our Old Testament. At twelve or thirteen 
 years of age Jesus became a " son of the Law," and 
 from that time onwards the synagogue became more 
 and more a familiar place to Him. There first, in all 
 probability. He shared its services by reading the 
 Scripture appointed for the day, and Luke iv. i6, 17 
 implies that it was His habit so to do. It is probable 
 that Jesus was not one of those Jewish boys who 
 entered a Rabbinical school or college with the view of 
 becoming a teacher of the Law. The one distinguishing 
 
THE EDUCATION OF JESUS 31 
 
 feature of His ministry was that He taught not as do 
 the scribes. He had had no training in their methods, 
 and He was in no sense one of themselves. Every well 
 brought up boy among the Jews was taught a trade, and 
 Jesus followed that of Joseph, and became a carpenter 
 and builder. It was mainly in this work that the years 
 of His young manhood were spent, and it is in vain 
 that we try to penetrate their secret. Dogmatic con- 
 clusions here are especially to be avoided. All that we 
 can gather from the Gospel narratives goes to show that 
 the manhood of Jesus Christ developed along genuinely 
 human lines. He grew in wisdom and in stature as do 
 other men. That there was in Him something greater 
 than our ordinary human nature is not to be denied. 
 But this did not lift Him out of the human category. 
 Indeed, His greatness appears in the use He makes of 
 ordinary human experiences, and in His adaptation of 
 Himself to ordinary human conditions. No doubt we 
 are safe in arguing that the habits of His earlier life 
 followed Him into His maturer years. When we first 
 read of His going up into the mountain by night to 
 pray, we need not conclude that this was the first time 
 He had ever done anything of the kind. The attempts 
 which are sometimes made by theologians to penetrate 
 what is called the self-consciousness of Jesus can never 
 be very successful, save as they follow strictly the line 
 
32 LIFE OF CHRIST 
 
 of His own thought and teaching. But we shall not go 
 far wrong if we believe that in those silent years prayer 
 and communion with His Father formed the regular 
 discipline of His soul, and prepared Him for that work 
 which He had come into the world to do. 
 
 The training of Jesus was thus a fit preparation for 
 His ministry. Granted that He had an unique power 
 of using the opportunities presented to Him, those 
 opportunities w^ere just such as the special character of 
 His work required. In recognising the world-wide scope 
 of the work and teaching of our Lord, and its curious 
 adaptability to humanity as such, we must never lose 
 sight of the strictly limited conditions under which that 
 work was done, and of the equally limited forms under 
 which the teaching was presented to the world. Jesus 
 was a man of His time first, that He might become the 
 man for all time. He knew His own people, their life, 
 their learning, their occupations, their needs, their sins, 
 and they became in His hands types of humanity at 
 large. His early surroundings were those of the cheerful 
 every-day life of His time. There was no trace of 
 asceticism, in the sense of alienation from the world, in 
 His upbringing, just as there is no trace of it in His spirit 
 in maturer years. He was a man of the people. He 
 loved His folk, and He shared their busy life and simple 
 occupations. But He had a soul above them, and saw a 
 
THE EDUCATION OF JESUS 33 
 
 meaning in it all that His contemporaries could not see. 
 His love of nature, and the simple and beautiful expres- 
 sion which He gives to it in His later teaching, marks 
 Him out at once as having a certain originality in 
 His point of view, and this is characteristic of His 
 whole outlook upon things. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE BEGINNING OF THE MINISTRY 
 
 The ministry of Jesus Christ began with His Baptism at 
 the hands of John the Baptist, and with His Temptation 
 in the wilderness. At His baptism He showed Himself 
 conscious of the fact that He had come into the world 
 to fulfil a great mission, and in His temptation He 
 recognised that the work was to be done not after any 
 human plans but in strict accordance with the will of 
 God. These two experiences are very closely allied, and 
 may be reckoned as the definite setting apart of Jesus to 
 His life's work. 
 
 John the Baptist was the last of the prophets (Matt. xi. 
 9), and in many respects he recalls the work and teach- 
 ing of such great names in Hebrew history as Elijah, 
 Amos, and Isaiah. Indeed, he seems definitely to have 
 modelled himself upon the first-named of these. The 
 fierce, shaggy aspect of the man, his clothing of skins, 
 and his ascetic fare of locusts and wild honey, all go to 
 
 suggest the prophet of Horeb. But the Baptist was no 
 
 34 
 
BEGINNING OF THE MINISTRY 35 
 
 mere imitator. He had his own work to do, and it was 
 a work strictly conditioned by the circumstances of his 
 time. Recent investigation has shown that the time was 
 ripe for something like a religious revival in Israel. 
 The Roman yoke pressed heavily upon the nation, and 
 the hope of the kingdom of God was in every heart. 
 That this hope was often cast in the form of a narrow 
 nationalism cannot be denied, and both John the Baptist 
 and Jesus after him used it only that it might be 
 corrected and purified in their hands. John was strictly 
 the forerunner of Jesus in that he gave to this spirit of 
 expectation an ethical turn. He preached " a baptism of 
 repentance for remission of sins " (Mark i. 4). To him 
 the vision of the kingdom meant that a great religious 
 crisis was at hand, and in preparation for it he required 
 humiliation and repentance from the nation and from 
 individuals alike. He recalled the half-forgotten spirit 
 of the ancient prophets, and in stinging words lashed the 
 vices of his time and called men to a new and better life. 
 The scene of his ministry was the wilderness of Judsea, 
 near where the Jordan falls into the Dead Sea. Great 
 crowds of people, among whom all classes were repre- 
 sented, gathered to hear him. They were stirred by his 
 words as are the leaves of the forest by the wind, and 
 when he proposed to follow up his preaching by the 
 symbolic rite of baptism they came ready to his hand. 
 
36 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 The act of baptism was analogous to the ceremonial 
 washings so familiar among the Jews, though it differed 
 from these in being supposed to be final in its effect. 
 As men and women plunged into the waters of Jordan 
 and were raised out again, they were held to have been 
 cleansed from their evil past and pledged to a better 
 life. But both the baptism and teaching of John were 
 regarded as only preparatory to something greater, 
 according to the Gospel writers. The Baptist conceived 
 himself to be a forerunner, and pointed men to another 
 teacher and another mission that should supersede his 
 own. As time went on this presentiment seems to have 
 become stronger, and when one day Jesus presented 
 Himself among the crowd of those waiting to be baptized, 
 John recognised in Him the one who was to come. 
 
 That Jesus should have submitted Himself to the 
 baptism of John is a fact that seems to require explana- 
 tion. It would appear that John himself showed some 
 hesitation in the matter (Matt. iii. 14). Probably he 
 had some prior knowledge of Jesus, and it may be that 
 he felt, as many have felt since, that He was not a fit 
 subject for a baptism of repentance. But it may be 
 urged, on the other hand, that in thus identifying Himself 
 with the common crowd Jesus was really and effectu- 
 ally inaugurating His ministry. Nowhere do His full 
 humanity, and His deep sympathy with human needs. 
 
BEGINNING OF THE MINISTRY 37 
 
 appear more strikingly than when He went down into 
 the waters of Jordan with the Baptist's penitents. This 
 act of voluntary humiliation became the sign of His 
 ministry, and is the beginning of that sharing of our human 
 experiences which gives to Jesus His right to lead men 
 and to speak in their name. It was confirmed by what 
 is called the descent of the Spirit upon Jesus, and by the 
 voice which said, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I 
 am well pleased." From this time forward Jesus spoke 
 and acted as one who had a mission to accomplish. 
 
 Immediately after His baptism Jesus was "led up by 
 the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil." 
 Under some Divine inner compulsion (Mark i. 12) He 
 retired from the face of man, and held communion with 
 Himself as to His life's work. Something of what hap- 
 pened in those days of prayer and striving, we know from 
 the stories of the Temptation in the Gospels. These 
 stories must have come from Jesus Himself, and they 
 throw a clearer light on the mystery of His inner con- 
 sciousness than perhaps any other incident in His career. 
 The form in which the narratives are cast is frankly 
 parabolical. It was only through symbols and in 
 pictures that the struggle of those days could be made 
 real to other men. The struggle itself, we may be sure, 
 was fought out on the battle-ground of the soul. And 
 it was a real struggle, no dream or phantom of the night. 
 
38 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 The Temptation of Jesus can never be explained by being 
 explained away. " He was tempted like as we are," 
 and in that fact is to be found His power to help us 
 when we too are tempted. He was without sin, but 
 His sinlessness was not that of the child whose inno- 
 cence hardly knows what it is to be tempted, but that of 
 the grown man, the strong warrior, who has fought and 
 conquered in many a pitched battle. The non posse 
 peccare of the ancients is a poor thing beside the posse 
 non peccare. And it is this latter that describes the 
 position of Jesus. It is not that He was unable to sin 
 but that He was able not to sin. The conflict we call 
 the Temptation showed how great His power was, and 
 sealed His victory. 
 
 The story of the Temptation is too familiar to need 
 a detailed exposition. If it may be taken to represent 
 Christ's own view as to the methods of His future work 
 and of the ideals which should dominate Him, then we 
 to-day are much more concerned with the spiritual 
 interpretation of the story than with its details or its 
 dramatic form. It has often been pointed out that the 
 conflict was really a conflict of ideals. There is no 
 question here of sin in its grosser forms. The battle 
 was fought out on the plane, not of the physical, but 
 of the spiritual world. Thus, in the first temptation, 
 to turn stones into bread, Jesus is met with the 
 
BEGINNING OF THE MINISTRY 39 
 
 suggestion that He should use His powers to satisfy 
 purely personal needs. The same temptation presented 
 itself to Him once and again during His ministry, as 
 when He was urged to call down fire from heaven, to 
 save Himself from the Cross, or to perform miracles 
 for personal and inadequate ends. The answer of 
 Jesus, that man " does not live by bread alone, but by 
 every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God," 
 lays down a principle of self-denial and of subservience 
 to the Divine ends which became the guiding principle 
 of His career. He realised that the path marked out 
 for Him was one which led not to self-gratification 
 but to self-sacrifice, and it would thus have been con- 
 trary to the whole spirit of His life to employ His 
 power in order to help Himself. The way in which 
 Jesus used His mysterious gifts is quite as remarkable 
 as the gifts themselves. There was a restraint about 
 it which argues a singular force of character, and a 
 clear understanding of the situation involved. 
 
 The method of the second temptation is closely 
 allied to that of the first. Our Lord is bidden to 
 cast Himself down from the pinnacle of the Temple, 
 that the angels may bear Him up in their hands, and 
 all the world see how He enjoys the favour and pro- 
 tection of God. In answering, " Thou shalt not tempt 
 the Lord thy God," Jesus showed that He was not 
 
40 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 to be regarded as a favourite of heaven, who was 
 exempted from the ordinary rules of every-day human 
 life. His trust in God was to be equal to every 
 emergency of life, and was to be justified, not in 
 being allowed to escape from perils, but in suffering. 
 Here, again, the conflict is between the two wills, the 
 human and the Divine. The aim of Jesus was to do 
 the will of Him that sent Him, therefore He was not 
 anxious about His own safety, and still less anxious to 
 demonstrate to all and sundry that underneath Him 
 were the everlasting arms. His dependence on God 
 did not bring Him any protection that was not granted 
 to other men. As Dr. Fairbairn says, "There was 
 to be for Him no special intervention, no exclusive 
 providence, nothing that marked Him as the solitary 
 care and single love of Heaven. He was to take 
 His place in the ranks of men, live as they lived, 
 under the same conditions, sons of one Father, brothers 
 in dependence on God as on Nature, and if He did 
 a greater work than any other. He was still to do it, 
 not as made of God independent of law, but as, like 
 man, bound to all obedience." ^ 
 
 The third temptation offers to Jesus the kingdoms 
 of this world if He will promise allegiance to the 
 prince of this world. It springs out of the previous 
 
 ^ "Christ in Modern Theology," p. 351. 
 
BEGINNING OF THE MINISTRY 41 
 
 trials, and makes a more subtle and more terrible 
 appeal than they. It is not now His personal position 
 that is in question, but the success of His life's work. 
 Will He make a compromise with evil for the sake of 
 securing the triumph of His aims? Resistance to 
 this temptation meant a fixed determination to do 
 God's work in God's own way, and to pay the cost. 
 The keen moral sense of Jesus rejected the possibility 
 of any lowering of His ideal or of any compromise 
 with evil. The way of the world was not to be His 
 way. "The prince of this world cometh, and hath 
 nothing in me." 
 
 The temptations, taken as a whole, give us the clue 
 both to the character of Christ's personality and to the 
 nature of His mission on the earth. The life He lives 
 among men is to be a really human life, subject to the 
 ordinary limitations of our lot. That He has a power 
 greater than that of other men goes without saying, 
 but He will not use this power for any purposes of 
 show, or to protect or aggrandise Himself. He holds 
 it simply at the service of those who need, and in 
 order the better to fulfil His mission of beneficence 
 and redemption. So far as He Himself is concerned, 
 He lives in unquestioning submission to the will of 
 His Father. The principle here laid down will be found 
 to be of the greatest importance when we come to 
 
42 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 discuss the miracles of Jesus, and His death upon the 
 Cross. The Temptation shows Him laying down, as 
 it were, the programme for His future work, and He 
 " set His face steadfastly " to follow it throughout. 
 
 For the events immediately succeeding the Baptism 
 and Temptation, the narrative of the Synoptic Gospels 
 needs to be supplemented by that of St. John. Accord- 
 ing to the now generally accepted chronology,^ these 
 events took place in the winter of a.d. 26. The home 
 of Jesus was still at Nazareth, and after the solemn 
 inauguration of His work He set out from Judaea to 
 return thither. He was accompanied by His family, 
 and possibly by some of John's disciples, who had 
 been attracted to Him through the incidents at the 
 Baptism, and who began to share the expectations of 
 the Baptist in regard to Him. At any rate, it was on 
 the return journey through Galilee, and afterwards at 
 the first Passover in Jerusalem, that Jesus began to 
 gather round Him the band of men who formed His 
 disciples. On the way to Nazareth Jesus and His 
 friends stayed at a little town called Cana, and it was 
 there that the first of His "signs" was accomplished 
 (John ii. i-ii). The attendance of Jesus at the 
 marriage feast, and His turning of the water into wine, 
 
 ^ See ihe article on '* Chronology of the New Testament '' in 
 Hastings' " Dictionary of the Bible." 
 
BEGINNING OF THE MINISTRY 43 
 
 are not without significance for the interpretation of His 
 ministry. It is no doubt because of this meaning to 
 be attached to it that the event is recorded by the 
 writer of the Fourth Gospel. The scene is in almost 
 violent contrast to that of the preaching of the Baptist. 
 John was an ascetic, and amid the joy and plenty of 
 the feast Jesus first showed that spirit which afterwards 
 was to condemn Him in the eyes of some as "a 
 gluttonous man and a wine-bibber." The real moral 
 of the incident, however, is to emphasise His full and 
 beautiful humanity, and His identification of Himself 
 with our common life and its needs. From Nain Jesus 
 went on to Capernaum (John ii. 12), and after a brief 
 stay there returned with some of His disciples to 
 Jerusalem for the Passover. It was during this 
 Passover, according to the writer of the Fourth Gospel, 
 that Jesus expelled the buyers and sellers from the 
 outer court of the Temple. The Synoptic w^riters 
 describe a similar act as having taken place early in 
 the last week of the ministry. It is just possible that 
 Jesus repeated it, though the act is certainly more ap- 
 propriate at the beginning of His public work, as an 
 expression of His claims, and as a commencement of 
 that cleansing process foreshadowed in the baptism of 
 John. Some overt act of the kind seems to be needed 
 in order to account for the public notice which now 
 
44 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 began to be taken of His work. In this and in other 
 respects the Johannine narrative well fills the gaps left 
 in the other Gospels, and taken along with them gives 
 a coherent picture of events in this early period. 
 
 It was about this time also that the fortunes of Jesus 
 and the whole outlook of His mission were profoundly 
 affected by the arrest of John the Baptist at the hands 
 of Herod Antipas. The son of Herod the Great, Anti- 
 pas had inherited from his father the tetrarchy of Galilee 
 and Perea. He was a fairly successful administrator, 
 and skilled in diplomacy of the more cunning type. 
 His arrest of the Baptist was a purely political measure 
 of precaution against a seditious person and a possible 
 menace to the Roman power. John was throv/n into 
 the fortress Machserus, and there remained a prisoner 
 for many months. This action on the part of the 
 authorities was a warning to Jesus of the trouble that 
 might be expected, and He at once retired into Galilee. 
 On His way " He must needs pass through Samaria," 
 and St. John's moving and beautiful story of the inter- 
 view with the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well, and of 
 the events which followed from it, serves to show the 
 way in which His mission shaped itself before the mind 
 of Jesus, and the difficulty He experienced in making 
 it known both to His disciples and to the populace 
 (John iv.). On the return to Galilee Jesus remained in 
 
BEGINNING OF THE MINISTRY 45 
 
 comparative privacy, and the disciples seem to have 
 returned to their ordinary occupations. But their 
 Master could not altogether be hidden. The news of 
 events in Jerusalem had preceded Him, and as He was 
 stirred by compassion to perform certain works of 
 healing, men's minds began to be occupied with 
 Him and His doings, and the time became ripe for 
 greater things. 
 
 There is no doubt that the execution of the Baptist 
 proved a turning-point in the career of Jesus. Some 
 modern writers contend that Jesus really became John's 
 successor, and did not begin His mission until this 
 moment. Without going so far as this, we may well 
 believe that the death of the forerunner served to put an 
 end to the probationary period of the ministry, and 
 acted as a call to new and wider activities. From this 
 time forth it became more and more evident that the 
 kingdom of heaven was at hand. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE CALL AND COMMISSION OF THE 
 TWELVE 
 
 In gathering round Him twelve men that they might 
 receive His teaching and carry on His work, Jesus was 
 acting in accordance with the custom of His time. 
 The Rabbi and his school of followers was a familiar 
 figure throughout Palestine. But it was only in externals 
 that Jesus resembled him. The relationship between 
 Him and His followers, and the effect that He produced 
 both upon them and by their means, were quite unlike 
 anything that had been known in the Rabbinical 
 schools. There is no doubt that the method of Jesus 
 was deliberate. It was not His purpose to found a 
 Church, or establish an organisation, but rather to call 
 men to Himself and mould them after His own pattern. 
 They were to become the living vehicles of His truth 
 and the witnesses to His power. In stamping them 
 with His own image Jesus left behind Him a cere- 
 monial more lasting than any institution. The relation 
 
 46 
 
CALL OF THE TWELVE 47 
 
 between Jesus and His disciples is most interesting 
 and instructive. They were His intimates during the 
 time of His ministry, and much of His teaching was 
 meant solely for their ears. But it was only by slow 
 degrees that they were brought to an understanding of 
 their Master's message, and the Gospels are singularly 
 candid in recording their misapprehension of the real 
 situation, and even their unbelief This is not sur- 
 prising when it is remembered that the men themselves 
 were men of the people, and had had no special lite- 
 rary or spiritual training. Some of them at least had 
 been disciples of John the Baptist, and wxre " looking 
 for the consolation of Israel " ; and it is safe to con- 
 jecture that there must have been about all of them 
 some signs of fitness for the work in hand before they 
 received their call. The common element about them 
 seems to have been a readiness to receive new im- 
 pressions and an absence of that formalism which 
 was so marked a characteristic of the religious 
 life of their age. In other respects their culture and 
 mental attitude were those of their contemporaries. 
 The connection of these men with Jesus was established 
 only by degrees. As has already been indicated, some 
 of them attached themselves to Him as the result of 
 John the Baptist's teaching, and remained in a more or 
 less loose adherence during the early days of the 
 
48 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 ministry. But there came a time when it was necessary 
 to make this connection a more formal and definite 
 thing. A special arrangement was entered into with 
 the Twelve. They were to be with Jesus ; they were to 
 be sent out to preach in His name ; and they were 
 to receive power to heal sicknesses and to cast out 
 devils (Mark iii. 14). 
 
 It was thus by a gradual process of selection that 
 the little company was formed. First of them came 
 the two brothers — Simon, surnamed Peter, and Andrew 
 — and the sons of Zebedee, James and John. These 
 four seem to have enjoyed a peculiar degree of intimacy 
 with Jesus. Peter was the frequent spokesman of the 
 band. A strong, passionate, impulsive soul, he had 
 the defects of his qualities. Though he sinned greatly 
 he loved much, and the power of our Lord's personality 
 is seen in the way in which He bound this child of 
 nature to Himself, and caused him to grow in grace 
 until he became the life and soul of the early Church. 
 Of the first four, and indeed of the whole twelve, John 
 was the intellectual leader. He first began to under- 
 stand the work and teaching of Jesus, and between 
 him and the Master, who was also his cousin according 
 to the flesh, there sprang up a very close and beautiful 
 intimacy. Of Andrew and James very little is known. 
 Both, it appears, suffered a martyr's death — Andrew at 
 
CALL OF THE TWELVE 49 
 
 Patrse in Achaia, and James at the hands of Herod 
 Agrippa (Acts xii. 2). Next in order among the 
 Twelve come Philip and Bartholomew, The latter 
 is usually identified with Nathaniel of Cana, " an 
 Israelite without guile," Bar Talmai being his patro- 
 nymic. Philip was of Bethsaida — a slow, dull man, 
 who, according to the tradition, was charged wath the 
 work of catering for the temporal needs of the band. 
 Thomas and Matthew come next, both remarkable 
 men. Thomas was a doubting soul, but for that very 
 reason all the more conspicuous in his absolute devo- 
 tion to the Master. Matthew, or Levi, belonged to the 
 despised class of publicans, and his call to disciple- 
 ship was a practical manifesto on the part of Jesus. 
 His book, the Logia or Sayings of Jesus, became the 
 basis of our First Gospel. James the son of Alphaeus, 
 also called James the Little, is the next in the band, 
 and tradition says that he also had been a tax-gatherer, 
 the friend and companion of Levi. Then comes one 
 who is variously called Lebbseus, Thaddseus, or Judas 
 the son of James. Last on the list are Simon the 
 Canansean, a Zealot, a member of a party that was 
 pledged to undying enmity against the Roman Govern- 
 ment, and Judas of Kerioth in Judaea, who became 
 treasurer of the band, and ultimately sold his Master 
 to the priests for thirty pieces of silver. 
 
50 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 It was with these men that Jesus began the work of 
 His ministry and laid the foundations of the kingdom. 
 To them He first opened " the mystery of the kingdom," 
 and then sent them forth to preach and act in His name. 
 Much of the teaching of Jesus was intended for the ears 
 of the disciples in the first instance, though afterwards 
 they were to become witnesses of it to the world. Thus, 
 while He spake to the crowd in parables, the explanation 
 of the parables was given only to this inner circle. But 
 even the disciples were slow of heart to believe, and the 
 soil of their minds needed much preparation before it 
 was ready to receive the seed of the kingdom. They 
 all had their traditional preconceptions as to the nature 
 of the kingdom of heaven, and were by no means ready 
 for the purely spiritual tone of the teaching of Jesus on 
 the subject. It was for this reason, probably, that so 
 many of the more private discourses of their Master 
 dwelt on the prospects of the persecution that awaited 
 them, and on the blessings that belonged to the poor 
 and the meek. They were not to be led astray by the 
 first enthusiasms of the crowd, but were to keep in 
 mind that their destiny was to be hated of all men for 
 the Son of man's sake. Parable after parable bids 
 them recognise the slow, secret, and silent way in which 
 alone God's kingdom can come, and helps to disabuse 
 their minds of those facile notions as to place and 
 
CALL OF THE TWELVE 51 
 
 power by which they were too easily occupied. They 
 are constantly warned against judging of their work and 
 of the life of the kingdom by external signs. It is the 
 inner motive and conscience that determine everything, 
 and by the word of God only that men live. So the 
 disciples are sent forth as Apostles into the world, re- 
 lying only on the help which comes from the Spirit of 
 God. They have to work the works of their Master and 
 testify for Him to a crooked and perverse generation, 
 and they have to do it all dependent only on the unseen. 
 Without money or changes of raiment they are to go 
 forth, bearing the Lord's burden, turning their cheeks 
 to the smiter and facing the harshness of the world, 
 with no other assurance than that of the presence of 
 spiritual help with those that need and seek it. They 
 are to seek, in utter self-forgetfulness, the glory of God 
 and His kingdom and the salvation of men. The 
 programme of their mission as Jesus sketches it is truly 
 amazing, and it may be questioned whether any of the 
 disciples realised it in its entirety until after the Resur- 
 rection. It is always useful to remember that in the 
 Gospels we have unconsciously the reflections of these 
 men themselves in the light of experience. It is well, 
 too, that in studying the commission of Jesus we should 
 bear in mind the manner in which afterwards it was 
 carried out. Some of the narratives in the Acts of the 
 
52 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 Apostles form the best possible commentary on the 
 words of Jesus in the Gospels as to the work which His 
 Apostles were called upon to do, and reveal in quite an 
 unmistakable fashion the impression which Jesus had 
 made upon them. 
 
 Any account of the instruction which Jesus gave to 
 the disciples would require a recapitulation of the 
 whole of His public teaching. They were present 
 when " He taught the multitudes," but they had also 
 the advantage of hearing certain private explanations 
 of the more public teaching. Among the discourses 
 intended primarily for their ears, are generally reckoned 
 parts of the Sermon on the Mount and of the address 
 on the great mission (Matt. x. 5-14), the apocalyptic 
 address in Matt. xxiv. and xxv., and the discourse in the 
 upper room at the time of the betrayal (John xiv.-xvi.). 
 Of certain special incidents in the life of their Master 
 the Twelve or certain individuals among them were 
 the only witnesses, and these, too, must be reckoned 
 among the lessons which they were intended to learn. 
 Such were the raising of Jairus' daughter, the walking on 
 the sea, the transfiguration, the cursing of the barren 
 fig-tree, the foot-washing in the upper room, and the 
 miraculous draught of fishes. In addition to all this, 
 however, very much of the general teaching of Jesus 
 bears on the nature of the discipleship of which the 
 
CALL OFTHE TWELVE 53 
 
 members of this little band were to be the first 
 examples and exponents. Their relations with Jesus 
 Christ and His mission were to be reproduced in 
 countless others who had not known Him "after the 
 flesh." To these He is leader and guide, the way 
 to the Father, the example and inspiration of life. 
 They become, through their relation of obedience and 
 likeness to Him, a community fenced off from the 
 world, bearing its burdens but not sharing its spirit. 
 The object of their discipline is that they, too, may 
 take up the cross and deny themselves for the sake of 
 others. Thus they become the " salt of the earth," " the 
 light of the world," the leaven which "leaveneth the 
 whole lump." The charge laid upon them, when their 
 training is complete, is that they shall go forth in the 
 name of their Master and in His strength, making 
 disciples of all nations and baptizing them into the 
 Name. In this vast undertaking His Presence is to go 
 with them unto the end, and from Him they will derive 
 the power and inspiration needed for their great task. 
 
 Thus for the student of the life of Jesus His call 
 and training of the Twelve are all important. We have 
 here, in epitome. His whole programme, and it enables 
 us to realise, as perhaps nothing else does, the breadth 
 of His outlook and the world-wide scope of His vision. 
 This thing was not done in a corner. Behind and 
 
54 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 throughout it all is manifest a purpose which is nothing 
 less than the world-wide mission for the uplifting of 
 men. Even the terms of the Messianic kingdom are too 
 narrow to include it all. Jesus reads His own inter- 
 pretation into the familiar Jewish forms, and works 
 on principles which are moral and spiritual rather than 
 ecclesiastical. The effect which He produced upon 
 the men who were His intimates was profound and 
 lasting. By the quiet influence of His Personality 
 He won their free assent to His claims and sent 
 them out to bear witness to the world. He changed 
 their character and moral conceptions first, that through 
 them He might appeal to the wider circle. This is 
 the chosen method of Jesus. Not by the exertion 
 of any authority or by the open manifestation of power, 
 but through the leavening influence of character and 
 personality does He make His truth known. It is 
 this which constitutes the universality of His message 
 and gives the most permanent guarantee to His word. 
 
 Amongst the first disciples of Jesus was a little band 
 of women who must not pass without mention. That 
 they should have found so large a place in the records of 
 the ministry is very significant. Their presence throws 
 not a little light on the tone and scope of the ministry 
 of Jesus. Some of these women were relatives of the 
 men disciples, and they cared for the simple domestic 
 
CALL OF THE TWELVE 55 
 
 needs of the band. Among them were Mary of Magdala, 
 who had been cured by Jesus of some mental or nervous 
 complaint (" out of whom He cast seven devils "), and 
 Joanna the wife of Chusa the steward of Herod Antipas, 
 one Susanna, and the household at Bethany. After the 
 death of Jesus His own mother seems to have joined 
 these women disciples. She, with others of them, was 
 present at the Crucifixion, and these remained faithful 
 when the other disciples had fled. Their devotion to 
 the Master was very real, and there is no doubt that 
 they played a large part in the ministrations of the early 
 Church. It was from the ranks of such women as these 
 that the first deaconesses were chosen and ministered to 
 the poor, the sick, and the imprisoned. In the spread 
 of early Christianity their influence was very considerable, 
 and they were instrumental in finding an entrance for 
 the new religion into the homes of both Jews and 
 Romans of the better class. Considering the very great 
 share which women have had in the work of the Chris- 
 tian Church from the beginning, and the influence of 
 Christianity on the status and estimate of their sex, it is 
 interesting to be able to trace the beginnings of it all to 
 the example and teaching of Jesus Himself. 
 
 The question has been raised in modern times as to 
 whether Jesus and His disciples can be said to have 
 belonged to any of the religious sects which were common 
 
56 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 in Palestine at the beginning of the Christian era. In 
 particular it has been urged that His teaching and that 
 of John the Baptist have special affinities with that of 
 the Essenes.^ These were a Jewish sect closely related 
 to the Pharisees, of whom Josephus says that there were 
 at least 4000 in and around Jerusalem. They were a 
 simple agricultural people, who lived as celibates and 
 had all things in common. They were characterised by 
 a scrupulous cleanliness, had no slaves, dressed in white, 
 and prohibited the use of oaths. They were rigid in 
 their observance of the Sabbath, but were excluded from 
 the Temple worship because of their abhorrence of 
 animal sacrifice, and their habit of making a daily prayer 
 to the sun. There is no evidence whatever that Jesus or 
 His disciples had any connection with them, nor is there 
 to be found any real trace of their influence in early 
 Christian teaching or practice. 
 
 ^ For further information about this curious order cf. Schiirer'i 
 " History of the Jewish People," and Bousset, Die Religion des 
 Jndentu7HS. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE MIRACLES 
 
 We have now reached a point in the ministry of Jesus 
 when it becomes necessary to treat certain outstanding 
 features of it by themselves and apart from any chrono- 
 logical sequence. For the contemporaries of Jesus His 
 teaching and His miracles provided at once the great 
 attraction and the great stumbling-block. "Whence 
 hath this man this wisdom and these mighty works ? " 
 By the modern world His teaching is accepted with 
 increasing reverence and assent, while His miracles are 
 viewed with suspicion as a hindrance rather than a help 
 to the faith. They present a problem which deserves to 
 be discussed with the utmost candour and with entire 
 freedom from prejudice. 
 
 Great changes have taken place since Mr. Matthew 
 Arnold dismissed the whole subject with the airy 
 dictum, " Miracles do not happen." Such a confident 
 and question-begging denial is not now possible to any 
 
58 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 careful student of the subject, and argues a prejudice of 
 which it must be our first business to rid ourselves if we 
 are to take a scientific view of the situation. We must 
 accept Huxley's dictum, that " no conceivable event, 
 however extraordinary, is impossible." Even among 
 scholars who are by no means conservative there is now 
 a strong tendency to recede from the extreme sceptical 
 position and to view the whole situation with an open 
 mind. The reasons for this are partly historical and 
 partly psychological. It can no longer be assumed that 
 the miraculous element is a late accretion in the Gospel 
 narrative, and arises out of the myth-making tendency at 
 work among the Evangelists. Critical investigation has 
 shown that the miracles are an essential part of the 
 Gospels in their very earliest form, so far, at least, as that 
 form is recoverable, and cannot be separated from them 
 without destroying them altogether. On the other 
 hand, modern psychology is opening up the whole 
 subject in a variety of ways, and making it less and less 
 possible to take the standpoint of a dogmatic materialism. 
 It is true that we can no longer regard the miracles as an 
 apologetic asset. No one now tries to prove the truth 
 of Christianity by means of them after the fashion of 
 Paley. Their evidential value is no longer regarded as 
 their supreme merit. They have to be accounted for 
 
THE MIRACLES 59 
 
 and explained. We no longer see in them a glorification 
 of the Person of Christ and evidence for His divinity. 
 We begin with the Person, and we see in them that 
 feature of His life and work which most challenges 
 criticism and makes the largest demands on faith. It 
 is both true and pertinent to say that the supreme 
 miracle of the New Testament is Jesus Christ Himself. 
 He represents a moral and spiritual problem that as 
 much requires explanation as do any of the wonderful 
 works attributed to Him. Granted that He was what 
 He claimed to be and some such works follow almost as 
 a matter of course. Knowing what we do of the power 
 of personality in ordinary experience it is hard to say 
 what limits can be put to the work of a personality so 
 extraordinary as Jesus Christ. This means a vast 
 assumption, and involves for those who make it a know- 
 ledge not only of the consciousness of Jesus during His 
 earthly ministry, but of the power of His personality in 
 history and in the lives of men. On the basis of His 
 unique relation to God on the one hand and to the 
 world on the other, the powers He possessed and the 
 actions He wrought appeal to us as natural and proper. 
 
 A very superficial study of the self-consciousness of 
 Jesus as presented to us in the Gospels shows that He 
 believed Himself to be possessed of unique powers, and 
 
6o LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 that in using them He adhered to a definite plan or law. 
 If the story of the Temptation means anything it means 
 a fixed determination on the part of Jesus never to use His 
 powers to secure His own safety or aggrandisement, or 
 in order to beat down the resistance of unbelief. The 
 story of His ministry shows this purpose to be dominant 
 at every point. In His use of signs, as the miracles are 
 called, He is sparing and reluctant. He charges secrecy 
 on many of those who benefit by them, and holds Him- 
 self, as it were, at the mercy of their attitude. Faith 
 was the condition on which alone He was able to help 
 men, and of one place we read, "He could not do many 
 mighty works there because of their unbelief." When 
 asked to give some striking exhibition of His power in 
 order to convince men as to His claims He utterly 
 refused, and He never lifted a finger in order to help 
 Himself. Most of His miracles simply arose out of His 
 deep compassion for the needs and sorrows of the people 
 around Him ; but even then He gave His help with no 
 lavish hand, and was evidently conscious of the double- 
 edged character of the weapons He wielded and of the 
 danger accompanying their use. All these are con- 
 siderations of the first importance in estimating the 
 miracles of Jesus Christ. They show Him to stand in 
 an altogether different category from other miracle- 
 
THE MIRACLES 6i 
 
 workers. They argue strongly for the verisimiHtude 
 of the Gospel narratives, for it is impossible that the 
 writers could have invented a picture so consistent and 
 so restrained. And they offer a theory of His action 
 which is at once probable and worthy of the highest 
 claims which can be made on His behalf. 
 
 But here again it must be admitted that we make 
 large assumptions. That the universe as a whole 
 expresses the will of God and moves according to 
 His plan. That the moral order is supreme, and that 
 a Divine purpose runs through all things. That Jesus 
 Christ appeared as part of this Divine purpose, and 
 that the natural order is not violated by His coming 
 or by any actions that He performed. It is important 
 too to remember, as Professor Gwatkin admirably 
 points out, that "The natural order does not mean 
 simply the physical order of things, but that order as 
 modified by the action of persons : for even the 
 necessitarians who finally resolve such action into the 
 physical order do not deny that it brings out results, 
 and that some results are not brought out without it. 
 Hence no result is contrary to the natural order unless 
 it cannot be reached by any action of persons. Now, 
 the results which men obtain from the natural order 
 depend mainly on their knowledge of science. As the 
 
62 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 results which the ancients obtained are no measure 
 of those we ourselves obtain, so these, again, are no 
 measure of the results we hope our children will obtain 
 by a better knowledge of science. Yet if science is 
 true sympathy with the power behind Nature, it is 
 but imperfect and one-sided sympathy. It is imperfect 
 because it is an uncompleted evolution ; and it is one- 
 sided because it so poorly represents the moral side 
 implied in the trustworthiness of that power. Yet, 
 such as it is, it gives us such power over Nature as 
 we possess. At this point I submit that even the 
 greatest imaginable victories of science are no measure 
 of the results a man might obtain, if he were in perfect 
 sympathy of feeling, thought, and will with the Divine 
 order of the entire universe — a character theologically 
 described as without sin. To put the matter in a 
 concrete form, let us imagine the story true, that Jesus 
 of Nazareth was such a man. In that case He must 
 have had power far greater than our own, and been 
 able to do in a perfectly natural way many things 
 we cannot do, and some, perhaps, which no advance 
 of science that we can look for would enable us to 
 do. If we think out what the supposition means we 
 may find it not unlikely that most of the 'signs' 
 ascribed to Him would be well within the power of 
 
THE MIRACLES 63 
 
 such a man. Nobody doubts that His vivid sympathy 
 might account for some obscure healings : but once 
 we are off the ground of technical scientific skill we 
 can establish no distinction of kind between these signs 
 and others which seem to lie further from common 
 experience. Given such a man, I see nothing unlikely 
 in the story that he had power to raise the dead." 
 The whole question of the miracles, therefore, runs 
 back into that of the Personality of Jesus. The two 
 stand or fall together. 
 
 Turning, then, once more to the Gospel history, we 
 note certain distinctions in the character of the miracles 
 recorded. There are : (i) The miracles worked on the 
 human subject, such as the healing of demoniacs 
 (Matt. viii. 28, ix. 32, xii. 22, xv. 21, xvii. 14; Mark 
 i. 23); of the impotent man at Bethesda (John v. 9); 
 of the man with the withered hand (Matt. xii. 10); of 
 the woman with the spirit of infirmity (Luke xiii. 11); 
 of various paralytics (Matt. viii. 5 and ix. 2); of the 
 blind (Matt. ix. 27, xx. 30; Mark viii. 22 ; John ix. i); 
 of lepers (Matt. viii. 2; Luke xvii. 11); the raising 
 of the dead, e.g. the daughter of Jairus (Matt. ix. 23); 
 the son of the widow of Nain (Luke vii. 11); and 
 Lazarus (John xi. 43). (2) The miracles worked upon 
 Nature, such as the cursing of the barren fig-tree 
 
64 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 (Matt. xxi. i8); the stilling of the storm (Matt. viii. 26); 
 the walking on the sea (Matt. xiv. 25). Among these, 
 too, must be placed the feeding of the four and five 
 thousand (Matt. xv. 32 and xiv. 19); as well as the 
 changing of water into wine at Cana (John ii. i). 
 (3) Standing in a category by themselves, as difficult 
 to estimate as they are to classify, are the following: 
 the miraculous draughts of fish (Luke v. i and John 
 xxi. 6); and the finding of the money in the fish's 
 mouth (Matt. xvii. 24). 
 
 Turning now to the evidence for the miracles in 
 general, it has to be noted that the various classes 
 of miracles stand very much on the same level. It 
 is not possible to accept the miracles of healing, for 
 instance, and reject the Nature miracles as being less 
 duly authenticated. No doubt it may seem to some 
 easier to account for the former than for the latter, 
 but so far as the history is concerned instances of 
 both kinds occur in the earliest sources of the life of 
 Jesus. If, as is now generally conceded, the tendency 
 of recent critical investigation has, on the whole, been 
 to establish rather than to destroy the historicity of 
 the Gospel narratives in general, then it must be 
 admitted that the evidence for the miracles is strong, 
 and that the difficulties in the way of those who would 
 
THE MIRACLES 65 
 
 summarily reject them are very great. This does not 
 mean that all the miracles are to be placed on the 
 same level. Allowance has to be made for the tendency 
 on the part of observers in those days to look for the 
 miraculous, and for consequent exaggerations, more 
 or less unconscious, in individual cases. It is of these 
 that Dr. Sanday's dictum holds good. "We may be 
 sure that if the miracles of the first century had been 
 wrought before trained spectators of the nineteenth, 
 the version of them would be quite different." If, 
 however, God reveals Himself to each age in the 
 language which that age can understand, and under 
 the forms to which it is accustomed, then there is 
 a certain congruity in the miraculous element in the 
 Gospels. The preconceptions of the age in which we 
 live must not be allowed to destroy our sense of histori- 
 cal perspective. On the same grounds, we have to 
 admit the reasonableness and the historical truth of 
 the attitude which our Lord Himself took up towards 
 these " signs." In dealing with the demoniacs, for 
 instance. He spoke and acted, as He was wont to 
 do, in accordance with the current ideas of the time. 
 The assumption was necessary in order to enable 
 Him to meet men on their own ground, and bring 
 to them the help which He had it in His power to 
 
66 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 give. It was a necessary consequence of His Incarna- 
 tion that He should use His powers under the usual 
 limitations of His age and of the circumstances of 
 His life.i 
 
 For, as has already been suggested, the miracles of 
 Jesus cannot be considered apart from the interpretation 
 of His personality. He began His ministry conscious 
 of a vocation, and of powers given Him in order to 
 exercise it. His use of these powers is sparing and 
 cautious. There is no display about it, and no attempt 
 to benefit Himself thereby. His motives are those of 
 His ministry in general, a pure pity for lost and fallen 
 men, and a passionate desire to save. The miracles 
 are sometimes objected to because it is said that they 
 are unworthy of the character of Jesus Christ. This is 
 surely to misunderstand altogether His own attitude 
 towards them. Rightly regarded, they can only enhance 
 our appreciation of His relations with men, of the 
 loftiness of His motives, and of the wonderful restraint 
 He showed in the use of His powers. The moral 
 and spiritual miracle involved in all this is the one we 
 have first to face; this admitted, the rest becomes 
 
 1 Cf. article on " Demonology " in Hastings' " Dictionary " by 
 Dr. Wliitehouse. " We are dealing with the reports of chroniclers 
 whose minds were necessarily coloured by the prevailing beliefs of 
 the age, psychic and cosmic." 
 
THE MIRACLES 67 
 
 comparatively easy, or at least conceivable. No doubt 
 the view of the contemporaries of Jesus was somewhat 
 different. They saw in His marvellous works the signs 
 of His power, and the justification for His claims, 
 and they judged accordingly. They were perfectly right 
 in so doing, and acted according to their lights. If 
 the miracles are rejected it becomes quite impossible 
 to account for their appreciation of Jesus and of His 
 work. But we are equally justified in looking at the 
 matter from a different point of view. To us the 
 supreme miracle is the Person of Jesus Christ, seen 
 as we see it, in the light of history and experience. 
 In our eyes He authenticates His miracles. Being 
 such an one as He was. He could not have done other 
 than He did. This conclusion does not debar us 
 from using all the knowledge that has come to us in 
 these latter days to explain His methods, and to 
 account for the results He achieved. As our knowledge 
 grows it may be possible to do this more satisfactorily. 
 Meanwhile, " I beHeve, help Thou mine unbelief," is 
 the best possible expression of the only becoming 
 attitude of mind on the subject. The whole question 
 is well summed up by Dr. Illingworth as follows : ^ 
 " If the Incarnation was a fact, and Jesus Christ was 
 
 ^ " Divine Immanence," pp. 88-90. 
 
68 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 what He claimed to be, His miracles, so far from 
 being improbable, will appear the most natural thing in 
 the world. . . . They are so essentially a part of the 
 character depicted in the Gospels that without them 
 that character would entirely disappear. They flow 
 naturally from a Person who, despite His obvious 
 humanity, impresses us throughout as being at home 
 in two worlds. . . . We cannot separate the wonderful 
 life, or the wonderful teaching, from the wonderful 
 works. They involve and interpenetrate and presuppose 
 each other, and form in their insoluble combination one 
 harmonious picture." 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE TEACHING 
 
 In the mission which Jesus came into the world to 
 
 accompHsh the work of teaching holds a very important 
 
 place. He came to " open the blind eyes and to bring 
 
 out the prisoners from the dungeon," to dissipate ancient 
 
 prejudices, and to set forth wider views of truth. For 
 
 such work His contemporaries were well prepared. To 
 
 them the figure of the Rabbi was a familiar one, and 
 
 could always command an audience. This was the ready 
 
 mould into which Jesus shaped His work. But He was 
 
 much more than a teacher, much more than an ordinary 
 
 Rabbi. He was Himself the greater part of His teaching. 
 
 He set before men not so much truth in the abstract, 
 
 but truth embodied in a person. He exemplified His 
 
 own doctrine. With astonishing boldness He called 
 
 men and women unto Himself, and set before them in 
 
 His own Person the example they were to follow and the 
 
 way they were to tread. He taught them with authority, 
 
 i.e. as one who had a right to speak, about the deep 
 
 69 
 
70 LIFE OF CHRIST 
 
 things of God, and about the application of them to the 
 simple problems of every-day life. Life in its broadest as 
 well as in its narrowest sense was His subject, and He 
 was Himself the Life, the Truth, and the Way. In recent 
 years there has been a great revival of interest in the 
 teaching of Jesus, and in its application to the problems 
 of social service and individual development. It is 
 recognised that the doctrine of the Son of man is con- 
 cerned not merely with theology but with ethics. The 
 cry, "Back to Christ !" means often "Back to the teach- 
 ing of Jesus," and the effort to discover in it principles 
 of conduct is among the most healthy features of the 
 religious life of to-day. To examine the teaching of 
 Jesus in detail would be far beyond the scope of the 
 present inquiry, but something in the way of outline or 
 summary must be attempted. 
 
 I. Form and Method of the Teaching. — As in all 
 things Jesus accepted the conditions and limitations of 
 His environment, so in His teaching He attached Him- 
 self to Jewish custom and tradition. He accepted the 
 role both of the prophet and of the scribe, and there was 
 a certain originality in His combination of the two. But 
 He identified Himself with no class or party either among 
 His predecessors or contemporaries. All attempts to 
 label Him have proved failures. He stands altogether 
 by Himself, and the striking feature about His words 
 
THE TEACHING 71 
 
 was that " He spake with authority, and not as do the 
 scribes." The scribe was above everything else a 
 traditionalist, bound hand and foot by the past. Jesus 
 used the past, but used it freely, as its master not as its 
 slave. " It hath been said unto you by them of old 
 time — but I say unto you," was a familiar formula in 
 His mouth. The impression which He makes is one of 
 strength and mastery, and this is confirmed both by the 
 form and substance of His doctrine. " How knoweth 
 this man letters, having never learned ? " asked the 
 Pharisees. They were astonished that one who had not 
 passed through their schools, and had never taken their 
 degree, should show the wisdom and insight which this 
 Teacher possessed. " From whatever side we approach 
 the life of Jesus this impression of mastery confronts us. 
 On the one hand is the ethical aspect of strength. . . . 
 Solemn exaltations of mood, experiences of prolonged 
 temptation, moments of mystic rapture, occur indeed 
 in His career : but when we consider wliat a part these 
 emotional agitations have played in the history of re- 
 ligion, we are profoundly impressed by the sanity, reserve, 
 composure, and steadiness of the character of Jesus. 
 He is no example of the 'twice-born' conception of 
 piety, which has been of late presented to us with such 
 vigour and charm. His 'Religion of Healthy-minded- 
 ness ' is not a psychopathic emotionalism, but a normal, 
 
72 LIFE- OF CHRIST 
 
 rational, ethical growth. His method is not that of 
 ecstasy, vision, nervous agitation, issuing in neurological 
 saintliness ; it is educative, sane, consistent with wise 
 service of the world, capable of being likened in an in- 
 finite variety of ways to the decisions and obligations 
 which every honest man must meet." ^ 
 
 These characteristics of strength and sanity belong also 
 to the external form of the teaching of Jesus. He is no 
 pedant, delighting in details of exposition, but broad and 
 free and even familiar in His treatment of the subject. 
 He speaks to the people in their own language, dealing 
 with principles rather than details, and painting with a 
 large and rapid brush. The truths He sets before His 
 hearers are seed truths, destined, perhaps, to bear fruit 
 after a long germination, and depending for their issue 
 upon the suitability of the soil into which they fall. The 
 common features of the life of His time are pressed 
 freely into service. The home, the field, the market- 
 place, the highw^ay, and the synagogue all serve for back- 
 grounds, and His treatment of them shows Him to be 
 a master of expression. But this local colour is so used 
 as not to blur the note of universality in the teaching. 
 It is with man as man that Jesus deals. He uses the 
 conditions to which He was subject as their master, and 
 
 ^ "Jesus Christ and the Christian Character," by F. G. Peabody, 
 PP- 54. 55- 
 
THE TEACHING 73 
 
 by means of them speaks to the universal heart of man. 
 This is perhaps best seen in His favourite device of the 
 parable, a form into which much of the teaching is cast, 
 and which needs some special notice. The term parable 
 means the setting of one thing beside another for pur- 
 poses of instruction by comparison or contrast. It is 
 to be distinguished from fable and myth and from teach- 
 ing by allegory. The parables of Jesus are, generally 
 speaking, simple earthly stories or incidents used for the 
 purposes of spiritual instruction by analogy. They are 
 of great literary beauty, and so pointed and even obvious 
 that the most uninstructed hearer can hardly fail to 
 grasp their lesson. Some of them are very brief, hardly 
 more than proverbs and seed parables. Others, again, 
 are longer and more elaborate, and need interpretation 
 before their full meaning can be grasped. Most of 
 them have to do with the kingdom of heaven, and 
 set forth the truth of the doctrine of the kingdom " em- 
 bodied in a tale." The parables have been variously 
 classified, the simplest method being that followed by 
 Edersheim. He divides them into three groups, distin- 
 guished by the time and place of their delivery, (i) 
 Those belonging to the ministry in and near Capernaum, 
 given in Matt, xiii.; (2) those belonging to the journeyings 
 from Galilee to Jerusalem, given in Luke x. 18; and 
 (3) those belonging to the last days in Jerusalem. The 
 
74 LIFE OF CHRIST 
 
 first group deals mainly with the kingdom as a whole, 
 the second with individual members of the kingdom, 
 and the third with the judgment passed on members of 
 the kingdom. It was a very profound insight which 
 led Jesus Christ to the use of this form of teaching. 
 It appealed most effectively to the kind of people with 
 whom He had to deal, and yet required on their part 
 some sympathy with His point of view. Only on such 
 an assumption can we understand the very difficult 
 references in the Synoptic Gospels to the prophecy in 
 Isaiah vi. 9-10, which would seem to imply that the para- 
 bles were used to darken counsel and to bring on those 
 who failed to understand them a greater condemnation. 
 The very word of God is a means of judging men ; their 
 attitude to it fixes their attitude to Him. In regard to 
 the interpretation of the parables there has always been 
 some difference of opinion between those, on the one 
 hand, who are content to discover the main lesson, and 
 those, on the other, who insist on finding some cryptic 
 significance in the smallest details. The safe rule is to 
 follow the method which Jesus Himself indicates in His 
 own interpretation of the parable of the Sower, in which 
 He draws out the lesson of the various parts of the story 
 in the simplest possible way, and avoids all fantastic 
 elaborations. 
 
 A distinction has to be drawn between the teaching 
 
THE TEACHING 7.^ 
 
 given to the disciples and the preaching to the multitudes. 
 It is not, perhaps, always possible clearly to separate the 
 two in the Gospel narratives, but there are certain broad 
 lines of demarcation which may be observed. In the 
 training of the Twelve, Jesus followed more closely the 
 example of the Rabbis. He gathered the little circle 
 round Him, and spoke in intimate terms of the scope and 
 purpose and difficulties of His Messianic work. With 
 the crowd He dealt, naturally, in more popular fashion, 
 and laid the foundations of His doctrine broad and 
 strong. This does not imply, however, that Jesus left 
 with His followers any systematic body of teaching. 
 The only actual words that He taught were those of the 
 Lord's Prayer. For the rest His teaching was occa- 
 sional, and dependent on the incidents and circum- 
 stances He met with. The main impression He left 
 behind was that of His Person. That evidently over- 
 shadowed His sayings, and only after He had left them 
 did the disciples remember that He had said such and 
 such things. His conflict with Rabbinism was not 
 merely directed against the traditionalism of the scribes' 
 interpretation of the Law, but also against their methods. 
 He was never a teacher in the same sense that they were. 
 2 . The Subject-matter of the Teaching : — 
 {a) God the Father. — Every new religion begins in a 
 new revelation of God, or in a new emphasis upon some 
 
76 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 hitherto half-understood aspect of the Divine nature. 
 Just as the starting-point of the religion of Israel was the 
 new name of Yahweh given to God, so it is often claimed 
 that the central point in the doctrine of Jesus is His con- 
 ception of the Fatherhood of God. There is, of course, 
 nothing new in the idea. Jesus accepts a name for 
 God which was already familiar, but fills it with a content 
 and meaning of His own. The determining factor in this 
 is His own relationship to God as Son, and it is from 
 that point that all His doctrine of God begins. As 
 Ritschl says, the distinctive New Testament name for 
 God is "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ," 
 so deep was the impression which Jesus' own personal 
 intuition of God made upon those who first heard Him. 
 The fact that He is Himself conscious of an unique 
 relationship to God is decisive in all His interpretation 
 of God to mankind. No exposition of the teaching of 
 Jesus can be fair or complete which ignores this initial 
 and fundamental fact. From this point of view the use 
 of the term Son of God for Jesus in the New Testament 
 is worth careful study, and serves to indicate not only 
 the conception which the Church had formed in regard 
 to Him but the position which He Himself assumed. 
 He came into the world to do His Father's business 
 (Luke ii. 49), and the consciousness of His communion 
 with the Father and of the Father's approval of His 
 
THE TEACHING 77 
 
 work sustained Him throughout. It is undoubtedly 
 this reading of His own relationship to the Father that 
 regulates the teaching of Jesus in regard to God and 
 man. He speaks to the disciples of " My Father and 
 yours," and teaches them to pray, " Our Father who art 
 in Heaven." This means a considerable advance upon 
 the old conception of a Fatherhood derived from the 
 fact of creation or generation. With Jesus the term 
 Fatherhood describes even something more than a 
 relationship. It gives the essence or spirit which 
 determines God's action and lies behind it all. The 
 parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke xv. 11-32) shows the 
 fatherly spirit in action, and gives as the object of its 
 concern not merely Israel, but sinful men of all kinds ; 
 and it is noteworthy that Jesus is addressing not the 
 disciples but the multitude when He says, "Call no man 
 your Father on earth : for one is your Father, who is in 
 heaven" (Matt, xxiii. 1-9). In the Fourth Gospel, as is 
 perhaps natural, greater stress still is laid on the univer- 
 sality of the Divine Fatherhood. God is the Father of all 
 men because He loves them. This conception of God, 
 however, does not in any way detract from the strength 
 and sternness of the ethics of Jesus. God's relation to 
 man is not resolved by it, as is sometimes supposed, 
 into mere sentimentalism. The stress which Jesus lays 
 upon the love of God only serves to throw into darker 
 
78 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 shadow the horror of man's sin. Sin against a father 
 has a deeper stain of guilt than sin against one who is 
 only a king or a judge. It does not even require 
 positive transgression ; the mere absence of trust and 
 love may constitute sin. Therefore forgiveness becomes 
 altogether a more difficult thing, and the conception of 
 God's Fatherhood, so far from doing away with the need 
 for atonement and reconciliation, makes these things 
 the more imperative. 
 
 But in the view of Jesus, God's love to men takes the 
 form not merely of redemption but of providence. As 
 their Father, God knows the needs of men, and will supply 
 them without fail. It was surely from the depths of His 
 own consciousness of the Divine presence and love that 
 Jesus spoke those striking words about God's clothing 
 of the fields and care for the birds, and warned IT is 
 hearers against being over-anxious about food and 
 raiment in the presence of a Father who "knoweth 
 that ye have need of these things." It is heathenish to 
 care for these things so much, and Jesus inculcates a 
 spirit, not of thriftless improvidence, as is sometimes 
 thought, but of quiet trust and freedom from worry. It 
 is the spirit which Frank Buckland showed when he said 
 in his dying moments, " God, who takes such care of the 
 little fishes, will not forget their inspector." There is 
 thus every reason to believe that those expositors are 
 
THE TEACHING 79 
 
 right who insist that in the mind of Jesus man's relation 
 to God is Hke that of young children to an earthly 
 father. The truly religious spirit is the childlike spirit — 
 the spirit of humble trust and willing obedience. This 
 is the natural attitude of the soul to God, and it contains 
 within it vast potentialities. The distinction between 
 natural and real sonship is valid enough, and indeed 
 necessary. God is the Father of all, but He can only 
 be known as Father by those who accept the position of 
 sons, and who work out their sonship in daily experience. 
 Originally God's relationship to man is something more 
 than merely physical. The fact of creation involves 
 certain powers and possibilities in the creatures, and 
 these are capable of development. Not, however, till they 
 are developed does the full meaning of the Divine image 
 in which they are made dawn upon men. It was not 
 the least among the aims of the teaching of Jesus to 
 bring home to men first the fact of this Divine relation- 
 ship, and then to show them the way to its fuller 
 realisation. It is in Him that men reach a true con- 
 ception of the meaning of God's Fatherhood, and He 
 becomes to them the way to the Father. It is true to 
 say that God is the Father of all men, and that all are 
 by nature His sons, but it is only by grace that they 
 enter into the full range and meaning and enjoyment of 
 their sonship. 
 
8o LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 This conception of God and of the attitude of men 
 towards Him is well illustrated by the teaching of Jesus 
 in regard to prayer. Here, again, He taught by example 
 as well as by precept. To Him that 
 
 " Still communion, which transcends 
 The imperfect offices of prayer and praise," 
 
 was a necessity of the spiritual life and a condition of 
 spiritual activity. It was His custom to retire frequently 
 and at stated seasons, that He might pray in secret to 
 the Father who seeth in secret. He desiderated on the 
 part of His followers the same constant and vivid com- 
 munion with God, in order that they, too, might be able 
 to work the works of God in the world. As we have 
 seen already, He gave them in the Lord's Prayer a 
 definite form of petition, and one that throws much light 
 on His conception of their needs and of the will of (jod 
 in regard to them. Its petitions mingle the simplicity 
 of the child with the sublime ambitions of the saint, and 
 the needs of the physical life with those of the spiritual 
 in a very striking fashion. Not less remarkable is the 
 constant insistence of Jesus on the need for reality in 
 prayer. It is well that we should really speak to God 
 and tell Him what we need, though He knoweth what 
 things we have need of already. It is as though the 
 Father delighted in the free requests of His children. 
 
THE TEACH ING 8i 
 
 But they are not to use vain repetitions as the heathen 
 do. Men are not heard for their much speaking, but 
 for the spirit in which they speak. Nor are they to 
 imagine that they can by prayer impose their wills upon 
 God. " Thy will be done " is the beginning and end of 
 all true prayer, and its object to bring the will of man 
 into closer accord with that of God. Simplicity of 
 speech, sincerity of thought, and submission of the will 
 are thus the three conditions of approach to God which 
 Jesus implicitly lays down. They present us with a 
 conception of man's relationship to God, in which there 
 is a fine blending of childlike trust and godly fear. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE TEACHING (consumed) 
 
 (if) Chrisfs Doctrine of Man. — The teaching of Jesus 
 in regard to God necessarily involved a deeper and 
 fuller conception of humanity than was current among 
 His contemporaries. It would be a mistake, however, 
 to suggest that Jesus formulated a definite anthropology 
 or set forth His views of human nature in any formal 
 fashion. His teaching on the subject has to be gathered 
 from things He took for granted rather than from any 
 set pronouncements. Even thus, however, it is suffi- 
 ciently explicit, as its consequences in Apostolic doctrine 
 clearly enough indicate. The spirit of Jesus was in 
 marked contrast to the jealous exclusiveness of the 
 Judaism of His day. He was sent first. He admitted, 
 to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, but He had 
 other sheep which were not of this fold. He was con- 
 cerned with man as man, and not as Jew or Greek, 
 bond or free. His purpose on the earth was to save 
 
 men, and the mere statement of this purpose involved 
 
 82 
 
THE TEACHING 83 
 
 the belief in the salvability of all men. The sharpest 
 criticism of His contemporaries was aroused by the fact 
 that Jesus was concerned to meet on the footing of a 
 common humanity with those whom the world con- 
 sidered to be outcasts. " He eateth and drinketh with 
 publicans and sinners" (Matt. xi. 19, Luke xv. i) be- 
 came the first and chief count in their indictment against 
 Him. Jesus accepted to the full the fact of man's sin, 
 with its awful consequences in sorrow and suffering. 
 But He also accepted the fact of man's freedom, and 
 therefore of the possibility of his co-operation in the act 
 of healing and forgiveness. In His eyes sinners were 
 " the lost " ; but, to Him, whatever was lost might be 
 saved. He preached a Gospel of hope. And He saved 
 sinners like Matthew the publican and Mary the Mag- 
 dalen, because in Him they realised for the first time 
 that there was hope even for them. In the teaching of 
 Jesus, man is therefore a being of infinite worth, because 
 of a genuinely spiritual nature and Divine capability. 
 And it was in order to make these possibilities actual 
 that Jesus came into the world. These are the "glad 
 tidings " of God which He has to bring. 
 
 (c) The Kingdom of God. — The vehicle in which the 
 message of Jesus to mankind was conveyed is known as 
 His doctrine of the kingdom of God or of heaven. 
 Both He and John the Baptist came preaching that the 
 
84 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 kingdom of heaven was at hand ; but though the text 
 in both cases was the same, a very different interpreta- 
 tion has to be put upon it. John represented the old 
 dispensation, and his view of the kingdom closely re- 
 sembled the Messianic teaching of the prophets. It 
 involved an ethical revival as a preliminary to the re- 
 establishment of the theocracy. With Jesus, however, 
 the kingdom is something much more original and 
 positive. It is at once present and future, actual and 
 ideal. It means the reign of God in humanity. The 
 kingdom comes when men do the will of God, and 
 comes in all men who do His will. It is not an organi- 
 sation but a spirit, not a society but a temper, an instinct, 
 an attitude. It is among or within men, and it comes 
 without observation ; nevertheless the fruits of it are 
 manifest, and in God's good time it will be consummated 
 in the universal humanity of which Jesus Christ Him- 
 self is the head. Jesus' preaching of the kingdom was 
 without either form or detail. Our idea of it has to be 
 gathered from many scattered references, parables, and 
 apocalyptic sayings. In the interpretation of these there 
 is room for wide diversities of opinion, but, in spite of 
 this, the general features of the kingdom are sufficiently 
 distinct, and afford a picture of exceeding interest and 
 spiritual beauty. 
 
 It is now generally agreed that both terms, " kingdom 
 
THE TEACHING 85 
 
 of God " and " kingdom of heaven," were used by Jesus 
 Himself, the latter being probably an euphemism for 
 the former, and that they mean a ruling of earthly things 
 according to Divine or heavenly laws. The conception 
 was one which the Messianic prophecies had made 
 familiar to the contemporaries of Jesus, but His first 
 work was to dissociate it from some of the ideas with 
 which it was inevitably connected in the popular mind. 
 As Sanday says, " The contemporaries of Jesus, when 
 they spoke of 'the kingdom of God,' thought chiefly 
 of an empire contrasted with the great world-empires, 
 more especially the Roman, which galled them at the 
 moment. And the two features which caught their 
 imagination most were the throwing off of the hated 
 yoke and the transference of supremacy from the heathen 
 to Israel. This was to be brought about by a catas- 
 trophe which was to close the existing order of things, 
 and which therefore took a shape which was eschato- 
 logical." Of Jesus' doctrine of the last things in 
 connection with the kingdom we shall speak later. 
 Meanwhile it is important to note that He gave no counte- 
 nance to the popular desire for a revolt against Rome, 
 and that His teaching throughout takes a spiritual rather 
 than a material or political form. No doubt the prin- 
 ciples which He inculcated had vast social and political 
 consequences, but it was with the principles themselves 
 
86 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 that He was chiefly concerned. The parable of the 
 leaven exactly expresses the situation. He hid the 
 leaven of His teaching in human hearts, and it has been 
 working ever since, and will go on working to the end 
 of time. 
 
 Thus Jesus' idea of the kingdom was not that of a 
 philosophy slowly developing in the minds of men, but 
 of a supernatural power descending as it were upon them 
 from the without and the beyond. The kingdom 
 ''comes," "is given," "is prepared," has to be "in- 
 herited," "sought for," and " entered into." As Bousset 
 puts it : " Jesus did not say to the people, ' The moment 
 has arrived for you to do something that the kingdom 
 may come, for you to compel its coming ; ' that was the 
 captivating message of the fanatical patriots who sought 
 to effect insurrections in Galilee at that time. But to 
 Jesus it was absolutely certain that the every-day doings 
 and the earthly labour of man could not bring the 
 coming of the kingdom one finger's-breadth nearer. 
 For Him the coming of the kingdom was something 
 entirely miraculous and future. The living Almighty 
 God, and He alone, will set up His miraculous kingdom." 
 That the perfecting of the kingdom will not come about 
 till the distant future Jesus makes abundantly dear, but 
 it is equally part of His teaching that the kingdom has 
 its beginning in the hearts of men here and now. It 
 
THE TEACHING gy 
 
 means the working of invisible laws, which gradually 
 extend their operation until the time comes when all 
 men are under their sway. There is very little doubt 
 that the Christian Church is the instrument by which 
 Jesus intended that His kingdom should be advanced 
 in the world — a view which supplies the only possible 
 answer to the vexed question as to the relation between 
 the kingdom and the Church. The Church is an in- 
 stitution and the kingdom an influence, and the two are 
 never to be identified. They stand rather in the rela- 
 tion of means and end, the Church being the divinely 
 appointed means for the realisation of the Divine ends 
 of the kingdom. The kingdom is thus the wider and 
 the Church the narrower and more limited conception. 
 The Church, too, is to be estimated by the success with 
 which it fulfils the aims which the kingdom sets before it, 
 and prepares the way for the final and universal reign of 
 God among men. It would be quite in accordance with 
 the ideas of Jesus to regard the Church as the soil which 
 receives the good seed of the kingdom, so that it germi- 
 nates and puts forth, first the blade, then the ear, and 
 then the full corn in the ear. Many of the parables 
 emphasise the idea that the growth of the kingdom 
 can only be slow, but they look forward at the same 
 time to a final establishment of the reign of God in 
 righteousness, when the kingdom shall have "come." 
 
88 LIFE OF CHRIST 
 
 The nature of the kingdom is perhaps best understood 
 from the conditions which Jesus laid down for entrance 
 into it, and from the qualities which were expected 
 of its members. The preaching of the kingdom was 
 always associated with repentance, and no man could 
 enter it until he had come to himself as did the Prodigal 
 in the parable. Change of heart, revolt against the 
 sinful past, and acceptance of a new role, were the inevit- 
 able beginnings of the new life. " Except ye turn, and 
 become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter into 
 the kingdom of heaven " (Matt, xviii. 3). In the Fourth 
 Gospel the new life of the kingdom is entered by a new 
 birth, which is accompanied by a baptism of water and 
 of the Spirit (John iii. 5). That baptism was to be the 
 sign of entrance into the kingdom rather than a condition 
 precedent was assumed from the teaching of Jesus. It 
 was a token of the Divine forgiveness which always 
 followed the act of repentance. It is quite clear that 
 in the mind of Jesus the spiritual change necessary to 
 membership in His kingdom was positive as well as 
 negative; that it not only left the things that were 
 behind, but reached forward to the things that were 
 before. It involved, that is to say, the putting on of 
 what the Apostle Paul came afterwards to call a new 
 man in Christ Jesus. The descriptions of this new man, 
 and of the lineaments of his character, are among the 
 
THE TEACHING 89 
 
 most notable things in the teaching of Jesus. The note 
 of childlikeness, simpHcity, and humble trust struck 
 at the outset is dominant all through. The ideal thus 
 depicted stands in marked contrast to most other ideals 
 of human character, and especially to those chiefly in 
 vogue in the ancient world. There could hardly be a 
 deeper distinction than that between the magnanimous 
 man of Aristotle and the Christian as Christ painted him. 
 In the ancient as in the modern world, the pushful and 
 aggressive virtues were those most in favour. The sons 
 of the kingdom, however, were to be distinguished 
 chiefly by meekness, poverty of spirit (which does not 
 mean poor-spiritedness), mercifulness, purity of heart, 
 humility, and the like. Love to God and to one's neigh- 
 bour summed up for them the whole duty of man, and 
 their love of their neighbours was to be shown by a 
 spirit of service and self-denial in all their relations with 
 their fellows. The type of character set forth in the 
 Sermon on the Mount, beautiful and attractive as it is, 
 has never won the place either in Christian preaching 
 or in Christian practice that it deserves. Yet there can 
 be no question that Jesus meant every word that He 
 spoke in this connection, and that the kingdom of God 
 will only come when men and women are framed on 
 this model and exhibit this spirit. Both in the ancient 
 and in the modern world the ideal of Jesus has been 
 
90 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 rejected as unpractical, and as impossible of realisation 
 in any organised society. But the best commendation 
 of an ideal is the difficulty of realising it, and the ethical 
 teaching of Jesus is known and justified by its fruits. 
 Already it has profoundly modified the whole of human 
 conduct. It has entered human society like the leaven 
 of the parable, and if the whole lump is not yet leavened 
 that is only to say that the kingdom is not yet come. 
 It must be remembered, too, that Jesus was legislating 
 for a society within society, that He aimed and aims still 
 to reform society from above, and that new conditions 
 are needed before His precepts can have full scope. 
 The ethics of Jesus are inseparable from His religion, 
 and the two taken together form a combination of irre- 
 sistible beauty and strength. " It was not an accident 
 that Christianity is the religion of the Crucified. The 
 Cross is like the culminating expression of a spirit which 
 was characteristic of it throughout. Its peculiar note is, 
 Victory through suffering. An idea like that of Islam, 
 making its way by the sword, was abhorrent to it from the 
 first. Jesus came to be the Messiah of the Jews, but the 
 narratives of the Temptation teach us that, from the very 
 beginning of His career. He stripped off from His con- 
 ception of the Messiahship all that was political, all 
 thought of propagating His claims by force. A new 
 mode of propagating religion was deliberately chosen, 
 
THE TEACHING 91 
 
 and carried through with uncompromising thoroughness. 
 The disciple was not above his Master ; and the example 
 which Jesus set in founding His faith by dying for it, 
 was an example which His disciples were called upon 
 to follow into all its logical consequences. Christianity, 
 the true Christianity, carries no arms : it wins its way 
 by lowly service, by patience, by self-sacrifice." ^ 
 
 One of the chief gains of modern Biblical study is an 
 ethical rather than a metaphysical interpretation of the 
 Person of Jesus Christ. Perhaps the only justification 
 of that much-abused cry, " Back to Christ ! " is that it 
 leads us to explain Him in the light of His own teaching 
 rather than in that of any system of human philosophy. 
 And no one can deny that in the teaching of Jesus the 
 ethical element largely predominates. It has already 
 been pointed out that He was Himself the doctrine He 
 taught. In His own Person is to be found the best ex- 
 emplification of His words. He called men and women 
 to come unto Him and to follow Him, that in so doing 
 they might find the true life of God in the world. It 
 was no ascetic ideal to which He pointed His followers, 
 but a life of active service both of God and man. The 
 righteousness of the kingdom was to be both higher and 
 better than the current Jewish righteousness of the 
 time, strict and scrupulous as that was. Jesus did not 
 
 ^ Sanday, " Outlines of the Life of Christ," p. 88. 
 
92 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 despise law, but His law was a very different thing from 
 the outward legalism of the Pharisees. He looked at 
 motive, intention, and desire as being at least as signi- 
 ficant morally as their outward expression in conduct. 
 The will to do, rather than the act, was the all-important 
 factor in His eyes. Humble submission of the will to 
 the rule of God in the soul is the only way to true 
 blessedness. This means a relationship to God based 
 on love and expressed in prayers and filial obedience. 
 It means also that the disciple learns to see as with 
 God's eyes and to judge others more as He judges them, 
 and so to behave towards them in a spirit of true self- 
 forgetfulness and charity (cf. Matt. vii. 21). The type 
 of character which Jesus strove to bring about in men 
 is based on struggle, discipline, and self-denial. His 
 ethical teaching, though social in its consequences, is 
 based on a keen appreciation of the value of the in- 
 dividual soul, which can only find itself by complete 
 submission to God and an exclusive passion for spiritual 
 ends. This explains the apparent harshness and diffi- 
 culty of some of the precepts of Jesus, e.g. " Resist 
 not him that is evil" (Matt. v. 39); " Give to him that 
 asketh thee " (Matt. v. 42) ; " If any man love father or 
 mother more than me," &c. (Luke xiv. 26 and Matt. 
 X. 27), and the like. These and many other sayings of 
 the same kind are not to be interpreted as universal . and 
 
THE TEACHING 93 
 
 unalterable laws, but rather as laying down principles 
 which have to be applied by the men of every age 
 according to the circumstances in which they are 
 placed. Just as the stress of Jesus is laid on dis- 
 positions rather than on single actions, so the life of 
 the kingdom will be regulated not by the details of a 
 complete legal system but by the free and intelligent 
 service of dedicated spirits. Beside purity of heart, 
 singleness of purpose, and love, all other things have 
 only relative values, and will fall into their proper place. 
 To put first things first was the aim of the teaching of 
 Jesus, and the kingdom was the sphere in which this 
 teaching was to be practised. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE TEACHING {concluded) 
 
 (d) The Messiah, — Every student of the life of Jesus 
 Christ is faced with the question, "What was His 
 relationship to the Messianic teaching and expectation 
 of His day ? " There is no doubt that the aim of the 
 four Gospels is to prove, or at least to set forth to the 
 world, that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. This 
 could not be attempted without assuming that He came 
 to fulfil the expectation of the people that a Messiah 
 (a divinely anointed one) should come and restore 
 the kingdom to Israel. There is no doubt, too, that 
 Jesus Himself taught that this expectation was realised 
 in Himself — and that He stood in an unique relation- 
 ship to God on the one hand and to man on the 
 other. Proof of this, if needed, may be found in 
 Peter's confession at Coesarea, in the account of the 
 entry into Jerusalem, in Jesus' oath before the High 
 Priest, and in the Roman inscription on the Cross. 
 The difficulty of the subject for us, however, arises 
 
 94 
 
THE TEACHING 
 
 95 
 
 from the fact that the conception which Jesus Him- 
 self held of His vocation was widely different from 
 the popular Messianic ideas of His time. In fulfilling 
 the Messianic conception He transformed it, and His 
 peculiar interpretation of it has to be studied in all 
 its bearings, apart from its Old Testament model. 
 
 In the time of Jesus the expectation of a Messiah 
 was widely prevalent throughout Palestine and the 
 whole Jewish world, but the forms which the expecta- 
 tion took were both various and vague. The more 
 educated and religious sections of the people based 
 their belief in the Messiah on the Old Testament 
 Scriptures and on various apocalyptic writings, but 
 with the vulgar the Messianic hope took a much more 
 political and material shape. There is a certain dis- 
 tinction to be maintained between an earthly and a 
 heavenly conception of Messiah's kingdom, though 
 these were often combined, and the same men be- 
 lieved that the Son of David who should come would 
 restore the political supremacy to Israel. There is 
 no clear proof, however, that the Messiah was re- 
 garded as being necessarily divine or supernatural, nor 
 can it be shown that there was any general expecta- 
 tion that He would suffer for the sins of the people. 
 Though popular religious thought in the first century 
 B.C. was saturated with the idea of the coming of a 
 
96 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 king who should establish a new kingdom in peace 
 and righteousness, the conception never attained either 
 coherence or unity. So far as the work of Jesus is 
 concerned, it cannot be said that the Messianic idea, 
 as He found it, did more than provide a background 
 for His teaching, and a line of thought which He 
 could easily adapt for His purposes. The men and 
 women of His own immediate circle were among those 
 pious souls who were looking for the consolation of 
 Israel, and who held the more spiritual view of the 
 form which that consolation should take. It was a 
 perfectly natural thing that, as their intimacy with 
 Jesus grew, they should come to attach to Him those 
 high hopes and beliefs which they had long cherished. 
 It was also natural, and strictly in accordance with 
 His methods, that He should use the fact as the 
 vehicle of His larger teaching. The scene at Caesarea 
 Philippi, and the confession of Peter, witness to the 
 reality of the disciples' belief. But the words of Jesus, 
 " Blessed art thou, Simon, son of Jonas, for flesh and 
 blood have not revealed it unto thee (e.^: that I am 
 the Christ), but my Father in heaven," show that 
 He Himself admitted the position, and wished them 
 to accept Him as the one who was to come. There 
 is practically no evidence for the opinion now often 
 urged, that the disciples did not come to regard Jesus 
 
THETEACHING 97 
 
 as Messiah till after His death. As Wernle says, " The 
 belief of the disciples in their Messiah must be older 
 than Jesus' death, for it could not entirely arise after 
 that death, which was such a grievous disappointment 
 to so many expectations. If it is older than Jesus' 
 death, it is incredible that Jesus did not share it, and 
 yet suffered it to be held." 
 
 We are on much more difficult ground when we come 
 to answer the question as to how far Jesus intended the 
 disciples to attach to Himself the popular Messianic 
 conceptions. This involves an examination of the 
 whole of His teaching in regard to Himself and to His 
 mission in the world, and such an examination results 
 in the conviction that while Jesus accepted the Mes- 
 sianic form, He filled it with a content that was all His 
 own. 
 
 I. This is seen, in the first place, in the names 
 which Jesus used of Himself. Of these, far the most 
 important is the term Son of man. This is found some 
 eighty times in the Gospels, and is generally regarded 
 as the title which Jesus used as best expressing His 
 office among men. As to its meaning very varied ex- 
 planations have been given, but of them all only two 
 stand out as deserving notice. One is that the phrase 
 is used always in the sense of its Aramaic original, which 
 simply means " man," i.e. in the sense of " mankind " ; 
 
98 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 and the other is that the term is used in the Messianic 
 sense in which it is frequently found in Daniel and the 
 Book of Enoch, where the Son of man is a superhuman 
 Person whose office is to judge the quick and the dead, 
 to vindicate the righteous, and to punish the wicked. 
 When we come to study the use of the title by Jesus 
 Himself there seems every reason for believing that 
 both these significations were involved in it. It is 
 evident that the phrase was not a new one, though it 
 was not altogether familiar (Matt, xvi, 13). It had a 
 certain Messianic content, and in the usage of Jesus 
 was frequently connected with ideas of apocalypse and 
 judgment {cf. Matt. xiii. 41, xvi. 28, xix. 28, xxiv. 30, 
 XXV. 31, xxvi. 64, &c.). It is noteworthy also that the 
 phrase is used in connection with His death and suffer- 
 ing when Jesus foretold these things to the disciples 
 (Mark viii. 31). At the same time, it is clear that the 
 wider use of the term as equivalent to mankind (or 
 perhaps we may say, the representative or ideal man) 
 was not infrequently before the mind of Jesus — e.g. 
 " The Son of man is Lord also of the Sabbath." This 
 latter view, however, cannot be taken exclusively with- 
 out doing violence to the Gospel narratives. It is 
 abundantly clear that this most significant title attests 
 the claim of Jesus to stand in an unique relationship to 
 mankind. It meant on His lips that He had the power 
 
THE TEACHING 99 
 
 of forgiveness and judgment, and that the destinies of 
 the race were in some way bound up in Him. 
 
 The name Son of God is more frequently given to 
 Jesus by others than used by Himself. But more 
 significant even than the actual use of the name is the 
 assumption of a special filial relationship to God in- 
 volved in the words " My Father," which were so often 
 in the mouth of Jesus {cf. Matt. vii. 21, x. 32, xi. 27, 
 &c.). It is quite evident that the disciples of Jesus 
 gathered from His teaching and, may we not say, from 
 His prayers, that He was God's Son in a very real and 
 exclusive sense, and that He neither did nor said any- 
 thing to disabuse them of the idea. 
 
 2. A much more important aspect of the Messianic 
 consciousness of Jesus is His conception of the work 
 which He had come into the world to do. This serves to 
 fill out the content of the names He used. His mission 
 as He conceived it was to save men from their sins. 
 The notion of the Messiah as a Deliverer He made 
 all His own, but the deliverance He contemplated 
 was not either political or material, but spiritual in its 
 aim and scope. He came not to set up a new State, 
 but to make new men. In His eyes the great enemy 
 was not the imperial might of the Caesars, but the 
 power and mischief of sin. In regard to this Jesus 
 was under no illusions, for from the very outset of His 
 
loo LIFE OF CHRIST 
 
 ministry He realised that this deliverance would not 
 be won save at the price of Himself, that the Son of 
 man would need to give Himself a ransom for many. 
 The story of the Temptation is the beginning of the 
 sacrifice of the Cross ; it strikes at the very outset 
 that note which remains dominant throughout the 
 ministry. No doubt this conception gained in intensity 
 as Jesus came into closer contact with the sins and 
 miseries of men. But it did not originate with His 
 knowledge of these things. It was with Him from the 
 first. Though He only disclosed it by degrees to the 
 disciples, and as they were able to hear it, it was ever 
 in the background of His own mind, and to ignore it 
 is to misunderstand alike His ministry and His teach- 
 ing. That the Son of man must suffer, that He had a 
 baptism to be baptized with and a cup to drink, that 
 He came into the world to minister and to give His 
 life a ransom for many, represented the necessity laid 
 upon Him not merely by the sin of man, but by His 
 own nature and the purpose of His life {cf. Mark ii. 20, 
 viii. 31, 33 ; Matt. xvi. 21). This idea of the Messianic 
 function reaches its culmination in the institution of the 
 Lord's Supper (Mark xiv. 22 ; Matt. xxvi. 28 ; Luke xxii. 
 19). The words there used are most significant, and throw 
 much light on Jesus' own conception of His work. Briefly 
 
THE TEACHING 
 
 they mean that He looked forward to His own death 
 not merely as the end of His career, but as a necessary 
 and most important part of His Messianic work, that 
 He attributed to it a certain saving significance, and 
 that He connected it in His own mind in some way 
 with the forgiveness of sins. It is on the fact that 
 these ideas are unmistakably present in the teaching of 
 Jesus that the whole doctrine of the Church regarding 
 salvation, atonement, and the like has been built. But 
 for our immediate purpose the important point is that 
 to the mind of Jesus Himself these ideas were con- 
 tinually present. When criticism has done its worst 
 with them there still remains this wonderful concep- 
 tion of Jesus as a Saviour of men, and one willing to 
 give Himself to the uttermost for their salvation. This 
 may not be Messianic in the usually accepted sense of 
 the term, but it was chief among the functions of the 
 Messiah as Jesus conceived them. 
 
 3. Another and very important element in the 
 Messianic teaching of Jesus is its connection with the 
 doctrine of the last things. It is a mistake, however, 
 to try and frame an elaborate eschatology from His 
 words. He spoke in poetry and figure and adopted ideas 
 current in His time. It is a grave error to turn His poetry 
 into prose. Though the progress of the kingdom of 
 
I02 LIFE OF CHRIST 
 
 heaven was necessarily to be slow, it would one day 
 reach a final consummation. This consummation was 
 ever present to the thought of Jesus. He had no 
 notion of evil as a permanent and necessary force in the 
 universe. Ultimately it was to be thwarted. The love 
 of God will triumph in the end, and His kingdom will 
 be finally established, Jesus Christ Himself being the 
 appointed instrument in the work. This triumph takes 
 a twofold form in the resurrection of individuals and the 
 judgment of the race. It is inseparably connected in 
 thought with a last day, a last judgment, and with the 
 second coming of the Messiah in glory. These ideas 
 have been described as "temporal expressions for un- 
 speakable and timeless realities." It is not always easy 
 to distinguish them in the teaching of Jesus. He Him- 
 self asserts His ignorance of the times and seasons when 
 they may be expected. " Of that day and hour knoweth 
 no one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son 
 but the Father " (Mark xiii. 32). So in Acts i. 7 : " It is 
 not for you to know the times and seasons which the 
 Father hath set within His own authority." In apparent 
 contradiction with this are a number of sayings which 
 prophesy the coming of the kingdom within the lifetime 
 of the then present generation {cf. Mark ix. i, xiii. 30; 
 Matt, xxv., xxxi. 32, and xxvi. 64). These and other 
 
T H E T E A C H I N G 103 
 
 similar passages, however, may very well be regarded as 
 references to the death of Jesus Himself, an apparent 
 defeat, but a real victory of the power and love of God. 
 Such references as these are spiritualised in the Fourth 
 Gospel {cf. John xiv. 18, 28, and xii. 31), where even the 
 judgment of the Son of man is regarded as a present 
 spiritual judgment {cf. " Now is the judgment of this 
 world "). The death of Jesus is regarded as one stage in 
 the eschatological process; and the imminent fall of 
 Jerusalem is looked upon as another {cf. Matt. xxiv. and 
 Mark xiii.). In the minds of the Evangelists there is 
 unquestionably some confusion between these various 
 stages and events, and we have not the data to enable 
 us satisfactorily to disentangle it. The final scene in 
 the process is one of judgment, and the remarkable 
 thing about this is that Jesus identifies it with His own 
 coming again in glory, and teaches that it is in Him that 
 men will be judged. " Inasmuch as ye have done it or 
 done it not unto one of the least of these, ye have done 
 it or done it not unto me." 
 
 Many vexed questions arise here, but it is only pos- 
 sible to suggest that there are certain indications which 
 seem to point to the possibility of a period of probation 
 after death. The story of the rich man and Lazarus 
 is a case in point, and may be compared with such 
 
I04 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 phrases as " Entering into life maimed," and " the sin 
 which will not be forgiven either in this life or in that 
 which is to come." This, however, is not allowed to 
 detract from the seriousness of the issues at stake. 
 The life that a man now lives determines his future, 
 and is therefore weighted with infinite significance. In 
 the final judgment that awaits all men Jesus Christ is 
 both the judge and the law or standard by which men 
 are judged. The end of the judgment is the final 
 establishment of the kingdom of heaven in righteousness 
 and peace. 
 
 Such is the picture of His person and work which 
 Jesus suffered to grow before the minds of His first 
 followers. At best it is but an outline, often blurred, and 
 always needing details to be filled in. It is impossible 
 now always to distinguish between the words of Jesus 
 Himself and the reflections of His reporters. Nor can 
 we be sure that they rightly express what they heard from 
 Him. His teaching was of set purpose cast in the 
 mould of ideas and phrases which were familiar to them, 
 and we cannot now always distinguish between what is 
 substance and what is merely form. Still less can we 
 conclude how far in the mind of Jesus the peculiar 
 Messianic form which His teaching concerning Himself 
 assumed was meant to be permanent. In spite of all 
 
THE TEACHING 105 
 
 these uncertainties, however, the main facts of the 
 position stand out with sufficient clearness. The esti- 
 mate which the early Church formed of Jesus, and the 
 language used regarding Him in the canonical epistles, 
 had their origin and justification in the facts of His 
 earthly career and in the impression which these facts 
 had left on the minds of the first disciples. All the 
 records go to show that the main feature about the 
 earthly appearance and teaching of Jesus was a note of 
 authority or power. The claims He made were, to the 
 men who knew Him, entirely consonant with His actions 
 and with His general attitude. Their chief surprise was 
 in the fact that He did not follow up these claims in the 
 way which they had always been taught to expect. If 
 He had marshalled legions of angels and called down 
 fire from heaven, there would have been nothing in the 
 action to astonish them. It was because He did not 
 do these things that His Messiahship seemed so strange 
 a thing. Another factor in the situation is that Jesus 
 Himself, though unmistakably conscious of His power, 
 was so entirely reserved in the use of it. His vast claim 
 was put forth in a manner so humble, and His power 
 was exercised so sparingly, that it is no wonder that men 
 should mistake both His spirit and His actions. This 
 is not after the manner of men, and it should really be 
 
io6 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 counted more marvellous in our eyes than some of those 
 obvious marvels at which we are inclined to stumble. 
 There can be no doubt, then, that Jesus suffered men to 
 think of Him as one who had come into the world to 
 fulfil the Divine plan concerning men and their salvation, 
 to mediate to them the will of God, and to open to them 
 the way to God. There can be no doubt also that He 
 saw, and would have them see, in Himself one who 
 stood in a peculiar relationship to God, and who had a 
 right to speak with authority in the name of God. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE ACTIVE MINISTRY 
 
 We have now to take up again the threads of the story 
 of the ministry of Jesus. The period under survey 
 covers the latter part of the year a.d. 27 up to the Pass- 
 over in the beginning of a.d. 28, and is marked by 
 a more definite and detailed preaching of the kingdom 
 and by a number of miracles, which serve not only, as 
 they have been called, as " the great bell before the 
 sermon," but are themselves a very real part of the 
 teaching. It is in this period, too, that Jesus begins to 
 differentiate His own teaching on the kingdom from 
 that of John the Baptist, and that in so doing He first 
 arouses the hostility of the authorised religious teachers 
 of His day. It must never be forgotten that at first the 
 ministry of Jesus in Galilee met with a great, if some- 
 what superficial, popular success. Even the common 
 people saw in Him a teacher very different from the 
 scribes and doctors of the law whom they were accus- 
 tomed to hear. These were mere echoes of the past, 
 
io8 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 exponents and interpreters of a law whose precepts they 
 had eviscerated of all spiritual content, and of which 
 they had only the dry bones left to offer to hungry 
 men. In sharp contrast with these, Jesus spake on His 
 own authority and with first-hand knowledge. He ap- 
 pealed not to tradition, but to the religious instinct and 
 common sense of His hearers. "Ye have heard how it 
 hath been said unto you by them of old time — but I say 
 unto you," was a frequent formula on His lips. There- 
 fore the people heard Him gladly, and when they saw 
 such teaching supported by the evidence of wonderful 
 works of healing, whose reality not even the enemies 
 of Jesus could gainsay, it is no wonder that they 
 crowded round the new Teacher and willingly regarded 
 Him as one sent from God {cf. Mark ii. 2, iii. 7-10 ; 
 Luke vii. 16). 
 
 But Jesus Himself knew what was in the hearts of 
 men, and understood from the first that this popularity 
 could not last. His own idea of His mission in the 
 world, and of the kingdom which He had come to 
 proclaim, was, as we have seen, very different from the 
 Messianic conceptions of His day. And as He began to 
 make this known misunderstandings inevitably arose. 
 The authority with which Jesus spoke was in marked 
 contrast to the humility and reticence of Mis demeanour 
 in other respects. Even when the people were willing 
 
THE ACTIVE MINISTRY 109 
 
 to acclaim Him as a king, or at least as a great prophet 
 risen up among them, He would do nothing to en- 
 courage them. Whenever the enthusiasm of the crowd 
 reached its height, He withdrew Himself and suffered it 
 to die down again. More than once He charged those 
 on whom He had wrought some work of healing to go 
 quietly to their homes and not make the fact known, 
 and when they would have made open confession of 
 Him, " He suffered not the demons to speak, because 
 they knew Him " (Mark i. 34, iii. 12). This period of the 
 ministry was, thus, eminently the time of seed-sowing. 
 Jesus' method was deliberately that of one who would 
 not strive nor cry aloud. He refused to advertise 
 Himself, and shrank from nothing so much as from 
 making a sensation. His aim was gradually to inform 
 and awaken a few (those that had ears to hear), and 
 through them permeate others with the truth He had to 
 reveal. The good seed of the kingdom was to be sown 
 quietly, and even secretly, and left to germinate. A 
 moral revolution was in progress, but the time of its 
 manifestation was not yet. 
 
 Under these circumstances it was inevitable that 
 Jesus should come into conflict with the regular 
 religious teachers of His time. Even in Galilee, and 
 still more in Jerusalem, these were all-powerful, and 
 enjoyed an entire monopoly of the popular favour. 
 
no LIFE OF CHRIST 
 
 In every village and town in Palestine there was the 
 local synagogue, the centre of its religious life, and 
 attached to every synagogue were scribes and elders. 
 These local teachers are to be distinguished from the 
 "scribes sent down from Jerusalem," who were emis- 
 saries of the temple hierarchy, and from the Hero- 
 dians, a dynastic party of the Herods, who afterwards 
 combined with them, for reasons of their own, in op- 
 position to Jesus. The familiar phrase " scribes and 
 Pharisees " is a generic term comprising those teachers 
 of the people who belonged to the stricter and more 
 patriotic section of the religious community. The 
 Pharisees, or Perushim, were the descendants of the 
 men of the Maccabean age who had earned for them- 
 selves by their devotion the title Kasidhim or Pious. 
 They represented the most rigid and exclusive type of 
 Judaism, and by their devotion to the study and 
 interpretation of the Law, had won the right to "sit 
 in Moses' seat." The use they made of their position 
 and privileges proved disastrous to the spiritual life 
 of the people. In their hands the Law became a 
 mere instrument of tyranny over the consciences of 
 the faithful. To use the familiar phrase, they made 
 a hedge round the Law, i.e. they so elaborated its 
 precepts that a man would have to break quite a 
 number of minor ordinances before he came near 
 
THE ACTIVE MINISTRY iii 
 
 transgressing the law itself.^ For example, they 
 enumerated thirty-nine works which were forbidden 
 on the Sabbath, but in the case of each of them entered 
 into endless discussions as to what exactly constituted 
 the breach. Reaping and threshing were forbidden, 
 but as to whether plucking a few ears and rubbing them 
 in the hands were lawful or not was a matter of grave 
 dispute. Thus the righteousness which they inculcated 
 was of the purely legalistic type, and justified the word 
 of Jesus to His followers, " Except your righteousness 
 exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees 
 ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven." 
 It was on this ground that the natural opposition of 
 Jesus to these men made itself felt. To them religion 
 was an affair of the forcing-house, while He lived in 
 the freedom of God's open heaven. They made men 
 slaves of God and of His will ; He came to give them 
 the liberty of sons. They sought to force piety into 
 rigid and uniform moulds ; He would have it grow 
 naturally and spontaneously. No doubt it is true that 
 it was the Jerusalem priests and the Sadducees who 
 killed Jesus in the end, but throughout His ministry 
 the Pharisees were His real opponents. To Him they 
 were hypocrites, actors who wore a semblance of that 
 
 1 On this whole subject, cf. Schiirer, " The Jewish People in the 
 Time of Jesus Christ," vol. ii. sec. 2, p. 96. 
 
LIFE OF CHRIST 
 
 righteousness which they did not really possess. He 
 rebuked them in terms of unmeasured mdignation and 
 scorn, and found in their errors and follies a con- 
 venient background against which to paint in bright 
 free colours His picture of the kingdom of heaven. 
 
 It is to this earlier part of the active ministry of Jesus 
 that the preaching of the kingdom mainly belongs. 
 This preaching was partly parabolic and partly didactic. 
 Of this latter St. Matthew's gospel gives a striking example 
 in the collection of discourses known to us by the name 
 of the Sermon on the Mount. This is now generally 
 regarded not as a set speech spoken on a single occasion, 
 but as a summary of the main points of the teaching. 
 Nowhere else in the Gospels is the character required 
 of members of the kingdom more vividly portrayed. 
 It is altogether a mistake to regard this *' Sermon " as 
 a mere exposition of Christian ethic, and as in some 
 way alien from the " Gospel." On the contrary, the 
 religious aim and motive is dominant throughout. The 
 Sermon also contains an implicit theology, and witnesses 
 unmistakably to the authority of the teacher and to 
 the place which He occupies in His own doctrine. 
 
 The " mighty works " of this period illustrate mainly 
 the attitude of compassion which Jesus took up towards 
 sinful and suffering humanity. The healing of the palsied 
 man, with its remarkable testimony, "The Son of man 
 
THE ACTIVE MINISTRY 113 
 
 hath power on earth to forgive sins," the casting out of 
 devils, the opening of bHnd eyes, the feeding of the 
 hungry multitudes, and the mission of the twelve, all 
 stand out not as mere signs and wonders, but as acts of 
 pure compassion wrung from the very heart of Jesus. 
 It cannot be insisted on too strongly that, even as seen 
 through the credulous eyes of those who report them, 
 these miracles represent a kind of minimum of power, 
 and appear an altogether natural accompaniment of the 
 claims which Jesus made. We would also note once 
 more that they form in themselves no inconsiderable part 
 of the teaching of Jesus concerning Himself. This is 
 probably more easily comprehended by us than it could 
 be by His contemporaries, but there is no question that 
 these miracles do more than merely witness to extra- 
 ordinary powers ; they help us to see what Jesus meant 
 when He called Himself the " Son of man," and they 
 prepare the way for the further and final manifestation 
 of the kingdom of heaven. 
 
 The feast of the Passover in the early part of the year 
 A.D. 28 marks the beginning of another stage in the 
 ministry of Jesus. From that time until the Feast of 
 Tabernacles in the October of the same year He was 
 occupied in extending and consolidating His work in 
 Galilee. The scene of this work was mainly the shores 
 of the lake of Galilee, but from there Jesus journeyed 
 
 H 
 
114 LIFE OF CHRIST 
 
 to the borders of Tyre and Sidon, thence eastward through 
 the district of Csesarea Philippi, returning finally to 
 Capernaum round the east of the lake through Decapolis. 
 It has been noted that this journey led for the most 
 part through the dominion of Philip, the brother of 
 Herod Antipas, and there is good reason for the belief 
 that it was taken in order to avoid the growing hostility 
 of Herod on the one hand, and the importunities of the 
 people of central Galilee on the other. It is from this 
 time that we must date the alliance of the Pharisees 
 and Herodians against Jesus. Enthusiasm in Galilee 
 had reached a climax in consequence of the miracle of 
 the feeding of the five thousand. This took place when 
 the Passover was at hand and when there were present 
 in Galilee multitudes of the devout on th-eir way to 
 Jerusalem. These men readily saw in the miracle the 
 beginning of the Messianic events to which they had 
 long looked forward.^ Jesus, however, was not prepared 
 to second their expectations or to meet them half-way. 
 
 ^ It is now generally agreed that the two accounts of the feeding 
 of the multitude in Mark vi. 30-46, and Mark viii. 1-9, refer to one 
 and the same event. In the second account the disciples are 
 made to speak as though the event were something new in their 
 experience, and the double account is no doubt due to the fact that 
 there were two independent traditions on the subject. As Sanday 
 
THE ACTIVE MINISTRY 115 
 
 He will take no steps to become their leader, and con- 
 tinues to do His work quietly and " without observation." 
 From this time, therefore, His popularity with the crowd 
 began to wane and many ceased from following Him. It 
 was not so, however, with the more intimate circle of 
 the disciples. They had kept all these things in their 
 hearts, and had evidently done so to some purpose. 
 They had had more opportunity than the crowd of 
 entering into the mind of their Master, and they were 
 able to put together His words and His works in such 
 fashion as to realise what it all meant. When, there- 
 fore, at Caesarea Philippi, Jesus asked the direct ques- 
 tion, "Whom say ye that I am?" Peter was ready to 
 act as the mouthpiece of the others with the words, 
 "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God," Even 
 then Jesus charges the disciples to tell no man what 
 they have learned, but He recognises at the same time 
 that the revelation has come to them from above, and 
 that the confession resulting from it is crucial. To this 
 confession Jesus adds His blessing and the promise that 
 it shall be the beginning of the Christian Church. Of 
 the meaning of this promise many and various interpreta- 
 
 points out, this would carry us back to a time earlier than the oldest 
 stratum of Gospel narrative, if we have to allow time for the two 
 versions to arise out of their common original. 
 
ii6 LIFE OF CHRIST 
 
 tions have been given. It is sufficient to say here that 
 the rock on which the Church is to be built is not Peter 
 the man, but Peter the confessor of the Christ. Wher- 
 ever there is a belief in and confession of Jesus as the 
 Christ, there is the element out of which the Christian 
 Church is formed. Peter's confession, being the first, 
 is regarded as the first stone laid in the edifice of the 
 Church. The importance attached to this by Jesus 
 is the more remarkable, because there can be but 
 little doubt that Peter had no very clear or true idea 
 of what the Christhood of Jesus really meant. It was 
 his attitude of belief rather than the content of his 
 belief on which Jesus laid stress, and the point is 
 important for the whole subsequent history of the 
 Church on earth. 
 
 How little Peter really understood of the mind of Jesus 
 is seen from his conduct when Jesus told the disciples 
 that " He must suffer many things, and be rejected of 
 the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and 
 the third day be raised up." Peter then took Him and 
 began to rebuke Him, and was himself rebuked with 
 the terrible words, " Get thee behind me, Satan : thou 
 art a stumbling-block unto me : for thou mindest not 
 the things of God, but the things of men." Then 
 followed the statement that each disciple must take up 
 
THE ACTIVE MINISTRY 117 
 
 his own cross and follow Jesus if he would really save 
 his life. The whole incident and the teaching based 
 upon it are very significant both as regards the historical 
 interpretation of the life of Jesus and the meaning to be 
 attached to His work in these days. It shows us some- 
 thing of His own method of self-revelation, and of the 
 grave difficulties which He had to face, and it helps us 
 also to realise that the true understanding of Jesus can 
 only come, not by the study of His words, but by the 
 reproduction of His experience. What He called the 
 cross is one thing to the man who looks at it more or 
 less critically from the outside, and quite another thing 
 to the man who has learnt to carry his own cross in the 
 spirit of the Master. It is never an easy thing for a 
 man to see as God sees, or to savour of the things of 
 God. It comes only by the hard discipline of expe- 
 rience. This experience the disciples at present were 
 scarcely prepared to face. 
 
 The process of preparation must have been greatly 
 hastened by another event which followed closely upon 
 the confession of Peter and is known to us as the Trans- 
 figuration. This familiar story marks yet a further stage 
 in the self- manifestation of Jesus. It is closely paralleled 
 by the accounts of the Baptism and the Temptation, 
 and, like these, purports to give a certain Divine attesta- 
 
ii8 LIFE OF CHRIST 
 
 tion to the work and claims of Jesus. There is a 
 dramatic propriety in its occurrence just at this time, in 
 view of the impending crisis in the ministry of Jesus. 
 The historicity of the story has, of course, been gravely 
 questioned, and it is often regarded as a merely sym- 
 bolical or parabolic confirmation of the Divine claim of 
 Jesus. On the other hand, there are certain considera- 
 tions which make against any such view, and suggest 
 that, however difficult it may be for us to understand 
 the incident, it is not without historical background. 
 These are summed up by Sanday as follows : "(i) The 
 significance of the appearance of Moses and Elijah at 
 a time when that significance can have been but very 
 imperfectly apprehended by the disciples, and when 
 there was absolutely nothing to suggest such an idea to 
 them ; and (2) the Transfiguration comes within the cycle 
 of events in regard to which a strict silence was to be 
 preserved. This striking and peculiar stamp of genuine- 
 ness was not wanting to it. We may note also (3) the 
 random speech of St. Peter (Mark ix. 5) as a little graphic 
 and authentic touch which had not been forgotten." On 
 the whole, the most obvious theory is here, as often, pro- 
 bably the best, viz. that the event represents a vision 
 seen by one or more of the disciples and regarded by 
 them and accepted by Jesus as a Divine confirmation 
 
THE ACTIVE MINISTRY 119 
 
 of His mission. It may at least have served to bring 
 home to them the imminence of that catastrophe in 
 which they had hitherto refused to believe. 
 
 We have now reached the culminating point in the 
 ministry of Jesus. His work in Galilee was practically 
 finished. Henceforth the centre of interest is trans- 
 ferred to Jerusalem and the neighbourhood. So far he 
 has borne His testimony among the people who sat in 
 darkness, and the general result has been that they have 
 shown themselves to love darkness rather than light. 
 Jesus has contented Himself with sowing a crop of seed 
 that, so far, has only fallen into the ground and apparently 
 died. The harvest is not yet. His mission has been 
 confined to simple, lowly, and needy folk, who, even if 
 they had thoroughly understood what He was doing, 
 would have had no power properly to make it known. 
 His association with them was deliberate, but even in 
 His own day was regarded as a grave drawback, and as 
 at least an error in tactics. " He eateth and drinketh 
 with publicans and sinners " was charged against Him 
 as a grave reproach by His contemporaries. As a matter 
 of fact, it was an exact description of His programme, 
 and from His own point of view a justification of it. 
 The Galilean ministry of Jesus sets the note of His 
 whole work among mankind. The healing of the sick, 
 
T20 LIFE OF CHRIST 
 
 the opening of the eyes of the blind, and the preaching 
 of the Gospel to the poor — these were the objects of 
 His coming into the world. The way in which He 
 carried them out, rather than the effect which He 
 produced by them, is the best possible witness to His 
 glory. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE ACTIVE MINISTRY {contmued) 
 
 As has already been suggested, the period from the 
 Feast of Tabernacles in a.d. 28 to the Passover of 
 A.D. 29 marks a new development in the ministry of 
 Jesus. It is Jerusalem and Judea rather than Galilee 
 which form the scene of operations. The religious 
 conditions are those of the Temple rather than of 
 the synagogue. And the opponents of Jesus are 
 priests and Sadducees rather than Pharisees and 
 scribes. The records of this period in Matthew and 
 Mark are very scanty. St. Luke is much more full, 
 and many of the incidents in the long passage, ix. 51- 
 xix. 28, though by no means in chronological order, 
 may be placed here. But even this narrative needs 
 to be filled in from the Fourth Gospel, which is a 
 source of real historical value for the Judean ministry. 
 Apart from the vividness and verisimilitude of his 
 narrative, the author of this Gospel supplies a record 
 of events which are really needed in order to account 
 
122 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 for the crisis which followed. In the teaching of this 
 period it is possible to discover a transference of 
 emphasis from the kingdom of heaven in general 
 to the Person who is regarded as its King. The Son 
 in His unique relation to the Father and to humanity 
 stands out now with increasing clearness, and it is 
 this personal claim which He makes which draws 
 upon Himself the growing hostility of the authorities. 
 It is exceedingly difficult to visualise the conditions 
 of this process. The sources are fragmentary and 
 disconnected, and notes of time are almost entirely 
 wanting. In spite of this, certain features stand out 
 from the confusion and are noteworthy. Among these 
 the most important is the greater prominence which His 
 approaching death assumes in the mind and con- 
 versation of Jesus. For a full discussion of this sub- 
 ject the reader may be referred to a series of articles 
 by Dr. Fairbairn which appeared in the Expositor 
 for 1896. It was not only that the signs of the 
 times were ominous, and that everything pointed to 
 an outburst of hostility on the part of those who 
 practically held the fate of Jesus in their hands. This 
 much was patent to any outside observer. But there 
 were certain deeper considerations which appealed to 
 Jesus Himself. He had deliberately ''set His face 
 to go to Jerusalem," and He knew what He was 
 
THE ACTIVE MINISTRY 123 
 
 doing. Jerusalem had a way of stoning her prophets, 
 and He was to be no exception to the rule. Already 
 He had in His own mind identified the Messiah with 
 the suffering Servant of Jehovah in the familiar pro- 
 phecy, and He was prepared to sustain the role 
 throughout. He had a large conception of His duty 
 as the Saviour of the world, and He was both able 
 and willing to proceed to the uttermost lengths to 
 fulfil His mission. As the salvation He wrought was 
 a greater thing than any earthly redemption, so the 
 means by which it was to be attained were greater 
 than those common among men. Meekness, endur- 
 ance, suffering, submission, ministry — these were the 
 means He was prepared to use, and He understood 
 to the full what they involved. There is something 
 wistful and pathetic in His endeavours to make this 
 known to the dull perceptions of His disciples and 
 their contemporaries. It is a pity that we only see 
 these through their eyes, for we may be sure that 
 the vision is a distorted one. Even so much, how- 
 ever, as they have left on record is enough to enable 
 us to realise how deeply and continuously the mind 
 of Jesus was possessed with the idea that it was only 
 by the sacrifice of Himself that He could accomplish 
 the work that had been given Him to do. 
 
 Thus it is that in the discourses given in the Fourth 
 
124 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 Gospel Jesus represents Himself as the Life and the 
 Light of men, as the living bread and the water of 
 life, as the Good Shepherd who gives His life for 
 the sheep, and as the resurrection and the life. Of 
 the same order is the teaching given in the Synoptists, 
 when He called little children unto Himself, and 
 bade the rich young man sell all that he had and 
 follow Him, and asked the disciples whether they 
 were able to drink of His cup and be baptized with 
 His baptism, and told them that "the Son of man 
 came, not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and 
 to give His life a ransom for many." Li spite of 
 a certain very perceptible difference in atmosphere, 
 these sayings all hang together, and suggest a picture 
 which is homogeneous. The impression which Jesus 
 thus produced on very varied minds is almost more 
 useful to us than more detailed and definite teaching 
 would be. 
 
 We now come to the Passover of the year a.d. 29, 
 and with it to the closing scenes in the ministry of Jesus. 
 The importance of these, and the effect they had on the 
 minds of contemporary observers, may be gathered from 
 the full and clear account of them which our four Gospels 
 have preserved. It is as though half unconsciously the 
 writers realised that the crisis was one of immeasurable 
 significance. The tragedy opens with the triumphal entry 
 
THE ACTIVE MINISTRY 125 
 
 into Jerusalem. There is no reason to question the 
 account given by the Evangelists, which indicates that this 
 was arranged by Jesus of set purpose. It is a deliberate 
 admission of His belief that He has come to fulfil 
 prophecy, and a deliberate acceptance of the yoke that 
 this involved. It served to open a good many eyes once 
 and for all, and awakened in the fickle multitude an 
 enthusiasm vv^hich, shallow though it was, threatened to 
 have inconvenient consequences. But the time of retire- 
 ment was now passed, and henceforth Jesus stands out 
 to the view of the world as definitely making the claim 
 to be the leader and Saviour of men. The effect of this 
 is at once apparent in the increased hostility of the 
 authorities. The Pharisees had bated nothing of their 
 enmity, and to their ranks must now be added the priests 
 and Sadducees. It is now that the Sanhedrin begins to 
 take part in the opposition to Jesus. Though there were 
 Pharisees among the members of the Sanhedrin, its 
 policy was mainly directed by the Sadducees, to whom 
 most of the chief priests belonged. The Sadducees re- 
 jected the traditions of the elders. They had not the 
 keen interest in the Law which the Pharisees showed. 
 They were politicians first and last, and they dreaded 
 and sought to avoid anything which would justify the 
 Romans in taking out of their hands the delegated powers 
 w^ith which they had been entrusted. Their name is 
 
126 LIFEOF 'CHRIST 
 
 probably derived from Zadok, the typical high-priest 
 and head of the priestly family. Historically they stood 
 for the assertion of the rights of the priesthood, and 
 were the social aristocracy of their nation. Conservative 
 and opportunist in spirit, their antagonism to Jesus was 
 a foregone conclusion, and they had the power to turn 
 their hate into deeds. No time was lost in bringing this 
 antagonism to a head. The cleansing of the Temple by 
 Jesus (Matt. xxi. 12), which the Synoptic writers place 
 at this period, and which may have been repeated, shows 
 Him challenging these men on their own ground. It was 
 not to be wondered at that they came and asked Him 
 " By what authority doest thou these things, and who 
 gave thee this authority ? " and they were not likely to 
 be placated by being referred to the baptism of John 
 and by being told that the publicans and harlots who 
 believed in him would enter the kingdom of heaven 
 before these righteous men who had no eyes for the 
 righteousness of John and his teaching. This shrewd 
 dealing with them was followed up by the parable of the 
 householder and his vineyard, and in the servants of the 
 householder who beat his messengers and slew his son, 
 the opponents of Jesus were openly invited to recognise 
 themselves. They were quick enough also to recognise 
 the tremendous implications of the parable in regard to 
 the speaker, and they would have made away with Him 
 
THE ACTIVE MINISTRY 127 
 
 there and then but that they feared the people. These, 
 who had accounted John as a prophet, were not yet 
 disposed to turn against John's Master. All the evidence 
 in the Gospels goes to show the increasingly political 
 character of the opposition to Jesus at this time. The 
 questions (Matt. xxii. 15, and xxii. 41) about the tribute 
 to C?esar, and about David and David's Lord, were 
 manifest traps, laid in order to embroil Jesus with the 
 secular power. Though the time was not yet, they 
 all helped to serve this end, and the time soon came 
 when Jesus recognised that the crisis was at hand and 
 that He was about to be betrayed into the hands of 
 sinners. 
 
 The agent in this betrayal was one of His own 
 disciples. We do not possess the materials necessary 
 for a full understanding of the motives which prompted 
 Judas Iscariot to sell his Master. That the man had the 
 possibility of great things in him goes without saying, since 
 he was one of the select few chosen to be the companions 
 of the Lord. Probably he was among those who, like 
 Simon the Zealot, cherished the more carnal expectations 
 of the Messiah's kingdom, and found it very hard to ex- 
 change them for the more spiritual idea of Jesus Himself. 
 There was a strain of fanaticism which, when thwarted, 
 easily became hate. This is a more probable explana- 
 tion of his action than the popular one of covetousness. 
 
128 LIFE OF CHRIST 
 
 Many of the discourses of Jesus in the last days, with 
 their entire repudiation of the material idea of the king- 
 dom, would no doubt help to bring the growing resolu- 
 tion of Judas to a head. 
 
 These discourses themselves raise one of the most 
 difificult problems of the Gospels. As the end ap- 
 proached, Jesus evidently spent much time in speaking 
 to His followers of the future. He had to prepare their 
 minds for the shock of His coming departure, and to 
 convince them of the permanence and ultimate triumph 
 of the kingdom which He had come to found. He had 
 also to bring home to them the startling truth that, 
 though absent from them in the flesh, He would yet 
 remain their very real and ever-present helper. Much 
 of His teaching on these subjects was couched in the 
 form of that Jewish apocalyptic which was not un* 
 familiar to their minds. This was strictly in accordance 
 with the whole method of Jesus. He spoke in the 
 language of His time. As we have already seen, how- 
 ever, the records show that His hearers did not alto- 
 gether understand Him, and at least failed to report 
 Him intelligibly. It is not to be wondered at, there- 
 fore, that an age like our own fails to grasp to any good 
 purpose this part of the teaching. For the critical 
 problems involved, and for the various interpretations 
 of them which have been given, we must refer our 
 
THE ACTIVE MINISTRY 129 
 
 readers to the many special treatises on the subject. 
 For our present purpose it is sufficient to distinguish 
 certain of the more important points in the narrative, 
 and reaHse where the main difficulties lie. According 
 to Professor Sanday's enumeration there are six kinds 
 of prediction attributed to Jesus during this period. 
 "There is (i) the prediction of His own death and 
 resurrection. There is (2) the prediction of the siege and 
 destruction of Jerusalem. With this in the great passage 
 Mark xiii. is directly connected (3) the prediction of the 
 end of the world and the last judgment ; (4) the dis- 
 courses in John clearly predict the coming of the 
 Paraclete as the substitute for Christ Himself; (5) in 
 another leading passage (Mark ix. i) a phrase is used 
 which may be explained, though it is not usually ex- 
 plained, of the remarkable spread of the Christian Church 
 from the Day of Pentecost onwards. Lastly (6) there is 
 the explanation which is frequently given of the coming 
 of the Son of man as a so-called ' historical coming,' a 
 coming not exhausted by a single occasion, but repeated 
 in the great events of history." But though all these 
 various predictions may be distinguished in the narra- 
 tives, it does not follow that they were all clearly dis- 
 tinguished in the minds of the narrators, or that when 
 they spoke of them they were all necessarily referring to 
 the same event. The one thing which seems to have 
 
I30 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 stood out clearly in their minds and in the minds of 
 early Christians generally, was an expectation of a 
 speedy second coming of the Lord, an expectation 
 which they based upon His own words. It is the dis- 
 appointment of this expectation which forms the real 
 crux of the problem for modern Christians, and it has 
 to be confessed that no satisfactory solution of it has 
 been reached. Unquestionably the expectation itself 
 served a great and good purpose in the early days of 
 the Church in nerving Christian men and women to 
 endure their trials, and in inducing among them that 
 unworldly or other-worldly spirit which proved so great 
 a help to their faith. There is a providential force at 
 ivork here which must not be overlooked. Apart from 
 this we may conclude either that the coming of the 
 Son of man took place in some great catastrophe such 
 as the destruction of Jerusalem or some great event like 
 the Resurrection, or that it is to be identified with the 
 coming of the Paraclete, which occupies so large a 
 place in the discourses of the Fourth Gospel, or that 
 it is still delayed, and that the early disciples were mis- 
 taken in their view of it as being close at hand. Even 
 the vast amount of study expended on the subject does 
 not yet justify a final solution, and the whole question 
 is so obscure that it is the part of wisdom to refrain 
 from dogmatism. 
 
THE ACTIVE MINISTRY 131 
 
 Among the closing incidents in the life of Jesus Christ 
 the Lord's Supper must be given an important place. 
 According to our sources Jesus ate the Passover with 
 His disciples, and gave to the meal a special significance 
 by attaching it to His own death, and giving to it a 
 certain commemorative function. This appears much 
 more clearly in the writings of St. Paul and in the 
 practice of the early Church than in the Gospels them- 
 selves, but there is no reason to doubt the fact that the 
 event recorded in the Gospels supplied the material for 
 St. Paul's teaching and for the action based upon it. As 
 was to be expected, the earliest form of our texts is the 
 least full and explicit, but the various authorities all 
 agree on certain main points. These are that in the 
 course of this meal with His disciples, Jesus took the 
 bread, and gave thanks, and broke it, and said, " This is 
 my Body ; " that He took the cup, and (so the Synoptic 
 and Pauline traditions) spoke of it as the cup of the 
 New Covenant in the shedding of the Messiah's blood. 
 In the Synoptic writers, again, the shedding of the blood 
 is spoken of as redemptive. These are but the bare 
 bones of the narrative, yet they are significant of much, 
 and they set before us an institution. This remains even 
 if we agree with those critics who tell us that the words, 
 "This do in remembrance of me," are no part of the 
 original narrative. The whole point is that the meal 
 
132 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 is associated with the death of Jesus as a sacrifice, and 
 we have to ask what this meant in His mind, and how 
 it would naturally be interpreted by His followers. It 
 would be regarded as the sacred meal following on the 
 sacrifice, a meal which invariably signified an act of 
 communion not only among the worshippers, but with 
 the Deity worshipped. This communion would readily 
 suggest itself to men who had heard Jesus speak of 
 Himself as the bread and water of life, and would lead 
 them to see in the sacrament a means of spiritual 
 assimilation of their Lord. Not that this impression 
 would arise at the moment. It is more in the nature 
 of an after-reflection on the event, and is connected 
 with the insistent promise of Jesus regarding His own 
 presence with His followers for all time. In the solemn 
 words which He used at this crisis in His fortunes, and 
 in the solemn and evidently symbolic acts by which they 
 were accompanied, we cannot but see a fresh effort on 
 His part to disclose to these men something of the 
 power and meaning of His presence among them, and 
 to reassure them against His departure. In spite of the 
 efforts which have been made to minimise it, St. Paul's 
 evidence is of real importance as to the position of the 
 Lord's Supper in the early Church. Its value is not 
 confined to the details of the ordinance, but is of the 
 greatest importance for estimating the place which Jesus 
 
THE ACTIVE MINISTRY 133 
 
 had come to occupy in the minds of His followers at a 
 very early period after His death. Working backwards 
 from this, we jeach again that consciousness of Jesus 
 concerning Himself and His mission of which the wisest 
 of His followers is only able to give us a dim and half- 
 realised impression. 
 
 The eucharistic meal was but one of several events 
 which show how Jesus anticipated His death and pre- 
 pared His disciples for what was to come. The 
 author of the Fourth Gospel has gathered together 
 a number of discourses bearing on these things, which, 
 though they have certainly passed through the mind 
 of their narrator, and taken something of the form of 
 his thought, show very clearly the kind of teaching 
 which Jesus impressed upon His followers at this 
 time. It was His aim to reassure them, and to help 
 them to realise that His death was not an end but 
 a beginning, and that there was still a great future 
 for His kingdom and for His followers. The same 
 appears from that fine incident, recorded also by St. 
 John, when Jesus, knowing that His hour was come, 
 having loved His own, loved them unto the end, and 
 "took a towel and girded himself and washed the 
 disciples' feet," leaving them an example that they 
 should follow His steps. This is the other sacrament, 
 the " sacrament of service," as it has been called, which 
 
134 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 the Christian Church would do well to celebrate as 
 scrupulously as she has celebrated the sacrament of 
 communion. It sets forth in a beautiful and unmis- 
 takable fashion the real spirit of Christianity, the spirit 
 which Jesus inculcated upon His followers, and of 
 which He was Himself the perfect embodiment. 
 
 Note. — The chronology of the Lord's Supper and 
 of the death of Jesus offers one of the most complex 
 problems in New Testament criticism. The facts are 
 briefly these. The Synoptic writers appear to identify 
 the Lord's Supper with the paschal meal, and give the 
 time of it as the evening before the Crucifixion, which 
 took place on a Friday. St. John, however, places 
 the Last Supper before the Passover, and makes the 
 Crucifixion take place on the 14th of the month Nisan. 
 There is also a discrepancy as to the time of day at 
 which the Crucifixion took place. St. Mark (xv. 25) 
 makes it the third hour {i.e. 9 a.m.); St. John (xix. 14) 
 says that the trial was not over by the sixth hour (noon), 
 and therefore the Crucifixion was still later. There are 
 indications in the Synoptists themselves which are incon- 
 sistent with the belief that the Crucifixion took place at 
 the time of the Passover, and would therefore go to 
 support the chronology of the Fourth Gospel. But 
 with no more than our existing materials before us it is 
 
THE ACTIVE MINISTRY 135 
 
 perhaps safest to follow the order of St. Mark. For 
 a discussion of the whole subject reference may be 
 made to the article on New Testament Chronology 
 in Hastings' " Bible Dictionary," and to " Some New 
 Testament Problems " by A. Wright, p. 147 ff. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE TRIAL AND DEATH OF JESUS 
 
 As the end drew near Jesus' anticipation of His death 
 became more acute. In that sad scene which we call 
 the agony in the garden of Gethsemane He faced the 
 dread possibility before Him. The real struggle was 
 then, when He braced Himself to drink His cup, rather 
 than in the hour and article of His suffering. Immedi- 
 ately after the agony, Judas, who had already agreed 
 with certain members of the Sanhedrin that he would 
 help them to take Jesus quietly, came at the head of 
 a mixed party of Temple police, soldiers, and lookers 
 on, and delivered Jesus up to His enemies. It is 
 important to note that it was at the instance of the 
 ecclesiastical authorities that Jesus was apprehended. 
 His offence was against them and their traditions, and 
 it is clear from the Gospel narrative that they had 
 some difficulty in making His guilt clear to the Roman 
 authority. It was the policy of Rome to be tolerant 
 in matters of religion, and although Judaea was a 
 
TRIAL AND DEATH OF JESUS 137 
 
 portion of a Roman province, and administered by a 
 Roman official, in religious matters power still remained 
 in the hands of the native ecclesiastical authorities. 
 They could try a cause and punish offenders in all 
 cases save when the capital sentence was passed. In 
 that event the case had to be re-tried before the Roman 
 governor, and if the sentence were sustained he was 
 responsible for carrying it out. This explains the pro- 
 cedure in the case of Jesus Christ. He was first tried 
 and condemned by the ecclesiastical authorities, and 
 then brought before Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, 
 that the sentence of death passed on Him might be 
 confirmed and carried out. 
 
 According to the rather confused accounts in the 
 four Gospels, the ecclesiastical trial of Jesus was carried 
 on in an informal and even irregular fashion. The 
 prisoner was first taken before Annas, an ex-high-priest 
 and father-in-law of the reigning high-priest, Caiaphas. 
 As the real head of the hierarchy, though no longer 
 holding the titular position, Annas was evidently a 
 prime mover in the arrest of Jesus, and probably had 
 his own reasons for wishing to subject Him to a private 
 and informal cross-examination. While this was going 
 on the Sanhedrin was hastily summoned at the house 
 of Caiaphas. The time was about midnight, and the 
 whole of the proceedings hasty and informal. It would 
 
138 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 seem to show that the accusers of Jesus were by no 
 means sure of their ground, or that the authorities 
 still, as on former occasions, feared the multitude be- 
 cause they accounted Him a prophet. The trial itself, 
 if we may judge from the accounts before us, was 
 altogether irregular. There was no attempt made to 
 formulate a charge, or even to call witnesses on 
 both sides. The judges who were the members of the 
 Sanhedrin interrogated Jesus with regard to His acts 
 and teaching, and very easily convicted Him of what 
 they called blasphemy. Something more was necessary, 
 however, if the matter was to go any further, and 
 Jesus brought under the Roman jurisdiction. His 
 enemies from the first were anxious to silence Him 
 for ever, and to this end they sought to obtain a charge 
 of conspiracy against Caesar. To prove that Jesus was 
 seeking to make Himself the head of a revolutionary 
 party would do all they needed. According to the 
 Gospel story, suborned witnesses were easily found, 
 who based the necessary charge on a misunderstanding 
 of the words which Jesus had used in regard to the 
 Temple. It was not altogether satisfactory, however, 
 and the high-priest asked Jesus point blank, "Tell 
 us whether thou be the Christ, the Son of God." To 
 this the answer came at once, " I am, and hereafter ye 
 shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of 
 
TRIAL AND DEATH OF JESUS 139 
 
 power and coming in the clouds of heaven." The 
 great confession was lost upon the judges, and served 
 only to bring to a head their long-gathering hate. 
 They turned on Jesus with the ferocity of animals, 
 smote and spat upon Him whom they were there to 
 judge. The so-called trial ended in confusion, and the 
 majority judged Jesus worthy of death. 
 
 jNIeanwhile Jesus had not been altogether forsaken 
 by His disciples. Though they had fled in the first 
 panic of the arrest, Peter, and probably others with 
 him, had followed Jesus at a distance, and mingling 
 with the crowd, \vaited in the court of the high-priest's 
 house to hear how matters were going on. While 
 waiting, Peter was challenged once and again as a 
 manifest Galilean, and accused of being one of the 
 companions of Jesus. The man w^as terrified, and at 
 first prevaricated, and then with all the excitement 
 of an Oriental denied with oaths that he knew any- 
 thing of Jesus. Just at that moment a cock crowed, 
 and Peter, remembering the half-prophetic words of 
 Jesus, went out weeping bitterly. 
 
 When the next day dawned, a deputation of 
 priests and elders, representing the Sanhedrin, carried 
 Jesus a prisoner before the Roman governor, Pilate. 
 The charge they preferred was skilfully concocted. 
 "We found this man perverting our nation, and for- 
 
I40 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 bidding to give tribute to Caesar, and saying that he 
 himself is Christ, a king." Pilate was shrewd enough 
 to doubt their zeal for Caesar, and probably realised 
 from the first that they were moved by religious 
 fanaticism. He knew the turbulent kind of folk he had 
 to deal with, and moved warily. The prisoner before 
 him, in His simple Galilean dress, worn out with the 
 strain through which He had passed, and bearing the 
 marks of the cruel treatment of His enemies, did not 
 seem very formidable, and certainly did not look 
 like a king. It was with a kind of irony, therefore, 
 that he asked, "Art thou the King of the Jews?" 
 Jesus replied simply, "Thou sayest." There was no 
 defiance of Caesar in such an answer, and Pilate wished 
 for something more explicit. He has a rough sense of 
 justice, and can see no evidence of the serious crime of 
 rebellion. The accusers of Jesus repeat the charge and 
 magnify it, but when Jesus is asked to answer them He 
 maintains a silence which puzzles and surprises His 
 judge. It looked as though he would set Him free, 
 when just then the proceedings are interrupted by the 
 clamour of the crowd for the release of a prisoner, 
 according to time-honoured custom, at the Passover. 
 To Pilate this presented a way out of his difficulty. He 
 knew that Jesus was popular with the crowd, and it was 
 with a sense of gracious concession that he asked, 
 
TRIAL AND DEATH OF JESUS 141 
 
 ''Shall I, then, release unto you your king?" At the 
 moment the people might have consented, but the priests, 
 their leaders, passed round the word that the right man 
 to ask for was Barabbas, a real patriot, while Jesus was a 
 lawbreaker and blasphemer. To Pilate they said, "If 
 thou release this man thou art not Caesar's friend," and 
 they knew the power of their words. The crowd then 
 clamoured for the release of Barabbas, and when Pilate 
 asked them what he should do with Jesus their king, 
 they cried, " Away with him ! Crucify him ! " The 
 Roman was more puzzled than ever. If Jesus were 
 really an enemy of Rome, why in the world should the 
 crowd want His death, and he asked them, " What crime 
 has he committed?" That was a question which no 
 one could answer, and priests and people alike covered 
 -their confusion in a wild clamour, " Crucify him ! Cru- 
 cify him ! " Half frightened and half ashamed, Pilate 
 solemnly washed his hands of responsibility, and then 
 handed Jesus over to the guard, condemned to be put to 
 death by crucifixion. His action was simply a cowardly 
 concession to the violence of the mob. Through all 
 this Jesus remained outwardly calm. For Him the 
 bitterness of death was passed already. He quietly 
 submitted Himself to the soldiers when, according to 
 the brutal custom, they scourged Him as a preliminary 
 to the execution. They added, too, insult to the injury,. 
 
142 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 mocking His weakness. They put on Him a purple 
 robe, and plaited a crown of some thorny shrub for His 
 head, and put a reed for sceptre in His hand. Then, 
 after making feigned obeisance to Him, they beat Him 
 with His own sceptre, and spat in His face. After this 
 cruel horseplay they took Jesus to the place of execution, 
 along with two robbers condemned to suffer the same 
 fate. It was the custom that the criminal, on this his 
 last journey, should carry at least part of the instrument 
 of torture on which he was to die. The load proved too 
 much for Jesus, and He sank under the weight of it. 
 The soldiers then impressed a passer-by to bear the 
 burden, and his name has been handed down — one 
 Simon of Cyrene. Arrived at the rising ground outside 
 the city called the " place of a skull," the soldiers, before 
 putting up the cross, offered Jesus drugged wine as a 
 narcotic. This He refused, as though willing to bear 
 to the uttermost all that came upon Him. He was 
 then nailed to the cross by His hands and feet, and the 
 cross having been raised, He was left hanging there to 
 die. Above His head was the inscription, ^'The King 
 of the Jews." The soldiers sat round waiting for the 
 end, and occupied the time by casting lots for the 
 clothes of the victims, which were their perquisites. In 
 addition to the soldiers a considerable crowd gathered. 
 Some were priests and elders come to see their work com- 
 
TRIAL AND DEATH OF JESUS 143 
 
 pleted, and others passers-by interested in the scene, 
 while in the distance was a group of women, friends of 
 Jesus. There were not wanting those who mocked the 
 victim with His helplessness and spent the time in 
 ribald jesting. It was about nine in the morning when 
 the dread scene began, and as the day wore on men 
 tired of the spectacle, and Jesus was left almost alone 
 with His guards, and the little group of agonised 
 friends. To these the whole earth seemed darkened 
 by the tragedy, and the very heavens to veil themselves. 
 Once and again Jesus spoke, and fragments of His words 
 have come down to us. But at last, long after midday, 
 with a great and bitter cry He yielded up His spirit. 
 Through all the long agony no hand was stretched out 
 to help Him, and the heavens above were silent. Such 
 was His demeanour, however, and such the manner of 
 His passing, that when all was over the captain of the 
 soldiers cried, "Truly this man was a Son of God." 
 
 The body of Jesus was left hanging on the cross till 
 the evening, and would have remained there in all 
 probability till the Sabbath was over, had not one Joseph 
 of Arimathsea asked Pilate's permission to remove it. 
 Pilate first made inquiry to see if He were really dead, 
 and then gave permission for the burial. Joseph and 
 the women took the body of Jesus down from the cross, 
 and with the due rites buried it in a rock tomb, the 
 
144 LIFE OF CHRIST 
 
 entrance to which they closed with a great boulder of 
 stone. 
 
 Such, in simplest outline, is the story of the greatest 
 event in the history of the world. There is always 
 something majestic about the death of a great man, 
 and the death of Jesus was no exception. But it 
 was not with Him as with other men, that His death 
 put a period to His earthly activities and closed His 
 career for ever. Certain results dated from it, and it 
 must be looked at in the light of them if it is to be 
 understood and its place in history fully realised. As we 
 have seen already, Jesus Himself anticipated His death 
 in a way which was, to say the least of it, unusual. It was 
 not merely that He feared that His teaching would bring 
 Him into conflict with the authorities and so imperil 
 His life. It was not, in other words, that He looked 
 forward to His martyrdom as a most probable conse- 
 quence of His actions. He rather regarded His death 
 by violent means as a necessary part of the work He 
 came into the world to do, as a consummation without 
 which that work would have been left incomplete. The 
 language He used in regard to it was the language of 
 sacrifice, made intelligible enough to His hearers, and 
 consecrated by generations of usage. This conclusion 
 cannot be altogether evaded by the suggestion that His 
 followers read these ideas into the event in retrospect. It 
 
TRIAL AND DEATH OF JESUS 145 
 
 only makes the mystery deeper, for it is impossible to 
 give any reason why they should have done so apart 
 from the interpretation of His work and person derived 
 from Jesus Himself. The sequel showed' that the death 
 of Jesus was pivotal to the whole system of His teaching 
 and life. In the preaching of the first apostles of the 
 Church it occupies an altogether disproportionate place. 
 They spoke of His death not as a martyrdom, still less 
 as a cruel and bitter end to all the hopes they had 
 founded upon Him, but as His own voluntary act, an 
 act by which the whole human race was to be benefited 
 for all time. In the eyes of the first Christians there 
 was a moral splendour and a moral value about the 
 death of Jesus which made it the transcendent act in 
 His career. The cross on which He died had been 
 regarded hitherto as a symbol of all that was most 
 cruel and shameful ; the fact that He had died upon it 
 lifted it at once into a new category, and it became the 
 symbol instead of a life-giving and beneficent power. 
 It was in the death of Jesus that His saving activity was 
 demonstrated, and it gave to Him, and to all those who 
 by faith participated in it, an irresistible power over 
 man's ancient enemy, sin. The secret of the power of 
 this idea of a sacrificial death for sin over the human 
 heart is one of the mysteries of psychology, and for the 
 moment we are not concerned to seek an explanation of 
 
 K 
 
146 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 it. But we are concerned with the fact itself. It is of 
 immense importance in determining the interpretation 
 put upon Jesus Christ by those who were nearest to 
 Him in point of time, and therefore we may presume 
 also of understanding. Reading back from their point 
 of view, we are forced to the conclusion that they re- 
 garded Him as one who had an unique right of repre- 
 senting God to man, who spake with authority in God's 
 name, and who stood by His very nature in close and 
 intimate connection with the whole human race. His 
 voluntary death upon the cross was regarded as in some 
 way a death in behalf of men. It was a supreme mani- 
 festation of the sinfulness of sin, of the love of God, 
 and of the possibihty of salvation through sacrifice. 
 To this interpretation the religious ideas of the Jewish 
 people naturally lent themselves, and it was not surpris- 
 ing perhaps that it should find vogue amongst them. 
 But it spread rapidly far beyond the confines of Judaism, 
 and found an answering echo in human hearts every- 
 where. It has been among the most moving and potent 
 of religious forces. That it was no more than a theory 
 invented by the excited imaginations of the disciples, and 
 improved upon and formulated by St. Paul, is frankly 
 incredible. Its origin is to be traced to the conscious- 
 ness of Jesus Christ, and its power to the facts of His 
 nature — that He was both Son of God and Son of man. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE RESURRECTION AND ASCENSION 
 
 The burial of Jesus in Joseph's tomb was probably 
 not intended to be final. It was rather a hurried and 
 temporary disposal of His body until the Sabbath 
 should be over and there should be a better oppor- 
 tunity of paying to it the last sad rites. It was 
 probably in view of this that after the Sabbath, quite 
 early in the morning, some of the women friends of 
 Jesus made their way to His tomb, that they might 
 anoint the body and prepare it in due form for its 
 final resting-place. On arrival at the grave, they found 
 the stone rolled away from the entrance and the body 
 of Jesus vanished. The grave-clothes were there, and 
 beside them sat a youth in white raiment whom they 
 took for an angel, and who told them that Jesus had risen, 
 and that they were to inform the disciples of the fact. 
 Terrified and perplexed, the women ran to the disciples 
 with the news, and these in turn hastened to the tomb 
 
 to prove it for themselves. Shortly afterwards Jesus 
 
 147 
 
148 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 appeared to Mary and then to the disciples. Once and 
 again He visited them, assured them that He was indeed 
 risen from the dead, and commissioned them to go 
 forth and preach in His name to all the world. Accord- 
 ing to the accounts before us, he remained with them 
 some forty days until " he was taken up and a cloud 
 received him out of their sight." 
 
 In this bare outline of the story there is material 
 enough for wonder and surmise. We have purposely 
 refrained from giving the details of the narrative, because 
 the sources are not agreed upon them. It is useless 
 to shut our eyes to the fact that the discrepancies be- 
 tween them are numerous and serious. Briefly, there 
 are discrepancies in regard to the time at which the 
 women visited the sepulchre, and in regard to the 
 number of the women themselves, in regard to what 
 was seen at the sepulchre, and in regard to the instruc- 
 tions given to the women and by them to the disciples. 
 Also there are serious differences in the Gospel accounts 
 of the appearances of the risen Jesus to His disciples. 
 The scene of these appearances is sometimes given as 
 Galilee and sometimes as Jerusalem. Matthew and Mark 
 throw the stress on Galilee, while Luke and John xx. 
 are based on appearances in Jerusalem. All the sources 
 agree that the disciples were in Jerusalem on the Re- 
 surrection morning. When all these points are taken 
 
THE RESURRECTION 149 
 
 into account they present us with a problem of extreme 
 difficulty and complexity, but they do not warrant us 
 in denying the fact of the Resurrection altogether, and 
 relegating the accounts of it to the realm of myth. 
 These very differences show underlying them an in- 
 dependent knowledge of the event on the part of 
 bona-fide reporters. In the absence of the trained 
 scientific observer, full weight has to be given to this 
 point. 
 
 It has also to be remembered that the strongest 
 evidence for the fact of the Resurrection is to be found 
 outside the Gospel narratives. In his first letter to the 
 Corinthians (chap, xv.) St. Paul speaks of the Resur- 
 rection as being in his belief, and in that of Christians 
 generally, the very foundation of their faith, and he 
 enumerates in attestation of the fact the appearances of 
 the risen Jesus of which he knows — viz. to Peter, to the 
 twelve, to a body of more than five hundred disciples, 
 to James, and to " all the apostles." There can be 
 no question as to the value of St. Paul as a witness — 
 not so much to the fact, perhaps, but to the strong 
 conviction of the contemporaries of Jesus that He 
 had risen from the grave and was alive for evermore. 
 Even a critic like Schmiedel admits that " the historian 
 who will have it that the alleged appearances are due 
 merely to legend or to invention must deny not only 
 
ISO LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 the genuineness of the Pauline epistles, but also the 
 historicity of Jesus altogether." It may not be possible 
 to give an exact and detailed description of the event 
 itself, but that " something happened " at the grave 
 in the garden may be taken as an indisputable fact. 
 It must also be admitted that that " something " was 
 of a nature to convince the disciples of Jesus that 
 He had risen from the dead, to rouse them from the 
 despair into which His crucifixion had thrown them, 
 and to send them forth upon their mission, ready to 
 stake their very existence on the belief that He was 
 alive for evermore. 
 
 It must be confessed that the real objection to the 
 story of the Resurrection of Jesus is not to be found 
 in the weakness of the historical argument but in the 
 modern objection to the miracle which the story in- 
 volves. Historically the account given in the Bible is 
 sufficient for all practical purposes, and would never 
 have been questioned had it referred to some every- 
 day event. It is the character of the event itself, rather 
 than the account of it, which creates the difficulty. 
 Accepted as it stands it involves a miracle. Hence 
 the necessity of trying to explain it away. It is this 
 consideration which has given rise to the numerous 
 attempts to account for the story on more or less 
 naturalistic grounds. It has been urged, for instance, 
 
THE RESURRECTION 151 
 
 that the death of Jesus was only a swoon, and that He 
 recovered and appeared again among His friends really 
 alive. Or it has been argued that His body was stolen 
 by Joseph of Arimathsea, and the report of His resurrec- 
 tion spread abroad — the empty tomb being shown as 
 proof. Hypotheses such as these, however, have now 
 been frankly abandoned. There is nothing whatever in 
 our sources to justify them, and they really raise more 
 difficulties than they settle. Much more persistent and 
 widespread is what is called the vision hypothesis. 
 This presupposes a certain expectation of the Resurrec- 
 tion on the part of the disciples, an expectation which 
 was fostered and encouraged by their extreme disap- 
 pointment at the death of Jesus. Given, it is said, a 
 number of men in this grief-stricken and excited con- 
 dition, and given on their part a keen desire and even 
 expectation that their loved Master would appear to 
 them again, and you have all the conditions which make 
 the vision of the risen Lord not only possible but 
 even psychologically procable. This is no doubt true, 
 given the necessary conditions. But the weak point of 
 the argument is just here. There is nothing in the 
 narrative to indicate that there was on the part of the 
 disciples this lively hope and expectation that Jesus 
 would rise again. However, such a condition of en- 
 thusiastic anticipation would require time for its growth 
 
152 LIFE OF CHRIST 
 
 and realisation, and there is no part of the Gospel 
 tradition which is more persistent than that of the 
 "third day." Nor is there any trace in our sources of 
 this kind of subjective hallucination in the appearance 
 which Jesus made to His friends. Such an explanation, 
 again, is not adequate to the facts before us, and only 
 serves to increase our difficulties. Neither fraud nor 
 illusion are sufficient to account for those vast and far- 
 reaching events which are based on the behef that 
 Jesus rose from the dead. 
 
 It should be easily apparent that this belief cannot 
 be dissociated from our general interpretation of the 
 life and teaching of Jesus. If it stood by itself, an 
 isolated phenomenon in the life of a great teacher, 
 it would be miraculous indeed, and practically in- 
 explicable. But coming as it does, as the culmination 
 of a long series of events all of which point to the 
 same conclusion, there is at least a strong balance of 
 probability in favour of the usual interpretation. It 
 must not be forgotten also that Jesus Christ was 
 morally no ordinary man. The claims which He made 
 in regard to His relationship both to man and God 
 were such as to lift Him into a category by Him- 
 self, and all the accounts given of Him need to be 
 viewed in the light of these claims. He could have 
 said, in a sense that was far wider than any that the 
 
THE RESURRECTION 153 
 
 poet could have used, Noti ojnnis 7noriar, and His 
 victory over death, and the assurance of an eternal 
 life thus given in His own person, were but the 
 natural sequence of His whole career. So, again, the 
 Resurrection of Jesus cannot be separated from the 
 results which have been founded upon it in history. 
 As has already been pointed out, it is very difficult, 
 if not impossible, to account for these on the basis 
 either of fraud or illusion. Experience shows that 
 things do not happen in that way. The pyramid is 
 not balanced on its apex. That which caused the 
 Christian Church, and overthrew the Empire of Rome, 
 and turned the world upside down, must have been 
 in itself great enough and powerful enough to originate 
 these events. The memory which Jesus left to His 
 disciples, and the inspiration of His teaching, were 
 moving enough, no doubt. But it was not these 
 things which drove them out to preach and suffer 
 in His name. It was the sense that He was not dead, 
 but alive, an ever-present power in and with His 
 followers, that gave them heart and hope. St. Paul's 
 testimony on this point is explicit. It was based first 
 on his own experience, and then on the logic of that 
 experience as reflection discovered it and saw it exempli- 
 fied in others. Faith working upon the fact proved it 
 by demonstrating its moral power over the human heart. 
 
154 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 All this, of course, does not help us to understand 
 the mystery surrounding the Resurrection appearances 
 of Jesus. In what corporeal form He showed Him- 
 self to His disciples we shall probably never be able 
 to understand. " It was sown a natural body, it was 
 raised a spiritual body," is probably the best possible 
 commentary on the accounts as we have them. Be- 
 yond that it is useless to inquire, and one speculation 
 has no more value than another. But it is not without 
 importance to remember that the whole New Testament 
 view of the event is based on a materialistic conception 
 of things which in these days we have practically out- 
 grown. No doubt St. Paul repudiated this view, and 
 to his mind resurrection was quite conceivable apart 
 from any physical resuscitation. There is good reason 
 for concluding that the purely spiritual view was the 
 earlier, and that in the later history, as well as in the 
 creeds of the Church, we see the popular materialistic 
 idea gradually taking its place. The modern student 
 of the subject will not go very far astray in returning 
 to the more primitive tradition. The narrative of the 
 journey to Emmaus shows that a certain moral pre- 
 paration was required in order to see the risen Jesus. 
 His appearance to the disciples involved a spiritual 
 experience which was fruitful indeed, and must be 
 judged by its results. 
 
THE RESURRECTION 155 
 
 It is often contended that the Resurrection of Jesus 
 from the dead is the foundation of the Christian rehgion, 
 and that belief in it is articulus stantis vel cadentis 
 ecclesice. So at least St. Paul taught, and it is hard 
 to conceive of a Christianity whose Christ is dead. It 
 should be clearly understood, however, that the fact does 
 not depend on the literal accuracy of every statement 
 made about it in the Gospels. Our religion does not 
 compel us to accept all the primitive ideas as to its 
 origin, and it is matter for thankfulness that modern 
 critical inquiries have forced us to discover foundations 
 of the faith that are capable of verification in experience 
 and that will stand all the tests we need apply to them. 
 History shows us at least this, that the grounds of belief 
 in the Resurrection which the early Church found were 
 sufficient for those days. The grounds of our belief are 
 also sufficient for us, though not necessarily the same as 
 theirs. As Bishop Westcott has said : ^ " The Resurrec- 
 tion was and is an abiding fact. It was the beginning 
 of a new and living relation between the Lord and His 
 people. He came to them while He went. The idea 
 may be expressed by saying that the apostolic concep- 
 tion of the Resurrection is rather ' the Lord lives,' than 
 * the Lord was raised.' This important truth is entirely 
 overlooked by critics who lay stress on the point that 
 ^ " The Gospel of the Resurrection," p. 294. 
 
LIFE OF CHRIST 
 
 'there was no eye-witness of the Resurrection.' It is 
 impossible to see what we should have gained by the 
 testimony of such a witness, or what he could have 
 established which was not established by the intercourse 
 of the living Lord with His disciples. That which had 
 to be made clear as to Christ was the reality of His 
 new life. This was first established for the apostles 
 by their complete experience of the continuity of His 
 manifestation to them, and for the Church in all ages 
 through the signs of His power. And it is here that 
 the 'proof of the Resurrection is to be found. Christ 
 lives, for He works still." 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE CHARACTER AND WORK OF JESUS 
 
 No attempt to sum up the impression made by Jesus 
 Christ can be successful or approach the truth which 
 does not recognise its primarily ethical quality. Inade- 
 quate as are our materials for the study of the life of 
 Jesus, and difficult as it is to make use of them, it has 
 yet to be confessed that they provide a background 
 against which the moral and spiritual personality of 
 Jesus stands out clear and sharp. It is not merely 
 that He followed the prophets in preaching a " better 
 righteousness." He showed Himself greater than the 
 prophets by exemplifying this righteousness in His own 
 person. That is why the person of Jesus is a greater 
 thing than His teaching or His work. The Christian 
 Church has shown her sense of the importance of this 
 by laying stress on the doctrine of His sinlessness, but 
 this purely dogmatic interpretation must not be allowed 
 to blind us to the facts behind it. The modern ten- 
 dency is to lay stress on the holiness rather than on the 
 
158 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 sinlessness of Jesus. The one involves the other. But 
 the character of Jesus must be studied without precon- 
 ceptions. He was very man, and played His part on 
 the arena of a full human life. He was tempted like as 
 we are, but did not yield to temptation as we do. In 
 contradiction to a generally received opinion, the domi- 
 nant feature in His character was a certain strength and 
 authoritativeness. He showed a mastery of men and of 
 truth that seemed a very strange thing in an age of 
 pedants and imitators. There was about Him an entire 
 absence of fear or even of hesitation. He went on His 
 course steadfastly, turning neither to the right hand nor 
 to the left, and that is why men have so willingly made 
 Him their guide. Then His strength of will meant also 
 strength of mind. For though he was an idealist, He 
 was without illusions. He understood what His mission 
 meant, and was prepared to pay the inevitable price of 
 His work. He was content that God's ways should be 
 His own : " My Father worketh hitherto and I work." 
 So it came about that He did not argue so much as 
 teach. His process was intuitive, and the success of it 
 is best judged by the fact that men were only too ready 
 to take Him at His word. They recognised that here 
 was one who at least had a right to speak. But along 
 with this strength there was in Jesus a singular tender- 
 ness. It is often said that He combined in Himself the 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS 159 
 
 mascuHne and the feminine as no other character has 
 ever done. The explanation leaves something to be 
 desired, for there was a strength even in the tenderness 
 of Jesus that was greater than that of women. In His 
 attitude towards men He was the embodiment of what 
 we call love. But with Him love was neither blind 
 nor soft. He loved men though He knew what was in 
 them. His knowledge of their greatness and of their 
 possibilities made Him condemn their sins and rebuke 
 their follies in the most unmistakable terms. With all 
 His sanity of judgment He never ceased to hope, and 
 He never compromised with evil. By us conduct and 
 duty are seen in a kind of moral haze, but to His eyes 
 all the outlines were sharp and clear. So His love was 
 more than an easy-going good nature. The note of 
 sacrifice was in it from the first, and this gave it both 
 pith and power. It was entirely without that alloy of 
 selfishness which so often taints human love even at its 
 best. Loving men, Jesus loved them to the uttermost, 
 and gave Himself for their salvation. 
 
 This calm estimate of His work and of its conse- 
 quences was altogether of a piece with His sanity and 
 serenity of outlook upon life in general. In the records 
 of His career there are moments of deep disturbance 
 when His whole soul is convulsed with an agony of 
 protest. But there are a meaning and dignity about 
 
i6o LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 these crises that lift them far above the fears and worries 
 of our common human nature. Jesus was absolutely 
 without worry. His trust in God was profound, and 
 His perspective was so true that He always saw this 
 life sub specie eternitatis, and was able to put their true 
 values upon things. He had no hesitation in rebuking 
 the short-sightedness of the men who saw otherwise. 
 He came, indeed, to open their eyes, and the spirit of 
 His simple faith in God's goodness and providence is 
 one that all His followers may well seek to catch. 
 Jesus' estimate of moral values was of the same order 
 as His estimate of the spiritual. Mere surface goodness 
 was worth nothing in His eyes. If it acted as a cloak 
 to unrighteousness, it was an altogether mischievous 
 thing. He had the single eye to some purpose, for He 
 was able to see not only the shams of the outside, but 
 that inner worth and possibility in imperfection to which 
 others were wholly blind. "The soul of goodness in 
 things evil " was a very positive reality to Jesus Christ. 
 It was this power of vision, at once deep and wide, 
 which made possible the meekness and humility of 
 Jesus. If, as Pascal says. He was " magnificent in His 
 humiliation," it was because His character was so com- 
 plete and well rounded that He could be independent 
 of ordinary human judgments. To us there is always 
 a strain of weakness in these minor and self-effacing 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS i6i 
 
 virtues, because with us character is so invariably one- 
 sided. The meekness of Jesus was no exaggeration, 
 it was simply a consequence of His personality. His 
 whole Being on earth was a surrender, a stooping, and 
 the thing was beautiful in Him because natural. 
 
 Thus there is some show of reason in attributing to 
 Jesus the characteristics of those apparently opposite 
 forms of temperament, the ascetic and the aesthetic. 
 There were in Him Hellenic elements as well as 
 Hebraic. He had affinities with Stoic and with Epi- 
 curean. But the mere mention of these names shows 
 how impossible it is to label Him with any of the 
 conventional titles. His asceticism was not that of the 
 fanatics of His own or any other age. It was moral 
 and spiritual rather than ceremonial. It governed not 
 so much His actions as His attitude to life. It made 
 Him the Man of Sorrows, the servant and friend of His 
 people, but it never drove Him into an abandonment 
 of the world, nor compelled Him to count anything that 
 God had made common or unclean. The spirit of 
 sacrifice and self-denial came to Him as a natural con- 
 dition of His being and work, and was not adopted as 
 a form of spiritual gymnastic. He denied Himself for 
 the sake of others, and not in order to perfect His own 
 religious development. So his self-sacrifice was entirely 
 compatible with a free and joyous outlook upon life. 
 
 L 
 
i62 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 To His mind the whole universe is beautiful and elo- 
 quent. He is quick to note the glad and hopeful side, 
 both in nature and in humanity. These things, how- 
 ever, are all subordinate to the main purpose of His 
 being and work. This is, in a word, to glorify the 
 Father in heaven, to take account of and to make real 
 to men that divine and spiritual side of things which is 
 too easily overlooked. This is His real business, and 
 the pursuit of this sets Him apart from all others on 
 this earth. He sees things which they cannot see, and 
 in the midst of the crowd He stands solitary and apart. 
 " Here indeed is the pathos of the character of Jesus ; 
 yet here also we approach the source of His strength. 
 It was in this detachment of nature, this isolation of the 
 inner life, that Jesus found His communion with the 
 life of God. At this point His ethics melt into His 
 religion. The crowd press round Him, and He serves 
 them gladly, and then it seems as if His nature de- 
 manded solitude for the refreshment of His faith. The 
 tide of the Spirit ebbs from Him in the throng, and 
 when He goes apart He is least alone, because the 
 Father is with Him. Thus, from utterance to silence, 
 from giving to receiving, from society to solitude, the 
 rhythm of His nature moves : and the power which is 
 spent in service is renewed in isolation. He is able to 
 bear the crosses of others because He bears His own. 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS 163 
 
 He can be of use to men because He can do without 
 men. He is ethically effective because He is spiritually 
 free. He is able to save because He is strong to suffer. 
 His sympathy and his solitude are both alike the 
 instruments of His strength."^ This solitariness of 
 Jesus takes Him out of all human categories, and makes 
 it impossible to judge Him by human standards. It is 
 the hall-mark of His divinity. In His relation to the 
 men and women who were His contemporaries, as well 
 as in His relation to the Father in heaven, He stands 
 altogether alone. 
 
 The character of Jesus Christ, and the estimate 
 formed of Him by His followers, determined His work 
 in the early days of the Church. The Christian re- 
 ligion is pre-eminently the religion of a Person. St. 
 Paul's confession, " Yea, though we have known Christ 
 after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we Him so 
 no more," became the guiding principle of Christian 
 thought on the subject. In their knowledge of Jesus 
 Christ, and in their relationship to Him, men found 
 an inspiration and a force, which constituted for them 
 a new life, and which made them new men. The 
 promise of Jesus, that He would draw all men unto 
 Himself, found a very real fulfilment. In Him, rather 
 than in His teaching, there was an attraction which 
 
 ^ Peabody, "Jesus Christ and the Christian Character," p. 69. 
 
i64 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 became irresistible. Thus the relation of Jesus to 
 His early followers was personal, and His unique 
 power is seen in the fact that He did not merely 
 appeal to the generation to which they belonged, but 
 has continued to satisfy the highest needs of men of 
 all races and climes. 
 
 To discuss this subject at length would be to write 
 a history of the Christian Church. All that we can 
 attempt to do here is to indicate very briefly the way 
 in which history justifies the claims made on behalf 
 of Jesus, and carries on the work which He began. 
 The story of the work of Jesus Christ in history leads 
 us out far beyond the range of the Christian Church. 
 His influence is not confined to any institution, but 
 goes deeper, and is to be discovered in many places 
 which the Church of the period refuses to own. The 
 process followed is that of a development. In His 
 earthly life Jesus dealt with principles which were 
 but half understood by the men who listened to Him, 
 and needed time for their explication. He cast them 
 among humanity as seed is cast into the ground, and 
 they have been growing ever since. But His teaching 
 was closely bound up with His own Person, and it 
 is to the power of His Person that the vitality of the 
 teaching is mainly due. The Gospels are exceedingly 
 frank in portraying the purely human side of the 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS 165 
 
 personality of Jesus. The disciples lived with Him 
 in ordinary human relations, and yet He produced 
 on them an impression which manifested itself in 
 the kind of doctrine concerning Him, which we find 
 in the discourses in the Acts of the Apostles and in 
 the Letters of St. Paul. It is very easy to exaggerate 
 the gulf between the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels 
 and the Christ of the early Church. As a matter of 
 fact, the one is the legitimate consequence of the 
 other, and represents the inevitable result of any re- 
 flective process which has for its foundation the life 
 and teaching of the Master. The first Apostles kept 
 close to the historic facts, but they were bound to 
 find an expression for the faith that grew out of 
 them. We shall never be able fully to explain how 
 it was that this Jesus, with whom they had lived on 
 terms of ordinary human companionship, came to be 
 regarded by them as the Lord of all, and as having 
 for them and for all men the religious value of God. 
 But we cannot evade the fact that they found in His 
 own teaching, and in His own presentation of His 
 claims, that which justified them in seeing in Him 
 the Saviour of the world, and in describing the salva- 
 tion which He brought in Messianic terms. He was 
 to them the mediator of a new idea of God, and of 
 a new redemptive relationship between God and the 
 
i66 LIFE OF CHRIST 
 
 world. They could scarcely find words strong enough 
 in which to describe His glory and His power. They 
 were conscious not merely of sacred memories which 
 gathered round Him, but of an experience of His 
 presence with them, and activity on their behalf, which 
 they could not but regard as real, and the effects of 
 which were unmistakable. The New Testament shows 
 us this reflective process assuming various forms, and 
 working along parallel Hnes in different directions. Of 
 these we may distinguish the Fourth Gospel and the 
 whole Johannine literature, the Pauline Epistles, the 
 Petrine tradition, and the tradition represented by the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews. Each of these represents 
 an individual point of view, but all of them alike 
 point back to the same source, and are legitimate 
 developments from it. Their work is not mere 
 doctrinal speculation; it is rather the natural effort 
 to explain certain given facts. 
 
 Not the least remarkable feature of the Apostolic 
 reflection upon the work and Person of Jesus, is the 
 way in which it accepts His own interpretation of His 
 Messianic work. To us this is a comparatively easy 
 thing, and it requires some effort of the imagination to 
 realise how hard it must have been for men, brought up 
 amid the average Jewish thought on this subject, to 
 adopt a point of view concerning it so alien as that of 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS 167 
 
 Jesus. It is now generally admitted ^ that while Jesus 
 claimed to be the Messiah, He gave an entirely new 
 connotation to the title. But this presented little or 
 no difficulty to the Apostles, after the Resurrection. 
 They accepted Him on His own terms, and went on to 
 expound Him to others on lines which He had Himself 
 laid down. In preaching Him to Gentiles as well as 
 to Jews, and in regarding Him as the Lord and Saviour 
 of mankind, they were influenced, no doubt, by the 
 circumstances and conditions of their time. This is 
 abundantly evidenced by the history of the early Church, 
 but it does not affect the fact that the Person of Jesus, 
 as they conceived Him, justified them in their own eyes 
 in making these wide-reaching claims on His behalf. 
 The process which they thus began has been carried on 
 all through the ages. All the great controversies which 
 have raged round the Person of Jesus Christ have not 
 been able to obscure His message or diminish His 
 power over the hearts of men. He speaks to-day, as 
 He spoke long ages ago, through the voice of a living 
 religious experience. As men look, not back to Him 
 as they are often urged to do, but up to Him, they find 
 the beginning of a new life and the inspiration to a 
 nobler service. The memory of His words and the 
 example of His deeds remain an undying source of 
 
 1 Cf. H. J. Holtzmann, Das Messianische Bewusstsein Jesu. 
 
i68 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 inspiration. But the true servant of Christ finds more in 
 Him than this, precious and effective though it is. His 
 living presence with the soul of man has become in 
 the case of multitudes an experience which cannot be 
 gainsaid. In the eyes of the Apostles Jesus claimed to 
 fulfil the functions of the Old Testament Messiah, to 
 judge the world, to forgive sins, and to be the Lord 
 of life and death. These are the prerogatives of God 
 Himself, and yet the modern Christian sees no in- 
 congruity in granting the claim. That the claim should 
 be contested is natural enough, and the appeal in proof 
 of it is still, as it was in the early days, to the experience 
 of those who have known Christ for themselves, and to 
 the effect which He has produced in and through them. 
 As Von Dobschiitz says,^ " Christianity possessed what 
 the speculations of Neo-platonism lacked — the sure 
 historical basis of Jesus Christ's Person. Nor was it 
 to a higher moral teaching that Christianity owed its 
 victory. Stoicism and Neo-platonism, after all, produced 
 moral thoughts of great beauty and purity, thoughts 
 which are more imposing to superficial contemplation 
 than the simple commandments of Christianity. Yet 
 neither of them could enable artisans and old women 
 to lead a truly philosophical life. Christianity could and 
 did : the apologists point triumphantly to the realisation 
 * "Christian Life in the Primitive Church," Eng. trans., p. 379- 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS 169 
 
 of the moral ideal among Christians of every standing. 
 That was due to the power which issued from Jesus 
 Christ and actually transformed men. The certainty 
 and confidence of faith based on Him, with reliance 
 on God's grace in Jesus Christ, begot in Christians 
 a matchless delight in doing good. Joy in good was 
 more potent than abhorrence of evil. In the midst of 
 an old and dying world, this new world springs up with 
 the note of victory running through it." 
 
 Controversy round the Person of Jesus Christ has not 
 yet ceased. In some respects it is keener than ever, 
 and its persistence is the best possible testimony to 
 His power and to the reality of His work. There are 
 signs, however, amid all the strife, of a certain consensus 
 of opinion on the main point. Even extreme critics of 
 the historicity of the New Testament records do not 
 withhold their homage to the Person of Jesus. This 
 stands out above all other factors in shaping the 
 Christian religion and in giving to it life and power. 
 In a sense which is true of no other personality in 
 history, Jesus Christ still lives and still speaks to the 
 hearts of men. The truth of His message each man 
 may test for himself, not by the process of historical 
 inquiry and criticism alone, but by those deeper and 
 more subtle processes, obedience and faith. There is 
 a charm about His demeanour and a simplicity about 
 
I70 LIFEOFCHRIST 
 
 His words that will always appeal to the student. But 
 to know Him in all His power and beauty it is necessary 
 to become not merely a student, but a disciple. To 
 the inner Sanctuary of His presence there is only one 
 password — My Lord and my God. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Accusers of Jesus, 140 
 Andrew, 48 
 Angel, 147 
 Anna, 25 
 Annas, 137 
 Antipas, Herod, 18 
 Apocryphal Gospels, 27 
 Arimathsea, Joseph of, 151 
 Aristotle, 89 
 Authority of Jesus, 71 
 
 Back to Christ, 70, 91 
 Baptism, 88 
 Baptism of Jesus, 26 
 Barabbas, 141 
 Bartholomew, 49 
 Betrayal of Jesus, 127 
 Bousset, Prof., 86 
 Boyhood of Jesus, 26 
 Buckland, Frank, 78 
 Burkitt, Prof. F. C. , 4 
 
 C^SAREA PhILIPPI, 96, I15 
 
 Caiaphas, 137 
 
 Call of the Disciples, 46 
 
 Cana in Galilee, 42 
 
 Character of Jesus, 157 
 
 Christian character, 89 
 
 Chronology of the Gospel, 42 
 
 Chronology of the Lord's Supper, 
 
 134 
 Church and kingdom, 87 
 Cleansing of the Temple, 43, 126 
 Confession of Peter, 115 
 Consciousness of Jesus, 59 
 
 Covenant, 131 
 Criticism of the Gospels, 2 
 Cross, the, 145 
 Crucifixion, 142 
 
 Daniel, 98 
 Deaconesses, 55 
 Death of Jesus, 136, 144 
 Decapolis, 19, 114 
 Demoniacs, 65 
 Demonology, 66 
 Disciples, 46 
 Divine purpose, 61 
 Doctrine of God, 75 
 Doctrine of Man, 82 
 Draught of fishes, 64 
 
 Education of Jesus, 30 
 Elijah, 118 
 Elizabeth, 25 
 Emmaus, 154 
 Enoch, 98 
 Epicurean, 161 
 Eschatology, loi 
 Essenes, 56 
 Eucharist, 131 
 Expositor, 122 
 
 Fairbairn, Dr., 40, 122 
 Fatherhood of God, 75 
 Feast of Passover, 113 
 Feast of Tabernacles, 113 
 Feeding of the multitudes, 114 
 Foot-washing, 133 
 Form of the teaching, 70 
 
172 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Galilee, 19, 107, 113 
 God, idea of, 80 
 Good Shepherd, 124 
 Gospel of hope, 83 
 Gvvatkin, 61 
 
 Hasting's •' Dictionary," 135 
 Hellenism, 20 
 Holtzmann, 167 
 Hope, Gospel of, 83 
 Huxley, 58 
 
 ILLINGWORTH, 67 
 
 Impotent man, 63 
 Incarnation, 67 
 Isaiah, 74 
 Iscariot, 127 
 
 JAIRUS' daughter, 63 
 
 James, 48 
 
 Jerusalem ministry, 121 
 
 Joanna, 515 
 
 John, 8, 48 
 
 John the Baptist, 34 
 
 Joseph of Arimathaea, 151 
 
 Judcea, 16, 121 
 
 Judas, 49 
 
 Kalthoff, 22 
 Kasidhim, no 
 Kingdom of God, 73 
 King of the Jews, 140, 142 
 
 Last Discourses, 128 
 
 Lazarus, 63 
 
 Leaven of the Gospel, 90 
 
 Logia, <; 
 
 Lord's Prayer, 80 
 
 Love of God, 78 
 
 Luke, 7 
 
 Mach.crus, 44 
 
 Man of Sorrows, 161 
 
 Mark, 3 
 
 Mary, mother of Jesus, 24, 26 
 
 Mary of Magdala, 55, 83 
 
 Matthew, 5, 49 
 
 Megiddo, 29 
 
 Messiah, 94 
 
 Messianic prophecy, 84, 85 
 
 Method of teaching, 70 
 
 Ministry in Galilee, 107 
 
 Miracles, 57 
 
 Moses, 118 
 
 Nain, 63 
 Nativity, 23 
 Nature, 62 
 Nazareth, 29 
 Neo-platonism, 168 
 Neumann, 26 
 New Covenant, 131 
 
 Old Testament, 95 
 Oral tradition, 14 
 Originality of Jesus, 70 
 
 Pagan historians, 12 
 
 Palestine, 16 
 
 Papias, 5 
 
 Parables, 73 
 
 Paraclete, 129 
 
 Pascal, 160 
 
 Passover, 124 
 
 Peabody, 71, 163 
 
 Pentecost, 129 
 
 Personality of Jesus, 41, 157 
 
 Peter, 48 
 
 Peter's denial, 139 
 
 Pharisees, no 
 
 Philip, 18, 49 
 
 Pilate, 139 
 
 Prayer, 80 
 
 Publicans, 119 
 
INDEX 
 
 173 
 
 Rabbinical Schools, 30 
 Ramsay, Sir W. , 24 
 Resurrection, 147 
 Robertson, J, Isl., 22 
 
 Sabbath, hi 
 
 Sacrament, 137 
 
 St. John's Gospel, 8 
 
 St. "Luke's Gospel, 7 
 
 St. Mark's Gospel, 3 
 
 St. Matthew's Gospel, 5 
 
 St. Paul, 149 
 
 Samaritan woman, 44 
 
 Sanday, 65, 85, 91 
 
 Sanhedrin, 17 
 
 Schmiedel 13, 149 
 
 Schiirer, iii 
 
 Second coming, 129 
 
 Sermon on the Mount, 52, 112 
 
 Servant of Jehovah, 123 
 
 Simon, 49 
 
 Sinlessness of Jesus, 158 
 
 Smith, Prof. G. A. , 19 
 
 Son of God, 99 
 
 Son cf Man, 97 
 
 Sower, 87 
 
 Stoics, 161 
 
 Subject-matter of teaching, 75 
 Suffering of Jesus, 100 
 Susanna, 55 
 
 Temptation, 37 
 Thomas, 49 
 Transfiguration, 118 
 Trial of Jesus, 136 
 Tribute to Caesar, 127 
 
 Victory through suffering, 9c 
 Virgin Birth, 25 
 Von Dobschiitz, 168 
 
 Wernle, 97 
 Westcott, 155 
 Whitehouse, Dr., 66 
 Withered hand, 63 
 Women disciples, 155 
 Wright, Dr., 135 
 
 Yahweh, 76 
 
 Zacharias, 25 
 Zealot, 49 
 
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Theological Seminary-Spee 
 
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