THE 
 MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 BY 
 FREDERICK LINCOLN ANDERSON, D.D. 
 
 PROFESSOR OF NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATION IN 
 NEWTON THEOLOGICAL INSTITUTION 
 
 £fotu fork 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 1914 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
Copyright, 1914 
 
 By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 10 14. 
 
 OCT 15 1914 
 
 'CI.A387033 
 
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO 
 
 Hg Jfcttljrc, <SaI«Hlja Attbwami, 
 
 FEARLESS PATRIOT 
 
 HONORED LEADER IN THE WORK OF CHRIST 
 
 MASTER AND EMINENT TEACHER OF THE ART OF PREACHING 
 
 BEARING CHOICE LITERARY FRUIT IN OLD AGE 
 
 AN ALTOGETHER WHOLESOME MAN 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 In writing this book, I have had the ordinarily 
 intelligent man constantly in mind, and have 
 tried to answer some of the questions about 
 Jesus, which have often arisen in his thinking 
 but have rarely passed his lips. But while writ- 
 ing for the people, I have never forgotten the 
 experts, a fact which they will quickly perceive, 
 if they will do me the honor to penetrate to the 
 core of the volume. I have tried to observe the 
 rules of the critical game, have practically used 
 only the first three gospels, and, even in them, 
 have clearly differentiated the sources. I am 
 ready to defend my position in the scholarly 
 arena. 
 
 This book is not an investigation, but a state- 
 ment of the results of fourteen years of research, 
 put forth in popular form. There are therefore 
 few critical arguments, few citations from schol- 
 arly authorities and not many quotations. Con- 
 sequently, also, I have not failed to use the con- 
 
V1U FOREWORD 
 
 elusions, so laboriously won, for the quickening 
 of faith and courage. As the readers will soon 
 see, I belong to no party, but have attempted to 
 investigate independently, to make a fearless 
 search for truth, and have drawn the picture of 
 Jesus which the facts, as I see them, give me. 
 My whole attitude has been historical rather than 
 theological. The final result will probably fully 
 satisfy nobody, and that may be the best test 
 of its real worth. 
 
 This is not a Life of Jesus, nor a summary of 
 his teachings, nor a mere character sketch. It 
 is rather a treatment of the most important prob- 
 lems about Jesus and his career, and that so far 
 as possible from the viewpoint of Jesus himself. 
 I am aware of the boldness of the attempt, but 
 feel that we may reverently penetrate to the 
 very heart of Jesus. Indeed, it is doubtful if 
 we can truly know him in any other way. 
 
 It should be understood that Chapter I is 
 merely preliminary, inserted to give a general view 
 of the subject and to create an appetite for some- 
 thing more definite and detailed. In my own 
 mind, Chapters III and IV constitute the prin- 
 cipal contribution of the book, and are the real 
 
FOREWORD IS 
 
 reason for its publication, though Chapters VII 
 and IX may possibly rank with them. 
 
 Of course, it would be impossible for me to 
 give a list of all the books which have influenced 
 my thought on this great subject. The following 
 authors should, however, be mentioned as pe- 
 culiarly responsible for the final form and indeed 
 some of the phrases of the book. For the first 
 chapter, I am much indebted to a sermon on 
 The Light of the World by my friend, Rev. James 
 A. Francis of Boston, and to Harnack's Chris- 
 tianity and History. My greatest helpers for the 
 most important chapters were Von Soden in his 
 Die Wichtigsten Fragen im Leben Jesu, and Holtz- 
 mann in his Das Messianische Bewusstsein Jesu. 
 For the chapter on the teaching, Clarke's The 
 Ideal of Jesus proved valuable. For the discus- 
 sion of the character, I must mention Bushnell's 
 The Character of Jesus, still inspiring though 
 from the older point of view, and a little book, 
 published since I began to write, Fosdick's The 
 Manhood of the Master, which is sure to prove of 
 lasting worth. 
 
 For kindly and yet thorough criticism, my 
 thanks are due to two of my colleagues, Professor 
 
X FOREWORD 
 
 Richard M. Vaughan and Mr. James P. Berkeley, 
 and, especially, to my father and mother, who 
 have also labored in many other ways to help me 
 in the production of this book. 
 
 Frederick Lincoln Anderson. 
 
 Newton Centre, Mass. 
 April 30, IQ14. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. The Power Behind the History . . i 
 II. The Situation in Which Jesus Found 
 
 Himself 23 
 
 III. How did Jesus Come to Believe Himself 
 
 the Messiah? 34 
 
 IV. How Jesus Handled Messianism . . 60 
 V. How Jesus Handled Legalism ... 97 
 
 VI. Jesus' Positive Teaching in 
 
 VII. Jesus' Work and His View of its Future 137 
 
 VIII. The Character of Jesus ..... 166 
 
 LX. The Finality of Jesus 209 
 
 Appendix 219 
 
 Index 223 
 
THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE POWER BEHIND THE HISTORY 
 
 Almost two thousand years ago there appeared 
 a man, who changed the course of human his- 
 tory, who, above any other person living or dead, 
 dominates the thought and feeling of our modern 
 world. The most intelligent and progressive part 
 of mankind date their letters, count time, from 
 the year of his birth. 
 
 Yet herein lies the deepest mystery, for he had 
 none of the external advantages which men 
 think necessary to such vast influence. He came 
 of a despised race. He was born of the peasant 
 class. He lived nearly all his life in an obscure 
 town of a frontier province. He never had what 
 either his Graeco-Roman or Jewish contem- 
 poraries would have called an education. It 
 cannot be proved that he ever read any book 
 except the Old Testament, or that he ever studied 
 the philosophers of Greece. He grew up under 
 
2 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 the blighting shadow of a fanatical and bigoted 
 religiosity. He never traveled a hundred miles 
 from his home; nor, until his fate was practically 
 sealed, did he ever see any country other than 
 his own. He had no money or any desire to 
 make money. He had no powerful or cultivated 
 friends. He eschewed politics. He championed 
 no popular social reforms. He stirred up no class 
 conflict. He never led an army, or wrote a 
 book, or founded a school. He never invoked 
 the aid of art, music or literature. He either was 
 shut out from all the avenues that in the experi- 
 ence of men lead to greatness, or he refused to use 
 them. His whole public activity extended over 
 little more than three years, quite possibly two, 
 perhaps only one. He was only thirty-five or six at 
 most when he died. His teachings antagonized the 
 religious traditions, the cherished political hopes 
 of his people, the interests of the higher classes, 
 and all the ingrained selfishness of humanity. 
 He continually disappointed his followers and 
 even his dearest friends. He was finally betrayed 
 by one of his own disciples, and was crucified 
 between two robbers, suffering the most shame- 
 ful death known to that age. 
 
THE POWER BEHIND THE HISTORY 3 
 
 And now the mystery begins. He had hardly 
 stepped out into public life, when all felt that 
 some extraordinary person had come upon the 
 scene. In a few weeks he had focused the atten- 
 tion of the nation on himself. Multitudes hung 
 upon his lips. The leading men of the Jews soon 
 found it necessary to journey to Galilee to op- 
 pose this young man, who was like to steal their 
 authority over night. The crowds began to think 
 him another Elijah or Jeremiah, and even to 
 wonder sometimes whether he might not be the 
 Messiah. Contrary to rule, his most familiar 
 friends, his daily table-companions, were more 
 impressed than those who knew him less inti- 
 mately. They accepted him as their teacher, 
 prophet and king. They found no stain of sin, 
 no shadow of impurity in him. They hailed 
 him as Messiah, although he was so different 
 from what they expected the Messiah to be, 
 and by that name they meant nothing less than 
 that he was God's special Representative on 
 earth, the Founder of the Kingdom of Heaven, 
 the Bringer of Salvation and the Final Judge of 
 Men. After his death, it did not seem unnatural 
 to them that he should have risen from the dead, 
 
4 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 nor incongruous with what they knew of him 
 that he should be sitting at God's right hand. 
 They confessed him as the Good Shepherd, the 
 Light of the World, the Prince of Life, the Son 
 of God. They said that they had beheld his 
 glory, glory as of the Only Begotten of the Father, 
 full of grace and truth. And soon a multitude 
 of Jews and heathen, wise and fools, declared 
 that he was the strength of their life, the Savior 
 of their souls, and that they had seen the glory 
 of God in his face. "This fact, which is as plain 
 as day," says Professor Harnack, "is unique in 
 history, and demands that the personality which 
 lies behind it should be regarded as unique." 
 
 These wonderful ascriptions of an almost di- 
 vine power and glory were soon matched by the 
 facts of history. The impulse of this powerful 
 personality began to make itself felt throughout 
 the world. Within two months after his death, 
 three thousand men and women enthusiastically 
 joined his cause in the very city in which he had 
 been executed as a criminal. His influence ex- 
 tended in ever widening circles. It leaped the 
 barrier of a narrow Judaism and entered upon a 
 career of conquest in the Gentile world. His 
 
THE POWER BEHIND THE HISTORY 5 
 
 followers gladly suffered imprisonment, torture 
 and death for his sake. The bitterest persecu- 
 tions only fanned the flame and scattered the 
 conflagration. The spiritual enthusiasm spread 
 like a prairie fire till the whole Roman Empire 
 was ablaze. The ablest and most thorough of 
 the early persecutors was struck down, and be- 
 came the most devoted of his followers, the most 
 successful missionary of the faith. Within thirty- 
 five years of Jesus' death, a Roman emperor was 
 burning Christians at the stake in his own gar- 
 dens in the distant capital of the world. Jesus 
 had against him the power, the culture, the reli- 
 gion, the pride, the self-interest, the prejudices, 
 the traditions and all the selfish passions of the 
 greatest, the richest, the most magnificent civiliza- 
 tion that man up to that time had produced. 
 But after a two hundred and fifty year contest 
 in which all these tremendous forces fought with 
 the energy of despair, the Roman Empire at 
 last surrendered. The Galilean peasant had 
 conquered. Emperors, at least nominally Chris- 
 tian, occupied the seat of Nero and Diocletian. 
 The completeness of the triumph is strikingly 
 evidenced by the facts that the priceless marbles 
 
6 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 which once adorned the throne-room of the ruth- 
 less persecutor, Domitian, on the Palatine, are 
 today the pride of the Church of Jesus in the 
 valley below the Capitoline, and that the most 
 magnificent Christian cathedral in the world 
 stands in the very gardens once lighted by the 
 fires of Nero's victims. 
 
 By simply associating them with himself, Jesus 
 changed the humble fishermen of Galilee from 
 ordinary men into the leaders of a new and world- 
 wide movement, and has made them famous for 
 all time. More people read Peter, John and 
 Matthew today than read Homer, Virgil or 
 Shakespeare. We call our children John, James, 
 Philip and Thomas, and the name of the mother 
 of Jesus is the commonest of all. A Johnson 
 has been President of the United States. An 
 Andrewson is writing these lines. The Jamesons, 
 the Matthews, the Phillipses, the Thompsons and 
 the Petersons are a great host. These obscure 
 disciples are honored by cities like St. John, 
 St. Paul and St. Petersburg; while the most 
 beautiful and stately buildings of Christendom 
 bear their names, St. Peter's at Rome, St. Paul's 
 in London and St. John the Divine in New York. 
 
THE POWER BEHIND THE HISTORY 7 
 
 It is interesting to note that these names are 
 beginning to invade India, China and Japan. 
 
 No character of the past exerts so direct and 
 vast an influence on the present world as Jesus. 
 The movement to which his personality gave the 
 initial impulse has outlived all contemporary gov- 
 ernments, philosophies and social systems, has en- 
 dured all the vicissitudes of nineteen centuries, 
 has crossed all the oceans, has invaded every con- 
 tinent, is strongest in the world's foremost nations 
 and never was more intelligent, more spiritual, 
 more powerful or more hopeful than it is today. 
 
 One of the most remarkable features of Chris- 
 tianity is her faculty of self-criticism and self- 
 purification. In this she seems almost to repro- 
 duce the functions of a living thing in throwing 
 off what is useless and effete. The impulse and 
 the power are from within. Thus she renewed 
 herself in the Reformation, and again in the Wes- 
 leyan revival. In fact the process is continually 
 going on, not only in the body as a whole, but 
 in each living section of it. Outworn forms are 
 cast aside, ancient traditions fade, doctrines are 
 modified. Christianity is always digging deeper 
 
8 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 foundations for her faith. The apologetic which 
 once satisfied has begun to seem superficial and 
 inadequate. Much she once thought essential, 
 she now sees was not the essence after all. Ever 
 deeper, deeper, deeper she goes, until she founds 
 her faith on the granite rock of reality. This 
 means progress and true growth. It is not the 
 sacrifice of faith, but a truer valuation and ap- 
 preciation of it. 
 
 Christianity is also constantly broadening her 
 outlook. More and more she sees with Paul that 
 all things are hers, because she is Christ's and 
 Christ is God's. She breaks the shell of Judaism, 
 she travels from Asia to Europe. She survives 
 the dissolution of the Roman Empire through 
 the conversion of the northern barbarians. She 
 finds herself able to cut loose from the papacy, 
 and at last from alliance with the state. She 
 crosses the ocean to a new world. Finally she 
 begins to take in earnest the missionary call and 
 the missionary hope, and is now seeing what is 
 really the beginning of a universal break-up of 
 heathenism. She recognizes the opportunity for 
 intensive as well as extensive growth. She lays 
 claim to the secular as well as to the religious 
 
THE POWER BEHIND THE HISTORY 9 
 
 sphere. She takes all life as her empire, and looks 
 forward to the day, when not only the inner life 
 and the home, but business, politics, education, 
 art, music, literature and the whole social order 
 shall be Christian. Thus she strengthens and 
 nourishes her hope. Her visions grow larger and 
 more glorious with the ongoing years. Her task 
 seems ever greater and more fundamental and 
 more essential to the good of men. She realizes 
 herself as the Light of the World. 
 
 She is the surer of this, for she finds in herself 
 an amazing ability to adapt herself to new situa- 
 tions. Beginning as a simple, unreasoning Jewish 
 faith, she was able to present herself to an age 
 dominated by Stoicism and Neoplatonism, and 
 to wear what seemed to the men of that day a 
 familiar face. When Scholasticism came in, she 
 was a Scholastic, and at the Renaissance still 
 knew how to be in fashion. So the history has 
 gone on until, in our own age, she seems to be 
 thriving on biblical criticism, the conceptions 
 of the new science and the philosophy of evolu- 
 tion. And yet she is always herself. In all these 
 different forms, she is seeking and finding some- 
 thing to round out and complete her truth. 
 
IO THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 Fashions in philosophy come, and fashions in 
 philosophy go, but she goes on forever. From 
 each fashion she gains some advantage, but casts 
 the fashions aside, when they no longer help her 
 to make herself known to men. Just now she 
 is getting ready to emphasize her pragmatic side; 
 and she is strong there. She feels sure that no 
 discovery of truth can ever disconcert or harm 
 her, for she knows that in her experience of union 
 with Jesus and communion with God she has 
 touched the rock bottom of life. Thus she is 
 certain of ultimate victory. She knows that 
 when the world gets through with all its experi- 
 ments, it is bound to come back to her and her 
 experience of God through Jesus. 
 
 Our whole point is this, that all this power of 
 self-purification, all this capacity for profounder 
 insight and growing vision, all this adaptability to 
 human hearts and minds in every age, all this stir 
 of hope and certainty of faith, in short, all this 
 actuality and potency of life she constantly refers 
 to the spirit and power of Jesus working in her. 
 In him and him alone she recognizes the source 
 and impulse of her vital energy. 
 
 Jesus' influence on our own age may also be 
 
THE POWER BEHIND THE HISTORY II 
 
 seen in the fact that he lays hold of men today 
 just as truly and wonderfully as he laid hold of 
 Paul on the road to Damascus, or Augustine in 
 the garden at Milan. These marvels never cease, 
 and science and sociology are at last taking them 
 seriously. Professor James in his Varieties of 
 Religious Experience and Begbie in his Twice 
 Born Men have called the world's attention again 
 to this common, world-wide phenomenon. Such 
 conversions occur in Chicago and Pekin, in Lon- 
 don and Madras, in Madagascar and New Zea- 
 land, in Greenland and on the Congo; and not 
 only among the degenerates of our own civiliza- 
 tion and those sunk in heathen superstition, but 
 also among the educated and prosperous. I some- 
 times contemplate rivaling Begbie with a book 
 on Twice Bom Respectables. I have a super- 
 abundance of material for it. But Jesus lays 
 hold of John and Andrew none the less surely 
 than he does of Paul. Though in such cases the 
 experience is quieter and not calculated to sum- 
 mon and fix the attention of men, yet the life 
 is just as truly moulded and shaped, just as 
 thoroughly, though not as strikingly, changed. 
 There are millions of Christians of this type, 
 
12 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 and they do not yield in devotion or faith to 
 those of the other sort. 
 
 With one voice they all testify, men of every 
 temperament, of every age, of every race and 
 of every social condition, that Jesus has drawn 
 them to himself, has made them moral victors, 
 has led them into communion with the Father, 
 has given unity to their lives, has furnished them 
 with a new and infinitely worthy motive and 
 purpose, has filled them with love to their fellows, 
 has inspired in them the ideals of a new humanity 
 in a new society, and has put into their hearts 
 the faith that overcomes the world. 
 
 This life relation with Jesus his followers count 
 their greatest blessing, their most sacred treasure, 
 the unspeakable gift. And, when occasion pre- 
 sents itself, they offer an indisputable proof of 
 the value they set upon it. "All that a man hath 
 will he give for his life," is an ancient proverb, 
 and it is nearly the truth. But there are some 
 things more precious than life, and this blessing 
 which Jesus gives his followers is one of them. 
 Rather than seem untrue to him the Giver, today, 
 as during all the centuries of the past, they will 
 endure supreme tortures and death in its most 
 
THE POWER BEHIND THE HISTORY 1 3 
 
 dreadful forms. Doughty, the English University 
 explorer of Arabia, so radical in his views that 
 many old-fashioned saints would almost deny 
 him the Christian name, spent years absolutely 
 alone among the fanatical Musselmen, but, unlike 
 other western travelers in those lands, he scorned 
 to hide the fact that he was a Christian, and 
 openly approached the very walls of Mecca. 
 His life was in daily danger. The horrid bigotry 
 of the Arabs made every night's sleep a peril, 
 and yet, as he says, he could never make up his 
 mind "to deny the dear name of Jesus," even 
 when threatened with imminent and instant 
 death. 
 
 The Christian boys of Uganda in Africa pre- 
 ferred to burn at the stake rather than renounce 
 their lately found Savior, and they died singing 
 amid the flames. The followers of Jesus in 
 Madagascar allowed themselves to be thrown over 
 precipices to the rocks below, although one com- 
 promising word would have saved them. Whole 
 families of humble Russian peasants, after years 
 of harassing persecution, have tramped the 
 thousand miles to Siberia across the barren plains 
 in the face of bitter winds and, after suffering all 
 
14 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 privations, have starved to death in proof of the 
 value they set upon the light and life which 
 Jesus had brought to their souls. And in our 
 century, ten thousand Chinese men, women and 
 children laid down their lives in the anti-christian 
 uprisings in China. One word of repudiation of 
 Jesus, only a word, would have given them life, 
 but that word they would not speak. The allied 
 troops found the whited bones of hundreds of 
 Christians in the palace gardens of Prince Chuang 
 in Pekin, mute and glorious witnesses of the power 
 and blessing of Jesus in our own age. Indeed, 
 there is no living king, emperor or leader, who 
 today could summon so large a host of devoted 
 volunteers, ready to live or die for him, as Jesus. 
 The power of Jesus in society continually in- 
 creases. He somehow created a new moral and 
 spiritual atmosphere in the world and a new type 
 of human character. Sins, that stalked un- 
 ashamed before he lived and died, have indeed 
 survived, but they have never recovered caste, 
 and some of them are now almost unknown in 
 Christian lands. In Jesus mankind made a dis- 
 tinct moral advance and has ever since, despite 
 all waverings and backslidings, lived on a higher 
 
THE POWER BEHIND THE HISTORY 1 5 
 
 plane. Lecky has well said, "The simple record 
 of three short years of active life has done more 
 to regenerate and soften mankind than all the 
 disquisitions of philosophers and all the exhor- 
 tations of moralists. In the character of its 
 Founder, the church has an enduring principle of 
 regeneration." With Jesus' insistence on the 
 seriousness of life and his appreciation of the 
 infinite value of a single human soul, there was 
 ushered in a new civilization, rightly called Chris- 
 tian. With the elevation of woman and the pas- 
 sion for purity, both originating with him, there 
 was created the Christian home. Just before Jesus 
 was born, liberty died in the Graeco-Roman 
 world, but he gave it a new reason for existence, 
 and, more than any other, he is responsible for 
 the modern revival of democracy. It is his spirit, 
 which has abolished slavery and duelling, which 
 frowns on cruelty and oppression, which is be- 
 hind all the forces of justice, mercy and brother- 
 hood, which is making unrelenting war on all the 
 forces of evil. He is at the bottom of much of 
 our social unrest. His spirit stirs us to bring in 
 the kingdom of righteousness and joy and peace. 
 He has entered into the warp and woof of our 
 
1 6 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 social life. As Bushnell says, "It were easier to 
 untwist all the beams of light in the sky and to 
 separate and expunge one of the primary colors, 
 than to get the character of Jesus, which is the 
 true gospel, out of the world." 
 
 His utterly unexpected triumphs in recent 
 years nourish the faith of his followers that the 
 day is approaching when he shall rule universally 
 in the hearts of men. His cause seems to be 
 gaining an almost irresistible momentum. His 
 final victory is changing from being a matter of 
 religious faith into being a matter of rational 
 probability. These advances are inextricably in- 
 tertwined with selfish motives, and disappoint 
 those idealists who do not understand that the 
 history of all progress is like that of a flowing 
 tide, whose new high water marks alternate 
 with ebbings. Recently the incoming waves have 
 reached points hitherto unknown. A universal, 
 idealistic, democratic, essentially Christian move- 
 ment seems to be encircling the globe, breaking 
 out here and there only to be suppressed. All 
 mature observers rejoice in the new high records 
 of progress, and understand that the retrogressions 
 are merely temporary. The next wave is bound 
 
THE POWER BEHIND THE HISTORY 1 7 
 
 to go higher still. 1 The dethronement of that 
 old serpent, Abdul Hamid, by the Young Turks 
 in 1909 and the reign of the original Committee 
 of Order and Progress in the Ottoman Empire 
 was an event of the highest and most cheering 
 significance. The national rising against despo- 
 tism in effete Persia and the proof that thousands 
 there were willing to die, as they said, "for the 
 sweet name of liberty," was beyond the faith 
 of the most confirmed optimists. To her shame 
 England has helped Russia put out that light, 
 but Persia and the world can never be the same 
 again. The appeal of the Japanese Minister of 
 Education to the Christian missionaries to help 
 solve the moral problems of the Empire was 
 plainly a turn in the tide. Most amazing of all 
 was the mighty change in China. The West is 
 still dumbfounded at the thought of a great 
 Chinese Republic, and most fittingly its provi- 
 sional President was a Christian. Who could 
 have believed it ten years ago? Today the 
 Crescent flaps feebly in the breeze behind its last 
 
 1 Since these sentences were in print, the general European 
 war of 1914 has broken out. The author, however, on mature 
 reflection sees no reason for changing the wording. Often the 
 greatest ebb precedes the greatest flow. 
 
1 8 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 breastworks in Europe. The old, corrupt Mo- 
 hammedanism is sinking to irremediable ruin. 
 Whether the Young Turks can create a new 
 Mohammedanism, more in accord with Chris- 
 tian ideals and the thought of Jesus, remains to 
 be seen. It is the only hope the Levantine world 
 has of avoiding Christian domination. All this 
 is partial, stained with sordidness, baseness and 
 blood, subject to temporary reverses, and yet it 
 is a wave of idealism, the pulse of a new life, 
 the splendid promise of a better world, and its 
 ultimate source is Jesus. His teaching and his 
 spirit irresistibly press the nations forward. He 
 is marching on. 
 
 All this accords with the philosophy of our 
 time. We do not minimize the influence of ideas, 
 slowly trickling down from the few into the 
 minds of the many until they become a part of 
 life and sometimes decide the fate of nations and 
 of ages. Nor do we forget those strange, almost 
 inexplicable mass movements of human minds, 
 which presage new epochs. Still the truth re- 
 mains, and without it no history can be rightly 
 written, that the sharp turning points in human 
 
THE POWER BEHIND THE HISTORY 1 9 
 
 progress have been due to great events and the 
 rise of great personalities. 
 
 The political evolution naturally led up to 
 Napoleon, but when he unexpectedly appeared, 
 he changed the whole course of the time, remade 
 the map of Europe, and brought in a new era. 
 With the French Revolution and Napoleon, his- 
 tory turned a sharp corner. The world could 
 never move along in the old groove again after 
 the execution of Louis XVI. and the battle of 
 Austerlitz. 
 
 The Spanish-American war was not much of a 
 war, but it has had the profoundest influence on 
 our national life. Nothing could have been more 
 unforeseen than the battle of Manila, yet it 
 woke this country on that first of May to a new 
 vision, a new duty and a new career. If an in- 
 telligent American had gone to sleep in 1897 and 
 awaked in 1899, ne could not have believed that 
 one brief year could have produced so great a 
 change. This little war was a momentous event. 
 It made the United States a world power, and 
 has brought about a new national feeling which 
 has been and will be of tremendous import. 
 
 In the middle of the last century Germany 
 
20 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 was a chaos of mutually jealous states, but Bis- 
 marck rose, unified them into the strongest mili- 
 tary empire of our time, and gave the German 
 people the stimulus, which makes them today 
 everywhere feared as business rivals. His iron 
 will, his masterly diplomacy, his courage to fight 
 at the right time, his ability to inspire a whole 
 race, in short, this one man permanently altered 
 the course of European history, and no one doubts 
 that his mighty personality, however many helpers 
 he may have had, was primarily alone'responsible. 
 
 What was it that changed the history of the 
 world in the first century? 
 
 It would perhaps be fair to our fathers to say 
 that most of them answered, Christianity, and 
 by this they usually meant a certain system of 
 truths, which they regarded as then for the 
 first time revealed and proclaimed. A great deal 
 of stress was laid on the originality of the revela- 
 tion as proof of its divine character. But the 
 scholars went to work on this proposition, and 
 they have shown that many New Testament ideas 
 were derived from the Old Testament, that there 
 are the most striking parallels to many more in 
 the uncanonical prechristian Jewish literature, 
 
THE POWER BEHIND THE HISTORY 21 
 
 that Greek, Persian, Indian and Chinese sages 
 had had some of the same thoughts, that some- 
 what contemporary mysteries had rites and ideas 
 surprisingly like the Christian. Thus critical in- 
 vestigation seemed to have disproved the unique- 
 ness of Christianity, and some Christians, much 
 disturbed, began to doubt whether anything very 
 remarkable had happened in the first century 
 after all. 
 
 But when the new scientific historical school 
 came in, they perceived that in spite of all that 
 had been shown, something of an epoch-making 
 character had occurred in the first century. They 
 traced Christianity back and they found that it 
 had its source in a great personality. Chris- 
 tianity is the most powerful moral and religious 
 force in the world today, and has been, so far 
 as Europe is concerned, for nineteen centuries. 
 Such a movement must have an adequate cause, 
 and no other adequate cause has ever been dis- 
 covered except the personality of Jesus. There- 
 fore he must be great enough to produce this 
 age-long and world-wide effect. There are limits 
 beyond which radical criticism cannot go and 
 remain scientific. So Professor Schmiedel, one 
 
22 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 of the foremost radical critics, said to me in 
 Zurich, "We may nibble away at the character 
 of Jesus, but we must at least leave a suf- 
 ficient initial impulse for this great and living 
 thing called Christianity." 
 
 The personality of the Man of Nazareth, then, 
 is the power behind the Christian history. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE SITUATION IN WHICH JESUS FOUND HIMSELF 
 
 Two great factors formed the background of 
 life in the first century, Greek civilization and 
 Roman rule. Alexander had carried the Greek 
 language and Greek culture to the Orient and 
 his great empire had virtually become a Greek 
 world. Even the remoter districts were more or 
 less strongly influenced. Over this Greek world, 
 Rome had extended its political sway. Men of 
 our time are not likely to overestimate the power 
 and efficiency of the Roman government at this 
 period. It knit the various countries around the 
 Mediterranean into one great compact body poli- 
 tic, whose vigorous heart beat in Italy and sent 
 the impulses of its authority to the furthest 
 boundaries. 
 
 When Jesus began his ministry, Palestine had 
 
 been virtually Roman for nearly a hundred 
 
 years, and composed part of the eastern frontier 
 
 of the Empire. Judea and Samaria for more 
 
 23 
 
24 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 than twenty years had constituted a Roman 
 province of the second or third class under a 
 Roman governor, called a procurator. Galilee and 
 Perea for more than thirty years had been ruled 
 by Herod Antipas, the tetrarch, a son of Herod 
 the Great, but he was a mere underling of the 
 Romans. The northeastern part of Palestine had 
 been for the same period under similar conditions 
 the dominion of Philip, the tetrarch, a half- 
 brother of Antipas. 
 
 The government of these rulers, while despotic 
 and often arbitrary, was on the whole firm and 
 just, and left much power in the hands of Jewish 
 magistrates and courts. For more than twenty 
 years, there had been practically uninterrupted 
 peace, and Palestine consequently was populous, 
 busy and rich. Jesus taught during a time of 
 business prosperity. This was especially true of 
 Galilee. 
 
 The Jews of Jesus' time were much like the 
 orthodox Jews of today, except that they were 
 neither poor nor persecuted. Their two greatest 
 interests were religion and money-making. Je- 
 rusalem was the religious and political center; 
 the seat of the temple, the Sanhedrin and the 
 
JESUS SITUATION 25 
 
 priesthood. It was ecclesiastical, formal, con- 
 servative, proud and intolerant. Galilee was 
 freer in its religious and social life, capable of 
 initiative and self-sacrifice, bold, courageous, un- 
 sophisticated, unspoiled. The people to whom 
 Jesus appealed were uncompromising monotheists, 
 had no doubts of God, and were equally sure of the 
 divine origin of the Old Testament. These things 
 were taken for granted in all his teaching. His 
 situation and task were radically different in these 
 respects from ours. 
 
 Though a frontier province, Palestine had 
 many Greek cities, and was truly in the life of 
 the Empire. Yet the Jews as a whole, though 
 inevitably influenced by Gentile life and thought, 
 most of them indeed speaking Greek, resolutely 
 set themselves against everything Gentile, as do 
 the orthodox Jews of today, and so far as pos- 
 sible lived in a world of their own. 
 
 This little Jewish world was divided by parties. 
 Of these, the Sadducees were the rich, aristocratic, 
 rationalistic, worldly party, made up principally 
 of priests and their retainers, with the High 
 Priest at their head. Their sympathies were 
 with the Romans. They were a small, compact, 
 
26 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 powerful coterie, in political control at Jerusalem 
 and in the Sanhedrin, but not largely influential 
 with the people, or numerous outside the capital. 
 They opposed the Pharisees doctrinally on tra- 
 ditionalism, the life after death and predestina- 
 tion. Apart from his last week in Jerusalem, 
 this party is comparatively unimportant for the 
 life and thought of Jesus. Its interest was in 
 political power and wealth. 
 
 The Pharisees formed a fraternity of some- 
 thing over six thousand members, and were the 
 nucleus of an influence which dominated the reli- 
 gious life of the whole nation. They were the 
 true leaders of the people, and, on that very 
 account, though a minority in the Sanhedrin, 
 practically dictated the action of that body. A 
 Pharisee was one who set himself to obey all the 
 prescriptions of the law, plus the endless interpre- 
 tations of the scribes, which they held to be of 
 equal validity. These interpretations referred par- 
 ticularly to the law of clean and unclean (es- 
 pecially to the items concerning food, and contact 
 with unclean persons), to the Sabbath, and to 
 tithes, fasting and prayers. Obedience was the 
 soul of piety. The law and its external perform- 
 
JESUS' SITUATION 27 
 
 ance filled the whole mental and spiritual horizon, 
 and discouraged every attempt to realize com- 
 munion with God or to nourish sympathy with 
 men. Ethics was practically sacrificed to exter- 
 nalized religion. Pride covered the Pharisees as a 
 garment, but they were not esoteric. They made 
 every effort to teach the law to all Israelites, in 
 school, in synagogue and by the wayside. They 
 compassed sea and land to make one proselyte. 
 They earnestly longed for the golden day when 
 Israel would keep the law and the traditions. The 
 whole interest of the Pharisee was in law-keeping. 
 His only care in politics was to secure a situation 
 favorable to legalism. The Pharisees were a re- 
 ligious and not a political party. 
 
 The Zealots would not have called themselves 
 a distinct party, being, like the rest of the people, 
 admirers of the Pharisees. They were principally 
 Galileans, and believed that it was a shame for 
 Israel, the elect nation, destined to rule the world, 
 to pay taxes or bow down to a heathen power. 
 They were ready to revolt against Rome at any 
 time, waiting only for a leader. They did not 
 expect to be able to overcome the world empire 
 alone, but thought that if they began the in- 
 
28 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 surrection, God would send the Messiah with 
 his supernatural powers to their aid. The Sad- 
 ducees and the more conservative Judean Phari- 
 sees frowned on these ideas, but the common 
 people and the less important Pharisees secretly 
 favored them, until Zealotism plunged the nation 
 into the war of 66-70. When the fighting began, 
 Galilee offered the most stubborn resistance to 
 Vespasian, and Galileans were the last desperate 
 defenders of Jerusalem and Masada. It is easily 
 seen how hazardous this Zealot feeling rendered 
 Jesus' Messianic work in Galilee, and conse- 
 quently Zealotism, which was a robust nationalism, 
 is one of the main factors in the situation. 
 
 The Messianic hope was active in Palestine 
 in the time of Jesus. It was derived almost 
 wholly from the Old Testament, but there were 
 many different opinions as to what sort of person 
 the Messiah would be and just what he would 
 do. Possibly the best general statement is that 
 the Jews expected the Messiah to be God's 
 special Representative on earth, the Bringer of 
 Salvation, the Founder of the Kingdom of God, 
 and the final Judge of Men. Each party would 
 desire, however, to interpret these phrases and 
 
JESUS SITUATION 29 
 
 modify them in its own way. Yet the people 
 generally expected the Messiah to be a human, 
 Davidic King, to destroy Israel's enemies, es- 
 pecially Rome, to judge the world, to establish 
 a universal Jewish empire with Jerusalem as its 
 capital, and thereafter to reign in righteousness 
 and peace. The Sadducees desired no Messiah. 
 The Pharisees waited for God to take the initia- 
 tive, on condition that Israel kept the law. The 
 Zealots would take the initiative themselves, ex- 
 pecting God to reward their faith by sending the 
 Messiah to help them. Jesus satisfied none of 
 these expectations. 
 
 There existed in Judaism an apocalyptic litera- 
 ture, which professed to unveil to the oppressed 
 people of God the future and the unseen world. 
 The books which especially interest us are the 
 Books of Enoch, the Assumption of Moses, the 
 Apocalypse of Baruch, and Fourth Ezra. These 
 are at once the most apocalyptic and the richest 
 in allusions to the Messiah. They are all founded 
 on the Book of Daniel and similar passages in 
 the Old Testament prophets. They give us the 
 apocalyptic view of the Messiah, as a pre-existent, 
 supernatural, semi-divine being, sent by God 
 
30 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 from heaven to be the Savior of Israel from its 
 enemies and the final Judge of Men. This is 
 quite different from what might be called the 
 popular political view, the idea of a Davidic king 
 and conqueror, born as a man among men. The 
 greatest historical question about Jesus is his 
 relation to these two radically different concep- 
 tions. 
 
 Although they have some phrases in common, 
 it is improbable that Jesus or the earlier apostles 
 had read these books. Many of the apocalyptic 
 ideas were undoubtedly more or less common 
 among the people, and from their speech they 
 get into both the Gospels and the apocalyptic 
 literature. The books themselves probably sprang 
 from small sects rather than from the main stock 
 of Pharisaic Judaism. 
 
 The common people from whom Jesus and the 
 apostles came, and with whom they had most to 
 do, were not Sadducees. Neither were they 
 Pharisees. They greatly admired the Pharisees 
 and took them for the highest types of piety. 
 The majority did the best they could and plodded 
 after the Pharisaic leaders, but a great many 
 were too busy or too poor to devote their lives 
 
JESUS' SITUATION 3 1 
 
 to keeping endless regulations. On account of 
 their failure to make even a serious attempt at 
 the legalistic ideal, these people were discouraged, 
 and many became "sinners," i. e., men who 
 made no pretense of keeping the law. To these 
 men Jesus offered his easier yoke and his blessed 
 rest. He was the friend of the "sinners." 
 
 Among the Jews of Jesus' day were many 
 truly pious people of generally Pharisaic type, but 
 hardly with the Pharisaic emphasis on legalism. 
 They were simple in their thought, nourished 
 their life on the Old Testament scriptures and 
 lived in communion with God. They have been 
 called "The Devout." They were really Old 
 Testament Jews, somewhat influenced by con- 
 temporary thought, and they looked hopefully 
 and prayerfully for the consolation of Israel. 
 They formed the special seed-plot of Christianity. 
 It was in such devout homes that the Baptist, 
 Jesus, and most of the Twelve grew up. 
 
 So we have the Sadducees representing worldli- 
 ness; the Pharisees, legalism; the Zealots, na- 
 tionalism and revolution; the Messianic hope and 
 the apocalyptic dreams; and the common people, 
 distressed and discouraged, and yet in expecta- 
 
32 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 tion of some help from God. Pharisaic legalism, 
 Zealot revolutionary nationalism, and the Mes- 
 sianic hope constituted the problem for Jesus, 
 and our principal interest is in seeing how he 
 handled these elements of the situation. 
 /"And now John the Baptist comes, a voice cry- 
 ing in the wilderness, a fresh breath of the ozone 
 [ of heaven's hills in a stagnant world, a prophet 
 in word and deed. He proclaims the Messianic 
 kingdom at hand, declares that the Messiah will 
 soon appear for judgment, and bids all men 
 repent. The people were profoundly moved, 
 "the Messianic hope revived with a start, and 
 the whole structure of Pharisaic legalism began 
 to crack and crumble." For John, with amazing 
 insight and boldness, demanded more than ex- 
 ternal piety, more than a stricter legalism. He 
 insisted on a real change of mind and heart 
 towards God, towards sin, towards fellow men, 
 i. e., towards life itself. It would not do to appeal 
 to racial privilege and say, "We have Abraham 
 for our Father." God could make children of 
 Abraham out of these stones. Nothing but genu- 
 ine repentance would suffice. It seemed as if 
 Amos or Isaiah had risen from the dead. The 
 
JESUS' SITUATION 33 
 
 people came in thousands to hear and to receive 
 the baptism of repentance, by which they sym- 
 bolized their burial of the old life and their resur- 
 rection to the new. But the Sadducees in their 
 cynicism and the Pharisees in their self-righteous 
 pride stood aloof from the man, who regarded 
 them as a generation of vipers, fit only for the 
 wrath to come. Just as little did John please 
 the Zealots, who waited in vain for a call to arms 
 amid the exhortations to repentance. It was a 
 great revival of genuine morality and pure reli- 
 gion. Jesus could not stand indifferent. He came 
 and was baptized. 
 
 (Note. — At this point many will wish to turn to the Appendix, 
 which furnishes a brief and comprehensive survey of the principal 
 divisions and events in the Life of Jesus.) 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 HOW DID JESUS COME TO BELIEVE HIMSELF THE 
 MESSIAH? 
 
 Although a matter of some doubt, the better 
 opinion seems to be that the Messianic hope 
 was strong among the Jews during the boyhood 
 of Jesus. At least we know that with the preach- 
 ing of John the Baptist it became the center 
 of national interest. But before that event, when 
 Jesus was ten or twelve years old, and a re- 
 markably bright boy for his age, Judas of Galilee 
 had risen in rebellion against Rome at the time 
 of the taxing under Quirinius, and, according to 
 Josephus, had thereby inaugurated the patriotic 
 movement. His followers developed into the well 
 known Zealot party of resolute nationalists, who 
 thought that if they only took the initiative 
 against the Romans, God would send the Messiah 
 to their aid. This rebellion threw all Galilee 
 into a ferment and the issues must have been 
 pondered in every home. The Old Testament 
 34 
 
JESUS AND THE MESSIAHSHIP 35 
 
 pictures of the Golden Age, the theocratic king 
 and the Servant of Jehovah were seen in livelier 
 colors, and the family at Nazareth could not 
 have been unmoved. In fact, the whole country 
 fell to discussing the matter. Among the Phari- 
 sees especially, various ideas emerged, for we 
 must remember that, while in those days conduct 
 was exactly prescribed, faith was free and theol- 
 ogy, outside a few leading ideas, was very much 
 in the fog. While then in Jesus' boyhood the 
 Messianic hope was vague and confused, various 
 parties vacillating between different ideas of just 
 what the Messiah would do, and just what sort 
 of person he would be, it is still probably correct 
 to say, as we have said before, that the common 
 denominator of all these opinions may be ex- 
 pressed thus: The Messiah would be God's special 
 Representative on earth, the Bringer of Salvation, 
 the Founder of the Kingdom of Heaven and the 
 final Judge of Men. Each party, of course, 
 would wish to add, define, explain and modify, 
 but this formula could express every view. And 
 this Messiah Jesus thought himself to be. Of 
 course, he too had his ideas of the meaning of 
 these terms, especially, salvation and the kingdom 
 
36 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 of God, but that is another story, which will 
 be told in subsequent chapters. 
 
 In spite of all that can be said against it, the 
 fact stands fast that Jesus thought himself the 
 Messiah, and that in the sense above expressed. 
 The gospel passages which go to make up the 
 proof are numerous, but we will mention only a 
 few of the more important, and will try at the 
 same time to find out how early in life the idea 
 entered Jesus' mind. 
 
 We know that he believed himself to be the 
 Messiah at the final Jewish trial, when the High 
 Priest asked him the direct question, "Art thou 
 the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed?" Think 
 for a moment of the solemnity of that scene. 
 Jesus stood at last before the supreme court of 
 Israel; the High Priest, the political and religious 
 head of the nation, who might well be looked 
 upon as the mouthpiece of the whole people, 
 asked the question. In asking it, he put Jesus 
 under oath to tell the truth, the whole truth and 
 nothing but the truth. On the answer, Jesus 
 knew full well, depended his life or death. But 
 he did not equivocate, he did not explain, he 
 did not hesitate. He answered simply and firmly, 
 
JESUS AND THE MESSIAHSHIP 37 
 
 "I am," and "what is more," he added, "one 
 day you, who judge me now, will appear before 
 my Messianic judgment seat." Any possible 
 remaining doubt that Jesus thought himself the 
 Messiah in his last week of life is swept away, 
 when we remember the Messianic Triumphal 
 Entry four days before this confession, and the 
 fact that a few hours after it the Sanhedrists 
 charged Jesus before Pilate with claiming to be 
 the Messianic King, which, of course, with the 
 Roman Governor was nothing less than high 
 treason. Pilate in accord with this charge placed 
 above Jesus' head upon the cross the words, 
 "This is Jesus of Nazareth, the King (the Mes- 
 sianic King) of the Jews." The proof is complete. 
 We now go back into the ministry, possibly 
 nearly a year, to Cassarea Philippi. Jesus has 
 been journeying with his disciples through non- 
 Jewish lands, and near this practically heathen 
 capital, he asks them the momentous question, 
 "Whom say ye that I am?" When Peter, in spite 
 of all the evidence to the contrary replies, "Thou 
 art the Messiah," Jesus accepts the answer with 
 joy. "Blessed art thou Simon Bar- Jonah," he 
 says, "for flesh and blood has not revealed it to 
 
38 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 thee, but my Father, who is in heaven." These 
 words ring as certainly as the confession before 
 the Sanhedrin. 
 
 But we can trace this thought in Jesus' mind 
 to the time of the temptation, in the very be- 
 ginning of his ministry. It is a fundamental 
 error to see in Satan's "If thou art the Son of 
 God" any suggestion of doubt, as though the 
 temptation to Jesus were to doubt his Messiah- 
 ship. Rather, to avoid ambiguity, we might well 
 translate, "Since thou art the Son of God," do so 
 and so. 1 Jesus' Messiahship is taken for granted, 
 it is made the very basis of temptation. The mat- 
 ter decided in that hour was not whether Jesus 
 was the Messiah or not, but what sort of Messiah 
 this Galilean peasant would choose to be, what 
 should be the fundamental principles of his Mes- 
 sianic activity. 
 
 Can we go yet further up the stream of Jesus' 
 life and still find this thought? Doubtless. The 
 principal thing in the vision at the baptism is the 
 divine message, "Thou art my beloved Son, in 
 
 1 Just as it might be said to an American President with refer- 
 ence to some bill, "If you are the President of the United States, 
 send in your veto," and this would mean, "Since you are the 
 President of the United States — and you are — send in your veto." 
 
JESUS AND THE MESSIAHSHIP 39 
 
 whom I am well pleased." The first words 
 would bring to any Jewish mind the second 
 Psalm, "Yet I have set my king upon my holy 
 hill of Zion. I will tell the decree: Jehovah said 
 unto me, Thou art my son; this day have I be- 
 gotten thee." This is the theocratic king; and 
 the Servant of Jehovah of Isaiah 42: 1 would 
 probably be suggested by the second phrase, "in 
 whom I am well pleased." To Jesus, this word 
 then could mean nothing less and nothing else 
 than, "Thou art the Messiah," the Messianic 
 king, "my Servant sent to bring Jacob again to 
 me, and to be my salvation unto the ends of the 
 earth." (Isaiah 49: 5, 6) 
 
 But did he think himself the Messiah before 
 his baptism? We enter here upon more debatable 
 ground, but we must, I think, say, "yes." Two 
 considerations lead us to this conclusion. In 
 Matthew's account, John the Baptist is repre- 
 sented as saying to Jesus as he presents himself 
 to be baptized, "I have need to be baptized of 
 thee and comest thou to me?" John senses in 
 Jesus his moral and spiritual superior, just as we 
 are often aware of standing in the presence of 
 men stronger, abler, purer than we are. With 
 
40 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 Jesus before him, John's own moral need pain- 
 fully obtrudes itself on his conscience. He feels 
 that he would like, himself, to be baptized by 
 this one mightier and better than he. But what 
 does Jesus say? Does he tell John that he has 
 made a mistake, that he does not stand in the 
 presence of a superior after all? Nothing of the 
 kind. He rather says, "John, you are correct. 
 It would be more fitting for me to baptize you, 
 but, in the circumstances, there are reasons which 
 make the other course right." These words 
 prove that Jesus, even before the baptism, felt 
 himself the superior of John, whom he afterwards 
 called "more than a prophet" and, indeed, "the 
 greatest born of women." Could such a superior 
 be any other than the Messiah? A second con- 
 sideration makes this answer certain. It is un- 
 psychological to suppose that the vision at the 
 baptism gave Jesus an entirely new idea. Things 
 do not happen that way in life. God prepares 
 men for his revelations, and must necessarily 
 have done so in this case, where the revelation 
 was the most astounding ever made to any of the 
 sons of men. Had it come as unexpectedly as a 
 bolt from the blue, it would probably first have 
 
JESUS AND THE MESSIAHSHIP 41 
 
 stunned and dazed Jesus, and then have unbal- 
 anced his mind. When we come to think it over 
 carefully, we must believe that Jesus had long 
 had the idea and that the voice from heaven 
 gave him only his final certainly. And this is 
 confirmed by those words reported as from his 
 lips at twelve years of age, "I must be about my 
 Father's business," l words which certainly do not 
 imply Messiahship, but do suggest that even at 
 that age Jesus felt that he was divinely called 
 to devote his life to some distinctly religious 
 task. 
 
 Some indeed would go further than this and 
 say that he knew himself as Messiah even from 
 the cradle. But in this they go not merely be- 
 yond scripture, but beyond all that we can 
 understand. My Sunday School teacher, for 
 instance, used to teach us that, as man, Jesus 
 knew no more than an ordinary infant, but that, 
 as God, he knew all things. This, however, was 
 not Luke's view. He writes, "The child grew 
 and waxed strong, becoming filled (margin) with 
 wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him " 
 (Luke 2: 40); and again, "And Jesus advanced 
 1 1 prefer this translation of the Authorized Version. 
 
42 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God 
 and men" (Luke 2: 52); and the author of the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews thought that "though 
 he was a Son, yet he learned obedience by the 
 things which he suffered" (5: 8). Moreover such 
 a double person, who thought and acted now as 
 God and now as man, is very far removed from 
 us, could not have been truly a man, nor have 
 lived a truly human life. We cannot think of him 
 as a real brother, involved in our difficulties, 
 fighting the same sort of battle which we must 
 fight, or really conquering in the moral conflict. 
 This Jesus, now God and now man, is thus alien 
 to us and we instinctively feel that he cannot 
 truly sympathize with us in our temptations, 
 struggles and sorrows. 
 
 My Sunday School teacher was only repeating 
 a dictum of fourth century theologians, which 
 cannot be made binding on free Protestant Chris- 
 tians, and which is entirely out of tune with 
 modern feeling and conceptions. As a sincere 
 attempt to explain the mystery of the personality 
 of Jesus and guarantee his unique greatness and 
 divinity, it is worthy of our respect, but we can- 
 not help feeling that it is mechanical, unnatural, 
 
JESUS AND THE MESSIAHSHIP 43 
 
 impossible and without warrant either in Scrip- 
 ture or in experience. Our age demands a more 
 vital theory, more in line with what we know of 
 mental and moral growth, more congruous with 
 the portrait of Jesus in the gospels. While per- 
 haps we cannot define our idea with the sharpness 
 vouchsafed those ancient theologians, we may 
 say that we must think of Jesus as developing 
 like any other child. Like all great personalities, 
 he gradually became conscious of himself, of his 
 capacities, of the work God had given him to 
 do, and of the career and the destiny before him. 
 But more than any other, he was led of the 
 Spirit in it all. 
 
 But can we discover the source and trace the 
 development of Jesus' idea that he was the Mes- 
 siah during the years which preceded his baptism? 
 I think we can. To be sure, the only passage 
 to which we can appeal is the one already quoted, 
 Luke 2: 49, "I must be about my Father's busi- 
 ness." But this is too meagre a foundation on 
 which to build, too uncertain in various ways to 
 bear the superstructure we intend to erect. We 
 are thrown back on wider considerations. 
 
 We choose to base the whole of our present 
 
44 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 investigation and indeed the whole of this book 
 on the moral perfection of Jesus. We do not 
 prove this by reviewing all the words and deeds 
 of Jesus recorded in the gospels, and coming to 
 the conclusion that Jesus knew no sin. Such a 
 method is illusory. These reports may not be 
 unbiased and are certainly fragmentary, and the 
 conclusion is therefore not indisputable. There 
 is a broader and, it seems to me, an incontestable 
 proof. It is this. The higher a man's moral and 
 spiritual standard, the surer he is to see and con- 
 fess his sinfulness and shortcomings. The great- 
 est saints, like Paul, Jonathan Edwards and 
 John Wesley, have ever felt their sin most acutely. 
 Now all will acknowledge that Jesus was a man 
 of exquisite moral feeling and deepest spiritual 
 insight. He was and is the great searcher of 
 human hearts. Yet he never seems to have been 
 conscious of any sin or fault or shortcoming in 
 himself. He never prayed for forgiveness, nor 
 expressed the slightest regret for anything he ever 
 did. Again, Jesus was the greatest teacher in 
 the sphere of morals and religion. No one ever 
 set the ethical standard so high, or preached more 
 solemnly the seriousness of the moral struggle. 
 
JESUS AND THE MESSIAH SHIP 45 
 
 Yet he never by a single word expressed the 
 slightest aspiration to be better than he was. 
 
 If it is objected that this proof also is insuffi- 
 cient, that, in this case too, omissions and im 
 perfections in the records may render it all illu- 
 sory, we answer with perfect confidence. This 
 method of representing the goodness of Jesus as 
 a goodness, unlike that of all other good men, 
 without repentance and without aspiration, de- 
 mands an originality and insight deeper than we 
 can ascribe to the simple Christians who wrote 
 these memorials. Moreover, according to this 
 theory, they have succeeded in building upon 
 this unique principle a character moving in a 
 real world of men with its vicissitudes, perplexi- 
 ties and tragedies, uttering thousands of words 
 on most diverse topics and in varied situations, 
 and yet they have made him so natural, so real, 
 so simple, so good and nevertheless so great, that 
 he has influenced the world as none other. This 
 feat, says Rousseau, no friend of Christianity, 
 would be a greater miracle than the character 
 itself. So also says John Stuart Mill. We agree 
 with them. Jesus was the perfect man. No 
 one has ever yet been able to conceive a char- 
 
46 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 acter greater, wiser, or better than he, nor has 
 anyone like him yet appeared in history. The 
 greatest test of Jesus' character was this very 
 idea of Messiahship; as Oscar Holtzmann says, 
 "the greatest thought that ever entered a human 
 mind and left it sane." But in spite of this 
 marvelous assumption, he never strikes the reader 
 of the gospels as an egotist, but is perfectly bal- 
 anced, calm and straightforward, nay more, al- 
 ways giving the impression of gentleness, humil- 
 ity, love and unselfishness. "This impression of 
 perfection which the Master made is entirely 
 unique in the spiritual history of man. No one 
 ever made it before, and no one ever tried to 
 claim it." 
 
 Founding everything then upon the moral 
 perfection of Jesus, we again ask, Can we dis- 
 cover the source and trace the development of 
 his idea that he was the Messiah, during the 
 years that preceded his baptism? We find that 
 this question practically resolves itself into an- 
 other, How would a morally perfect boy, the 
 boy who became the man Jesus, develop? In 
 other words, we must trace the character of Jesus 
 to its source, and in so doing may legitimately 
 
JESUS AND THE MESSIAHSHIP 47 
 
 use all we know of Jesus, of his career, and of 
 his thought, for the man is only the larger and 
 maturer boy. The following paragraphs present 
 therefore no merely imaginative picture based on 
 a fanciful theory, but a sketch which is true to 
 the best data we have. 
 
 First of all, brought up in a Jewish home, the 
 thought of God was perfectly natural to Jesus. He 
 drew it in with his mother's milk. He grew up 
 with it. It was the very center of his thought. 
 He was absolutely sure of God. Never a doubt 
 about him ever flitted across his mind. 
 
 All the world seemed full of God to him. 
 Heaven was God's throne, the earth was his foot- 
 stool. God sent the sunshine and the rain, God 
 fed the birds and would feed his children too, 
 God made the grass grow and painted the lily. 
 How much more would he clothe those who 
 trusted him ever so imperfectly? God led men by 
 his own hand. If perchance, to strengthen and 
 broaden them, he brought them into temptation, 
 he delivered them from the evil. Jesus was sure 
 that God was always near and that he could 
 depend upon him. His trust was as simple and 
 as strong as that of a child in its mother. 
 
48 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 God never seemed vague, unreal or strange 
 to him. No slightest shade of alienation ever 
 clouded God's face. No feeling of guilt ever 
 made him afraid of God or gave him any desire 
 to hide from him. He called God his Father, 
 not because he mysteriously knew of some unique 
 connection with him before the world was, but 
 because he felt so much at home with God. I 
 know that I am the son of a noble father, whom 
 God yet graciously spares to me, not so much 
 because of the facts recorded in the family Bible, 
 as because I find myself so much one with him. 
 I understand his peculiar physical movements. 
 I know why he does just this or that, and ex- 
 actly how he feels when he does these things. I 
 divine his thought before he speaks. I antici- 
 pate his wishes. There is a deep understanding 
 and interplay of feeling and life between us. His 
 characteristic mental action is perfectly familiar 
 to me. If someone asks him a question, I often 
 can predict his reply before he utters it. Jesus 
 knew his Father, God, even more intimately, 
 found himself in wonderful harmony and unison 
 with him. God's thought seemed to him the 
 most natural thing in the world. He found 
 
JESUS AND THE MESSIAHSHIP 49 
 
 that he felt as God felt towards righteousness and 
 evil, toward men and life. He discovered that 
 his own deepest purpose was a reproduction of 
 his Father's. So he felt that God was his Father. 
 It was deeper than reason, alien to the realm of 
 logic. It was instinct. His moral and spiritual 
 likeness to God made him sure that he was 
 God's own child. 
 
 So he lived in daily communion with his 
 Father, and this communion was the sunshine of 
 his soul, the very life of his inmost spirit. It 
 was an unbroken and delightful union of love, 
 an unspeakable joy welling up from the very 
 depths of his nature. 
 
 He read the Old Testament like every other 
 Jewish child, but he dwelt most of all on Deu- 
 teronomy, the Psalms and the prophets. These 
 were his favorite books. In loving study of these 
 scriptures, he often meditated on Isaiah's glow- 
 ing prophecies of the glory, purity and blessing 
 of Messianic times, but he felt that nothing there 
 described went beyond what he experienced every 
 day. God's presence, the light of his counte- 
 nance, the satisfaction of soul, the deep peace, 
 the holy joy, the sense of perfect security, the 
 
50 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 beauty of righteousness, so sublimely described, 
 all were his. He could imagine no future in 
 which he or other men could enjoy more than he 
 already possessed. There was only one conclu- 
 sion, these prophecies had been fulfilled in him, 
 heaven was in his heart, the kingdom of God 
 was within him. In Nazareth, he daily sat down 
 to all of the good things of the Messianic feast 
 and rejoiced as he looked into his Father's face. 
 Others might think the Messianic time to be 
 still future, but in his own soul, he knew that 
 it was now. 
 
 All this had a charming naturalness about it. 
 As Jesus developed, his secret conviction grew 
 in strength and definiteness. His was a happy, 
 healthy boyhood. It is a great mistake to sup- 
 pose that sin is an essential part of human nature. 
 It is not only not necessary to it, but is an ugly 
 twist given to what would otherwise be good and 
 beautiful. It is a greater mistake to look upon 
 religion in a child as something unnatural and 
 morbid. This sinless boy who grew up with 
 the thought of God as his Father, whose moral 
 perfection deepened and widened with his ex- 
 perience of life, was the only perfectly normal 
 
JESUS AND THE MESSIAHSHIP 5 1 
 
 boy of whom history tells us, and if we but knew 
 more of the years of his childhood and youth, 
 would be the ideal for boys of all lands and all 
 ages. 
 
 With this treasure in his heart, Jesus looked 
 out of happy eyes, upon the world of men about 
 him. He observed the motives and conduct of 
 his brothers and sisters, of the men and women 
 of Nazareth, and perhaps from the hill beyond 
 the city gazed on the Roman legions as they 
 marched, and the traffic which streamed to and 
 fro along the road between Ptolemais on the 
 one hand and Capernaum and Damascus on the 
 other. All lived the ordinary life of men before 
 him. They had no idea that this quiet, good 
 boy was to make the name of his obscure town 
 known on all the continents and through all the 
 centuries. So they ate, they drank, they bought, 
 they sold, they planted, they builded, they mar- 
 ried and were given in marriage. But Jesus' 
 sensitive soul soon discovered, possibly at first 
 with some surprise, that these people had no 
 such blessed experience of the Father's presence 
 and love as he possessed. 
 
 God seemed far off from them and they from 
 
52 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 God, they did not live in his presence, nor feel 
 him in their hearts. It was theirs to keep his 
 law, to be sure, but he himself, most of them 
 conceived, lived far away in heaven, only re- 
 motely interested in their daily cares. Some, 
 who had been caught in the snare of Gentile 
 thought, even doubted whether there were a God. 
 
 They looked out upon the world, but they did 
 not see God in it all. The sun rose in the splen- 
 dor of crimson and gold over the eastern hills, 
 flooding the world with light, and set in the 
 western sea, painting the sky with glory, but 
 most of them never noticed it, and few saw the 
 God of beauty and of love in it. They painfully 
 or carelessly toiled along the common road from 
 the cradle to the grave, but few saw the Father's 
 hand leading them through the sunshine and the 
 shadow. 
 
 Many were estranged from God by a sense of 
 sin and guilt. He grew very dim and misty to 
 their thought and they felt a wall of separation 
 between him and them. When conscience awoke, 
 they feared him as a criminal fears the judge. 
 Some of them indeed did not like to think of 
 him, for the thought brought them no joy or 
 
JESUS AND THE MESSIAHSHIP 53 
 
 peace. Possibly Jesus may have spoken to many 
 of them of the blessedness of his experience, but 
 found their ears deaf and their heart gross. 
 
 Jesus saw that all their life and happiness 
 was spoiled by sin and selfishness and inner 
 falsity, by envy, jealousy, covetousness, lust, 
 contempt, pride and hatred, by anxiety, distrust 
 and fear, by aimlessness, loneliness, weariness 
 and despair, by the burden of guilt and the 
 consciousness of moral failure; and with poverty, 
 disaster, disease and death ever standing just 
 behind the door, their lot was sad indeed. 
 
 Then his Savior-heart was stirred. He was 
 filled with compassion for them, for they were 
 scattered and distressed as sheep that had no 
 shepherd. His limitless love went out to them. 
 He knew that all their sin and misery would 
 vanish, if they could only live like him in the 
 sunshine of the Father's face, and he longed to 
 bring them into the blessing which irradiated his 
 life with purity and peace and joy. 1 
 
 1 He felt that he had what they had not. "He never put him- 
 self on the same level of sonship with men. He felt himself above 
 men here. They needed repentance, he none. He could not have 
 called himself Messiah, if he had not felt the difference first." 
 
 Von Soden. 
 
54 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 And this was his call, a call from above. Here 
 was his work, a work which lay immediately at 
 his hand. It was perfectly simple, perfectly 
 plain. All he had to do was to bring men into 
 the same communion with God which he pos- 
 sessed. His whole business was to give, to give 
 his inner self to those about him. And he felt 
 in himself the strength to do it. He understood 
 now that he had been born for no other purpose, 
 that God had given him all needed resources to 
 accomplish this blessed mission. He trusted in 
 God to lead him, to show him the way, to give 
 him the opportunities. The voice at the baptism 
 only brought him to a final certainty. With 
 every step the conviction deepened that his 
 Father had sent him to do this very thing. And 
 when the road grew rough and steep, and the 
 shadow of a cross loomed in the distance, his 
 love never drew back, but he went right on 
 through suspicion, calumny, danger, treachery, 
 insult, pain and death itself to do his work of 
 love. 
 
 Most appropriately Luke represents him as 
 preaching his first sermon from the text, long 
 since spoken of the Servant of Jehovah, 
 
JESUS AND THE MESSIAHSHIP 55 
 
 "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, 
 Because he anointed me to preach good tidings 
 to the poor: 
 
 He hath sent me to proclaim release to the 
 captives, 
 And recovering of sight to the blind, 
 To set at liberty them that are bruised, 
 To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord." 
 And the middle of the ministry repeats the mes- 
 sage: 
 
 "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are 
 heavy laden and I will give you rest. Take my 
 yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am meek 
 and lowly in heart, and ye shall find rest to your 
 souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is 
 light." He bids men come to him and learn 
 what his heart can teach them. That heart's ex- 
 perience is salvation and rest. 
 
 Having this work to do, having received this 
 divine call, having, been endued with all the 
 power of the Spirit, he most naturally thought of 
 himself as Messiah. There was no other word 
 in his world to express him. So we see that his 
 Messiahship was no arbitrary title, ambitiously 
 grasped at in self-will by one who could scarcely 
 
56 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 stagger under its load. We see too how unsatis- 
 factory and superficial is the view that it was 
 something unexpectedly imposed upon him from 
 without at his baptism. Rather his inner ex- 
 perience of communion with God, his sonship, 
 was the source of his Messiahship. What he was 
 was the root of what he became. He came to 
 think that he was the Messiah, because he found 
 that he had a Messiah's work to do, and that he 
 had within himself the resources to do it. The 
 strong man leaped up with joy to perform the 
 mighty task, confident in his own powers, and 
 relying implicitly on God. 
 
 All was natural. It was the unfolding of the 
 greatest of personalities. He went forth to share 
 with men his joy, his freedom, his light, his 
 energy; to give men his life — a life with God, a 
 life of love and righteousness. This is the inmost 
 secret of his mission. To this delightful spiritual 
 experience of his boyhood and youth we trace 
 everything back as to its spring. Nay more, 
 the source of the church, of Christianity and of 
 Christian civilization is found at last to be the 
 heart of Jesus. 
 
 And as a matter of fact, history has proved 
 
JESUS AND THE MESSIAHSHIP 57 
 
 that he was the Messiah in the sense in which 
 he used that term. He was and is God's special 
 Representative upon earth. Men can name no 
 greater. No one else has ever so impressed upon 
 the world the sense of the presence of God. He 
 seems the embodiment of the divine purity and 
 the divine love. He brings in himself God's 
 message of peace and hope to men. In him we 
 see the Father, learn to know his will, and feel the 
 beating of his heart. Jesus translates all our 
 religious abstractions into concrete realities, all 
 our theologies into life, all our vague spiritual 
 dreams and hopes into action and endeavor. 
 
 He was and is the Bringer of Salvation. All 
 who have come to him, who have accepted the 
 simple though radical conditions which he lays 
 down, and who have surrendered their lives to 
 his guidance have been saved. And by this I 
 mean that, either gradually or suddenly, accord- 
 ing to temperament and the circumstances of 
 the case, they have experienced such a sense of 
 freedom from old burdens and limitations, such 
 a new feeling of purity and peace, such an access 
 of moral and spiritual power, such a realization 
 of love for all men and especially for God, such 
 
58 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 a new and worthy purpose in life, such a unity 
 of heart and mind and will, such freshness, joy 
 and hope as all together can be counted nothing 
 less than a new life. And they come to recognize 
 that this is, after all, only sharing the wonderful 
 energy and purity of the inner life of Jesus. And 
 just in proportion as nations and ages and society in 
 general have entered into the blessings which Jesus 
 offers in himself, have they felt the hew stir, the new 
 impulse and the new hope, and entered upon 
 higher moral and spiritual stages of development. 
 He was and is the Founder of the Kingdom of 
 God on earth. That kingdom is being set up 
 today on every continent and among the people 
 of every race and language on the whole globe. 
 His name is praised from the rising of the sun 
 to the going down thereof. All spheres of life 
 and activity are being subdued to his will. The 
 multitude which hails him the Lord of their 
 lives continually increases, and with fervent faith 
 believes the day will come when he shall reign as 
 the spiritual leader and undisputed moral king of 
 men. No one can reasonably doubt that the 
 present movement descends through the centuries 
 from the Jesus of Galilee and Jerusalem. 
 
JESUS AND THE MESSIAHSHIP 59 
 
 He is and will be the Judge of Men. If he 
 is, as we have tried to prove, the one morally 
 and spiritually perfect man, the new type of a 
 higher race, excelling all others in beauty and 
 strength and the glory of a divine holiness and 
 love, then surely every character must finally be 
 tested by the attitude assumed toward him, and 
 he becomes the touchstone of destiny. 
 
 So then he is Messiah, not only because we 
 can show from many Scripture passages that he 
 so thought himself, but because he had the ex- 
 perience of God and the spiritual power to do a 
 Messiah's work, and lastly because, as a matter 
 of fact, he was and is God's special Representa- 
 tive on earth, the Bringer of Salvation, the 
 Founder of the Kingdom of Heaven, and the 
 Judge of Men. History has proved him to be 
 Messiah, in the sense in which he used the word. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 
 
 Part I 
 
 Two great elements in the life of Palestine 
 determined the outer form of the career of Jesus, 
 and their complications constituted that tangled 
 web of circumstance through which he had to 
 cut his way. The first was Pharisaic legalism, 
 the less important of the two, whose considera- 
 tion we consequently postpone to another chap- 
 ter. The other and more important, to one who 
 believed himself the Messiah, was the Messianic 
 Hope of Israel. 
 
 At the risk of repetition, we again sketch the 
 situation. The common people, at least after 
 John the Baptist began to preach, eagerly ex- 
 pected a Messiah, who would be a son of David, 
 born as a man of men, an earthly king, who 
 would break the power of the Romans, deliver 
 the Jews from their oppression, hold a judgment 
 day, found a world empire with Jerusalem as 
 60 
 
HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 6l 
 
 the capital and the Jews as the ruling people, and 
 thenceforth reign in peace and righteousness. 
 This Messiah would be endowed with super- 
 natural powers, and would have all the resources 
 of God for his great and holy enterprise. The 
 ethical element was of the essence of this hope, 
 more or less strong in the minds of various 
 groups. 
 
 The Zealots were the men who took this ex- 
 pectation of a political Messiah in earnest, and 
 felt that if they only initiated the rebellion 
 against Rome, God would send the Messiah to 
 their aid. They were the party of action and 
 aggression. It is important for us to remember 
 that Galilee was the birthplace and the hotbed 
 of Zealotism. It is the free-born, unspoiled 
 Galileans, who rise in rebellion again and again, 
 against whom Vespasian with sixty thousand 
 men must wage a relentless campaign of a year's 
 duration, before he can besiege the capital. It 
 is these Galilean Zealots, who undertake the 
 defense of Jerusalem, who die in the last ditch 
 at Masada, and who grace Titus' triumph in Rome. 
 The Jerusalem and Judea of Jesus' time, rich, 
 ecclesiastical, formal, did not favor such violent 
 
62 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 and fanatical ideas. They felt on the whole 
 that it was best to wait God's good time, which 
 they thought would come only on condition of a 
 perfect keeping of the law, and therefore was in- 
 definitely distant. Then in some inexplicable 
 way God would send his Messiah, a being more 
 or less vaguely supernatural, who would carry 
 out the same political program which the com- 
 mon people expected. 
 
 A few among the Pharisees carried the hope 
 of a supernatural Messiah to its extreme. They 
 looked for a preexistent Son of Man, who would 
 come from heaven to judge the world and in- 
 augurate a new age of supernatural glory. This 
 was the apocalyptic view, as opposed to the political 
 view held with variations by the common people, 
 the Zealots and the more conservative Pharisees. 
 With these two views, apocalyptic and political, 
 Jesus had to reckon. 
 
 This chapter will show how Jesus handled 
 these ideas and sentiments, and will especially 
 attempt to trace the movement of his own mind 
 and to analyze the great crises of his Messianic 
 career. It will therefore be a skeleton sketch of 
 his ministry from his own point of view, dealing 
 
HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 63 
 
 with the more important questions connected 
 with his life. 
 
 Jesus entered this world of conflicting Mes- 
 sianic views with a different and perfectly definite 
 Messianic conception of his own, utterly independ- 
 ent of the popular ideas in its origin, for it had 
 its source in his own experience of God and of 
 spiritual blessedness. The clue that will lead us 
 through the tangled maze before us is simply 
 this, that Jesus held firmly to his own conception 
 of his mission to the end. To be sure, he must 
 relate it to the popular ideas, must express it in 
 the popular language, and must perhaps modify 
 it and add to it as vicissitudes arose. But he 
 never changed it in any essential particular. 
 Whatever he appropriated from the popular be- 
 liefs only served to express his own view to the 
 people, or helped him to hold it strongly in the 
 swirling eddies of the conflict. And this is the 
 touch of reality. The gospels show us the ideal- 
 istic man of Nazareth with his matchless inner 
 experience leaving his quiet life, and, the moment 
 he steps upon the public stage, caught in the 
 cross currents of interests, opinions and preju- 
 dices, and soon in desperate struggle with narrow 
 
64 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 bigotry, sordid covetousness, patriotic ambitions 
 and treacherous superficiality. Here is the ideal 
 man in the real world. 
 
 The origin and content of Jesus' own view of 
 his mission and Messiahship were sketched in 
 the last chapter. Suffice it to say here that, im- 
 mediately after his baptism, Jesus was sure of 
 two things; that he enjoyed a unique relationship 
 and communion with God, and that he was called 
 of God to bring this spiritual blessing to men, 
 especially to the Jewish nation. This was salva- 
 tion, and he was, therefore, Savior. To this 
 end, he felt himself endued with all the necessary 
 spiritual power. These are the fundamental 
 facts about Jesus, at this time, and it is neces- 
 sary for us to conceive them clearly in all their 
 simplicity. Our whole aim must be to see Jesus 
 with new eyes, to put aside for the time at least 
 all preconceptions and prejudices, to forget the 
 everlasting debate about New Testament descrip- 
 tions of him and the later theological controversies 
 about his person, and to observe this Galilean 
 in his actual career as objectively as did the 
 earliest disciples and yet with minds even more 
 open than theirs. When the clouds of dust raised 
 
HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 65 
 
 by centuries of conflict and criticism finally lift, 
 we should see that the naked fact is that a new 
 type of man, fresh, strong and unique, appeared in 
 our race in the first century. With this simple 
 and yet pregnant statement, we begin inde- 
 pendently to make our own sketch of the history 
 and significance of Jesus. 
 
 We shall not understand the man or the his- 
 tory, however, unless we recognize as funda- 
 mental in him a crystalline purity of heart, an 
 absolute honesty and straightforwardness, which 
 precluded the slightest attempt to appear what 
 he was not, and prevented him from swerving 
 for a moment a hair's breadth from the straight 
 line of right to court popularity, avoid pain, or 
 fall in with the ideas of the crowd. In other 
 words, he was morally sound to the core. His 
 hope, his perfect childlike trust was not in man, 
 but in God, his Father, on whom he relied for 
 guidance and loving care. Yet no man ever 
 walked more warily than he. In him boldness, 
 faith and wisdom were perfectly combined. 
 
 Immediately after his baptism, Jesus was cer- 
 tain that he was the Messiah or Savior in the 
 sense already stated. The very simplicity of it 
 
66 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 all was almost baffling, however. How was he 
 to go to work? What were to be the first steps of 
 this Nazarene carpenter, who wanted to save 
 the world, and yet was so different from what a 
 Messiah was expected to be? On what funda- 
 mental principles was he to act? The story of 
 the Temptation lets us into his inner thought on 
 these questions. Here we see the kind of things 
 he decided not to do and the positive laws of 
 conduct which emerge from the decisions. The 
 first temptation tells us that he would not use 
 the peculiar power of which he was conscious to 
 help himself out of any difficulty or danger, even 
 to save his life. "He saved others, himself he 
 could not save." Without any reserve, he threw 
 himself into the service of men, by this principle 
 burning all his bridges behind him. He trusted 
 only in God's provision for his wants and God's 
 aid in distress. Beyond that he would not and 
 could not go. He resolved to fight the fight with 
 advantages no greater than are vouchsafed the 
 humblest and weakest of men. In the second 
 contest he met and conquered the lure to fanat- 
 icism, the tempting of God in self-will and spiri- 
 tual pride. This is one of the commonest, sub- 
 
HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 67 
 
 tlest and most destructive enticements and it 
 appeals most powerfully to men of faith. It 
 was the ruin of all the Jewish Messianic pre- 
 tenders of that age. But Jesus decided that his 
 ministry should be sane. In the third struggle, 
 he put away the kingly crown. He would not 
 be the popular political warrior Messiah, con- 
 quering all the kingdoms of the world, but would 
 accomplish his spiritual ends by spiritual means. 
 Thus he definitely repudiated all ideas of political 
 Messiahship and broke with the expectations of 
 the vast majority of the people. And this was 
 final. On this point, he never wavered nor com- 
 promised. 
 
 Having made these decisions, he went forth 
 calm and yet in deadly earnest to do his work 
 in his own way. The keenness of moral insight, 
 the practical largeness of view, and the strength 
 of character evinced in what is called the Temp- 
 tation must not escape us. Nor should we forget 
 that the life principles here disclosed are given 
 us, in all probability, in the words of Jesus him- 
 self, who could have been the only reporter, and 
 that he made the report many months after the 
 occurrence. These considerations strengthen our 
 
68 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 belief that Jesus not only made these decisions 
 at the beginning, but consciously recognized them 
 as determining the character of his ministry 
 throughout. 
 
 Jesus had principles then, but no elaborate 
 plan of action. He was mostly an opportunist, 
 allowing himself to be led by events, for in them 
 he saw his Father's hand. Yet, in great crises, 
 after long and earnest prayer, he boldly took the 
 initiative. His last journey to Jerusalem is a 
 striking illustration. From the first also he de- 
 cided that preaching and teaching would be his 
 method (cf. Mark i: 38, the Sower, the Tares 
 and his actual career) and to that he clung to the 
 very end. With his conception of his mission 
 as that of bringing men into the blessings of his 
 own experience of God, this was the only simple, 
 honest thing to do. Moreover, he conceived that 
 he ought to evangelize the whole Jewish nation 
 and do a work in every province. So he was a 
 teacher Messiah, a prophet Messiah in outward 
 form at least, and, most naturally, began his 
 work by assisting John the Baptist. 
 
 But how could Jesus think and call himself 
 the Messiah, when that name meant to the 
 
HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 69 
 
 people something entirely different from what he 
 intended to be? Was this pretending to be 
 something which he was not? Must it not neces- 
 sarily lead to tragic misunderstandings? We 
 answer, To be sure, the literal points of exact 
 agreement between the popular idea of the Mes- 
 siah and Jesus were reduced to one, viz.: — that 
 the Messiah would work miracles. Jesus was 
 neither warrior king nor, during his lifetime at 
 least, apocalyptic judge. Yet he was God's spe- 
 cial representative on earth; he came to bring 
 salvation and found the kingdom of God and, 
 if so, there was no other Jewish word to describe 
 him except Messiah. Doubtless salvation and 
 the kingdom of God had, in his thought, a higher 
 and more spiritual meaning than they had in the 
 thought of his contemporaries. Indeed he him- 
 self belonged to a higher and more spiritual 
 sphere than they had yet conceived, and there- 
 fore was very different from the divine represen- 
 tative whom they had expected. But there was 
 no higher popular title to describe him than 
 Messiah, and none so nearly fitted to set forth 
 his appointed work. The only thing which he 
 could do was to fill the word, Messiah, with the 
 
70 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 higher and simpler meaning, and this task Jesus 
 undertook and accomplished with a heavenly 
 wisdom. This attempt was justifiable and the 
 result in a sense successful largely because popular 
 ideas, on all these subjects, were loose and con- 
 fused; Jesus' teaching and person were the con- 
 crete realities which brought the open-minded to 
 definiteness and decision. In short, Jesus and 
 his mission found no human words or . concep- 
 tions high enough or simple enough to express 
 them, and he necessarily took the highest words 
 and conceptions available and filled them with a 
 new and higher content. In one sense, he was 
 not the Messiah (of popular thought), but much 
 more than the Messiah. 
 
 If Jesus had not assumed Messiahship, men 
 would have asked, What relation does your 
 work bear to the Old Testament representations 
 of the Messiah? Jesus could not have said, 
 There will be no Messiah. He did say, I am the 
 Messiah, the true Messiah is such as I. 
 
 What has been said on this point does not 
 imply that Jesus' idea that he was the Messiah 
 involved the logical process just sketched. Rather 
 as we showed in the last chapter, the idea sprang 
 
HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 71 
 
 up in him spontaneously and necessarily. He 
 could call himself nothing else, and never thought 
 of calling himself anything else. I have simply 
 explained why, and have justified Jesus' spon- 
 taneous thought. 
 
 Jesus also encountered the political difficulty. 
 A political Messiah, a warrior Messiah, a king 
 of the Jews, such as the people and especially 
 the Zealots expected, would be a traitor to the 
 Romans, would receive short shrift at their hands 
 if unsuccessful, and, if successful, must lead an 
 insurrection against them. All these ideas were 
 abhorrent to Jesus, yet how could he call himself 
 Messiah and not awaken these hopes and sug- 
 gest these popular connotations? This was a 
 vital and finally tragic problem for Jesus, and 
 one to which he was constantly alive. In an 
 atmosphere palpitating with Zealotism, he nat- 
 urally never went about claiming to be the 
 Messiah, as many seem to think, but always 
 exercised a holy discretion and reserve on this 
 point. 
 
 We find that in consequence of the situation 
 which we have described, Jesus does not begin 
 by announcing his Messiahship, but by pro- 
 
72 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 claiming and explaining the kingdom of God. 
 First, he preaches the spiritual kingdom, and 
 then at last discloses himself as the spiritual 
 king, for he thinks the cause of the righteousness 
 of the kingdom is after all summed up in him 
 (Matthew 5: 11). The kingdom was a common 
 idea and meant the political Messianic kingdom. 
 Jesus also meant by it the Messianic reign and 
 realm; but, to emphasize its spiritual origin and 
 character, called it the kingdom of God. This 
 exact phrase is found only rarely, if at all, in the 
 Old Testament and the prechristian Jewish litera- 
 ture, but the idea itself is very common. 
 
 Jesus' thought about the kingdom and sov- 
 ereignty of God was just as much his own, just 
 as independent of popular conceptions in its 
 origin, just as clearly founded on his personal 
 experience as his thought of Messiahship and is 
 indeed the counterpart of it. It may be denned 
 as follows: The Father was sovereign in his 
 own heart and life. He had come to induce all 
 men to accept this blessed sovereignty and to 
 enjoy all the satisfactions and privileges of the 
 Father's love. With him the Messiah, the Mes- 
 sianic reign had come. The kingdom was within 
 
HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 73 
 
 him. It was to be realized and set up on the 
 earth now. Its full realization could, however, 
 come only in the future when it should become 
 universal, but men could now prepare themselves 
 for the enjoyment of that future by change of 
 mind and heart toward sin and toward God and 
 righteousness. So the kingdom was both present 
 and future. Yet the future was the more glorious 
 and characteristic. The ethical conditions of 
 sharing the Messianic blessing stripped it of the 
 last shred of nationalism, took it out of politics 
 and guaranteed its universal and spiritual nature. 
 Yet, while beginning as an individual experience, 
 it involved new social relations and indeed a new 
 and heavenly society on this earth, a society in 
 which the will of God would be done as perfectly, 
 unanimously and joyously as in heaven itself. 
 Jesus' work was not merely proclaiming and ex- 
 plaining this kingdom, but also inducing men 
 to receive it and enter into it, that is, founding 
 the new society. 
 
 But entirely apart from the political situation 
 and the circle of narrow Jewish ideas in which 
 Jesus found himself (i. e., apart from the political 
 and pedagogical considerations), there was an- 
 
74 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 other reason why Jesus preached the kingdom 
 first, and always more emphatically than the 
 king. This reason is found in the very nature 
 of his mission, is therefore of primary significance 
 and would have been operative, if the other mo- 
 tives had not existed. The kingdom is actually 
 first in importance in his thought because the king- 
 dom stood for the experience of blessing, present 
 and future, into which he conceived himself di- 
 vinely sent to bring men. See his equation of the 
 kingdom and this experience of blessing in the 
 Beatitudes, in the representation of the Messianic 
 Feast, in the parable of the Prodigal Son, and in 
 the formula, "the good news of the kingdom." 
 To have put himself to the front would have con- 
 fused men on this point, would have made them 
 think that some belief about him (i. e., that he 
 was the Messiah, with appropriate political ac- 
 tion based on that belief) was more important 
 than entrance into the new life of righteousness 
 and faith. It would have been analogous to the 
 mistake of his church in those ages when it has 
 put the emphasis on an intellectual assent to the 
 deity of Christ rather than on the new life he 
 bade men lead. Still this experience of blessing 
 
HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 75 
 
 was to be had only in union with him, it was the 
 experience of his own heart which he wished to 
 share with others. He was after all essential to 
 it and to its vigorous and sustained development. 
 In the end he could not be hid, the king as well 
 as the kingdom must appear. 
 
 Did he at first expect an immediate success in 
 his enterprise? The evidence is inconclusive and 
 the answer doubtful. Much is involved in the 
 decision, yet it must be made. Else we can never 
 gain clearness on the fundamental aspects of 
 Jesus' career and must always walk in the mists. 
 After long and painful wavering, I have finally 
 come to believe that Jesus did at first expect 
 immediate success, and on these grounds: — a. 
 Luke 13: 6-9, the parable of the Barren Fig-tree, 
 gets its whole point from the fact that the issue 
 of the salvation of the Jewish people through 
 Jesus' work is not yet certain, and with this the 
 lament over Jerusalem, "How often would I have 
 gathered thee" (Matthew 23: 37), is to be com- 
 pared, b. The whole spirit of the early ministry 
 seems to exhibit the expectation of a sweeping 
 victory. Jesus seems at first even to have had 
 hopes of at least the Galilean Pharisees (Luke 15: 
 
J 6 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 25-32). c. The historical and psychological dif- 
 ficulties of the opposite view are almost insu- 
 perable, d. This goes well with our statement 
 in Chapter III about the gradual development 
 of Jesus' Messianic consciousness. 
 
 So we believe that he began his work with the 
 greatest enthusiasm, though with some misgivings 
 caused by the Temptation, and that he only 
 slowly learned the bitter truth. Only toward 
 the middle of his Galilean activity, was he finally 
 convinced that his earthly ministry was doomed 
 to comparative failure so far as immediate results 
 were concerned and that he could accomplish his 
 mission only through his death. Some may ask 
 what would have happened if Jesus had had the 
 success, which he at first anticipated. The in- 
 quiry opens up vast reaches of possibilities, 
 through which we cannot find our way. If the 
 question ever came into Jesus' mind, he doubtless 
 left all such future contingencies to his Father's 
 love and wisdom. 
 
 Jesus' popularity in Galilee was immediate 
 and immense. Its basis was primarily the power 
 and attractiveness of his personality, his moral 
 and spiritual enthusiasm, the simplicity and sym- 
 
HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 77 
 
 pathy pi his heart, the fresh note of freedom, 
 courage and hope. This was reinforced by the 
 authority, plainness and common sense of his 
 preaching, his miracles, especially those of heal- 
 ing and casting out demons, and his alluring 
 promises of Messianic blessings. Still, this popu- 
 larity was hollow and Jesus soon saw its hollow- 
 ness. The crowd was moved mostly by curiosity, 
 wonder and a hope of external advantages from 
 what they vaguely felt to be a Messianic move- 
 ment. Only a comparatively few understood his 
 message of a spiritual salvation in a spiritual 
 kingdom, and soon they too were involved in 
 misunderstanding and externalism. So difficult is 
 it to get purely spiritual conceptions into men's 
 minds. The parables of the Sower and the Tares 
 evidence Jesus' recognition of the superficiality 
 of this seeming success. 
 
 During this period, as we have seen, he was 
 engaged in explaining the nature of the kingdom, 
 but did not openly or plainly declare his Messiah- 
 ship. Rather he carefully concealed it. 1 Yet 
 
 1 The seeming exceptions to this statement are to be explained 
 from the peculiar geographical or personal circumstances involved 
 in the particular case or possibly by the application of critical 
 principles. 
 
78 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 the authority with which he spoke and acted, 
 his mighty miracles, the confessions of the de- 
 mons, his forgiveness of sins, his superiority to 
 John the Baptist who had announced the Coming 
 One, his constant assertion that he was God's 
 representative and an altogether extraordinary 
 person, his authoritative proclamation of an im- 
 minent, indeed a present Messianic kingdom, all 
 filled the people with expectation and led them 
 to surmise that this could be no other than the 
 Messiah, different as he was from what they had 
 anticipated the Messiah would be. 
 
 The Galilean ministry consequently ended with 
 an explosion of Zealotism, for which the train 
 had long been laying. It is commonly called 
 the Crisis at Capernaum. Its immediate causes 
 were three events which occurred in closest con- 
 nection: the Mission of the Twelve, who had not 
 freed themselves from the idea of a political Mes- 
 siah and who may have been more or less indis- 
 creet in their preaching; the news of the murder 
 of John the Baptist, which must have profoundly 
 stirred the people against Herod Antipas and the 
 Roman overlordship; and the Feeding of the Five 
 Thousand. The result was that five thousand en- 
 
HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 79 
 
 thusiastic men, the nucleus for an effective army, 
 attempted to seize Jesus and make him a king 
 (a political Messiah). It was an hour of gravest 
 peril for Jesus and the world, but he met the 
 crisis with admirable decision. In the synagogue 
 at Capernaum the next day, he explained to 
 the people that he had no material blessings for 
 them. He could give them only himself, the 
 Bread of Life. Moreover, he intimated that he 
 was going to die. The crowds deserted him; it 
 looked as if even the Twelve might waver. His 
 Galilean popularity was at an end. At the same 
 time he finally broke with the Pharisees on the 
 subject of clean and unclean meats, but that 
 belongs to another chapter. 
 
 Jesus now leaves Palestine, for some weeks at 
 least, and wanders with his disciples in Gentile 
 territory. They are alone, no multitudes follow 
 him. He has been rejected both by the people 
 and by the scribes. Not the slightest sign or 
 prospect of political Messiahship remains. In 
 these circumstances he asks his disciples for their 
 opinion of him. Peter, their spokesman, declares 
 him the Messiah in spite of it all. He founds this 
 judgment not on any external mark of Messiah- 
 
80 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 ship, but only on what Jesus was in himself and 
 the spiritual blessing he had brought to his fol- 
 lowers. It was at last a confession of a spiritual 
 Messiah, however confused with older ideas it 
 might be. It was an epoch in Jesus' ministry and 
 in the history of the kingdom. And Jesus clinched 
 it with the definite announcement of his final re- 
 jection, sufferings and death. This in principle 
 absolutely put an end to all the old Messianic 
 conceptions and hopes. A dying Messiah was no 
 Messiah (in the old sense) at all. But Jesus added 
 that all his followers must be ready for the cross 
 as well as he. This was a bitter truth, fitted to 
 cut the root of all externalism, pride and self- 
 seeking, and to leave them nothing outside the 
 spiritual sphere. 
 
 There arises the difficult question how far 
 Jesus had made known his Messiahship to the 
 disciples before Peter's confession at Caesarea 
 Philippi. The Fourth Gospel represents John 
 the Baptist as pointing him out as Messiah, but 
 this could have been only to a private circle of 
 those who afterwards became apostles. This 
 private circle, as well as John the Baptist, under- 
 stood Messiahship, however, in the popular sense, 
 
HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 8 1 
 
 more or less spiritualized, and were doubtless 
 strictly charged not to speak of it in public (cf. 
 Jesus' charge to the demonized, the leper, etc.). 
 In the meantime we know that Jesus was adopt- 
 ing the same method of instruction in private 
 as in public, i. e., he was teaching a spiritual 
 view of the kingdom rather than proclaiming 
 himself the Messiah, but all the while his manner 
 of life and teaching was nevertheless impressing 
 his unique personality and mission. The great 
 advance at Caesarea Philippi was an advance in 
 the spiritual conception of the Messiahship, the 
 founding of all Messianic claim on the spiritual 
 nature and power of Jesus. Once discovered in 
 the disciples by Jesus, this was reinforced and 
 deepened by the teaching of the cross. Only this 
 view of an original belief of the disciples in Jesus' 
 Messiahship, together with a growth in the dis- 
 ciples' conception of it, can adequately explain 
 the phenomena before the confession of Peter, 
 especially their willingness to follow him, their 
 joy in his presence, their clinging to him when all 
 deserted him. If the people more than suspected 
 that he was the Messiah, surely the disciples must 
 have been certain of it. 
 
82 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 Had Jesus from the first expected rejection 
 and a violent death? In accord with the position 
 already taken we must say that he had not. 
 He had at first anticipated that Israel, as a 
 whole, would accept him as its spiritual Messiah 
 and with him all the blessings which he brought. 1 
 Not without misgivings, however, for in the 
 Temptation Jesus seems to have recognized and 
 weighed the might and unalterable opposition 
 of the forces which were bound to oppose him. 
 The bitterness of his conflict with the scribes, 
 and especially, his growing distrust of the en- 
 thusiasm of the multitudes must have changed 
 these misgivings into conviction. There could be 
 only one end. He could not change nor abandon 
 his mission, he must go on with his work, and 
 the result, he clearly saw, must be his violent 
 death. If so, he thought that his death must be 
 the Father's will; but it could not mean failure; 
 death must be only a means of victory, the climax 
 of his earthly mission. This is the new experience, 
 
 1 Yet both John the Baptist and Jesus always despaired of the 
 ruling Sadducaic-Pharisaic clique at Jerusalem and of legalistic 
 Judaism. Their only hope was that the people as a whole would 
 leave Judaism and come over to the new spiritual kingdom, in 
 which Jesus would spiritually rule. 
 
HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 83 
 
 the new revelation which came to Jesus in the 
 middle of his ministry. He must save the world 
 by dying for it. He must bring it to know God 
 and his richest blessings by the sacrifice of him- 
 self. Thus he would redeem from the power of 
 sin all who received him and followed him as the 
 dying Savior, and his death would lay the foun- 
 dation of a new covenant, a new society, a new 
 Israel. 
 
 Part II 
 
 And here we meet the most difficult problem 
 of all. Jesus now saw that the future and more 
 glorious kingdom lay beyond his death. Yet he 
 was perfectly certain that he had been called 
 to found that kingdom by the impartation of his 
 own inner experience of communion with God. 
 He was sure that the kingdom would come and 
 in his mind it was axiomatic, nay almost a matter 
 of definition, that the kingdom could not come 
 without him. Indeed a Messianic reign without 
 a Messiah was to him unthinkable. Now Jesus in 
 common with all Pharisaic Jews believed in the 
 life beyond death, and he had no doubt that from 
 the cross he would go to the Father; indeed many 
 
84 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 Jews believed that the Messiah was hidden with 
 God. With these thoughts in the background, we 
 can easily see how Jesus, after accepting the 
 tragic outcome of his earthly life, became convinced 
 that he would survive death in the spiritual world, 
 would reign at the Father's right hand, would 
 personally inaugurate the more glorious kingdom 
 on earth and rule in it as king. This more glori- 
 ous kingdom would only be his own blessed ex- 
 perience of God now become universal and effec- 
 tive in human hearts and human society. All 
 this was only another evidence of his supreme 
 confidence in his God-given mission and its ulti- 
 mate triumph. Indeed this thought of Jesus 
 rests on two universal principles: — every divine 
 impulse in humanity is sure of final victory; and 
 every great moral and spiritual movement under 
 the best conditions centers about a personality, 
 who is its fountain of life and power. As a mat- 
 ter of fact, Jesus has been the source of spiritual 
 energy to his followers for twenty centuries, is 
 today the rallying point of their hope, and the 
 ground of their unyielding faith in final triumph. 
 Jesus from the beginning had never for a mo- 
 ment compromised with the political, nationalistic 
 
HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 85 
 
 Messianism of his day, but did he, on the other 
 hand, in the idea of his Coming, accept in part 
 at least the apocalyptic idea of the Messiah? 
 The answer must be a modified "yes," if we hold 
 to our Gospel data (cf. p. 2of.). There is no 
 evidence that Jesus ever read any of the current 
 apocalypses of his day, but these apocalyptic 
 ideas were common among the people, springing, 
 as they did, out of the Book of Daniel, which 
 was a part of their Bible. As one of the common 
 people, with the Old Testament in his hand, 
 Jesus was perfectly familiar with apocalyptic 
 ideas. 
 
 Jesus' favorite self-designation was Son of Man. 
 Where did he get it? From Daniel 7: 13, 14. * 
 To him it meant Messiah, especially in the role 
 of Founder of the Kingdom of God. He loved 
 the passage for three reasons at least, first because 
 it represented the Messiah and his kingdom as a 
 man over against the dreadful beasts, symbolizing 
 
 1 Readers are urged to study the whole of Daniel 7. The old 
 idea, still so common, that Jesus referred to his divine nature by 
 the phrase Son of God, and to his human nature by the phrase, 
 Son of Man, is no longer tenable. Both phrases meant Mes- 
 siah, and were related to his Messianic character and mission. 
 Certainly Jesus during his earthly life had no need to emphasize 
 his humanity which was patent to everybody. 
 
86 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 world-empires. Unlike them he had no terrify- 
 ing appearance or frightful weapons. It was their 
 part to destroy and tear to pieces, but it was his, 
 humanly, intelligently and peacefully, to construct 
 a new society by spiritual means. The passage 
 also appealed to him because it echoed his cer- 
 tainty that this work and kingdom were given 
 to him by God and, lastly, because it declared 
 that his reign should be world-wide and eternal. 
 In the conflicts, disappointments and crises of 
 his life, this passage was to him a guiding star. 
 He was that Son of Man. All the plots of his 
 enemies against One with such a destiny were 
 petty and temporary. 
 
 Did Jesus by the use of the phrase, Son of 
 Man, disclose his Messiahship to the people? 
 This is a very difficult question, for, since Jesus 
 often used the phrase publicly, it involves our 
 whole conception of a period of reserve with 
 reference to the Messiahship. The truth seems 
 to be that by the common people among whom 
 Jesus moved "Son of Man" would not be under- 
 stood to mean Messiah, but would be to them a 
 striking enigmatic phrase, provoking curiosity 
 and inquiry as to what Jesus meant by it. Pos- 
 
HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 87 
 
 sibly in inner Scribal circles, it was more than a 
 hint that he believed himself to be Messiah, and 
 yet a hint of such a kind that they could scarcely 
 seize upon it to his harm (cf. Son of Man, in 
 Psalm 8, Ezekiel, Book of Enoch, and John 12: 34). 
 The phrase, Son of Man, is derived from an 
 apocalyptic passage, but may have meant to 
 Jesus nothing more at first than what has already 
 been stated (p. 85L). After he became convinced 
 that the future Messianic kingdom lay beyond 
 his death however, the apocalyptic phraseology 
 became a part of Jesus' speech and perhaps in- 
 fluenced his thought. As our records stand, 
 Jesus plainly said that after his death he was 
 coming on the clouds of heaven to judge the 
 world and inaugurate the more glorious stage 
 of the kingdom, and that this would occur before 
 the end of the contemporary generation. This 
 cannot be explained away by a candid exegesis. 
 And yet, as a matter of fact, he did not so come 
 in the life-time of that generation. The date 
 and the apocalyptic manner of the Coming con- 
 stitute two grave difficulties for modern men. 
 There seem to be only two positions which may 
 be taken. Either Jesus spoke as the records 
 
S8 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 stand and was in error; this would change tradi- 
 tional ideas about Jesus, possibly seriously. Or, 
 to choose the other horn of the dilemma, the 
 records are not trustworthy in this matter; the 
 disciples, full of the political and apocalyptic 
 Messianism, misunderstood Jesus. It is therefore 
 a question between a mistaken Jesus and un- 
 trustworthy records, or records untrustworthy at 
 this point at least (cf. Mark 13 : 30 and parallels, 
 Mark 9: 1 and parallels, Matthew 10: 23). 
 
 In such a case, we must proceed from the 
 known to the unknown. The gospels give us the 
 Jesus, whom we have already presented, a Jesus 
 great and commanding, profoundly spiritual in 
 his views and teachings, simple, sane, independ- 
 ent, certain of himself, his mission and his Father. 
 Nothing which impugns this character, so naively 
 and simply drawn and yet so wonderfully complex 
 and unique, can be true. As to the date, "in 
 that generation," it may be said that such an 
 error is incidental and external, merely in the 
 intellectual sphere, and that it is not inconsistent 
 with the honesty or spiritual greatness of Jesus. 
 He was perfectly certain that he was Messiah. 
 The Messiah was to appear at the end of the 
 
HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 89 
 
 age. He had appeared. The end was near. It 
 was the error of a hero of faith, filled with the 
 thought of the time. Or, if this does not satisfy 
 us, it is open to us to say that Jesus predicted 
 the coming of the Spirit, the destruction of 
 Jerusalem, the victory of his church and his own 
 personal Coming, the first two at least in that 
 generation; and that the disciples, obsessed with 
 apocalyptic notions, unconsciously transferred 
 this date to his personal Coming, and gradually 
 emphasized his Coming out of all due propor- 
 tion. 
 
 As to the apocalyptic form, "in the clouds of 
 heaven," it may be said that the catastrophic 
 feature of it is not inconsistent with modern 
 theories of evolution in biology or history. Geol- 
 ogy now knows catastrophic periods. The burst- 
 ing of spring, the emergence of the butterfly, 
 the birth of the child, are all catastrophic and 
 each brings in a new age. A few years or months 
 or even days have often changed the whole course 
 of history, and similarly have produced new 
 eras. Nor is such an idea, when rightly con- 
 ceived, inconsistent with Jesus' teaching of the 
 gradual growth of the kingdom in other passages. 
 
90 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 Gradual growth often ends in a catastrophic 
 consummation. Why not in the case of the king- 
 dom? 
 
 Nor are we to think that Jesus changed his 
 fundamental spiritual attitude and conceptions 
 when he adopted the apocalyptic form. He who 
 employed the Jewish ideas of kingdom and Mes- 
 siah to express himself to his followers, yet re- 
 moulded them for his own uses, filled them with 
 a new content, and partially transferred them to 
 the present, did not fall a foolish victim to 
 apocalyptic mania; but, when the new idea of 
 final spiritual victory in spite of death demanded 
 assertion, he did as he had done before, he took 
 the apt apocalyptic form, familiar to all Jews, 
 and through that taught them figuratively things 
 which he could not have expounded literally and 
 definitely. 1 Indeed the latter course would have 
 been inadequate and ineffective, and therefore 
 stupid in the circumstances. And when we note 
 Jesus' free use of parable and metaphor, the 
 figurative nature of the Daniel passage itself 
 
 1 In fact, there may have been sayings of Jesus, capable of 
 explaining much along this line, which, not being understood 
 by the disciples, disappeared before they found a place in the 
 tradition. 
 
HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 9 1 
 
 from which "the clouds of heaven" are derived, 1 
 when we study how Jesus himself reported his 
 baptism and temptation, and his vision of the 
 fall of Satan in Luke 10: 18, it is open to those 
 of us, who wish to do so, to explain the form of 
 the Coming "on the clouds of heaven" as figura- 
 tive, the form, but not the substance: the figure is 
 the figure of something. 
 
 If we can no longer be satisfied with the literal 
 "Coming in clouds," we may therefore believe 
 that Jesus taught that towards the end of that 
 generation or, possibly, at some indefinite future 
 time, there would occur a spiritual event in hu- 
 man history, so wonderful that all would sense 
 it beyond mistake, so plain that all would recog- 
 nize its significance, so mighty as to inaugurate a 
 new age and judge and destroy all hostile forces, 
 so personal as to constitute for his people and all 
 others a coming of Christ Jesus himself, his final 
 triumph, the climax and consummation of his 
 Messianic work. This event must be conceived 
 as still future, for its chief characteristic is that 
 it will usher in an age when God's will shall be 
 
 x Note that, throughout the whole Bible, the "cloud" is the 
 constant symbol of the manifested presence of God. 
 
92 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 done on earth as it is done in heaven. Come 
 quickly, even so, come, Lord Jesus. 
 
 From the time of Cassarea Philippi, Jesus' prin- 
 cipal thought was to complete his Messianic 
 work by his death at Jerusalem (cf. p. 82f.). On 
 the way to the capital, he evangelized Perea. 
 This Perean ministry followed the lines of the 
 earlier ministry in Galilee, but was briefer, more 
 decisive and solemn. He now knew that nothing 
 which occurred in Perea could change the final 
 result. 
 
 At the end of the Perean ministry, he entered 
 Jerusalem with a Passover throng of Pereans and 
 Galileans. Contrary to his usual custom, Jesus 
 had carefully planned this Triumphal Entry. 
 It was a public announcement of his Messiah- 
 ship, and a demand that he be received as Mes- 
 siah by the nation and its official leaders. He 
 could not allow any misunderstanding on that 
 point at the end. If he is to die, he will die as a 
 rejected Messiah. 
 
 Some have thought that Jesus here compro- 
 mised with the idea of political Messiahship, or at 
 least gave his followers that impression. It may 
 be conceded that this was the view of the multi- 
 
HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 93 
 
 tude, but Jesus is not to blame. He had done 
 everything to make them think otherwise. We 
 cite his whole ministry and teaching of a spiritual 
 kingdom up to this time and, especially, his de- 
 cisive action in the crisis at Capernaum; the 
 peaceful emblem of the ass and the fact that 
 his followers had no weapons but palm branches, 
 cf. John 18: 36; Jesus' tears and lament over 
 Jerusalem (Luke 19: 41-44) which was not about 
 to be saved by a conquering Messiah, but about 
 to be destroyed by its enemies; and, lastly, his 
 failure to follow up the Triumphal Entry by 
 energetic measures. At any rate, the people 
 were soon to be undeceived by his words about 
 tribute to Caesar and by the cross. 
 
 During Passion week, he was asked about pay- 
 ing tribute to the Roman government. It was a 
 crucial question. If he should fall in with the 
 popular view of his Zealot followers and take sides 
 against paying tribute, he would immediately be 
 involved in a nationalistic political movement, 
 which could mean nothing else than treason to 
 Rome, and, therefore, either success as a warrior 
 Messiah or a traitor's death. If, on the other 
 hand, he should advise paying tribute, he would 
 
94 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 appear a traitor to the dearest national hopes, 
 and would take the heart out of the once more 
 enthusiastic multitude. He did not hesitate a 
 moment. He chose the latter course, which left 
 him without enthusiastic friends, but left his 
 enemies without a charge which they could prefer 
 against him before the Roman governor. 
 
 This was a source of the most serious embar- 
 rassment to the Jewish leaders. Even before 
 their own court, dependent as it was on the 
 Romans, they were at a loss for a charge against 
 this simple preacher and prophet. Finally, they 
 condemned him to death for blasphemy, on his 
 confession of his Messiahship. Yet they could not 
 execute their own sentence, but must hand him 
 over to the Romans, and blasphemy was not a 
 capital charge in a Roman court. They, there- 
 fore, charged Jesus before Pilate with claiming 
 to be a political Messiah ("Christ a king," 
 Luke 23: 2, cf. Mark 15: 2) despite his answer 
 about the tribute. Pilate is not inclined to take 
 seriously such a charge against this simple but 
 impressive peasant, and, after Jesus' private 
 explanation that his kingdom is not of this world 
 (John 18: 36), is convinced of his innocence, and 
 
HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 95 
 
 yields finally only to political pressure and self- 
 interest. 
 
 It is to be noted that Jesus died rather than 
 deny that he was the Messiah. The solemn cir- 
 cumstances of his final confession (Mark 14: 60- 
 64 and parallels) have already been described 
 (p. 36L) but must be repeated here. He stood 
 before the supreme court of his nation; the re- 
 ligious and political head of the nation, the High 
 Priest, put the question; Jesus was under oath; 
 he knew that on his answer depended his life or 
 death. He might have explained or equivocated, 
 but he did neither. He said, "I am the Mes- 
 siah," and more, "you shall one day believe it, 
 when you stand before my judgment seat, as I 
 now stand before yours." The charge made be- 
 fore Pilate shows that he was condemned as a 
 political Messiah, a traitor to Rome. And the 
 title on the cross, the bitter sarcasm of the un- 
 willing but weak judge, completes the proof of it. 
 It was a false charge, and both the Sanhedrin 
 and Pilate knew it. Still Jesus had laid himself 
 open to it by applying to himself the Messianic 
 title in a sense different from that in which it 
 was popularly used. 
 
96 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 We have noticed in Chapter III that, in the 
 development of Jesus, his sense of a blessed, 
 intimate, unique filial relation to God was the 
 root of his belief that he was the Messiah. And 
 although that belief was inevitable to him in his 
 environment, and necessary to his self-expression, 
 still it must be said that the Messianic title was 
 inadequate, and always likely to be misunderstood. 
 He was Messiah in his own sense, and he was not 
 Messiah in the popular sense. He was Messiah, 
 but he was more than Messiah. He was a per- 
 sonage greater than the race had ever known or im- 
 agined before. The large prominence which Jesus 
 gave to the idea of the kingdom, and his remark- 
 able reserve in using the word, Messiah, along with 
 his evident consciousness of his own greatness, 
 show that he himself was fully aware of all this. 
 We do not now need the Messianic title to explain 
 him. Indeed the title is Jewish, belongs to a past 
 age and needs itself to be explained. The Church 
 has been divinely guided in relegating it to history, 
 and, for popular impression, calling him the Son of 
 God and the Savior of the world. And yet, had 
 he not used the title, we might never have seen 
 that he was far greater than all that it implied. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 HOW JESUS HANDLED LEGALISM 
 
 The Judaism of Jesus' day was a retrogression 
 from the religion of the Old Testament, especially 
 from the high level of the prophets and the nobler 
 psalms. It so exaggerated the ceremonial and 
 legal at the expense of the moral and religious 
 in the scriptures that almost the whole reli- 
 gious interest centered in the keeping of a set 
 of precepts. Religion thus became externalized, 
 mechanical, superficial, burdensome. Obedience 
 to the letter of the law bade fair to become the 
 whole of piety. Communion with God faded out 
 of popular thought and language. The inevitable 
 tendency was to foster self-righteousness, pettiness, 
 hypocrisy, casuistry, and downright immorality. 
 This system we call Legalism. 1 
 
 The Pharisees were the especial exponents of 
 this system, the perfect patterns of legalistic 
 piety. They were the leaders of the people, and 
 
 1 See p. 261. on the Pharisees and Legalism. 
 97 
 
98 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 generally admired and reverenced for their pains- 
 taking performance of the law. Yet we must not 
 overdraw the picture. There were many devout 
 men in Israel, who cherished true religion and 
 an earnest morality even in that legalistic age. 
 Not all the Pharisees themselves were hypocrites. 
 There were great souls among them, like Hillel, 
 Gamaliel, and Saul of Tarsus, but, as the last 
 named said after his conversion, they were on the 
 wrong track. The fact is that the Pharisees and 
 their sympathizers had about all the religion 
 that was left in Israel. At the time of the Mac- 
 cabean uprising, true piety was like to perish 
 from the earth, but the predecessors of the Phari- 
 sees saved it in that crisis by magnificent devotion 
 and heroism. Pharisaism has been the backbone 
 of Judaism from the days of Jesus until now, a 
 potent though isolated force. Still most of the 
 leading Jerusalem Pharisees of his time were all 
 that Jesus painted them, proud, self-righteous, 
 hypocritical, covetous and immoral. 
 
 Jesus nourished his soul on the Old Testament, 
 which he knew thoroughly and quoted with 
 perfect ease. He found in it a divine revelation. 
 He never had a thought of setting up a new 
 
HOW JESUS HANDLED LEGALISM 99 
 
 religion with no root in the old. The Old Testa- 
 ment was his Bible, he recognized his Father in 
 its God, and all he ever said which goes beyond 
 the Old Testament was a natural outgrowth 
 from it. It is probably true that in a general 
 way he even accepted the Pharisaic theology 
 except in those points in which he criticized it. 
 The law and the prophets, as interpreted by the 
 scribes, were the background of his life and 
 thought. Indeed Jesus was brought up in the 
 atmosphere of Pharisaism. Doubtless his rela- 
 tives belonged to the circle of the Devout, and 
 he breathed the freer air of Galilee, but the Phari- 
 see was even there the beau ideal of the good 
 man, and he himself would naturally have been 
 of the same mind. 
 
 But, although growing to maturity in such an 
 environment, Jesus was the instinctive foe of 
 legalism. The simplicity, freedom, freshness and 
 joy of his spiritual life, his unerring moral in- 
 sight, the breadth of his mind, the universality 
 of his sympathies, and the greatness of his per- 
 sonality were entirely out of harmony with the 
 Pharisaic system. He could not be cramped and 
 bound by that strait-jacket. He was sure to 
 
IOO THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 rebel. The clash was inevitable and the breach, 
 once made, could never be closed. 
 
 Jesus began his Galilean ministry and laid 
 the foundation of his popularity by casting out a 
 demon on the Sabbath day and healing a leper 
 by a touch. These unlawful acts led the Phari- 
 sees to begin to watch him, and we can trace 
 the history of their feelings through the stages 
 of surprise, suspicion, criticism, bitter opposi- 
 tion and conspiracy to kill. These stages Jesus 
 met by explanation, argument, demonstration 
 (Mark 2: 1-12), appeal to better feeling and 
 common sense, finally, however, by aggressive 
 assault, open break and denunciation. Jesus' 
 initial attempts to win at least the Galilean 
 Pharisees are too frequently disregarded, but 
 can be plainly seen in his first mild replies (Mark 
 2: 1-22, Luke 5: 39, 7: 36-50), and his tactful 
 invitation to the Pharisees to come in and share 
 the joy of the new kingdom (Luke 15: 25-32). 
 It is clear that the Pharisees began the conflict 
 by criticising Jesus and trying to force him to 
 respect their views. Finally, however, Jesus 
 carried the war into their territory, and with 
 astonishing boldness attacked the whole system 
 
HOW JESUS HANDLED LEGALISM IOI 
 
 of legalism, denouncing its advocates as hypo- 
 crites, worthy of the condemnation of God. 
 
 Jesus objected to the fundamentals of legalism: 
 (i) to its externality, its conception of religion 
 as a round of outward duties and ceremonies, its 
 careful washing of the outside of the cup, but 
 neglect of the things of the heart within; (2) to 
 its lack of a real distinction between duties, all 
 being in its view equally important as equally 
 involving obedience to the law, until at last the 
 pettiest prescriptions got the most attention, and 
 ethics as well as true religion bade fair to be 
 ignored; (3) to its casuistry, its endless hair- 
 splitting, which rotted the very fibre of sincerity 
 and candor, inevitably tended to hypocrisy and 
 double-dealing and was a convenient and oft- 
 used cloak for covetousness and lust; (4) to its 
 burdensomeness, its impossible exactions, a heavy 
 yoke which men were unable to bear and which 
 banished all the spontaneity and joy of a genuine 
 religion; (5) to its exclusiveness, its contempt for 
 those who did not attain its standard, its critical 
 censorious attitude, its remorseless condemna- 
 tions, its holier-than-thou spirit; (6) to its self- 
 righteousness, pride and ostentation, springing 
 
102 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 out of its superficial externalism and exclusive- 
 ness. Since Jesus got through with this feature 
 of Pharisaism, self-righteousness has never been 
 good form. It has. never recovered from the 
 mortal blow he gave it, though under the guise 
 of self-salvation it has again attained quite a 
 vogue. (7) Jesus also objected to the legalists' 
 thought of God, as a mere law-giver and judge, 
 stern and unsympathetic, more concerned with 
 the maintenance of law than with the salvation 
 of men. Indeed Pharisaism so filled the whole 
 horizon with the thought of the law, that the 
 idea of God and immediate relation to him was 
 shoved into the background. 
 
 No wonder that the Pharisees rejected John the 
 Baptist and Jesus, whose religion was, in direct 
 contradistinction to theirs, a religion of the heart, 
 of the inner man; of indifference to ritual and 
 ceremony in comparison with justice, mercy, faith 
 and love to God; a religion of great principles 
 of action, lived out in all sincerity, joy and free- 
 dom; of sympathy, self-sacrifice and love for the 
 weak and the fallen. Jesus put his seal of ap- 
 proval on the humble heart, filled with a sense of 
 its need, and hungering and thirsting after right- 
 
HOW JESUS HANDLED LEGALISM I03 
 
 eousness. His teaching of the Good Shepherd 
 seeking the lost sheep and of the free forgiveness 
 of prodigals, denied the fundamental premise of 
 Pharisaism, i. e., that men could and must de- 
 serve and earn salvation by a record of external 
 good works; and established forever the doctrine 
 of God's grace or undeserved favor toward the 
 repenting sinner. Right in line with this, he 
 emphasized the thought of God, his nearness 
 and love, his sympathy with men, and put the 
 name, Father, into the foreground in all his speech. 
 To Jesus' mind, fellowship with the Father was 
 the most valuable and important thing in religion. 
 The whole manner of Jesus' teaching corre- 
 sponded to his inner spirit. The Pharisaic teachers 
 were really lawyers. Everything with them was 
 second hand. They dealt in quotation, tradition, 
 precedent. They were mere echoes of the Old 
 Testament and the decisions of earlier scribes. 
 They were always debating the same old ques- 
 tions of casuistry. They prided themselves on 
 being cisterns, rather than springs. Jesus, on 
 the other hand, was independent, fresh and orig- 
 inal, a prophet rather than a lawyer. The people 
 soon discovered that he spoke on his own initia- 
 
104 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 tive and not as the scribes. He did not quibble 
 or debate, but poured out of a great soul words 
 of life and power. He did not deal with the mi- 
 nutiae of conduct, but with the basic principles 
 of action. He did not preach the letter that 
 killed all freedom and joy, but the life-giving 
 Spirit. Here was a new voice, a new method, a 
 new gospel and a new tone of authority. 
 
 Jesus clashed with the Pharisees not only on 
 the fundamentals, but also on the inferences and 
 practical details of legalism. 
 
 The Pharisees had built up a whole system of 
 traditional interpretation of the law, which they 
 considered of equal validity with the law itself, 
 and in practice more important. This tradition, 
 as it was called, corresponds to the body of legal 
 precedents and judicial decisions, which plays so 
 great a part in our own courts. It originated in 
 the desire to apply the law to all the innumerable 
 vicissitudes of life, and was to a certain extent 
 inevitable to a legal system, which lay back of 
 the life of a people. The trouble was that its 
 framers in the multiplicity of applications lost 
 sight of great leading principles, and that this 
 law was religious as well as social. As a result, 
 
HOW JESUS HANDLED LEGALISM 105 
 
 life was fettered just where it most needed to be 
 spontaneous and free, and the tradition in many- 
 cases was a glaring reversal of the true spirit of 
 the law. It was only "a tradition of men," any- 
 way, and could not rightly be proclaimed as 
 divine in its sanctions and obligation. Jesus did 
 not feel bound by it. He repudiated its authority, 
 and, what was more to the point, the authority 
 of its makers, the scribes. 
 
 The law of the Sabbath was the masterpiece 
 of the scribes for particularity, casuistry, ab- 
 surdity and downright oppression. It aimed to 
 decide in a binding way every possible question 
 of conduct on the Sabbath. In the end, it was 
 such a maze of disjointed precepts that no ordi- 
 nary person could even keep it in mind; it made a 
 good memory a prime prerequisite of piety. Jesus 
 let in the light of religious common sense, founded 
 all on the principle of a Sabbath made for man, 
 appealed to the fair-mindedness of his hearers 
 against Pharisaic bigotry and severity, and al- 
 ways won the day with the common people. 
 
 Jesus also opposed the whole teaching of cere- 
 monial defilement, the law of clean and unclean. 
 This was a peculiarly external piece of legal 
 
106 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 mechanism, applied especially to foods, but also 
 to touching unclean persons and things, — Gentiles 
 and dead bodies, for instance, — and involved 
 endless purificatory washings. Jesus seems to 
 have openly disregarded it from the first. He 
 ate with unclean publicans and sinners, allowed 
 a sinful woman to touch him, himself touched a 
 leper, and was careless about his ceremonial 
 ablutions before meals. All these things he de- 
 fended on the ground of his love for the lost and 
 the necessity of saving them, and, as to clean 
 and unclean foods, he practically denied the dis- 
 tinction and abolished that whole section of the 
 law, declaring in general that legalism was a 
 plant which his heavenly Father had not planted, 
 and that it was bound for the ditch of destruc- 
 tion (Mark 7: 1-23 and parallels). 
 
 This last item brings up the whole question of 
 Jesus' attitude towards the Old Testament Law. 
 Jesus kept the law, both ceremonial and moral, 1 
 except as hereinafter indicated, and even bade 
 his disciples keep the tradition too when not in- 
 
 1 As a preliminary to the discussion it should be said, that how- 
 ever useful and justifiable the modern distinction between the 
 moral and the ceremonial law may be, neither Jesus nor anybody 
 else in New Testament times ever clearly made it. 
 
HOW JESUS HANDLED LEGALISM 107 
 
 consistent with morality (Matthew 23: 2). Only 
 thus could he have gotten the ear of the people 
 in that legalistic age. He was really more revolu- 
 tionary in teaching than in conduct. Indeed he 
 was at heart conservative in the best sense. To 
 him the Old Testament was a revelation of right- 
 eousness. He felt that it was all summed up in 
 love to God and love to man. He founded his 
 whole life and teaching upon it. He maintained 
 and exalted the moral law as no one before him 
 had ever done. On the other hand, while he 
 generally kept the ceremonial law, he laid no 
 emphasis on it, treated it with indifference, and 
 evidently took no interest in it. 
 
 Did Jesus in any particular abrogate the Old 
 Testament law? The first chapter of the Sermon 
 on the Mount (Matthew 5: 17-48) is often cited 
 in proof that he did. To be sure, we here see 
 Jesus assuming authority as a teacher that puts 
 him above Israel's great Law-giver. "Moses said 
 thus and so to those of old times, but I say unto 
 you." Yet Jesus begins the first great section of 
 the Sermon by declaring that he had not come 
 to destroy the law by loose interpretation, that 
 the moral content of every least precept must 
 
108 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 come to fruition, that he had come however to 
 fill the law with deeper meaning and to carry it 
 on to a new stage of development, and this, in 
 5: 21-48, he proceeds to do with a consciousness 
 of power and profundity of moral insight which 
 has been the wonder of the ages and secures the 
 assent of every heart. It cannot be truly said 
 that in this chapter Jesus abrogates the law. He 
 deepens it, and makes it more positive and 
 spiritual. 
 
 In the matter of the Sabbath, Jesus broke ex- 
 plicitly only with the scribal tradition, but the 
 spirit of his teaching and the implications of his 
 principles do certainly abrogate the severer and 
 more particularistic Sabbath precepts of the Old 
 Testament as well, and are inconsistent with 
 much of the Old Testament point of view on the 
 subject. The story of the man who gathered 
 sticks on the Sabbath (Num. 15: 32-36), for 
 instance, is certainly not in line with the spirit 
 of Jesus. 
 
 On the subject of divorce, Jesus appealed from 
 the laxity of Moses, whom he excuses, to the more 
 fundamental teachings of Genesis and Malachi. 
 Fasting, to be sure, is only rarely prescribed in 
 
HOW JESUS HANDLED LEGALISM I09 
 
 the old scriptures, but Jesus would make it en- 
 tirely voluntary, the expression of a spiritual 
 mood. 
 
 There can however be no doubt or equivoca- 
 tion with reference to Jesus' attitude on the sub- 
 ject of clean and unclean. This is an Old Testa- 
 ment prescription. He not only disobeyed it by 
 touching a leper, but distinctly abrogated the 
 whole code, so far as it had to do with food at 
 least. He here spoke as if superior to the Old 
 Testament, and acted as though he were Lord 
 in the sphere in which it had hitherto ruled 
 supreme. 
 
 How can we reconcile his love and honor for 
 the Old Testament, with this implied and open 
 abrogation of parts of it? The answer is that he 
 did not look on the Old Testament as a set of 
 external precepts, a legal code, but he penetrated 
 to its inner character and meaning. It was to 
 him a book of religion. It was a revelation of 
 God, of righteousness, of love, of hope. As such 
 he honored and loved it. "It was as if he had 
 skipped the temporary in the scriptures in the 
 reading, so little did it interest or busy him." 
 He was not a revolutionary, he built on the old; 
 
110 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 but he was a progressive, he went on to the new. 
 Yet he loved more to dwell on the old in the new 
 light, than to set the new against the old as 
 something opposite and antagonistic. Indeed he 
 never did this except when forced to it. He was 
 instinctively conscious of genetic and evolutionary 
 connections, but when the old had had its day 
 and stood squarely in the way of the new, he 
 decisively swept it aside. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 JESUS' POSITIVE TEACHING 
 
 Jesus is rightly called "The Great Teacher," 
 for, in the realm of religion and morals, he is 
 absolutely supreme. The profounder side of life 
 is his chosen sphere. He taught men how to 
 live richly, deeply, nobly. "He made religion a 
 new thing and transfigured the religious life." 
 Yet it must always be remembered that he was 
 not a teacher only or principally. He was also a 
 man of character and a man of action. He 
 founded the Kingdom of God. What he was, 
 what he taught, and what he did, together con- 
 stitute his title to be called Savior and Lord. 
 
 The originality of Jesus' teaching is not ab- 
 solute. If it had been, it would have been par- 
 tial and one-sided. Indeed he never claimed 
 originality, but frankly founded his teaching on 
 the great religious conceptions of the Old Testa- 
 ment. Many of his ideas may be found in the 
 contemporary Jewish literature, rare grains of gold 
 in heaps of sand, and in the works of Graeco- 
 
112 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 Roman and Oriental sages, who lived before him. 
 Yet it is most improbable that Jesus had ever 
 read any of these sages or even heard of the most 
 of them. He and they were dealing with essen- 
 tially the same subject, and an occasional simi- 
 larity in thought or speech is not at all strange. 
 Yet in almost all these parallels, Jesus is the pro- 
 founder, the more comprehensive or the more per- 
 fect in form. In fact, it seems as though in these 
 other teachers, we see candles throwing their light 
 out into the darkness, while Jesus gathers up all 
 their partial truths with his own into one incandes- 
 cent shaft of light, which turns the night into day. 
 Yet, in the large sense, Jesus' originality is in- 
 contestable. It consisted of four elements. The 
 first was his matchless insight into the human 
 heart, its motives and its needs. Those pure and 
 loving eyes searched the depths of the soul, and he 
 knew how to recreate men by the touch of truth 
 and power. We wearily turn thousands of pages 
 of pre-christian and non-christian literature to 
 find a few gleams of such quick and sure intuition, 
 as give every paragraph of Jesus' teaching real 
 worth. Again, we wonder at his sense of propor- 
 tion and relative value, which leaves the impres- 
 
JESUS POSITIVE TEACHING 113 
 
 sion of unequalled sanity and penetration. This 
 is all the more remarkable since the legalistic 
 system of his day had lost all sense of balance, 
 and was as badly awry and out of plumb as any 
 system intelligent men have ever known. But with 
 infallible accuracy, Jesus put first things first, and 
 never failed to get at the inner principle, at the very 
 root of the problem. The best illustrations of this 
 are his discovery of active love as the guiding prin- 
 ciple of a true life, and his indissoluble combination 
 of religion and ethics, while reserving to religion 
 a certain primacy, in his famous summing up of 
 duty as love to God and love to man. This 
 fine balance of duties to God and man is the 
 profoundest and most valuable contribution to 
 ethics ever made. Add to this, as a third element, 
 a deep seriousness and unexampled moral earnest- 
 ness, and we shall understand something of the 
 impression of power, which his words give to 
 every generation, a spirit and life which takes 
 them out of the realm of the speculative and 
 theoretical, and makes them a positive practical 
 force in the world with a peculiar penetrative 
 quality. His teaching is its own best praise. 
 Its effect is the self-evidencing proof of its unique 
 
114 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 character. Lastly, he was conscious of a sort of 
 final authority. The tone of certainty rings in 
 every utterance. God had sent him. A life 
 built on his sayings is built on rock. The Judg- 
 ment Day itself will not budge it an inch. If 
 John the Baptist is the greatest of the prophets, 
 he is more. 
 
 When we turn to examine Jesus' way of teach- 
 ing, we see immediately that he never thought of 
 constructing an ethical or theological system. 
 He was the very reverse of methodical. Rather 
 he was occasional, fragmentary, practical. He 
 seized every opportunity for inculcating his truth. 
 He used the language of the common man and 
 his thought moved along popular lines. He 
 understood the value of the short pithy style, of 
 illustration, of the story. His matchless parables 
 reveal his delicate appreciation of the hidden 
 harmonies of nature with the deeper things of 
 the kingdom and of the human heart, his wonder- 
 fully accurate observation of common life from 
 every side, and his exquisite sympathy with men, 
 birds, fields, sea and sky. He used the acted 
 parable with equal power, as when he washed 
 the disciples' feet for a lesson on loving service, 
 
JESUS' POSITIVE TEACHING 115 
 
 presented the deepest things of his religion under 
 the symbolism of the Lord's Supper, or withered 
 the fig tree by the wayside. Along with the 
 striking and beautiful parabolic form, he was the 
 master of spiritual apothegms. They stick in 
 the mind like burs in the clothing, and he meant 
 they should. The world will never forget the 
 Golden Rule, his summons to supplication, "Ask 
 and ye shall receive," and his high ideal, "Be 
 ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect;" 
 while the Lord's Prayer seems ideal in brevity, 
 simplicity, comprehensiveness, spirituality and 
 uplifting power. He is often almost poetic, in- 
 dulges in hyperbole, sometimes argues by the 
 extreme case, and is never careful to define with 
 exactness. There is nothing scholastic about 
 him, he is never fanciful or flat like the scribes, 
 but there is in him an elemental freshness, sanity 
 and understanding which give his words a per- 
 petual interest and charm. The reason is not 
 far to seek. What he taught had not been learned 
 from books, nor from other men, but was the 
 expression of a constant inner experience of 
 unique fellowship with his Father, and of a soul 
 strong in love and purity. His heart spoke to 
 
1. 1 6 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 men's hearts with a directness, lucidity and sim- 
 plicity absolutely unrivalled in the history of the 
 world. And it went home and it goes home, 
 because in it men seem to hear the voice of all 
 that is purest and best. Consequently, if we 
 would correctly represent Jesus, we cannot 
 analyze his teaching after the style of modern 
 systematic ethics or traditional theology, but 
 will attempt to describe it as it lay in his own 
 mind, so far as our fragmentary sources will allow. 
 
 The leading and unifying idea in Jesus' teach- 
 ing is the Kingdom of God, a conception which he 
 seized upon as the best expression of his experi- 
 ence and the object of his mission, and which he 
 more or less transformed. As the phrase only 
 imperfectly corresponded with his deepest thought, 
 however, he said many things, which he doubt- 
 less did not consciously relate to it. Yet, as a 
 matter of fact, nearly all his teaching may be so 
 related without violence. 
 
 This phrase contains the two leading religious 
 ideas of Jesus, and the more important of the 
 two in his mind was God. The earliest, deepest 
 and most abiding element in Jesus' experience 
 was his fellowship with God (cf. p. 47fl.). Out 
 
JESUS' POSITIVE TEACHING 117 
 
 of this sprang the thought of his mission, and in 
 it securely rested his whole life. Jesus' God was 
 the God of the Old Testament, but he called 
 this God Father. To be sure, this word is ap- 
 plied to God in the Hebrew Scriptures, in his 
 relation to Israel, to the theocratic king and 
 classes of individuals, but Jesus, with his wonder- 
 ful sense of proportion, exalted this title to the 
 first place, individualized it, and gave it a warmer, 
 richer, more intimate meaning. As Father, God 
 loves, rules and cares for his children; and they 
 on their part owe him, as their Father, rever- 
 ence, supreme love, obedience and trust. God is 
 not far off, despite what the legalistic system 
 tended to teach men, but near at hand, and in- 
 tensely interested in their salvation and all their 
 highest good. This teaching of the Fatherliness 
 of God is Jesus' greatest service in the revelation 
 of God to man. Yet, as the very phrase "king- 
 dom of God" shows, the Father was in Jesus' 
 thought the King, 1 the Moral Governor of the 
 
 1 Sometimes Jesus makes God king in the kingdom, and some- 
 times represents himself as king. But there is no difficulty here. 
 Just as the Davidic king was merely God's deputy in a state, 
 which was essentially a theocracy, so Jesus is God's Messiah, 
 and (deputy) king in the Messianic kingdom. 
 
Il8 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 world, to whom men are responsible and to whom 
 they must give account. Jesus never imagined 
 that the ideas Father and King could ever be 
 thought inconsistent with each other. To him, 
 God was the Father-King. God, he taught, was 
 holy, supremely good, perfect in every moral 
 excellence, the basis, norm, and end of moral 
 character, the absolute guarantor of the victory 
 of the kingdom. On this account, Jesus made 
 no sharp distinction between religion and morals. 
 He knew no religion which did not go out in 
 active love to man, which was not instinct with 
 the impulse of duty to humanity. He knew no 
 morals, which were not founded in the idea of 
 God, and which did not continually draw motive 
 and inspiration from him. 
 
 The Kingdom of God has already been ex- 
 plained (cf. p. 72f.). It is first of all individual. 
 That man has entered into the kingdom in whose 
 willing and happy heart God has begun his blessed 
 reign, and this is evidenced by the loving obe- 
 dience of the man to God. "To be in the kingdom 
 is to be with God," to repeat in kind, if not in 
 degree, the experience of Jesus. Yet the future 
 will be still more glorious and blessed. The 
 
JESUS' POSITIVE TEACHING 119 
 
 kingdom has come, but is still to come, and the 
 best is yet to be. It inevitably becomes social. 
 These children of the kingdom will constitute a 
 new and heavenly society on this earth, a society 
 in which God will reign and which will do his 
 will gladly and perfectly. 
 
 This thought of the kingdom is one of the 
 most important ever given to men. History is 
 not a monotonous round of ever returning cycles. 
 It is coming out somewhere. The world is tend- 
 ing towards an ideal perfection, and that ideal 
 gives it purpose and unity. God is not outside 
 society, detached, vague and shadowy, but work- 
 ing in it and through it, actively engaged in its 
 development towards this most blessed consum- 
 mation of a glad and universal obedience and 
 fellowship. So the world is to find its final unity 
 and final blessedness in God. Nothing gives the 
 Christian such patience, strength and joy as this 
 thought. 
 
 This kingdom, Jesus taught, was of priceless 
 worth to the individual and to society. It is a 
 feast of blessings. In it he who sorrows over sin 
 shall receive the peace and comfort of the divine 
 mercy. He who hungers and thirsts after right- 
 
120 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 eousness shall have the solid satisfaction of real 
 moral attainment. The cleansed in heart shall 
 have the vision of God, and shall know the deep 
 joy of the divine sonship. Through the power 
 of gentleness, God makes them the heirs of the 
 world. This is life and life more abundant. No 
 sacrifice is too great to gain it. 
 
 Jesus laid stress on the seriousness of the issue 
 when the kingdom was offered men and they 
 were invited to enter it. There were only two 
 ways then, one led to life and one to death. 
 That offer makes the supreme demand on men. 
 To reject it even to gain the whole world is the 
 most dreadful folly, for it means the rejection of 
 the highest good — the throwing away of life 
 itself. Better cut off the right hand or pluck out 
 the right eye, than suffer such a final and irre- 
 mediable loss. No more solemn words were ever 
 spoken than those used by Jesus to emphasize 
 and illustrate the gravity of this choice both for 
 the individual and the nation. This note of the 
 seriousness of life and its issues pervades the 
 teaching of Jesus, and magnifies the value of 
 the kingdom. 
 
 Jesus came not only to teach men about the 
 
JESUS POSITIVE TEACHING 121 
 
 kingdom, but to induce them to come into it. 
 In doing so he naturally laid down the conditions 
 of entrance. These are variously stated and 
 illustrated, but in each case the first step is 
 repentance, by which Jesus meant a change of 
 mind and heart and will towards sin and God. 
 Looked at from the divine side, it is a new birth, 
 the beginning of a God-given, new, and higher life. 
 
 This repentance unto life means definitely 
 quitting the old life of sin and selfishness and 
 beginning to do the will of God, not from neces- 
 sity or as a burden, or with legalistic particu- 
 larism, but gladly and freely, with a real appetite 
 for righteousness and service. Jesus' insistence 
 on righteousness can hardly be overstated. It 
 is the theme of the Sermon on the Mount and 
 the lesson of his most public and striking act, 
 the cleansing of the temple. Jesus knew nothing 
 of any incongruity between love and righteous- 
 ness. Love to him was a part of righteousness, 
 and righteousness the indispensable quality of 
 love. In his mind, justice underlies benevolence. 
 
 This new life is the life of faith. Jesus saw the 
 budding of faith in a consciousness of spiritual 
 need, humility and the childlike qualities of 
 
122 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 teachableness and open-mindedness. Its flower 
 was trust in God's willingness to pardon and to 
 bless, and its fruit was a complete surrender, a 
 renunciation of self and all that stands in the 
 way of the new life, a supreme devotion to Jesus 
 and a readiness to sacrifice everything, even life 
 itself, in following him and doing God's will. 
 Of the completeness of this surrender in faith 
 Jesus could hardly speak more strongly than he 
 does. 
 
 This new life is also a life of love to God and 
 man, and on this account must begin with the 
 forgiveness of all who have done us wrong. 
 Jesus is inflexible with reference to this initial 
 test. Gentleness, mercy and peace are equally 
 indispensable. Love is not merely benevolence, 
 good will, but it is active beneficence, a real doing 
 of good to all those about us. The children of 
 the kingdom will, however, have a special affec- 
 tion for all who follow Jesus and show a special 
 kindness towards them, just because they are 
 his and are therefore brethren in an especial sense. 
 
 The condition of entrance into the kingdom 
 is, then, repentance, a change from a life of self- 
 ishness and sin to a life of righteousness, faith 
 
JESUS POSITIVE TEACHING 1 23 
 
 and love in the sense in which those words are 
 used above. 
 
 Now this new life is salvation. He who enters 
 upon it and continues in it is saved, now and 
 for all eternity. He is saved from irreverence, 
 unbelief, aimlessness, selfishness, sensuality, and 
 all their brood of vipers. He is saved to fellow- 
 ship with God and Jesus and all good men, to 
 purity, freedom, peace, joy and love. He is 
 given an unshakable rock of confidence and the 
 noblest of all purposes. He receives a new spir- 
 itual and moral power, and triumphs in the hope 
 of ultimate moral victory, not only for himself 
 but for the race. If he fall, he shall not be 
 utterly cast down, for the Lord shall make him 
 to stand. The God who has bestowed upon him 
 this wealth of blessing will not forsake his mercy 
 towards him at any possible judgment day. Such 
 is the teaching of Jesus. 
 
 Let us now follow Jesus as he more particularly 
 describes the life of the children of the kingdom. 
 His primary insistence here is not on outward 
 duties but on the inner life. It is heart religion 
 which he demands. The kingdom of God is first 
 of all a spiritual kingdom within men. Jesus 
 
124 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 begins at the center and works from within out- 
 wards. He cleanses the life at its fountain head. 
 With unerring insight, he goes to the very root 
 of the matter. He searches out the hidden springs 
 of action in the thoughts, motives and desires of 
 men, and judges the outer conduct by the inner 
 intent. All sin and all blessedness proceed out of 
 the heart. It is the cleansed in heart who shall 
 see God. This innerness is the unique quality in 
 the righteousness of the kingdom of heaven. 
 
 So Jesus puts truth first. He demands that a 
 man shall be inherently honest with himself, and 
 therefore, with others. There is nothing which 
 he hates so much as a basic falseness, an uncon- 
 scious but real hypocrisy. This subtle poison 
 rots a man at the core. 
 
 Such fundamental honesty assures moral in- 
 tegrity. The man is no longer torn with conflict- 
 ing emotions, conscience pulling one way and the 
 desires the other. The purified will is the cap- 
 tain of the ship and directs it right on in spite 
 of storms. So life gets a unity in the one su- 
 preme purpose of the loving heart to do God's 
 will and finds a simplicity and peace which can- 
 not be had in any other way. 
 
JESUS POSITIVE TEACHING 125 
 
 From this results Jesus' demand for spiritual 
 independence, that men shall judge and choose 
 in the spiritual realm for themselves, that they 
 shall see things in the clear light of truth simply 
 and as a whole, and that they shall act on the 
 light they may gain. This is the root of that 
 spiritual freedom which refuses to be bound by 
 external authority, and is the mainspring of intel- 
 lectual no less than religious progress. 
 
 It is no wonder then that Jesus, who sees in 
 the human heart the seat of morals and religion, 
 should have exalted as no one before him the 
 value of a man. Man, in his view, is incom- 
 parably superior to inorganic nature and animals. 
 Human rights always take precedence of property 
 rights. He thought men well worth dying for. 
 One human soul is worth more than a whole 
 world of things. This is the source of the Chris- 
 tian ideas of reverence for personality, of democ- 
 racy, of the equality of the sexes, the rights of 
 children, the Christian home, and the demand 
 for a new social order. 
 
 The life of the children of the kingdom, while 
 fundamentally a life of honesty and independence 
 in the spirit, is also the life of love. God loves 
 
126 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 his children, and they love him, their brethren in 
 the kingdom, and all men, even enemies. God 
 loves his children more than any earthly father 
 can. He understands them, will care for them 
 and protect them, will hear their cry, and stands 
 ever ready to help them. Their welcome home 
 when they come back to him as sinners shows 
 what sort of a Father he is. Nor will he ever 
 allow those who have trusted his love to perish. 
 On this assurance, Jesus bases his teaching of 
 immortality (Mark 12: 26f.). Yet this is no easy- 
 going, indulgent love, indifferent to principle and 
 the highest good of the children, but "the firm 
 and steadfast administration of a holy household," 
 where the Father is supreme and his spirit is the 
 accepted law. 
 
 Jesus' heart glowed with God's love for his own. 
 He is the Good . Shepherd, who seeks and saves 
 the lost even at the cost of his life. He identi- 
 fies himself with his disciples most intimately. 
 Those who reject them reject him, and those who 
 do them the slightest kindness because they are 
 his, do it to him. With jealous love he denounces 
 his direst woes upon him who shall cause one of 
 the least of them to fall into sin. He promises 
 
JESUS' POSITIVE TEACHING 1 27 
 
 his continual presence with them. He will never 
 fail them. 
 
 God's children also will love. The first com- 
 mandment and the second, too, is, "Thou shalt 
 love." It is the law of the kingdom. They love 
 God. This is the foundation of everything in the 
 spiritual realm, underlies all thought, feeling and 
 action. It is the first instinct of God's child, 
 and carries with it trust, obedience and reverence. 
 
 They love Jesus in whom they see the love of 
 God. They follow and obey him at any cost of 
 sacrifice or suffering. They stand by him, when 
 all the world deserts him. They bring their 
 precious ointment and pour it on his feet, and on 
 his head, and he thinks that they do well. They 
 lay down their lives for him and he thinks it 
 fitting that they should. Again and again Jesus 
 demands a love that shall be faithful unto death. 
 
 They love their brethren in the kingdom, 
 brethren indeed, joined by closer ties than those 
 of the flesh, having the same experience of God's 
 grace and Jesus' love, the same inspiring task, 
 the same blessed hope. They love all men. Love 
 of neighbor is the second great commandment. 
 The Golden Rule, while essentially a rule of 
 
128 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 justice, is its practical principle. The neighbor 
 is the man who needs us, whether friend, stranger, 
 alien or enemy. Yes, Jesus requires his followers 
 to love even enemies, who are actually striving 
 to ruin and kill them. This love, however, is 
 no sentimental feeling (we cannot enjoy our ene- 
 mies), but an active doing of good. The chil- 
 dren of the kingdom will be gentle, kindly in 
 judgment, forgiving, compassionate, peacemakers, 
 reverent in feeling towards personality, and will 
 ever be giving to the very limits of gener- 
 osity. 
 
 Indeed, the condition of rank in the kingdom is 
 not wealth, intellectual ability, power, or even 
 length or difficulty of service, but a loving heart 
 which ministers in a lowly spirit to the good of 
 men. No one thing in this connection is more 
 emphasized than this, and here Jesus presents 
 himself as the great example. 
 
 The life in the kingdom is presented from other 
 points of view, all more or less related to those 
 already mentioned. It is a life of sexual purity; 
 Jesus goes out of his way to reiterate this. It 
 is a life of rest to the soul, of real and abiding 
 peace, of deep and lasting joy. It is a life of 
 
JESUS' POSITIVE TEACHING 1 29 
 
 freedom from care and anxiety; of faith in the 
 ultimate triumph of righteousness and love, of 
 the cause of Christ and God; of patience and 
 courage in the spiritual conflict. 
 
 Its external religious duties are very few and 
 simple. Towards God, prayer seems to be the 
 only one urged on the disciples. Towards men, 
 all duties may be summed up in loving service 
 in the spirit of humility, and yet the greatest 
 service we can render is often made prominent, 
 i. e., preaching, making known and communicat- 
 ing to others the unspeakable gift of life which 
 we have received in our entrance into the king- 
 dom. 
 
 Yet we do not correctly represent Jesus unless 
 we remember his insistence on doing God's will. 
 The right state of heart is only the necessary 
 preliminary to this. The life of the disciples of 
 Jesus is to be both active and contemplative, 
 but the emphasis is on action. With Jesus, too, 
 the will is king. He insists on choosing rather 
 than drifting, on doing rather than professing. 
 Indeed he anticipates our modern psychology, 
 and declares that men will learn God's will by 
 doing it, will come to certainty and depth of ex- 
 
I30 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 perience by walking in the path of loving obedi- 
 ence. Jesus never thought of offering a substi- 
 tute for real objective righteousness. 
 
 The attitude of the children of the kingdom 
 towards life and society needs more than a pass- 
 ing word. As we have said, Jesus' primary con- 
 cern was with the inner nature of the individual 
 man. He sought to make men reverent, pure, 
 honest, just and loving by bringing them into a 
 new relation to God. His first care was character. 
 But just as soon as men were renewed in the 
 spirit of their minds, their relation to life and 
 men around them was necessarily changed. Their 
 life in the family, in business, in the state, would 
 be different from what it was before. There 
 would be new motives, new ideals, new view- 
 points, new energies. Jesus' insistence on active 
 love, not merely to brethren within the kingdom, 
 but to strangers, Samaritans and even enemies, 
 shows his general attitude. He was generally 
 content, however, with inculcating a spirit. Only 
 rarely did he deal with particular practical prob- 
 lems, yet these rare instances prove that he recog- 
 nized and expected that the principles he had 
 taught would have a direct and decisive influence 
 
JESUS 7 POSITIVE TEACHING 131 
 
 on social relations. He spoke only once about 
 the State (Mark 12: 17). It was a conservative 
 word, when the radical word was anticipated by 
 his foes, and yet it had in it the seeds of some of 
 the finest modern developments in government. He 
 spoke repeatedly and emphatically about marriage 
 and divorce, upholding the highest ideals with ref- 
 erence to them in a lax age. His most frequent and 
 most scathing social utterances were, however, re- 
 served for the sin of covetousness. So strong are his 
 words against riches that he has been claimed by 
 modern agitators as their rightful leader in their 
 war against property, and has been weakly de- 
 fended by some social conservatives as giving us 
 a temporary code of morals, fitted only for the 
 brief interval which he thought would elapse 
 before the end of the world. But Jesus never 
 thought of an end of the world in any such sense. 1 
 The kingdom of glory which he would bring in 
 at his coming would be a kingdom on this earth, 
 a new society of men and women, in all essential 
 features like the kingdom he was setting up dur- 
 ing his earthly career, but purified and relieved 
 
 1 The words " end of the world " should always be translated 
 ' consummation of the age." 
 
I32 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 of the incubus of evil. Society would not "end 
 in a crash," as some say that he taught, but 
 would go on at a higher level. 
 
 Moreover, both social radicals and conserva- 
 tives interpret Jesus' words with too bald a 
 literalism and without regard to his fundamental 
 attitude and purpose. In his care for the spiritual 
 development of men, he saw that their only 
 salvation was in putting God absolutely first. 
 Men could not be bond-servants of both God and 
 mammon, for their demands were often opposite, 
 and if they tried to worship both, money was 
 sure to win them in the end. The opinion which 
 puts material things, — food, clothes, money, com- 
 forts, — above God, the kingdom, character, so- 
 ciety, love, and justice, Jesus set out to reverse. 
 He found wealth, and the intense desire for it, 
 his greatest foe in this endeavor. It was almost 
 impossible to make rich men see what he wanted, 
 or to enter into the new life that he opened before 
 them. In some desperate instances, he told them 
 that their only salvation was in giving it all away 
 and starting afresh and free in the new path. 
 Yet he did not say this to all, nor make it a 
 universal demand. He had rich men and women 
 
JESUS POSITIVE TEACHING 133 
 
 among his disciples, and always conceded the 
 need of bread and clothes and money. Lately 
 we have been told that Jesus preached a renun- 
 ciation of the world of such a character that to 
 follow him would break up society. But this 
 also is untrue. He did demand a renunciation 
 of self (Mark 8: 34), of the selfish life, of all that 
 is sinful and wrong. And this renunciation of 
 self and sin is revolutionary in its influence on 
 the world. Jesus said it would bring in a new 
 age. It has already done so, and will work in- 
 creasingly from the present day on. But Jesus 
 did not bid men renounce the good in the world. 
 He loved nature, he loved his country, he did not 
 withdraw his disciples from life but bade them 
 fight the good fight in life's swirling currents, he 
 recognized the State, he refounded the home, he 
 blessed marriage and children, he enjoyed all of 
 life's innocent pleasures, he made life richer, 
 fuller and nobler. So far as world-renunciation 
 and world-affirmation * are concerned, he held 
 that even balance of sanity, which did not fear 
 
 1 World-affirmation is a somewhat recent technical word, in- 
 vented as an opposite of world-renunciation. It expresses the 
 attitude of the man who thinks this' a very good world and is 
 not disposed to deny himself any of its pleasures. 
 
134 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 to bring in the radical change, and yet appre- 
 ciated and conserved all that was good in the exist- 
 ing order. When he says that his kingdom is 
 not of this world, he refers to its heavenly origin 
 and its spiritual (non-political) character. He 
 never denies, however, that it is his purpose 
 to build a new world in the midst of the old one, 
 a new world into which the old must come or be 
 doomed. 
 
 But what was the relation of Jesus to the King- 
 dom of God? * The answer is full and plain and 
 makes up a very considerable part of the teach- 
 ing of Jesus. To be sure, as we have pointed 
 out, he at first and always spoke more of the 
 spiritual kingdom, but afterwards frequently of 
 the spiritual king. His relation with God was 
 intimate and basic. God was his Father, had 
 sent him, given him an experience of blessing, 
 had filled him with the Spirit and with power, 
 had endued him with all the resources of spiritual 
 knowledge and energy necessary to his great work 
 of salvation, and had guaranteed its ultimate 
 success. No less a term than Messiah could 
 
 1 Jesus' teaching on the Method and Progress of the Kingdom 
 is more appropriately treated in the next chapter. 
 
JESUS 7 POSITIVE TEACHING 135 
 
 possibly describe him and that was inadequate. 
 So he was the Son of Man, the Son of God, the 
 Savior of Men, the King in the Kingdom, and 
 the Final Judge. Though his mission, he finally 
 saw, could be accomplished only through his 
 death, he was certain that he would survive death, 
 and in a future and glorious consummation finally 
 and perfectly set up the kingdom, and reign in it 
 as king. 
 
 Indeed this kingdom was only God's reign in 
 the humble and loving heart, with all its blessed 
 social consequences. To enter it was but to enter 
 into the delightful experience of God, which Jesus 
 enjoyed. So the kingdom came with him, and 
 could increase and strengthen only as the enjoy- 
 ment of his experience was shared by an ever 
 increasing multitude. This new life, shared with 
 Jesus, found its source of supply in Jesus himself, 
 in communion with him, and through him with 
 God. The Lord's Supper can mean nothing less 
 than that the disciple is to nourish his spiritual 
 life by a constant appropriation of the spirit, 
 purpose and self-sacrificing love of Jesus. 
 
 Therefore salvation is in Jesus. To love him, 
 to follow him, to obey him, to cleave to him, to 
 
136 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 get his experience and to share his purpose is 
 life. He is the way to God. To reject him is to 
 choose spiritual death. He is the touchstone of 
 destiny. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 JESUS' WORK AND HIS VIEW OF ITS FUTURE 
 
 Jesus was more than a teacher, he was a 
 founder. He must rank with the great empire 
 builders; but he was greater than they, for he 
 founded a spiritual empire by spiritual means, 
 an empire which he still dominates and guides, 
 and which still increases, centuries after their 
 temporary structures based on force have dropped 
 to pieces. This is directly in line with one of 
 Jesus' favorite passages, Dan. 7: 13, 14. He 
 founded this empire or kingdom, as he called it, 
 by giving men a new spiritual life, fostering that 
 life, and finally sending them out to build the 
 kingdom by communicating their new life to 
 others. Despite all that may be said for Peter, 
 John and Paul, in a real sense Jesus founded it 
 alone. 
 
 Now let us look at this great work of Jesus, 
 as presented to us in the gospels and especially 
 as viewed by Jesus himself. 
 i37 
 
138 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 First of all, he believed that he was founding 
 God's kingdom. God was behind him in this work. 
 It was his Father's business, God had sent him. 
 The Spirit was upon him, had anointed him, 
 and worked in and through him. All the future 
 lay in his Father's hands, and he was content 
 that it should be so. 
 
 The character of the work is plain. It was 
 an aggressive ministry. He sought men. He 
 did not wait for men to come to him. He went 
 after them. So it was an itinerant ministry. 
 Ceaselessly he pursued his preaching tours, from 
 village to village, from city to city, from province 
 to province. He covered all the major divisions 
 of the Jewish fatherland, Judea, Galilee and 
 Perea, and preached also in Samaria and Philip's 
 tetrarchy. He strove to come into personal con- 
 tact with just as many people as possible. 1 The 
 white harvest was ever before his eyes and on 
 his heart. He prayed for helpers and urged 
 
 x The thoroughness and comprehensiveness of this speaking 
 campaign has rarely been equalled. Where did Jesus get this 
 aggressiveness? It was peculiarly foreign to the circle of the 
 Devout from which he sprang, and in striking contrast to the 
 quiet years at Nazareth. Jesus himself ascribes it to the Spirit 
 (Luke 4: 18). It clearly testifies to his early certainty and def- 
 initeness with reference to his divine call and mission. 
 
JESUS WORK AND VIEW OF ITS FUTURE 139 
 
 others to pray for them. No difficulties or weari- 
 ness held him back. Over the mountains and 
 through the wilderness the Shepherd sought his 
 sheep. He sent out his still ill-prepared disciples 
 by the dozen and the seventy on the same mis- 
 sion. From the very first he had intended to 
 make them "fishers of men." 
 
 It was a preaching ministry. Preaching was 
 Jesus' principal, and, except healing and helping, 
 his only method. As the great sower, he sowed 
 the divine word or message in men's hearts, the 
 message of the kingdom and its new and blessed 
 life. He urged men to enter the kingdom, told 
 them how to do so, and solemnly warned them of 
 the consequences of refusal. He revealed to 
 them the father-heart of God, bade them cast 
 aside the weary yoke of legalism, and find rest 
 in his experience of joy and his new service of 
 freedom. 
 
 The ultimate object of this ministry was salva- 
 tion, to save men and society from falseness, 
 selfishness and irreligion, to truth, righteousness, 
 love and God. So Jesus sought sinners, promised 
 them on the condition of repentance the divine 
 welcome, a Father's forgiveness, and a rein- 
 
140 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 statement in his favor, constantly alluring them 
 by the blessedness of the life of the kingdom 
 here and hereafter. On the other hand, he plainly 
 warned them that it meant self-renunciation, 
 danger, poverty and possibly death. Yet to lose 
 life for his sake was to find it. 
 
 It was a ministry of love, of healing and help- 
 fulness. Conscious of extraordinary power and 
 compassionate by nature, Jesus could not but 
 heal the sick and free men from the dreadful 
 demon possession. He rejoiced in this power to 
 help, he even saw in the casting out of demons 
 the evidence of his victory over the powers of 
 darkness and evil; but he also recognized the 
 danger that by the indiscriminate and continuous 
 use of his healing ability, he might give a wrong 
 impression of his real object, which was not after all 
 the curing of men's bodies but the setting up of a 
 spiritual kingdom of spiritually renovated men. So, 
 towards the close of his career, we find, in our rec- 
 ords at least, ever fewer miracles of physical healing. 
 
 His ministry had a truly universal character. 
 Offering a purely spiritual good, the kingdom, on 
 purely spiritual conditions, it could not be other- 
 wise. Jesus was one of the Jewish common people 
 
JESUS WORK AND VIEW OF ITS FUTURE 141 
 
 and he loved them. From the very first he had 
 not the slightest idea of allying himself with the 
 narrow fraternity of separatist Pharisees or gain- 
 ing recognition in rabbinic circles. He was 
 frankly a common man and remained so. His 
 Savior-heart went out to the lost sheep of the 
 house of Israel, who, he saw, had no shepherd. 
 He came to preach glad news to the poor and 
 neglected. He felt himself drawn to the "sin- 
 ners," those who had given up trying to keep the 
 law and its thousand refinements, and were 
 looked upon as unclean by the Pharisees. They 
 were not bad people as a whole, but were shut 
 out from the religion of the day by the religious 
 leaders, and were wandering aimlessly and hope- 
 lessly about. Jesus became the shepherd of these 
 people, presented to them his glad news that 
 legalism was not religion, but that the highest 
 spiritual good could be had by the sincere and 
 childlike, who would begin a life of inner honesty 
 and love to God and man. And they received 
 his message. Into this circle he drew the publi- 
 cans, the small practical politicians of the day, 
 who had turned their back on Pharisaic exclusive- 
 ness and Zealot dreams as unremunerative, and 
 
142 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 were in life for what they could make out of it. 
 Many of them received him gladly and one of 
 them became an apostle. 
 
 Nor did Jesus confine himself to these. Con- 
 trary to the law, he laid a sympathetic hand on 
 a poor leper. He invited the harlots to come into 
 the kingdom and they came. He offered a 
 Samaritan woman the water of life and had an 
 open heart towards all her hated race. He healed 
 the servant of the Gentile Roman centurion, 
 started to enter his house without a thought of 
 defilement (cf. Acts 10: 28, 11: 3), and praised 
 his faith as greater than any he had yet found 
 in Israel. But Jesus was no class Savior. He 
 sought to bring even the Pharisees into the joy 
 of the kingdom. He pleaded with the Jewish 
 senator, Nicodemus; he was at home with the 
 well-to-do family at Bethany. Of the rich young 
 ruler alone, it is said in the Synoptists that "he 
 loved him." 1 He neither courted nor shunned 
 any particular set of men. He sought nothing 
 less than the salvation of the nation as such. 
 
 x Mark 10: 21 (no parallels). John 11: 5 tells us that Jesus 
 loved Martha and Mary and Lazarus, also prosperous people; 
 the Fourth Gospel too sometimes speaks of " the disciple whom 
 Jesus loved." 
 
JESUS WORK AND VIEW OF ITS FUTURE 143 
 
 This conclusion with reference to the univer- 
 sality of Jesus is seemingly opposed by two pas- 
 sages, Matthew 10: 5 (no parallel) and Matthew 
 15: 24-26 (Mark 7: 37). The former, however, 
 which bids the Twelve avoid Gentile or Samaritan 
 territory on their preaching tour is fully explained 
 by the inadvisability of sending men still full of 
 Jewish prejudice to preach to outsiders. The 
 latter passage, in which Jesus says to the Syro- 
 phcenician that he is sent to the lost sheep of 
 the house of Israel, is more difficult. It probably 
 records Jesus' feeling about the limitations of 
 his own mission, which at that period especially 
 he could not transgress without serious harm to 
 his ultimate purposes. A Gentile mission at this 
 crisis in his career would not only have rendered 
 a final appeal to the nation impossible, but 
 would probably have strained the disciples' faith 
 to the breaking point. But here too, it must be 
 noted, the wise love of Jesus found a way. The 
 woman's faith, Jesus intimated, showed that 
 she belonged to the spiritual Israel. 
 
 As we have seen, the ministry was not much 
 more than half over, before he became convinced 
 that his violent death was inevitable. He was 
 
144 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 sure that God had sent him, and he could not 
 stop. Yet his continuance in the work constantly 
 aggravated the bitter and murderous opposition of 
 his enemies. There could be only one result, but, 
 if so, death was a part of his mission, a part of the 
 Father's plan for him, and, consequently, it must 
 be necessary to the accomplishment of his great 
 purpose of salvation. So he was certain at last 
 that he could not save the world by preaching 
 only. He must add to preaching the laying down 
 of his life. He could save the world only by dying 
 for it. 1 But just how his death was to save the 
 world Jesus never said. 
 
 Only two passages can possibly aid us at this 
 point. In Mark 10: 45 and parallel, Jesus speaks 
 of giving his life a ransom for many, as the loftiest 
 example of loving service. He tells us that his 
 self-sacrificing death was a part of his mission, 
 and that through it God would save "many," 
 but the how and why remains a mystery. Mark 
 14: 24 and parallels at first look more hopeful. 
 Jesus is speaking of the wine at the Last Supper, 
 
 1 When this thought began to dawn on Jesus, he found Old 
 Testament passages which confirmed it to his mind, especially 
 Isaiah 53. 
 
JESUS' WORK AND VIEW OF ITS FUTURE 145 
 
 as the symbol of his shed blood. "This is the 
 blood of the covenant, which is poured out for 
 many," and Matthew rightly adds, "for the 
 remission or forgiveness of sins." Jesus by these 
 words clearly indicates that he regarded his 
 death as a sacrifice. All sacrifices are more or 
 less related to the forgiveness of sins, which is 
 one of God's initial steps in the salvation of the 
 sinner. Still, after all, the whole meaning may be 
 nothing more than that through the offering of 
 his life as a sacrifice, salvation will come to the 
 world, and we make no progress in trying to 
 answer the how and why. 
 
 The only real items of information which we 
 get from this passage are the facts that Jesus 
 looked upon his death as a covenant sacrifice, 
 which actually founded the new community, the 
 new Israel; and that in this symbolism he ex- 
 pressed the power of blessing which he expected 
 from his death. Just as they drank the wine of 
 the cup, assimilated and made it a part of them- 
 selves, so his disciples must partake of and ap- 
 propriate his spirit which does not refuse the 
 supreme sacrifice for others' good. Only thus 
 can they nourish their own spiritual lives or 
 
146 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 have a part in the new kingdom of self-giving 
 love. They too must add sacrifice to preaching. 
 This is profoundly significant. It founds Chris- 
 tianity not on a teaching, but on a person and an 
 act. 1 That person and act must live again in 
 Jesus' followers. Possibly we begin to see an 
 answer to the how and why, but not as clearly 
 as we would like. Possibly Jesus could not pro- 
 duce in this world by any other means except 
 his self-sacrificing death that new type of charac- 
 ter which would be dead to all the claims of self- 
 interest and self-gratification and would gladly de- 
 vote and lay down life itself for other's good. And 
 such a life of self-sacrifice in lowly service to man 
 and loving obedience to God and duty is salvation. 
 Gethsemane and the cry on the cross, "Why 
 hast thou forsaken me?" still call for explana- 
 tion. Up to the time of the midnight hour in 
 the garden, Jesus had proved himself to be the 
 bravest of the brave, always decisive, always 
 master of the situation. Why then this agony of 
 
 1 We may here aptly repeat the old story of the young man 
 who came to Rousseau, no friend of Christianity, complaining 
 that after ten years of labor he had not gained a single convert 
 to the new religion he had invented. "If you will be crucified 
 and rise again the third day, you will have no difficulty," answered 
 the old philosopher. A deeply significant reply. 
 
JESUS' WORK AND VIEW OF ITS FUTURE 147 
 
 soul in prospect of the nearer approach of a 
 death which he had long anticipated and had 
 come to Jerusalem to meet? Was this an hour 
 of weakness, of faltering before a reality, of 
 which he had spoken bravely enough when it 
 was at a distance? No, we cannot believe that 
 Jesus faltered where many of his followers have 
 sung hymns of triumphant faith. The cry on 
 the cross explains Gethsemane. In the garden, 
 he found in the cup which he was about to drain 
 something more dreadful to him than physical 
 anguish and death. That something was the 
 clouding of the perfect communion with his 
 Father, which he had enjoyed from his earliest 
 recollection, which was more than life to him. 
 He had never anticipated this before that final 
 night. It was something absolutely new and 
 strange to him, and he shrank back from it till 
 he learned that it was the Father's will, the only 
 way of accomplishing his mission and securing 
 the salvation of men. The why he never learned, 
 and still asked, "Why?" upon the cross, where 
 at last in those hours of darkness he suffered the 
 dread reality of which Gethsemane was but the 
 warning shadow. And men ever since have 
 
148 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 asked, "Why? Why was it necessary? " Possibly 
 that our leader might go to the very limits of 
 self-sacrifice and submission to the Father's will, 
 that he might taste a bitterness in death of which 
 none of his followers can possibly find the equal. 
 He will not ask us to tread where he has not 
 preceded and outdone us. 
 
 And this may not be all. For a time at least 
 Jesus was in the sinner's place in that there was 
 a cloud between him and the Father. We can- 
 not believe that the Father was, as a matter of 
 fact, angry with his Son, now suffering in obedi- 
 ence to him. But the Father did allow the cloud 
 to come between, and to Jesus it was all real. 
 Was the cause merely physical, some profound 
 nervous depression? Even so, it was the bitter- 
 ness of death to him, and God allowed it to be, 
 as part of his plan. And just what was the 
 cloud? Was it the cloud of sin? If that is true, 
 it could not have been his sin, for he had none, 
 but ours. And so we are back at the fifty-third 
 of Isaiah again. It is to be noted that this chap- 
 ter was very much in the mind of the earliest 
 church, and very likely of Jesus himself in this 
 very connection. 
 
JESUS' WORK AND VIEW OF ITS FUTURE 149 
 
 But whatever we may think or say about it, 
 the cross has been the greatest element of power 
 in the gospel. In all the long history it has 
 awed, allured, melted and conquered men's 
 hearts. Paul is not wrong when in Romans 8 : 3 
 he declares that by the death of Jesus, God 
 had done a hitherto impossible thing, he had 
 by one act forever condemned and broken the 
 power of sin and selfishness. By this act, Jesus 
 bound the strong man, and from that day, pro- 
 ceeds to spoil him of his goods. The powers of 
 evil can never recover from that deadly blow, 
 but are bound to fall at last as the result of it. 
 In the blaze of the light from Golgotha, all the 
 beasts of darkness will finally creep into their 
 holes, never to emerge again. The cross will yet 
 make Jesus the Lord of the world; by its power 
 he will draw all men unto himself. 
 
 Jesus' view of the future of his work is not 
 altogether clear and the subject raises many 
 difficult questions much debated by scholars. 
 The first of these questions is whether Jesus in- 
 tended to found a church, and whether he fore- 
 saw even the separation of his disciples from 
 Judaism. It is asserted by the more radical 
 
150 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 critics that Jesus moved wholly in the narrow 
 circle of Jewish ideas and customs, that he con- 
 sidered his mission limited to the Jewish people, 
 that he was altogether an opportunist in his 
 method, deciding nothing until the occasion arose 
 but leaving all the future in his Father's hands, 
 that the early disciples after the resurrection still 
 considered themselves Jews and attended the wor- 
 ship of the temple, indeed that Christianity needed 
 a Paul to shake it free from its Jewish exclusive- 
 ness. It is furthermore pointed out that the two 
 passages in which the church is mentioned, Mat- 
 thew 16: 18 and 18: 17, are peculiar to Matthew 
 and are probably not the words of Jesus. 
 
 We cannot accept these views as a whole. 
 The evidence gives us another picture. Phari- 
 saism was practically Judaism. It had a pre- 
 dominant influence in the Sanhedrin, and con- 
 trolled the whole synagogue and school system 
 of Palestine. It permeated the whole thought of 
 the people, and neither Jesus nor Christianity 
 could finally unfasten its hold on the nation. 
 The break with the Pharisees began with John 
 the Baptist. He rejected them and they rejected 
 him. His baptism practically created a new kind 
 
JESUS ' WORK AND VIEW OF ITS FUTURE 151 
 
 of Jew, known as the disciples of John. Finding 
 no welcome in Pharisaism, they clung together 
 and long survived the death of their leader with- 
 out being re-absorbed into Judaism. John thought 
 those who received his baptism of repentance the 
 true Israel and looked on the Pharisees as doomed 
 to destruction. Jesus took the same view of the 
 Pharisees. While he seems to have had some 
 hopes of the Galilean and perhaps of the Perean 
 Pharisees at first, his break with Pharisees as 
 such was final and complete. They had and 
 wished no part in his new spiritual kingdom, and 
 Jesus prophesied their rejection by God and their 
 irremediable ruin. On the other hand, he was 
 gathering about him a band of disciples, among 
 them many publicans and "sinners" whom the 
 Pharisees counted unclean. Jesus, however, 
 thought these disciples the heirs of the kingdom 
 of God. He had originally called them in order 
 that, after suitable instruction, they might help 
 him in his work of preaching, might become 
 "fishers of men," that is, missionaries or apostles, 
 but, when he chose the Twelve, he probably 
 already began to foresee that the nation as such 
 would never be won from Judaism to enter the 
 
152 THE MAN OE NAZARETH 
 
 new society. This choice of the Twelve gave his 
 little band a sort of loose organization, and he 
 made the education of these leaders one of the 
 principal parts of his work. He had no idea 
 of a reunion of his disciples with contemporary 
 Judaism. Rather he predicted that the Jews 
 would persecute his disciples to the death, and 
 in the Lord's Supper, he bound them in a new 
 covenant to himself and to each other, and thus 
 formally founded the new Society. 
 
 Although Jesus was no revolutionary and 
 frankly based his teaching on the Old Testament, 
 he looked upon his mission and teaching as some- 
 thing new, and the Pharisees clearly recognized 
 it as such. In his parables of the new patch on 
 the old garment and the new wine in the old 
 wine skins, Jesus declared that his new teaching 
 could never be related to the old so as to become 
 a part of it. Indeed Judaism would be destroyed, 
 while he was setting up an everlasting king- 
 dom. 
 
 How, then, can it be said that Jesus did not 
 foresee the separation of his disciples from Ju- 
 daism? And if he did get a vision of that, he 
 must also have foreseen their future community 
 
JESUS WORK AND VIEW OF ITS FUTURE 1 53 
 
 life. They had gained his view and his spirit, and 
 must share his isolation and rejection. So long 
 as they held to Jesus as Messiah, the Pharisees 
 would bar them out and bitterly persecute them. 
 It consequently seems as if Jesus must have said 
 some such words as those recorded in Matthew 
 16: 18, "On this rock I will build my church." 
 They not only fit the historical situation, but it 
 practically demands them. By "church" Jesus 
 here meant "sacred congregation," using the 
 Aramaic equivalent of the Hebrew Old Testa- 
 ment word for the congregation of Israel. He 
 felt that his followers were the true Israel, the 
 heirs of the coming Kingdom. On Peter, the 
 first confessor of his spiritual Messiahship, he 
 will build of like living stones, his congregation, 
 his church. 
 
 The church then began historically with the 
 followers of John the Baptist, but developed 
 under Jesus' teaching and leadership in Galilee 
 and Perea, having few, if any, roots in Jerusalem 
 and Judea. Yet while it was thus brought into 
 being by John and Jesus, it was a formless thing, 
 organizing itself around the Lord in the way of 
 personal devotion, and recognizing after a fashion 
 
154 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 the moral authority of the twelve men whom 
 Jesus had made leaders. 
 
 Harnack and Pfleiderer cannot believe that 
 Jesus had any such historical horizon as to enable 
 him to foresee a Gentile mission, and by criti- 
 cal or exegetical methods they eliminate all pas- 
 sages which appear to ascribe such foresight to 
 him. 
 
 We must here, too, start from the known 
 towards the problematical. Nothing is more cer- 
 tain about Jesus than his breadth of mind, his 
 depth of insight, and his sympathy with the de- 
 spised and the outcast. He had an inward antago- 
 nism to all Pharisaic exclusiveness and contempt 
 for others. This is a strong preliminary reason 
 for believing that Jesus was interested in Gentiles, 
 who were common enough in all parts of Pales- 
 tine. Three great a priori arguments arise too 
 from Jesus' historical situation. 1 First, the Old 
 Testament is full of predictions of the conversion 
 of the Gentiles. This is especially true of Isaiah, 
 one of Jesus' favorite books, and the same thought 
 is found in Daniel 2: 35, 44; 7: 14. The last is 
 
 1 Care must be taken not to confuse the subject of the Gentile 
 mission with the narrower question of the Judaistic controversy. 
 
JESUS' WORK AND VIEW OF ITS FUTURE 1 55 
 
 the Son of Man prophecy, which we felt justified 
 in calling Jesus' guiding star (p. 86). x Second, 
 those who believed in the coming of a political 
 Messiah believed that he would conquer and 
 finally reign over all nations. Indeed, the third 
 temptation is based on this very thought. Would 
 a spiritual Messiah expect to do less? Third, 
 the Pharisees of Jesus' time carried on an active 
 propaganda among the Gentiles, and had many 
 converts. Jesus himself refers to their compass- 
 ing sea and land to make one proselyte (Mat- 
 thew 23: 15). Would Jesus have his "fishers of 
 men" less zealous? 
 
 Add to these familiar elements of the thought- 
 world of Jesus the fact that he himself spent 
 some weeks or months in heathen Phoenicia and 
 Syria after the crisis at Capernaum. Can we 
 believe that he went through that experience 
 without having his heart moved with compassion 
 for the Gentiles, although it may not have been 
 wise for him to give expression to it then? Note 
 
 1 It seems clear that Jesus identified himself with Isaiah's 
 Servant of Jehovah, who is represented as God's Messenger of 
 Salvation to the ends of the earth (Isa. 49: 5, 6, and other 
 passages). This is another strong proof of his consciousness of 
 a world-wide mission. 
 
156 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 especially that before he took this journey, he had 
 been eager to help the Gentile centurion, who 
 had asked him to heal his servant, and had been 
 loud in his praise of the heathen's faith, nay, 
 without hesitation was proceeding to enter his 
 house, something which even Peter was loath 
 to do years afterwards (Acts 10: 28, 11: 3), and 
 was only stopped by the centurion's considerate 
 message. The centurion knew the Jewish prej- 
 udice and would not permit Jesus to expose 
 himself to ceremonial defilement. Note also that 
 the Syrophoenician asked for help just at the 
 beginning of this foreign tour. Many things 
 combined to make her request seem untimely, 
 but, as we have seen, Jesus reconciled his Jewish 
 mission with his aid to the Gentile on the prin- 
 ciple that faith rather than nationality admitted 
 to membership in his new Israel. This incident 
 in all its significance would go with him during 
 his entire journey. Nor should it be overlooked 
 that the visit of Gentiles from this very territory 
 described in the twelfth of John is exactly in 
 line with the foregoing. 
 The spiritual character of the kingdom which 
 
JESUS' WORK AND VIEW OF ITS FUTURE 1 57 
 
 Jesus preached and its spiritual conditions of 
 entrance plainly implied the universality of its 
 membership. And this is strengthened when we 
 remember that Jesus absolutely repudiated the 
 nationalistic ideal of Messiahship and the king- 
 dom. This spiritual character of the kingdom 
 made it the property of the poor in spirit and 
 the pure in heart, freed men from all class dis- 
 tinctions and race prejudice, and brought them 
 into a new world of love and brotherhood. Can 
 we think that he who first gave the world this 
 wonderful charter of spiritual liberty really did 
 not understand its true significance or its simplest 
 implications; that Jesus, the originator of the 
 idea, comprehended it less clearly than Paul, 
 its expounder? Furthermore, the universality of 
 Messiah's reign is a necessary logical corollary of 
 monotheism. If there is one God, he must be 
 God of both Jews and Gentiles, and interested in 
 the salvation of all. This is Paul's argument 
 in Romans 3: 29-31. Could not Jesus also draw 
 so plain an inference? There can be but one 
 answer, and that answer is further confirmed by 
 Jesus' acknowledged attitude towards Samari- 
 
158 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 tans, whom the Jews hated certainly as cordially 
 as they did Gentiles. 1 
 
 These considerations make the reference of 
 Jesus to the Gentile mission perfectly natural, 
 though it is probable that the thought came into 
 greater prominence after his foreign tour. This 
 favorable feeling towards Gentiles gives point 
 to his first speech at Nazareth (Luke 4: 24-29). 
 The universalism of the salt of the earth and the 
 light of the world (Matthew 5: 13, 14) is unmis- 
 takable. The reference to many coming from 
 the east and the west and sitting down with 
 Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of 
 Heaven while the sons of the kingdom shall be 
 cast out, in its immediate connection with the 
 Gentile centurion's faith and in a passage criti- 
 cally unassailable, is decisive for Jesus' inclusion 
 of Gentiles in the kingdom (Matthew 8: 11, 12; 
 Luke 13: 28, 29). Being brought before govern- 
 ors and kings, therefore, naturally implies the mis- 
 
 1 While Jesus never discussed the question of circumcision or 
 pronounced on the issue raised in the Judaistic controversy, the 
 evidence adduced above leaves us in no doubt as to whether 
 Jesus would have sided with Paul or the Judaizers, had the ques- 
 tion arisen in his day. Here Jesus, Stephen and Paul stand to- 
 gether. 
 
JESUS WORK AND VIEW OF ITS FUTURE 1 59 
 
 sion to the heathen (Mark 13: 9; Matthew 10: 18). 
 In these circumstances, we doubtless have a gen- 
 uine saying of Jesus in the prophecy that the 
 anointing by Mary should be heralded, wherever 
 the gospel is preached in the whole world. And 
 the entire discussion greatly strengthens the uni- 
 versal Great Commission of the risen Savior. We 
 cannot doubt that "the world was in his heart." 1 
 Jesus then believed that his disciples would 
 separate from Judaism, would form a new com- 
 munity, the true Israel, 2 that this gospel would 
 be preached among the Gentiles and received by 
 them, and that all peoples, nations and languages 
 would serve him (Dan. 7: 14, the "Son of Man" 
 passage). Jesus therefore was the Founder of the 
 Kingdom of God. We do not mean that God had 
 not reigned truly but imperfectly in the hearts of 
 Abraham, Moses, Samuel and Isaiah before this 
 time, but we do say that Jesus definitely set 
 before himself, as they did not, the idea of a 
 
 1 Mk. 13: 10; Mt. 21: 43, and the numerous universalistic pas- 
 sages in John are omitted from the discussion, because they would 
 carry little weight with those who take the opposite side, and 
 some of them are possibly open to legitimate critical and exe- 
 getical objections. 
 
 2 Indeed these changes had already occurred in principle and 
 had been partially worked out historically. 
 
l6o THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 concrete spiritual kingdom, which would take prac- 
 tical form as a body of men bound together only 
 by spiritual ties, calling themselves brethren be- 
 cause all felt in themselves the working of the same 
 new life; a definite body of people in the world 
 but not of the world, having the one definite pur- 
 pose of bringing the whole world to enjoy their 
 blessing of spiritual life. This mission, which was 
 his mission, he left at his death in the hands of a 
 few ordinary men of a despised race, and with only 
 an imperfect understanding of their task. But he 
 trusted their faith and love and God's ability to 
 use them in this high enterprise. This little band, 
 which he still inspires with his life and energy, has 
 become the dominant force in our civilization, and 
 the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. 
 
 Jesus takes pains to describe the processes of 
 the kingdom's growth. The influence of his 
 disciples will be all pervading; like salt, saving 
 the world from its corruptions, like light, bring- 
 ing to all men the knowledge of the Father. The 
 growth is from small to large, from beginning to 
 consummation and ever from within outward. 
 Jesus likens it to the mighty, silent, self-acting 
 forces of nature. The parables in which these 
 
JESUS' WORK AND VIEW OF ITS FUTURE l6l 
 
 truths are expressed sound almost like those of a 
 modern evolutionist. Yet Jesus emphasizes the 
 divine agency more than the human cooperation. 
 The kingdom is God's, it is from heaven; the 
 initial impulse, the fundamental energy, the power 
 for consummation, are divine. Nor will the de- 
 velopment be always even and peaceful. The 
 kingdom is bound to enter upon a fierce life-and- 
 death struggle with its environment, a conflict 
 which will end in victory only after the most 
 dreadful persecutions and martyrdoms. Jesus 
 came to send not peace, but a sword. 
 
 As to the outcome, Jesus had not the slightest 
 doubt. It will be a complete and final victory. 
 But whether that victory is to be won before 
 his second Coming is not made clear. On this 
 point the evidence is conflicting and confused. 
 The one passage which hints a pessimistic view, 
 that the Son of Man at his Coming will fail to 
 find faith on the earth (Luke 18: 8), is in all 
 probability a very early interpolation from the 
 margin of the manuscript. The Leaven, more 
 or less supported by some other growth parables, 
 seems to know nothing of the second Coming and 
 to rely merely on the spiritual vitality of the 
 
1 62 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 kingdom to carry it on to success by the use 
 of preaching in its largest sense. On the other 
 hand, the parable of the Sower teaches only par- 
 tial success, and the Tares tells us plainly that 
 wheat and tares shall grow together until the 
 harvest. Yet these too are evolutionary parables 
 of growth. The parables of the return of the house- 
 holder, the king and the bridegroom likewise assert 
 that they will find good and bad at their home- 
 coming. Indeed, this is the predominant repre- 
 sentation. It seems possible that the parables of 
 the former type belong to the period when Jesus 
 expected to succeed in his campaign of preaching, 
 the latter sort to the time after he became sure of 
 his death and as a result began to preach his 
 second Coming to his disciples. The difference is 
 not so great as it first seems, however. In both 
 representations final victory is assured and, as it 
 seems to me, by spiritual means (cf. p. 9of.). 
 
 However great the difficulties involved, the 
 evidence seems to prove that Jesus looked for- 
 ward to his resurrection as well as to his second 
 Coming. And we cannot help asking, How did 
 Jesus come to think that he would rise again? 
 Of course, all good Jews of his time believed in 
 
JESUS' WORK AND VIEW OF ITS FUTURE 163 
 
 the resurrection at the last day, but Jesus antici- 
 pated for himself something entirely different, in 
 fact, unique. This assurance was possibly the 
 complex result of several lines of faith and feeling. 
 Jesus' extraordinary career was based on his ex- 
 perience of perfect moral union and communion 
 with his Father and his consequent call to bring 
 men into that same experience. As he looked 
 forward to a fast approaching death, and felt 
 it to be a divinely appointed part of his mission 
 of salvation, long since foretold in the Old Testa- 
 ment, he felt that death could not be the end 
 either of him or his work. His cross might be 
 necessary to the triumph of the kingdom, but 
 could not be its consummation. That glorious 
 kingdom of the future must lie beyond his death. 
 Further, he had first realized the kingdom in 
 his own heart and life. The kingdom came with 
 him. He had been its founder among men, had 
 been the center of its life, power and righteous- 
 ness. He was the Messiah-king. He could not 
 conceive of the further development of the king- 
 dom without him. He was necessary to it. God 
 had called him for this purpose and there was 
 no other to complete the task. So he felt that 
 
164 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 death after all could not for any extended time 
 sever his personal relation to the kingdom. Nor 
 did he believe that his Father, of whose love he 
 had never had the shadow of a doubt, would 
 leave him the prey of death (Mark 12: 261., cf. 
 Acts 2: 24-28) or that he would allow the ene- 
 mies of his kingdom the lasting triumph of the 
 cross. These subjective feelings were justified 
 by the history. All now agree that without the 
 disciples' belief in the resurrection, all Jesus' work 
 would have come to naught. 
 
 But, most important of all, Jesus felt within 
 himself an indestructible life, a vital energy far 
 above that of other men, a power which had 
 brought health to ten thousand sick, which was 
 more than a match for leprosy itself, which had 
 even revivified the dead. He had indeed been a 
 victor in his conflict with Satan, had bound the 
 strong man and spoiled his goods by casting out 
 innumerable demons, had defied and overcome 
 all the powers of evil and darkness. He felt that, 
 though he might die, death was not congruous 
 with his nature and that he would snap its bond. 
 
 He therefore thought of himself as always con- 
 tinuing with his disciples (Matthew 18: 20; 28: 20) 
 
JESUS' WORK AND VIEW OP ITS FUTURE 165 
 
 to answer their petitions, to be their helper and 
 leader in all their work of building the kingdom. 
 To be sure, he would be present no longer visibly, 
 but by his Spirit, who would dwell in their hearts, 
 take his place, and do for them all that he had 
 done during his earthly ministry, and more 
 (John 14-16). So Paul calls the glorified Lord 
 "the Spirit" (2 Cor. 3: 18). 
 
 And he would come again. We have shown 
 (p. 9if.) that this is probably also a purely spiri- 
 tual coming, but so personal that all would recog- 
 nize his presence, and so dynamic as finally to 
 extirpate all the forces of incorrigible evil, and 
 lift the whole world up into a new age of spiritual 
 power, that glorious final perfect stage of the 
 kingdom, which the Father has planned. In 
 other words, Jesus was certain of personal triumph 
 in his mighty enterprise and a final triumph in 
 spite of death, nay, through death, a triumph 
 which God had pledged him in his very call, and 
 which was as certain to come as God was to con- 
 tinue righteous and supreme. Representing all 
 that was purest and holiest in the universe, Jesus 
 was sure that "he must reign until he had put all 
 his enemies under his feet" (1 Cor. 15: 25). 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 
 
 What Jesus was, was the root of all that he 
 said and did. All he taught originated in his 
 inner experience, and his life was the undistorted 
 reflex of his heart. This is what gives him that 
 indefinable charm of simplicity, naturalness and 
 reality, familiar to all readers of the gospels. 
 Clear waters flow from a pure spring. 
 
 The two foci of Jesus' inner experience were 
 his Father and his mission of salvation for men 
 (Luke 2: 49), but of these his Father was first. 
 The deepest secret of Jesus is his relation to his 
 Father. He could not remember the beginning 
 of that divine fellowship, close, delightful, un- 
 broken, reverent. He lived in the sunshine of 
 his Father's smile. He was conscious of such a 
 real unity of love, thought and purpose with 
 God, that he could call him nothing less than 
 Father, and himself nothing else than Son. His 
 greatest happiness was in communion with the 
 166 
 
THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 1 67 
 
 Father. Prayer was his vital breath, the basic 
 activity of his soul. His life was consequently a 
 life of childlike trust in his Father's love and wis- 
 dom. Even when his skies darkened, and apparent 
 failure and death loomed large upon his horizon, 
 he still trusted. He knew that the Father's will 
 was best, and left all the future in the Father's 
 hands. Even in that last strange cry upon the 
 cross, God is still "my God." Jesus cannot, will 
 not and does not lose his hold on God. 
 
 In one of the few passages in which Jesus refers 
 to his own inner experience, he tells us that his 
 life had a joy deeper than all perplexity and 
 sorrow, and a peace which the world could neither 
 give nor take away. And this joy and peace 
 sprang from his sense of his Father's love. That 
 love was his life. He consciously lived and moved 
 and had his being in God. Never the shadow of 
 a doubt flitted across his mind. God was the 
 bottom of his certainty, the beginning, middle 
 and end of all things to him. He was incapable 
 of a single thought or act, he heard or saw noth- 
 ing which he did not instinctively relate to God. 
 "He was as full of religion as a rose is of fragrance 
 or a nightingale of song." What wonder then 
 
1 68 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 that when he began his work, he knew nothing 
 except heart-religion and proved the relentless 
 foe of externalism and imposed authority, and 
 that he founded his whole conception of salvation 
 on the possibility of such a unique relation be- 
 tween God and man as had never been broached 
 before. 
 
 Out of this blessed fellowship with the Father 
 and his sense of the spiritual need of men, came 
 Jesus' idea of his mission. He wanted all men to 
 share the Father's love with him, and knew that 
 all their sorrow, sin and fear would vanish as 
 soon as they came into possession of what he had 
 always enjoyed. And he felt that he must and 
 could bring them into that blessed state. His 
 deep love and regard for men permitted nothing 
 less. This was his mission in the world. This 
 was the work which God had given him to do, a 
 work of salvation which included in it all lesser 
 good. So he called himself Messiah, and Messiah- 
 ship meant to him just this and nothing else. 
 In Jesus' mind Messiah meant Savior, the One 
 whom God had anointed to bring salvation to 
 men. 
 
 Certainty. Jesus was sure of God and of his 
 
THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 169 
 
 mission, and his certainty was and is one of the 
 elements of his power. He knew God as well as 
 he knew his mother. In fact, he says that no 
 one ever knew God so well as he (Matthew n: 
 27). His mission came with a "must." It was 
 an inner necessity. He could not and would not 
 hold back. Like all great men, and yet more 
 surely than any other great man, he was positive 
 that he had been sent into the world to do a 
 definite thing and the nature of that definite 
 thing was perfectly clear to his mind. His as- 
 surance of life beyond death and of the consum- 
 mation of his work in his final Coming showed 
 that his certainty stood tests such as no other 
 man's faith in his mission has ever surmounted. 
 Courage. So he undertook his God-given work 
 without hesitation or misgiving, in the naked 
 strength of a mighty and noble purpose in which 
 he rejoiced with joy unspeakable and full of 
 glory. He was filled with a high enthusiasm, 
 which was tempered indeed by the events of the 
 ministry, but ran more strongly when it ran 
 deep. He was never discouraged, fretted or 
 soured by opposition and seeming failure. He 
 was aggressive from the very start and pressed 
 
I70 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 the work. No more tireless preacher ever lived. 
 When enemies arose, he was not content merely 
 to defend, but stormed their works and carried 
 the war into Africa. There was about him a 
 holy boldness which utterly disconcerted his 
 foes, and eventually made timid fishermen into 
 Sons of Thunder (Acts 4: 13). So sure of himself 
 was he, that he sometimes seemed to risk all on 
 a single hazard, and almost recklessly to defy 
 his opponents to put him to the test (Mark 2: 
 9-12). He was the bravest of the brave. Almost 
 single handed, he faced a nation, an age, a world, 
 which was bound to misunderstand, oppose and 
 hate him, and yet always with the same lofty 
 courage. No forlorn hope was ever led more 
 resolutely than the last march of Jesus' little 
 band from Galilee to Jerusalem. The serene 
 calm of Jesus before the Sanhedrin and Pilate, 
 and on the way to the cross, will never cease to 
 compel the world's admiration. 
 
 Jesus' simple confidence in his final triumph was 
 superb. In spite of all outward defeats, he had 
 in his soul a continuous victory of faith. Ob- 
 stacles like the cross, unforeseen at the beginning, 
 could not dim that supreme assurance, for it was 
 
THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 171 
 
 based on his Father's love for him and for men, 
 and in an optimism with regard to our race, 
 which had never before been cherished in a human 
 heart. So, strange to say, he was not in the least 
 nervous or anxious about the outcome. He 
 never swerved a hair from the straight path of 
 his purpose to gain a single convert, or to keep 
 a multitude from deserting him. He was so 
 certain of triumph that he could wait for it and 
 bide the time when he could have it on his own 
 terms. This is the finest patience, and patience 
 is courage long drawn out, the last test of the 
 bravest hearts. 
 
 Joy. Jesus was not only sure, enthusiastic, 
 hopeful and brave, but he was positively joyous. 
 It was the joy of certainty, love and strength; 
 a Son's joy deeply based in his Father's affection, 
 a Savior's joy in the rescue of the lost, a strong 
 man's joy in a great and worthy task, in battling 
 with the storm. So he partook with zest of life's 
 pure pleasures; he enjoyed nature, children, 
 friends, the busy world in all its phases. His 
 spirit was fresh and exultant. The early days 
 of the ministry seemed to him like a wedding 
 party with himself as the bridegroom. Whatever 
 
172 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 others might think of fasting, it was alien to his 
 mood. Life to him was a continual feast and he 
 so represented it. He wanted this happy spirit 
 to be contagious (John 15: 11). He pleaded with 
 men to enter into the joy (Luke 15: 28-32). 
 "On the two occasions 1 when Jesus took special 
 pains to justify his conduct to his enemies, he 
 was really explaining why he and his disciples 
 were so joyful." To be sure, as the ministry 
 went on to its tragic issue, the tone of Jesus grew 
 more solemn. He was indeed "a man of sorrows, 
 and acquainted with grief," but there is no con- 
 tradiction here. Joy and sorrow are not enemies 
 but twin brothers. Indeed in the midst of trou- 
 ble and sadness, Jesus' joy only grew in depth 
 and ripened into triumph as he became assured 
 that he would gain more by his death than he 
 ever had by his life. He came to rejoice in his 
 great sacrifice as his supreme victory. On the 
 last night, he could say, "I have overcome the 
 world," and could leave as a legacy to his dis- 
 ciples not only his peace, but his joy. 
 
 Love. The call to the work of saving men to 
 God and to goodness found a ready response in 
 1 Mark 2:18-20; Luke 15: 1-32. 
 
THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 1 73 
 
 Jesus' tender heart. Love made him Savior. Com- 
 passion for men in darkness, perplexity, sorrow and 
 sin constrained him to show them how to enter into 
 light and certainty, joy and holiness. Thus love to 
 men goes back to the beginning of his experience 
 so rich in love to God, and proves itself one of the 
 major constituent elements in his character. 
 
 His love was perfectly natural and simple. 
 He loved men as men. He never asked why he 
 should love men. He just loved them. They 
 seemed to him to need love and he gave it with- 
 out stint. Man seemed to him most lovable, 
 more valuable than all else beside, a single soul 
 worth more than a whole world. Before the 
 shrine of every human heart he stood with rever- 
 ence. He would not force open the door, nor 
 do violence to the will, nor intrude upon the 
 secrets of the unwilling soul. His respect for 
 personality was perfect. That men were stupid, 
 foolish, sinful and foul only made him the more 
 eager. He was the physician for sick souls. He 
 had no doubts that men could rise from weakness 
 and sin into spiritual health and wholeness. He 
 was strangely optimistic about the least hopeful 
 cases. It was the faith of love. 
 
174 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 Just because he held men so high, he sought 
 their good the more earnestly and persistently. 
 And it was no sentimental love that he showed 
 and taught, but a love of deed, a true kindliness, 
 thoughtfulness, a loving service which shrank 
 from no sacrifice, a real doing of good. Nor did 
 his love know any limits of class or sex or nation 
 or creed. He had no race or social prejudices. 
 He loved men for themselves, rich and poor, 
 men, women and children, Pharisees, Gentiles 
 and publicans, lepers and Sanhedrists, Samari- 
 tans, scribes and sinners, respectable and outcast, 
 good and bad, friends and enemies. He loved 
 them all and there was nothing which he would 
 not do for their true good. And he who led this 
 life of practical love also preached love as the 
 sum of the whole Old Testament and of his new 
 religion too, and along with love, as variation 
 or by-product of it, he preached and exemplified 
 gentleness, patience, mercy, charity, forgiveness, 
 generosity and peace, giving these passive vir- 
 tues for the first time a standing as indispensable 
 to character. So he lived and preached and died 
 to bring the reign of love into this old world of 
 selfishness and greed and hate. 
 
THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 1 75 
 
 That this was no assumed and, as it were, pro- 
 fessional love is proved by his entire character 
 and career. Rather it was instinctive. He had 
 a sensitive nature. He was no cold, detached, 
 impassive philosopher or ascetic, a mere onlooker, 
 while men strove and struggled. Rather he 
 plunged into the struggle himself. His emotions 
 were strong and warm. His heart was tender. 
 He loved his friends. Bold and firm as he was, 
 he suffered under opposition and hatred, though 
 he did not allow them to narrow or spoil his life. 
 He knew trouble and sorrow, and his sensitive 
 spirit sometimes cried out in its pain. 
 
 He had a strong social nature. He loved the 
 crowded streets, the feast, the wedding, the 
 eager multitude and all the ways of men. To 
 be sure, he often preferred to be alone on the 
 distant mountain to spend the night with his 
 Father in prayer, but, next day, refreshed, he was 
 engaged again among the busy throng. Sym- 
 pathetic by nature, he felt the need of company 
 and the strength supplied by the presence of 
 loving friends. No one more deeply appreciated 
 the affection lavished upon him, but, on the other 
 hand, he was free from the weakness of self-pity, 
 
176 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 he knew how to stand alone. He loved nature 
 and children too, as few in his day did, and as 
 he has taught the world to do. This inborn love 
 gave this Galilean peasant an exquisite refine- 
 ment and courtesy. He was the first and fore- 
 most Christian gentleman of all time, and though 
 he loved all, he was filled with the rarest chivalry 
 for those who had no helper, for women, for the 
 poor, the outcast and the fallen. The friendless, 
 at last, had a great and tender friend. 
 
 This Jesus was incarnate love. He was abso- 
 lutely unselfish. He had no ambitions to satisfy, 
 he never gave a thought to riches, he sought no 
 pleasures outside the one great work to which 
 he had devoted himself with entire single-hearted- 
 ness, the highest good, the salvation of men. 
 He wanted nothing for himself. All he desired 
 was to give, to help, to sympathize, to heal, for- 
 getting all his own comfort, consuming himself 
 in labor for others, and finally dying that they 
 might live. He felt that he had so much of spiri- 
 tual blessing that he could be lavish in its be- 
 stowal. He was the first great lover of men, and 
 none of his followers has yet equalled him 
 here. 
 
THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 177 
 
 And just at this point is solved the most serious 
 seeming contradiction in his character. Jesus 
 was great, and he was conscious of his power, as 
 all truly great men are. He was Messiah, Lord 
 and King, and this he asserted in no uncertain 
 words. Yet he did not grasp at authority (Phil. 
 2: 6-8), rather he praised humility, and said 
 that he was meek and lowly in heart. How can 
 these two things coexist in one spirit? His love 
 solves it all. He did not look on his Messiahship 
 as a self -won dignity of which to be proud, but 
 as a divinely given commission to be performed, 
 a service of love to be rendered. To him, as we 
 have said, Messiah meant Savior. There was 
 no work so important or so lowly that he did 
 not rejoice to do it. He washed the disciples' 
 feet the night before he died upon the cross, and 
 for him there was no distinction in kind between 
 the two acts. So his greatness was in his power 
 to serve. He ranks first in self-sacrifice. He 
 was Lord because he was conscious of absolutely 
 unequalled resources for effective results in his 
 labor for men. And when he bids men call him 
 Lord, he only asks them to reverence in him 
 the supreme claims of self-denying service. He 
 
178 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 is king, because above all others he is mighty in 
 the power of his love. 
 
 Wisdom. Even Christian men think too little 
 today of the sagacity and breadth of Jesus. In 
 him we find the profoundest wisdom and orig- 
 inality just where, on natural principles, we 
 should not expect it. It was an unschooled 
 wisdom, the wisdom of the practical man, the 
 wisdom of the spiritual man, not the wisdom of 
 the student, and yet a wisdom greater than any 
 scholar or philosopher has ever exhibited. It 
 did not come from books, or from travel, or from 
 wide experience of men and affairs. It seems to 
 have been inborn. Everything in his age and 
 country was against the appearance of such a 
 wisdom. For here breadth seems to spring from 
 Jewish narrowness, insight from legalistic ex- 
 ternalism, and practicality from a system which 
 had left common sense behind. Surely the people 
 who sat in darkness saw a great light (Matthew 
 4: 16). 
 
 There is a reasonableness, sanity and self- 
 mastery in Jesus which put him immediately in 
 the class of great men, and before which all 
 charges of being a visionary fall harmless. He 
 
THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 1 79 
 
 took large views. He refused to be caught in the 
 eddies of the current of his times. He always 
 sailed in midstream. He was calmly superior to 
 the one-sidedness, the prejudices and the extremes 
 of his contemporaries. He has commended him- 
 self to the better sense of all ages and races. The 
 universal and eternal were strong in him. And 
 this is the more noteworthy, when we remember 
 his emphasis on the inner man, the spirit, and 
 the life of prayer and faith. The temptation of 
 such natures is always to extravagance and fana- 
 ticism, though it has often happened, as in the 
 case of Jesus, that the most unworldly spirits 
 have seen the nature and trend of real life most 
 clearly. Jesus was indeed an idealist but he was 
 under no illusions. He was led of the Spirit, but 
 he never deserted the sphere of the practical. 
 He was foremost in the ranks of progress, but he 
 was no iconoclast. He made ideal demands, but, 
 rightly interpreted, he never forgot that his fol- 
 lowers were human after all. Indeed, there often 
 appears in his teaching a homely common sense, 
 which might almost be mistaken for worldly 
 wisdom. This remarkable balance both in word 
 and in action seems not to have been the result 
 
l8o THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 of study or calculation, but to have been spon- 
 taneous and natural to him. He had that high- 
 est genius which enables a man to take in the 
 whole situation at a glance, to see around things 
 and behind them. 
 
 The man of balance is often cold, judicial and 
 incapable of decisive action, but Jesus combined 
 balance with enthusiasm, wisdom with aggres- 
 siveness, sanity with magnificent leadership. He 
 made statements whose reasonableness none could 
 deny, which yet set standards which none have 
 ever reached. His breadth never dulled the 
 sharpness of his cutting edge, nor did his large- 
 ness of mind ever paralyze his ability to give 
 the smashing blow. As the result of a judicial 
 outlook on the situation, he could wait, but 
 none ever acted with greater decisiveness than 
 he, when the time for action came. 
 
 In an age when precedent was everything, he 
 had the wisdom and the firmness to be absolutely 
 independent, allying himself or seeking alliance 
 with no party, never compromising his truth for 
 the sake of a following, never content with a 
 partial success, never for a moment diverted from 
 his great aim. Sometimes he is called a revolu- 
 
THE CHARACTER OF JESUS l8l 
 
 tionary and this is as warmly denied. The debate 
 is due to his instinctive equipoise. He saw the 
 good in the old and loved it, he built the new 
 upon it. He did not put the new and the old 
 as such into opposition. Rather he would have 
 had the old become new. He recognized that 
 there must be large changes; against some ex- 
 crescences, like legalism, he waged open war; but 
 he strove to carry the Old Testament religion in 
 its essence on to its consummation, to deepen it, 
 to individualize, spiritualize and give it warmth, 
 to make it positive and universal. He never 
 admitted that his spirit was alien to the spirit 
 of the Old Testament, and died because he still 
 claimed to be the Messiah of the Jews. "He 
 was the boldest of reformers and the finest type 
 of conservative" at the same time. 
 
 In an age when men thought of nothing but 
 precepts and external duties and refined upon 
 them beyond endurance, Jesus steadfastly dealt 
 with the inner man, and with great principles of 
 life and conduct. He might have started a hun- 
 dred useful individual reforms in Palestine, but 
 he refused to be turned aside from his great work 
 of recreating men, and thus making a new world. 
 
l82 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 This fundamental business was his one great 
 reform. He would not be entangled in the details 
 of politics, nor would he define narrowly the ap- 
 plications of his principles to the minor affairs 
 of life. He left his teaching flexible, living, ever 
 adaptable to new conditions, not tied to his age, 
 which would soon pass away. He did this not 
 so much with an eye to the future, however, as 
 because he prized so highly men's spiritual in- 
 dependence, the value of the moral and spiritual 
 self-education involved in applying these inner 
 principles to the details and exigencies of daily 
 living. This one thing evinces a penetration, 
 sagacity and largeness of mind which make 
 Jesus the supreme guide in the realm of religion 
 and morals. The result of it has been that the 
 men of every age have come to Jesus with their 
 deepest problems, and have received an answer 
 so profound and apt that it has seemed as if he 
 spoke to them alone. 
 
 Possibly the finest illustration of Jesus' intellec- 
 tual and moral poise is seen in his exquisite sense 
 of proportion in the realm of truth, his genius 
 for putting first things first, for bringing order 
 out of moral confusion and thus substituting 
 
THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 183 
 
 light for darkness. His placing of religion and 
 morals on a par and yet religion first, his balance 
 between the individual and society, his equilib- 
 rium of the active and passive virtues, his com- 
 bination of self-renunciation and a practical life 
 in the world, are not only evidences of the high- 
 est wisdom, but are the richest blessings which the 
 world has ever received from a teacher's lips. 
 
 Jesus' wisdom may be viewed too as insight. 
 He seemed to see with perfect clearness into every 
 situation, but especially into the soul of man. 
 He is a greater "knower of the human heart" 
 than ever Shakespeare was. With unerring glance 
 he analyzes the hidden springs of motive and 
 reports his analysis in such simple terms that 
 men in all ages recognize in it a moral photograph 
 of themselves. As John says, he knew what was 
 in man. Indeed, he was the first discoverer of 
 the infinite value and dignity of the human soul, 
 of the common man, of the individual. So he 
 began, as no other reformer before him had ever 
 begun, with the common man. He was a com- 
 mon man himself. He knew, sympathized with 
 and prized the common man. He made common 
 men the leaders of his new movement. He loved 
 
184 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 the crowds. His one great method was to come 
 into touch with just as many people as he pos- 
 sibly could, and pour himself into them. He 
 had the utmost faith in what men might become 
 in fellowship with his Father and theirs. He 
 therefore dared to try to attract them with a 
 spiritual kingdom and to use spiritual means in 
 so doing. He trusted everything at last to an 
 appeal to reality and the deepest realities. This 
 was an original and amazing venture, which 
 could only prove its wisdom by its success. But 
 it did succeed; it has succeeded. The world in 
 our own lifetime, however, is only just waking 
 up to its full significance, and now only beginning 
 to give Jesus' experiment its full leeway. We 
 agree now that men are infinitely valuable, that 
 successful movements must grow from the people 
 up, that spiritual means are the only really effect- 
 ive ones, and that, if the world is to be saved at 
 all, it must be saved in Jesus' way. 
 
 It is simply of a piece with the foregoing, that 
 Jesus had a wonderful way of seeing the central 
 point in every problem, of cutting the Gordian 
 knot of every perplexity, of answering questions 
 in a way which left the old debate behind and 
 
THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 1 85 
 
 brought men out into the heavenly light of a 
 higher world, and of threading his way through 
 the mazes and complexities of his historical situa- 
 tion with a sureness which confounded his con- 
 temporaries. 1 
 
 Jesus' wisdom was wholly practical; nothing 
 abstract, speculative, dialectic here. Simplicity 
 and directness were his method. He built no 
 lofty pyramid of logic, nor did he even think of 
 attempting a system. Such things were entirely 
 foreign to his mind. Rather he spoke out of 
 his experience of blessing straight to the hearts 
 of men, and this, though unmeditated, was the 
 highest art. Of all the world's greatest teachers, 
 Jesus alone spoke so that the common people 
 not only understood him, but were delighted 
 with him. Not even Paul can claim an equality 
 with him here. He told men what he knew and 
 it had a wonderful self-evidencing quality. It 
 gave an impression of reality, which, twenty 
 centuries afterwards, clings to his words and 
 gives them perennial freshness and power. He 
 
 x No illustration of this is more comprehensive than the ac- 
 count of the Temptation. His moral insight in detecting what 
 was wrong in each subtle proposition was incomparably delicate 
 and keen. 
 
l86 TEE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 filled the world with a new and immediate sense 
 of God, which it has never since lost. "He 
 brought, as it were, the perfume of another and 
 higher sphere in his garments, and it floated out 
 upon the universal air." In the simplest, most 
 direct way, he just told men how to live, and the 
 loveliest and noblest characters of history have 
 been those who have come the nearest to being 
 and doing just what he said. He was a new 
 type of man, and created a new type of humanity. 
 His astuteness consisted largely in doing the 
 simplest thing, the thing which lay so near his 
 hand, that most men would have overlooked it. 
 He had new truth. Most other men in his posi- 
 tion would have labored to create new terms to 
 express it, and so would have had a futile, clumsy 
 and unmeaning apparatus with no connection 
 with the past and no appeal to the present. But 
 such a method probably never occurred to Jesus. 
 He found religious concepts already in use like 
 Kingdom of God, Messiah, Father (for God) and 
 salvation. He seized upon these, purified and ele- 
 vated them, freed them from their errors and 
 limitations, and made them speak a new and 
 higher message to men. This was the only sen- 
 
THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 187 
 
 sible thing to do; it reveals the instinct of the 
 practical man. The history of this process, 
 traced in former chapters, shows in Jesus a 
 genius, a breadth, a patience, and an ability in 
 instilling new conceptions, which command the 
 profoundest admiration. 
 
 Though Jesus had some tearing down to do, 
 he did not delight in it, as do so many men with 
 new ideas. Rather, his teaching and work were 
 decidedly positive and constructive. He was one 
 of the great builders. He laid foundations so 
 broad and deep that his church has never needed 
 to be anxious about their solidity and sufficiency. 
 To be sure, he weakened the walls of Judaism, 
 but, when the Jewish state fell in ruins, his own 
 edifice already shone forth in beauty and strength. 
 But possibly the finest illustration of his practical 
 wisdom was his refusal to appeal to authority, 
 to tradition, or even to lay final stress on the 
 Old Testament scripture. He preferred to ad- 
 dress himself directly to the conscience, the reason 
 and the will. He evoked all the nobler emotions 
 and rallied them on his side. Men felt that here 
 was a new method, the appeal to truth, to com- 
 mon sense, to reality. It was Jesus' way. It is 
 
1 88 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 sincere. It is effective. It is ultimate. If it 
 does not finally succeed, nothing can. 
 
 In conclusion we may say, that whether we 
 regard the character, the substance or the method 
 of his wisdom, the world is still sitting at the 
 Great Teacher's feet. 
 
 Power. Rising from a fresh and intimate 
 study of the gospels, we must say that, after all, 
 the dominant impression left by the portrait of 
 Jesus is that of power, of the greatness and force 
 of his personality. And this same feeling is ex- 
 pressed by Tennyson's famous line, "Strong Son 
 of God, Immortal Love," and by Mark's first 
 comment on Jesus, "He taught as one who had 
 authority." Power is the constant impression 
 made by him on the men of his time; on John the 
 Baptist, on his disciples, on the multitudes, on his 
 foes, on the Sanhedrin, on Pilate. Whatever his at- 
 titude towards Jesus might be, there was no one 
 who was not deeply conscious of the vigor of his 
 character. To the Galilean centurion, "he seemed 
 like a commander who was born to be obeyed." 
 The Gadarene felt that he was in the presence 
 of one who could order out a legion of demons. 
 He stirred the whole nation to the bottom, and 
 
THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 1 89 
 
 the chief priests themselves confessed that he 
 was like to turn them out. 
 
 And Jesus was fully conscious of his power 
 from the very beginning of his ministry. He 
 knew that he had in himself resources more than 
 sufficient for his great task. All the solicita- 
 tions in the Temptation presuppose his power; 
 the last one even implies his ability to conquer the 
 entire world. Jesus does not deny that he can 
 do these things, but he sees that they would 
 involve misuse of power, and so refuses to engage 
 in them. The personal moral problem for Jesus 
 was largely one of self-restraint, of too much 
 energy rather than too little. Note the names 
 of strength and aggressiveness he gives his dis- 
 ciples; he calls Simon, the Rock, and James and 
 John, Sons of Thunder. He made men strong. 
 He had power to give away. 
 
 Jesus seems to have had perfect physical 
 health. He was capable of long continued, stren- 
 uous labor, a kind of work, too, which called for 
 large expenditures of emotion and sympathy and 
 sapped the nervous force. Yet he was never ill 
 and rarely tired. All he ever needed was a night's 
 rest. With unimpaired energy he pressed the 
 
190 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 battle to the very end. His body was of that 
 noblest type, which unites all the more delicate 
 and finer nervous mechanism with glorious phys- 
 ical strength. So he was a perfectly normal 
 man, a man almost disconcertingly natural. He 
 had the sanguine, fiery temperament, was en- 
 thusiastic, brave and hopeful. In his inmost soul 
 welled a deep spring of joy. He had a sense of 
 humor. He loved children and liked to watch 
 their games. He was capable of a sternness of 
 indignation against hypocrisy and wrong, which 
 sometimes flared forth to the discomfiture of his 
 foes. Yet all was under the control of the strong 
 man. Irritability is the vice of saints and heroes, 
 but Jesus seems to have been calmly superior to 
 the little vexations which so frequently call forth 
 an exhibition of the weaknesses of high-strung 
 spiritual men. He seems to have had not the 
 slightest trace of our modern neurasthenia. It 
 is this self-mastery which peculiarly impressed 
 his disciples. Matthew speaks of his quietness 
 of demeanor and his gracious patience (Matthew 
 12: 19, 20); Paul of the mildness and gentleness 
 of Christ, his "sweet reasonableness," as Matthew 
 Arnold would say (2 Cor. 10: 1); Peter of his 
 
THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 19I 
 
 composure and faith in the midst of suffering 
 and his silence under insult (i Pet. 2: 23). Jesus 
 had a great, energetic, warm, aggressive nature, 
 but he never let it carry him beyond the bounds 
 set by love and self-respect. 
 
 He overflowed with vitality. He was a spring- 
 ing fountain of life and power. The sick were 
 healed by his touch or even by his word of com- 
 mand. The sinful and discouraged went from 
 his presence with a new purity and hope. In 
 him, says John, was life. He came that men 
 might have life and have it more abundantly. He 
 was so rich in spiritual goods that he gave with- 
 out thought, as it were, extravagantly. As in 
 the case of all strong men, the multitudes gath- 
 ered about him, hung on him, listened spellbound 
 to his words, sought to share his wonderful 
 energy. 
 
 Jesus strikes us as a man of unlimited and 
 mighty resources. He never seemed at a loss. 
 He always knew what he would do (John 6: 6). 
 He dominated every scene. The shrewdest lead- 
 ers of his nation found their most adroit schemes 
 to entrap him as ineffectual as the green withes 
 with which his foes tried to bind Samson. He 
 
I92 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 had a wisdom of simplicity and expedients of 
 love in his heart, of which worldly men had 
 never dreamed. Angry foes, with murder in their 
 eyes, might surround him, but there was such 
 authority in his very mien that they instinctively 
 made a way for him through their ranks, and 
 dared not lay a hand upon him. 1 The vicissi- 
 tudes of his career were many and keenly felt, 
 but he mastered every situation and solved every 
 problem from the viewpoint of a higher sphere 
 than this. Even when a defenceless prisoner 
 before the Sanhedrin and Pilate, he is still the 
 central figure, calm and undismayed. We feel 
 that, after all, the silent sufferer is supreme. 
 Though they seem to be judging him, he in 
 reality is judging them and they seem to mistrust 
 it. In condemning him, they are themselves 
 condemned, and all the ages affirm the sentence. 
 It is not strange that this man of power should 
 add to his certainty, firmness and consistent 
 bravery a striking personal dignity, a sort of 
 kingly bearing. There was no pride in it. He 
 never acted a part. There was not the slightest 
 
 1 Compare the similar escapes of the missionary Paton from 
 the cannibals of the New Hebrides. 
 
THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 1 93 
 
 suspicion of pretension to a position which did 
 not really belong to him. There was no service 
 too lowly for him to render. He had none of 
 the airs of the great, or any aloofness or aus- 
 terity, yet his self-respect was perfect. It was the 
 wholly natural dignity of true greatness, of simple 
 integrity, of the seriousness of the highest purpose. 
 It probably never occurred even to any of his 
 enemies to trifle with him, till the rude underlings 
 smote and mocked him at his trial. We instinc- 
 tively feel that none of his disciples ever dared 
 to take liberties with him. The only approach 
 to it occurred when rash Peter attempted to dis- 
 suade him from going to the cross, and we all 
 know how that resulted. 
 
 In other words, he was Lord. This, of course, 
 was involved in his Messiahship and, especially, 
 in his work as Founder of the Kingdom of God. 
 And he was Lord from the first. John the Bap- 
 tist intuitively felt his superiority and yielded 
 to his preference at the baptism. The bartering 
 crowd in the Temple owned his authority and 
 fled at his gesture. The sons of Zebedee left 
 their nets to follow him. He was always Master. 
 No disciple ever questioned it for a moment, and 
 
194 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 Jesus never waived his prerogative. He naturally 
 and easily took and held the position. He never 
 consulted with any of his disciples about his plans 
 or methods. He never asked anybody's advice. 
 He initiated all new movements on his own re- 
 sponsibility. He simply led the way and the 
 disciples followed in his steps. He commanded 
 and they obeyed. He called himself Lord and 
 King and they accepted him as such. 1 
 
 So he was the Leader, the absolute leader, and 
 yet so unselfish, so fair, so sympathetic, so pa- 
 tient, so inspiring that no leader has ever since 
 equalled him. He bound men to him with the 
 bonds of love. In spite of disappointment, mis- 
 understanding, fiercest opposition, most dreadful 
 danger, he roused in them a reverence, an adora- 
 tion, a deathless affection, a devotion to his per- 
 son, which did not stop at the sacrifice of life it- 
 self. Even today, twenty centuries after his death, 
 there is no single individual, though he be the 
 
 1 This independence of Jesus had its root not in pride, but in 
 his certainty of God and his absolute trust in him. He did not 
 consult men but his Father, and when he rose from prayer, every- 
 thing had been decided. The finest independence of feeling and 
 action is the fruit of a life of prayerful humility. Cf. Robertson, 
 Sermons, First Series, pp. 270L 
 
THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 1 95 
 
 ruler of an empire, who could summon so great a 
 host of ardent followers, ready for any sacrifice, 
 as could Jesus. He was the greatest of leaders 
 for he was the supreme inspirer of men. He 
 was the supreme inspirer of men, because he, the 
 greatest of them all, unreservedly gave himself 
 for them, even to the death of the cross. This 
 made him the unrivalled Captain of the hosts of 
 righteousness, yesterday, today and forever. 
 
 The force of this Personality, as we have 
 shown, has crossed all the oceans and streams 
 down through all the centuries. How mighty must 
 have been the power resident in him, who could 
 create the initial impulse and supply the con- 
 tinuous energy for such a movement in our 
 race! 
 
 Antitheses. Nothing is more impressive than 
 the opposites in Jesus, except the nice equipoise 
 which they always maintain. It is an iridescent 
 character; you get a new and changing view from 
 every different angle, and yet all is ever beautiful 
 and harmonious. Most of these usually anti- 
 thetic qualities have already been discussed, but 
 we make bold to catalogue the most prominent 
 of them at some risk of repetition, lest any reader 
 
196 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 should fail to appreciate this noteworthy feature 
 of the personality of Jesus. 
 
 He was a thorough Jew, had never known 
 aught but Jewish influences, yet he was a Greek 
 in his love of nature and his joy in h'fe and an 
 American in the strenuosity of his work and the 
 practical cast of his mind. He was a child of his 
 age, and yet has become the leader of every age. 
 
 He was a wonderful combination of the active 
 and the passive virtues, the man of love who 
 could not and would not avoid conflict, the 
 Prince of Peace, who died bitterly hated by his 
 many foes. In fact, he seemed to unite in himself 
 the noblest traits of manhood and womanhood. 
 He was strong without a trace of violence, and 
 gentle without a trace of weakness. Love alone 
 can explain this. 
 
 In him we find an extraordinary union of the 
 contemplative and the active. He loved the 
 crowd and the thronged street, yet he often stole 
 away to the mountain to be alone with himself 
 and God. He courted popularity, thrust himself 
 on the attention of men, compelled them to hear 
 his message, but, unlike Paul, was strangely reti- 
 cent about his inner experience and men felt that 
 
THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 1 97 
 
 he died with secrets undisclosed. He was con- 
 scious of a fullness of life and a wealth of power, 
 and yet his prayerfulness shows a sense of need 
 which only God could supply. There was a 
 secret life behind the scenes which is necessary 
 to explain the Jesus whom the world knows. 
 
 He was refined and dignified, yet never cold 
 and haughty. He was enthusiastic and sym- 
 pathetic, yet always wise. He was deeply spiri- 
 tual, but he was no fanatic, deadly in earnest in 
 his hatred of sin, but no ascetic. 
 
 He made plans, looked out into the future, 
 but within the outlines of his plans, he was a 
 thorough-going opportunist. He showed the most 
 remarkable breadth of conception, and yet be- 
 stowed the utmost attention on details. He talked 
 with each casual inquirer as though that were his 
 one business in life. Never was there a busier 
 man, and yet he always had time. 
 
 No man ever gave himself more unreservedly 
 to his career, and yet he showed a wonderful 
 freedom from anxiety about the outcome. He 
 understood how to wait, but he never hesitated. 
 He knew his hour with unerring certainty and, 
 when it came, he acted with amazing decisiveness. 
 
198 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 He was a teacher, a preacher, a poet, but at 
 the same time the most practical of empire 
 builders. 
 
 He joined the authority of Lordship with the 
 most genuine humility, the intrepid self-reliance 
 of God's Anointed with implicit obedience to his 
 Father. 
 
 His heart responded to all life's innocent 
 pleasures, his joy was real and deep, yet he was 
 the man of sorrows, the familiar friend of grief. 
 He knew no antithesis between self-realization 
 and self-denial. He found himself in self-giving. 
 He grew stronger in spirit the more fully he de- 
 voted himself to others' good. 
 
 He was a natural conservative, yet a true pro- 
 gressive, and in many matters such a radical 
 that the world has not yet caught up with him. 
 He was an individualist of the most pronounced 
 type, and yet he preached a social conception, 
 the kingdom of God, as his highest ideal. 
 
 He put an almost equal emphasis on ethics 
 and religion. He introduced a new and freer 
 religion with a deeper and sterner morality. He 
 preached both righteousness and love with the 
 same insistence. His love for sinners was genuine 
 
THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 1 99 
 
 and amazing, yet he had no illusions about them 
 and never hinted the slightest excuse for their 
 sin. 
 
 Though he was unschooled, the world has gone 
 to school to him, and that in the very highest 
 studies. Though a common man, he has im- 
 pressed the world as inexpressibly and uniquely 
 great. "He seems to include and bring to perfec- 
 tion in himself every conceivable type of goodness." 
 "The white light in him gathers up all the split 
 and partial colors of our little spectrums." "All 
 these opposites are only beams from the diamond 
 of his soul," and the center of the diamond was 
 the divine spirit that dwelt in him. 
 
 These varied and almost contrary qualities 
 exactly fit Jesus to be the moral and spiritual 
 leader of our race. They make him a sort of 
 universal man. Each sex, each time of life, every 
 age, every nation and every class finds in him 
 something strangely familiar and genial, some- 
 thing to admire and love. The most opposite 
 sects claim him with equal enthusiasm, and the 
 most antipathetic men and women join in a com- 
 mon devotion to his person. The new world-life 
 of our age, a united humanity with its new needs, 
 
200 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 can discover in no other the diversity and uni- 
 versality of character which it demands, and 
 can see in none but Jesus its Lord and Savior. 
 
 The most difficult ethical achievement is the 
 maintenance of the moral balance in a many- 
 sided personality, yet Jesus seems to have at- 
 tained success at this point with perfect ease. 
 With all these antithetic qualities, he never seems 
 to be a complicated character, but always, at 
 first view and indeed in the last analysis, im- 
 presses us with the simplicity, harmony and 
 unity of his inner life, with the artlessness of his 
 self-mastery, and the naturalness of his greatness. 1 
 
 Goodness. There is a so-called goodness that 
 men instinctively hate. All the satirists have 
 levelled their shafts at it. The more virile and 
 
 1 We quote Bushnell's famous paragraph on this topic. "Men 
 undertake to be spiritual and they become ascetic; or, endeavor- 
 ing to hold a liberal view of the comforts and pleasures of society, 
 they are soon buried in the world, and slaves to its fashions; or, 
 holding a scrupulous watch to keep out every particular sin, 
 they become legal and fall out of liberty; or, charmed with the 
 noble and heavenly liberty, they run to negligence and irrespon- 
 sible living; so the earnest become violent, the fervent fanatical 
 and censorious, the gentle waver, the firm turn bigots, the liberal 
 grow lax, the benevolent ostentatious. Poor human infirmity 
 can hold nothing steady. When the pivot of righteousness is 
 broken, the scales must needs slide off their balance." 
 
THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 201 
 
 practical men are, the more they despise it. But 
 ridicule grows dumb before the goodness of Jesus. 
 His peerless character somehow never excites 
 jealousy or dislike. Rather it is winsome and 
 attractive. The bigger the man is, the surer he 
 is to praise Jesus. We feel that to oppose Jesus 
 is to judge ourselves. To be sure, Jesus had 
 enemies, but they hated him because he antago- 
 nized their sins and interfered with their financial 
 and popular influence. They objected to him 
 not because he was too good, but because, think- 
 ing themselves the patterns of piety and the 
 bulwarks of the state, they considered him the 
 ally of irreligion and disorder. Some men today 
 will take the same attitude towards Jesus for the 
 same reason. He stands in their way. But, by 
 their action, they only reveal to their fellows 
 the smallness of their thoughts and the baseness 
 of their hearts. The world has about made up 
 its mind that Jesus is right. 
 
 Men like the perfect honesty of Jesus. He 
 was simple as a child. He was grounded in truth. 
 He was sound to the very core. He was abso- 
 lutely genuine. He had a passion for righteous- 
 ness and reality, a consuming hatred of artifi- 
 
202 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 ciality and hypocrisy, a sternness against evil which 
 is never obscured by his love for sinners. His 
 character gives the impression of a singular and 
 pellucid purity, no mixture of low with high 
 motives, some form of selfishness pulling one 
 way and love or duty pulling the other. In this 
 man there is not a single false note, no morbid- 
 ness, no vanity, no posing, no pretence, no false 
 humility, no religious extravagance, no fanaticism 
 or asceticism, no attempt to seem other than 
 he was. In matters of duty, he never dreamed 
 of compromise to avoid conflict. He thought it 
 better to die than to sin, and this principle of 
 his was put to a fiery test, when, in the question 
 of the tribute money, he refused to equivocate 
 with full knowledge of the consequences and threw 
 away his life. He could endure crucifixion, but 
 he could not shade the truth a single particle. 
 This perfect sincerity is the secret of the spon- 
 taneity and naturalness of his life, of the straight- 
 forwardness of his course, of his fairness and 
 candor in debate, of his constant appeal to reality, 
 and gives him the charm which his disciples felt, 
 when they said that he was full of grace and 
 truth. 
 
THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 203 
 
 His goodness was not only founded on the bed- 
 rock of honesty, but was utterly unselfish. His 
 one object in life was to bring men into the bless- 
 ing of loving obedience to the Father's will. 
 This purpose of love ruled supreme, unrivalled by 
 a thought of personal advantage or comfort or 
 the praise of men. He held to this high aim in 
 spite of all temptations to become involved in 
 other matters, in spite of all the vicissitudes and 
 disappointments of a very varied career, in spite 
 of the fact that he discovered by and by that it 
 led straight to the cross. His bold earnestness 
 in his great enterprise made him deaf to all the 
 allurements of self-seeking and gives him the love 
 of all those who admire the brave and the true. 
 
 The goodness of Jesus attracts men because we 
 feel that he dealt honestly with himself, that he 
 practised what he preached, that his high ideals 
 and stern demands made on others had their 
 first application to his own life, that he was more 
 exacting with himself than with any of his hearers. 
 With this was naturally joined a sort of fairness 
 in his treatment of sinners, a willingness to look 
 at the matter from their point of view, a kindly 
 appreciation of the first efforts to struggle up- 
 
204 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 ward, however clumsy and feeble, a helpful hand 
 stretched out gladly to aid every aspiration 
 toward goodness. Matthew tells us that it was 
 Jesus' custom to do his best for bruised reeds and 
 not to throw them away as useless, to conserve 
 the little heat left in the smoking wick till he 
 could fan it again into flame. Such was the 
 patience and tenderness of the Savior. There 
 was nothing exclusive or narrow, then, about 
 his goodness. Like the sunshine and the rain, 
 it was for all. His great heart took in the weak- 
 est and the strongest, without any distinction 
 whatever. Yet he never for a moment in false 
 mercy let down the high standards of right- 
 eousness which he came to establish for man- 
 kind. 
 
 All this was possible because Jesus himself 
 was involved in the moral struggle. He was 
 tempted like as we are. Though he never sinned, 
 his goodness grew deeper and richer year by year, 
 and came at last to its finest maturity. It was 
 therefore a real attainment, a real victory. If 
 it had not been so, his goodness would belong, 
 as it were, to another sphere external to us, he 
 would be like the cold marble, icily faultless, a 
 
THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 205 
 
 perfect character fitted to chill us into discourage- 
 ment and despair. But fighting our fight as he 
 did, struggling with our foes on the same field 
 where we find ourselves, and finally conquering 
 with the weapons which we must use, he is to 
 us the pioneer who leads us on, the victor who 
 cheers us in the daily struggle, the Light and 
 Hope of the World. He makes those who trust 
 and follow him believe that, although they start 
 at a lower level than he, they will win as he 
 did. 
 
 Greatness. It seems almost unnecessary to 
 give even a paragraph to the Greatness of Jesus. 
 All that has been written combines to give us 
 an overwhelming impression of it. Many great 
 men are great in some one quality or aptitude, 
 but the greatest men are great in more ways than 
 one. So it was with Jesus. Among men he 
 ranks as the greatest Character, the greatest 
 Teacher, the greatest Organizer of righteousness, 
 the greatest spiritual Inspirer and Leader of man- 
 kind. Among the noblest of his brethren he rises 
 like Mount Everest in the Himalayas, supreme, 
 unrivalled, alone. 
 
 Whether we consider the disadvantages of his 
 
2o6 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 birth and environment compared with the vast- 
 ness and permanence of his influence, the unique- 
 ness of his spiritual experience, his mastery and 
 originality in the sphere of religion and ethics, 
 his preeminence as the Leader of humanity in 
 purity and love, the fruitfulness of his thought 
 and the inspiration of his personality for the 
 uplifting and continuous progress of the indi- 
 vidual and the race, his founding and perpetual 
 revitalizing of the kingdom of God, or the per- 
 fection of his personal character, we must all 
 agree that in Jesus we see the moral and spiritual 
 Lord and Savior of mankind. 
 
 Loneliness. Jesus, however, paid the penalty 
 of his supreme greatness by a supreme loneliness. 
 Though he did his very best, he could not avoid 
 being misapprehended. His parents thought 
 him a strange child, and at the height of his 
 popularity his mother and relatives came to seize 
 him because they had concluded that he had 
 gone crazy. His own brothers looked on him as 
 an impractical dreamer. Neither the leaders 
 nor the common people ever really comprehended 
 his spiritual purposes, and this was only less true 
 of his disciples. "Those who understood him best 
 
THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 207 
 
 understood him only half." * And we now see 
 that it could not have been otherwise. In many 
 respects, Jesus was at least twenty centuries ahead 
 of his time. He belonged to that future age of 
 spiritual glory of which he so often spoke. As he 
 passed through the world in which he lived, he must 
 have felt himself, in the last analysis, a stranger. 
 Finally, he found himself deserted, first by the 
 people, who had once followed him with a super- 
 ficial enthusiasm, and then by his own disciples. 
 One of his dearest friends denied that he ever 
 knew him, and he was openly rejected and cruci- 
 fied by the leaders of the nation which he came 
 to save. Was there ever sorrow like this sorrow, 
 a cup of tragic grief more bitter than this? If 
 Jesus had been by instinct a recluse or one of 
 those stern, cold characters who prefer to walk 
 alone, this spiritual isolation could have been 
 more easily borne. But Jesus was the very 
 friendliest of men, he had a great, sensitive heart, 
 he lived in the sunshine of love. To such a man, 
 
 1 This view of the matter suggests that, instead of giving us an 
 exaggerated picture, the evangelists never did Jesus justice. In 
 his case it is probably literally true that the half was never told. 
 Why should we not understand Jesus better than the men of his 
 time? Our time is largely the resultant of his life and teaching. 
 
208 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 profound loneliness must have been the keenest 
 of trials. He walked among men, the crowds 
 pressed upon him, he journeyed surrounded by 
 his friends, and yet he was alone. He was cut 
 off from the sympathy for which his whole nature 
 cried out, and which was indeed necessary to 
 the immediate success of his great life purpose. 
 Here is the real pathos of this wonderful character, 
 the pathos of supreme greatness in a little world. 
 
 We have now come to the innermost shrine 
 of this personality, that sacred sphere of reserve 
 and mystery which Jesus could not reveal, and 
 even if we knock, we cannot enter. "No man 
 knows me but the Father," said Jesus (Mat- 
 thew ii : 27). "He has a name written which no 
 one knows but he himself" (Rev. 19: 12). In this 
 hidden life, Jesus was alone, but alone with God. 
 This is his Holy of Holies. Here is the treasure 
 house of his power, and the fountain, whence flow 
 the streams of divine salvation to all the world. 
 
 This unshared and solitary elevation of charac- 
 ter should not repel men, for, after all, it is be- 
 cause Jesus is above us that he can help us up. 
 It is because he is stronger than we, that we may 
 flee to him in every hour of need. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE FINALITY OF JESUS 
 
 That was a great day for the human race, 
 when the last touches were put upon the glorious 
 Parthenon, and architecture came to its perfec- 
 tion of beauty. That was a great day when 
 Raphael completed the Sistine Madonna and 
 painting reached its highest mark. Those were 
 great days when men invented the steam engine, 
 the telegraph, the electric light and the telephone. 
 
 But above all other days was the supreme day 
 when at last the Perfect Man appeared. 1 Cicero 
 in his Tusculan Disputations tells us that the 
 ancient thinkers often discussed what sort of 
 man the just man would be; but nobody dis- 
 cusses that now, for the ideal of humanity has 
 been revealed in Jesus. The wonderful dreams 
 of the world's philosophies and religions have 
 come true at last in the Man of Nazareth. All 
 
 1 For extended proof of the moral perfection of Jesus, see 
 pp. 43-46. 
 
 209 
 
2IO THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 their prophecies, longings and imaginings find 
 their fulfilment and more in him. 
 
 All attempts to draw a rival character are 
 hopeless failures. Nietzsche's Superman repels 
 all the finer feelings of mankind, and an attempt 
 at its realization would drown civilization in 
 blood. The glory of the Caesars and the Na- 
 poleons, the Rothschilds and the Vanderbilts 
 fades. Even great benefactors of the human race, 
 like Washington and Lincoln, Jenner and Pas- 
 teur, are judged and honored only by their like- 
 ness to Jesus. Even those who are not his fol- 
 lowers find in him the norm of conduct. John 
 Stuart Mill, who did not pretend to be a Chris- 
 tian, says, "Religion cannot be said to have 
 made a bad choice in pitching upon Jesus as 
 the ideal representative and guide of humanity; 
 nor even now would it be easy, even for an un- 
 believer, to find a better translation of the rule 
 of virtue from the abstract into the concrete 
 than the endeavor so to live that Christ would 
 approve our lives." More universally than we 
 usually think, this sentiment has become an es- 
 sential of the mental furnishing of the non- 
 christian part of Christendom. Jesus, or the 
 
THE FINALITY OF JESUS 211 
 
 more generalized Spirit of Christ, is really the 
 moral standard of the whole Western World, 
 accepted by the ordinary man as unconsciously 
 and absolutely as the air or the sunlight. It is 
 indisputably the cornerstone of Christian civiliza- 
 tion, "the undying root of all that is best in 
 modern life." 
 
 The magnitude of this fact can possibly be best 
 appreciated if we consider what the loss of this 
 ideal would mean, if indeed such loss were think- 
 able. It would set back the clock of spiritual 
 progress twenty centuries. It would plunge the 
 nations into moral chaos and disaster. It would 
 bring a universal sense of an overwhelming and 
 irreparable world-calamity. Nothing can be imag- 
 ined that would so deeply and permanently sad- 
 den mankind. 1 
 
 We cannot, however, rest the finality of Jesus 
 on his moral perfection alone, though this is and 
 must ever be the starting point. We may con- 
 ceive a morally perfect man, who would never be 
 known beyond the limits of his Nazareth. All 
 
 1 Compare Romanes' Thoughts on Religion, p. 29. When 
 Romanes gave up the thought of Christ and God, he "suffered 
 the sharpest pang of which his nature was susceptible" and "the 
 universe for him lost its soul of loveliness." 
 
212 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 morally perfect men are not necessarily identical 
 in character. Indeed the probabilities are that 
 each one would be different, just as no two ex- 
 quisite sunsets are alike. Filled with the op- 
 timism of Jesus, we may go a step further and 
 ask whether the world is not likely to see perfect 
 characters produced by the Spirit in the future, 
 especially in those days when "God's will is done 
 on earth even as it is done in heaven." 
 
 Yet, even so, Jesus would still be "the first 
 born among many brethren" (Romans 8: 29), 
 the pioneer, the road breaker of our salvation 
 (Hebrews 2: 10), our forerunner into the holiest 
 (Hebrews 6: 20). Though there may be varieties 
 of perfect men, he will always be the pattern and 
 the prototype, the leader and perfecter of faith. 
 Just because he came first, he occupies the unique 
 place, which can never be taken from him. In 
 the course of our history there may appear many 
 Americans as great, wise and patriotic as Wash- 
 ington, but no other can ever be the Father of 
 his Country. So Jesus, because he was the Be- 
 ginning of Christianity, the Founder of the King- 
 dom of God, has an inalienable preeminence. 
 
 But Jesus has a preeminence far beyond this, 
 
THE FINALITY OF JESUS 213 
 
 a uniqueness which guarantees his finality. And 
 here we should proceed slowly and circumspectly, 
 considering all the factors of the problem. The 
 quiet, morally perfect man whom we have al- 
 ready imagined, would by his very nature desire 
 that other men should enter into his life of bless- 
 ing and, more, would have so much of the Savior- 
 heart that he would actively try to bring them 
 into it. But we can well conceive that his efforts 
 might be confined to a narrow circle. It is sig- 
 nificant here that Jesus himself did not work 
 outside of Nazareth until he was about thirty 
 years of age. But Jesus felt a call to a wider 
 service, the call to bring salvation to the nation 
 and the world. This, as has been well said, was 
 the greatest thought which ever entered a human 
 mind and left it sane. Nor was this all, nor in- 
 deed the most important thing. The great point 
 is that he felt in himself the resources adequate 
 to so great a work, and that this self-judgment 
 has been justified by history. To moral perfec- 
 tion, to the Savior-heart, was added not only 
 the wide outlook, but ability, capacity, power. 
 In the end it all comes back to the greatness of 
 his personality, the mighty strength of his soul, 
 
214 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 the breadth and depth, yes, the size of the man. 
 And this was natural to him. He was made 
 that way. It was enduement or endowment, as 
 you please. Peter tells the whole story, "God 
 anointed him with the Holy Spirit and with 
 power." 
 
 Of this most significant of all human facts 
 twenty centuries are the proof. Jesus changed 
 the whole course of history. He created a new 
 sense of God, a new type of man, a new social 
 order and a new world of life and freedom. It 
 is the best world men have ever known, but Jesus 
 insistently demands that it must be far better 
 still. And Jesus has done all this by moral and 
 spiritual means, by giving his first attention to 
 the spirit of the individual. He actually saves 
 the individual man from selfishness, sensuality, 
 pride, greed and hate, and saves him to a life 
 of righteousness and unselfish love. It is not only 
 that, if men will follow his prescriptions, they will 
 be made over, but he himself seems in some 
 strange way to be the embodiment of the power 
 which urges men and the world on to such a life 
 of loving obedience and service. 
 
 Moreover, he does all that religion can be asked 
 
THE FINALITY OF JESUS 215 
 
 to do. He brings men to God. He is the Way, 
 the Truth and the Life. Yes, better still, he 
 brings God to men. He who yields to the spell 
 of his personality, surrenders to his love, unites 
 his life to that of Jesus, gets his spirit and shares 
 his purpose, that man, working with him, finds 
 God in Jesus, sees the Father in him, gains his 
 unshakable faith, and enters into communion 
 with the Most High. 
 
 And Jesus grows on the world. Pharisees, 
 philosophers, satirists, atheists, critics and psy- 
 chologists, have all had their day with Jesus, 
 but every new attack makes Jesus greater and 
 stronger. Old conceptions of him may disappear, 
 but they only give place to larger, juster and 
 profounder views of his character and significance. 
 As Browning sings, 
 
 "That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, 
 
 Or decomposes but to recompose, 
 
 Becomes my universe that feels and knows." 
 
 Yes, Jesus grows on the world. The more 
 men study him, the more he impresses them. 
 Rival parties and classes claim him as their 
 leader and authority. Nothing against which 
 
2l6 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 he pronounced has any future in our new world. 
 More and more it is seen that in him are the 
 principles of social regeneration and that he 
 alone can unite all men, and that only in himself. 
 If the world is to be saved, he must be its Savior. 
 And so he gains a universal significance. He 
 leaves the stage of the historical and the personal 
 and becomes an ideal, an atmosphere, a working 
 principle, the basis of the coming age, which all 
 far-seeing men perceive is to be more Christian 
 than any which have preceded it. The world 
 has not yet outgrown Jesus. It is just now at 
 last catching his real meaning. 1 He still leads 
 us on. 
 
 In our marvelous world-history, Jesus is the 
 greatest marvel of all. No one can ever take his 
 place. All future saviors will acknowledge his 
 supremacy and finality. His energy seems ex- 
 haustless and indeed increasing. 
 
 1 A single illustration. Fosdick quotes Dr. Samuel J. Barrows 
 as saying, "We speak of Howard, Livingston, Beccaria and others 
 as great penologists, who have profoundly influenced modern 
 life; but the principles enunciated and the methods introduced 
 by Jesus seem to me to stamp him as the greatest penologist of 
 any age. He has needed to wait, however, nearly twenty cen- 
 turies to find his principles and methods recognized in modern 
 law and penology." 
 
THE FINALITY OF JESUS 21/ 
 
 Men have always asked and are still asking 
 the secret of this personality. It will never be 
 wholly revealed. Paul's explanation was that 
 God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto 
 himself, and that the light of the knowledge of 
 the glory of God shines on us from the face of 
 Jesus. The Church in her enthusiasm for her 
 Lord and Savior has tried to say this better and 
 define it more narrowly. Whether it has alto- 
 gether succeeded in the task may be a matter of 
 debate, but one thing is perfectly plain: — This 
 Jesus, so strangely and uniquely full of God, is 
 Lord in a sphere beyond the reach of our highest 
 thought. He therefore demands and deserves 
 the wonder, reverence, love and supreme devotion 
 of every human being. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 AN OUTLINE OF JESUS' CAREER 
 
 Part I. The Life before the Ministry. 
 B. C. 5 or 6— Fall of A. D. 26. 
 Principal Events. 1. The Birth at Bethlehem. 
 2. The Quiet Years at Naz- 
 areth. 
 Part II. The Preliminary Events of the Ministry. 
 Fall of A. D. 26 — Passover, April n, 27. 
 Principal Events. 1. The Ministry of John the 
 Baptist. 
 
 2. The Baptism of Jesus. 
 
 3. The Temptation of Jesus. 
 
 4. The First Disciples. 
 
 Part III. The Early Judean Ministry. 
 
 Passover, April 11, 27 — December 27. 
 Principal Events. 1. First Cleansing of the 
 Temple. 
 
 2. Interview with Nico- 
 
 demus. 
 
 3. Cooperation with John in 
 
 his Ministry in Judea. 
 Part IV. The Galilean Ministry. 
 
 December 27 — Passover, April 18, 29. 
 Principal Events (mostly topical). 
 
 1. Jesus' Itinerant Preach- 
 ing of the Kingdom and 
 Miracles attract Great 
 Multitudes. 
 219 
 
220 APPENDIX 
 
 Part IV. The Galilean Ministry — Continued. 
 
 2. Jesus' Calling, Teaching 
 
 and Organization of his 
 Disciples. 
 
 3. The Scribes and Pharisees 
 
 increasingly hostile. 
 
 4. The Crisis at Caper- 
 
 naum. 
 
 a. The Mission of the 
 
 Twelve. 
 
 b. The Feeding of the 
 
 5,000. 
 
 c. The Break with the 
 
 People at Caper- 
 naum. 
 
 d. The Break with the 
 
 Pharisees on Eating 
 with Unwashed 
 Hands. 
 Part V. The Retirement in the North. 
 
 Passover, April 18, 29 — November 29. 
 Principal Events. 1. Instruction of Disciples, 
 ending in Peter's 
 Confession and Jesus' 
 Prophecy of his Death. 
 2. The Transfiguration and 
 Jesus' Resolution to go 
 up to his Death at 
 Jerusalem. 
 Part VI. The Perean Ministry. 
 
 November 29 — Sunday, April 2, 30. 
 The Perean Ministry was much like the Gali- 
 lean, except that all was briefer, more pointed 
 and more solemn. 
 
APPENDIX 221 
 
 Part VI. The Perean Ministry— Continued. 
 
 The data are too uncertain to justify a list of 
 principal events. Suffice it to say that at the 
 close Jesus goes up to Jerusalem from Perea 
 by way of Jericho. 
 Part VII. The Passion Week. 
 
 April 2, 30 — April 9, 30. 
 
 Principal Events. 1. The Triumphal Entry. 
 
 2. Second Cleansing of the 
 
 Temple. 
 
 3. Conflicts with the Jewish 
 
 Leaders. 
 
 4. The Last Supper. 
 
 5. Gethsemane and the Be- 
 
 trayal. 
 
 6. The Jewish Trial. 
 
 7. The Roman Trial. 
 
 8. The Crucifixion and 
 
 Burial. 
 Part VIII. The Forty Days. 
 
 April 9, 30 — May 18, 30. 
 Principal Events. 1. The Resurrection Morn- 
 ing. 
 
 2. The Appearances during 
 
 Forty Days. 
 
 3. The Ascension. 
 
 (Note. — This chronological scheme is based on the supposition 
 of a three year ministry. I am almost, though not quite, per- 
 suaded to accept a two year ministry. But such a change would 
 not alter the order or relative importance of these events. The 
 substantial historicity of the Gospel of John is also presupposed. 
 My acknowledgments are due to Stevens and Burton's Harmony 
 of the Gospels, though I have freely amended their outline.) 
 
INDEX 
 
 Adaptation of Christianity, 9 f . 
 Aggressiveness of Jesus, 138 f., 
 
 169 f. 
 Antitheses of his Character, 
 
 195-200 
 Apocalyptic and its Influence 
 
 on Jesus, 29 f., 62, 84-92 
 Authority of Jesus, 114, 177 f., 
 
 193 ff., 217 
 
 Balance of Jesus, 178 ff., 198 f. 
 Baptism of Jesus, 38-41 
 Bringer of Salvation, 57 f. 
 Broadening Outlook of Chris- 
 tianity, 8 f . 
 
 Caesaiea Philippi, Confession 
 
 at, 37 f., 79 ff- 
 Call of Jesus, 51-55 
 Centurion, Gentile, 156 
 Certainty of Jesus, 168 f. 
 Character, 130 
 Character of Jesus, 166-208 
 Church, Jesus' View of it, 149- 
 
 154, 159 
 Clean and Unclean, 79, 105 f., 
 
 109 
 Clouds of Heaven, 89 ff . 
 Coming, Second, 83-92, 161 f., 
 
 165 
 Common People, 30 f., 125, 
 
 140 f., 183 f. 
 
 Community, The New, 145 f., 
 
 151 ff., 159 f. 
 Constructiveness of Jesus, 
 
 187 f. 
 Conversions, 11 f. 
 Courage of Jesus, 169 ff. 
 Covenant, 145 
 Covetousness, 131 
 Crisis at Capernaum, 78 f. 
 Cross, 146-149 
 
 Death of Jesus, 80, 82 f., 135, 
 
 143-149, 163 
 Deserted, Jesus, 207 f. 
 Devout, The, 31 
 Dignity of Jesus, 192 f . 
 Disadvantages of Jesus, 2 f., 
 
 178 
 Divorce, 108 
 Doing God's Will, 129 f. 
 Duties, Religious, 129 
 
 Economic Situation of Pales- 
 tine, 24 
 End of the World, 131 ff. 
 
 Faith, 122 
 
 Fatherhood of God, 48 f., 103, 
 
 117 f. 
 Feeding of Five Thousand, 
 
 78 f. 
 
 223 
 
224 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Fellowship with God, Jesus', 
 47 ff., 146 ff., 163, 166 ff. 
 
 Finality of Jesus, 209-217 
 
 Forgiveness, 122 
 
 Founder of Kingdom, 58 f., 
 85 f., 137 f- 
 
 Gentile Mission, 143, 154-159 
 Gethsemane, 146 f. 
 God, 117 ff., 126 
 Goodness of Jesus, 200-205 
 Grace of God, 102 f. 
 Greatness of Jesus, 205 f . 
 Greek Influences, 23, 25 
 Growth of Conception of 
 Messiahship, 41-56 
 
 Healings, 140, 191 
 Healthiness of Jesus, 190 f. 
 Historical Situation of Jesus, 
 
 23-33 
 Honesty of Jesus, 65, 166, 201 f . 
 Humility of Jesus, 177 f. 
 
 Inadequacy of Messianic Title, 
 
 96 
 Independence of Jesus, 180 f., 
 
 194 
 Independence, Spiritual, 125, 
 
 182 
 Influence of Jesus: 
 
 On the Ages, 1, 4-18, 195, 
 
 215 f. 
 On Christianity, 7-10 
 On Contemporaries, 3 f., 
 188 f. 
 Insight of Jesus, 112, 1832. 
 
 Jewish Trial, 36 f., 94 f. 
 
 John the Baptist, 32 f., 39 f., 
 
 78, 80 f., 102, 150 f., 153 
 Joy of Jesus, 171 f. 
 Judaism and the Disciples, 
 
 149-154 
 Judea and Galilee Contrasted, 
 
 24 f., 99 
 Judge of Men, 59 
 
 Kingdom of God, 58 f., 71-75, 
 83 f., 116, 118-121, 131 f., 
 134 f., 138, 156 f., i59ff-> 
 163 f. 
 
 Last Supper, 144 ff . 
 
 Legalism and Jesus, 26 f., 97- 
 
 110, 168 
 Life, Inner, 124, 181 f. 
 Life, The New, 1 21-135 
 Loneliness of Jesus, 206 ff . 
 Lordship of Jesus, 177 f., 193 ff., 
 
 198, 217 
 Love, 122, 126 ff. 
 Love of Jesus, 126 f., 140-143, 
 
 172-178, 203 f. 
 
 Man, 125 
 
 Martyrdoms, Testimony of, 
 
 12 ff. 
 Messianic Hope, 28 f., 34 f., 
 
 60 ff. 
 Messianism and Jesus, 34-96, 
 
 i34 i- 
 Mill, J. S., 45, 210 
 Mission of Jesus, 53 f., 64, 152, 
 
 160, 168 
 
225 
 
 Moral Advance due to Jesus, 
 14 ff. 
 
 Old Testament and Jesus, 49 f ., 
 
 98 f., 106-110, 154 f. 
 Opportunism of Jesus, 68, 197 
 Optimism of Jesus, 173 
 Originality of Jesus, 20 f., 111- 
 
 114 
 Outline of Jesus' Career, 219 ff . 
 
 Parties, Jewish, 25-31 
 Pedagogic Difficulties of Jesus, 
 
 68 ff. 
 Perean Ministry, 92 
 Perfection of Jesus, 43-46, 
 
 209-212 
 Personality of Jesus, 18-22, 65, 
 
 200, 208, 212-215 
 Peter's Confession. See Csesa- 
 
 rea Philippi 
 Pharisees, 26 f., 97 ff., 100 f., 
 
 103-106, 150-153 
 Political Difficulties of Jesus, 
 
 7i 
 Popularity of Jesus, 76 f. 
 Power of Jesus, 188-194, 212 ~ 
 
 215. See Influence of Jesus 
 Practicality of Jesus, 185 f . 
 Preaching of Jesus, 139 f. 
 Presence, Continuing, 164 f. 
 Proportion, Jesus' Sense of, 
 
 113, 182 f. 
 Publicans, 141 f. 
 
 Reality, Jesus' Appeal to, 184, 
 187 f. 
 
 Recent Triumphs of Chris-. 
 
 tianity, 16 ff. 
 Refinement of Jesus, 176 
 Religion, 102 f. 
 Repentance, 121, 123 
 Representative, God's, 56 f ., 
 
 185 f. 
 Reserve. Messianic, 71-75, 
 
 77 f., 86 f. 
 Respect for Personality, Jesus ', 
 
 173, 182 
 Resurrection of Jesus, 162 ff. 
 Revolutionary? Was Jesus a, 
 
 180 f. 
 Righteousness, 121 
 Rousseau, 45, 146 
 
 Sabbath, 105, 108 
 
 Sacrifice, 145 f. 
 
 Sadducees, 25 f. 
 
 Salvation, 12, 57 f., 123, 136 
 
 Secret of Jesus, 208, 217 
 
 Self-criticism and Self-purifica- 
 tion of Christianity, 7 f. 
 
 Self-mastery of Jesus, 190 f. 
 
 Separation from Judaism, 149- 
 154 
 
 Seriousness of Jesus, 113, 120 
 
 Service, 128 
 
 Sexual Purity, 128 
 
 Sinners, 31, 141 
 
 Social Attitude, 130 
 
 Social Nature of Jesus, 171 f., 
 
 175 f- 
 
 Son of Man, 85 ff . 
 
 Spirit of Jesus, our Ideal, 210 f. 
 
 State, The, 131 
 
226 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Success, Immediate, of Jesus, 
 
 75 i; 82 
 Syrophcenician, 143, 156 
 
 Teaching of Jesus, Esp. 111- 
 
 136: 
 Manner of, 103 f., 114 ff., 
 
 185 f. 
 Originality of, 20 f., 111- 
 
 114 
 On Character, 130 
 On Covetousness, 131 
 On Doing God's Will, 
 
 129 f. 
 On Duties, Religious, 129 
 On End of the World, 
 
 131 f- 
 On Faith, 122 
 On Forgiveness, 122 
 On God, 117 ff., 126 
 On Grace, 102 f. 
 On Independence, Spir- 
 itual, 125 
 On Inner Life, 124 
 On the Kingdom. See 
 
 Kingdom 
 On Love, 122, 126 ff. 
 On Man, 125 
 
 On the New Life, 121-135 
 On Religion, 102 f . 
 On Repentance, 121, 123 
 On Righteousness, 121 
 On Salvation, 123 
 On Service, 128 
 On Social Attitude, 130 
 On the State, 131 
 On Truth, 124 f. 
 
 On Wealth, 13 iff. 
 
 On World-renunciation, 
 
 132 ff. 
 Temptation of Jesus, 38, 65-68, 
 
 204 f. 
 Tradition, Scribal, 104 f. 
 Tribute-money, 93 f. 
 Triumphal Entry, 37, 92 f. 
 Truth, 124 f. 
 Twelve, The, 151 ff. 
 Two-nature Theory, 41 ff. 
 
 Universal Man, Jesus, 199 f., 
 
 216 
 Universality of Kingdom, 156 f. 
 Universality of Jesus' Ministry, 
 
 140-143, 174 
 Unselfishness of Jesus, 176 ff., 
 
 203 
 
 Vicarious Suffering, 148 
 Victory, Final, 161 f., 165, 
 
 170 f. 
 View of Future of his Work, 
 
 149-165 
 Vitality of Jesus, 164, 189 ff. 
 
 Wealth, 131 ff. 
 
 "Why hast Thou Forsaken 
 
 Me?"i46ff. 
 Wisdom of Jesus, 178-188 
 Work of Jesus, 137-149 
 World-renunciation, 132 ff. 
 
 Zealots, 27 f., 34, 61 f., 78 f., 
 93 f. 
 
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