Biography of Jesus

Foreword

N PRESENTING to the Christian world the volume entitled a Biography of Jesus, the author has performed a service which will add new luster to his past achievements.

Encyclopedia of American Biography mentions Elbert H. Sawyer, a soldier, minister, educator, author, was born in Michigan, U.S.A., 1843. Educated at Kalamazoo College, La Grange College, Theological Seminary and University of Chicago, from which institutions he has received six regular and honorary degrees. Served as minister in St. Louis, professor of history and teacher of the sciences at La Grange, traveled and studied in Europe, president of Canon City College and professor of moral and mental philosophy and instructor in ancient languages. Author of works on history, theology, missions, education and social science; preached and lectured in America and abroad.

Doctor Sawyer has been peculiarly situated in his educational and Christian work. His unusual acquaintance with statesmen and scholars has given him an independence of judgment and expression rarely enjoyed by the student. His scholarship, united with a life of intense activity, has ripened into great certainties since his retirement to the quiet and leisure of Oakwood, his beautiful country home.

It was only natural that one of such alert life habits should desire to be helpful to others, and one who has pointed many to the Lamb of God will ever wish to realize a vision of Jesus Christ to those who need Him. So this volume will help and guide, as a pastoral letter, all seekers after the living Word.

As Paul dealt with the heresies of his day, so this author indicates the great dangers of our age. Not, however, in a controversial spirit, but by presenting the vital truths of the v

FOREWORD gospel which themselves answer the cavils of the amateur. No Christian of faith fears the speculations and doubts so frequently spoken of in current newspapers, magazines and light books, but much wasted time and folly could be saved by putting into the hands of the public such books as this. The Christian worker and Sunday School teacher will find here material to counteract the vicious theories of skepticism about our faith. Historical and exegetical material here bronght together on the side of faith will prove of great value to the reader.

This book does not just tell the story of the life of Jesus, but it takes up the mountain tops of the teaching of Jesus and shows them in their connection with the great plan of God in the movement of the life of Jesus.

The warm heart-throbs of this volume, in loyal devotion to the Master, will win many friends who want more than the cold facts about the greatest message and the most exalted personage this world has ever known.

Those who seek a deeper insight into the mysteries of the Cross, and who desire to worship there with this humble child of God, will find in this Biography of Jesus, joy and comfort as well as erudition and profit.

OLIVER P. DEVIN

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Contents

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XIX.

Chapter I

THE ANCESTRY OF JESUS CHRIST eee history of our Lord recorded by the evangelists begins with genealogical records, reaching back into the remote past. Sixty-five times Jesus as the promised Messiah is cited in the Old Testament Scriptures. Under the ancient covenant the Hebrews boasted their descent from Abraham, the chosen leader of their race. Nations, like individuals, are ambitious to trace their origin from an honorable source. Matthew, specially, writing for the Hebrews, begins his record of Jesus in the genealogical table of Abraham, following the family history to David, thence through Solomon to Joseph, the son of Jacob. Luke, in an inverse order, after stating that Jesus was the son, as it was supposed, of Joseph, the son of Eli, traces upward through another line to Nathan, the son of David, thence on through the regular genealogy to Abraham, and onward up to Adam, who was the son of God.

This variation in the record between David and Joseph may indicate an intention on the part of Luke to trace the family of Mary, who were undoubtedly of honorable ancestry. Some authors think the former gives the legal and the latter the natural descent from David. There is a tradition that Joseph claimed to be the uncle of Mary and her sister Miriam; that they were the children of Joachim and Anna, of Bethlehem, who, like himself, were lineally descended from the royal son of Jesse; that, being the nearest of kin to Mary, he had taken her to wife as the law required, to secure to her a share of the small property left to the girls by the death of their parents.

The Davidic descent of Mary is implied in Acts, “by the fruit of his loins, he would set one on his throne.” And Paul says in Romans, “Jesus Christ was made of the seed of David according to the flesh, and declared to be the Son of God, with power, according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead.” The omission of three names by Matthew, and the tessera decades in the blocks of fourteen generations in the seventeenth verse of the first chapter of his gospel, as well as the names omitted by Luke are common in Jewish chronology. Mill and Hervey have apparent proof of full reconciliation of these differences.

Mark does not speak directly of the ancestry of Jesus, but through the testimony of the Baptist confirms the statement respecting the divine origin of our Saviour, when he says, “You are my son, my beloved.”

John, writing much later, found a disposition prevailing among heretical brethren, to question the divinity of Christ, and make unjust criticism upon the character and work of Jesus. In the revelation the Lord had made to John while in banishment on the Isle of Patmos, attention had been called to a certain sect called Nicolaitanes, whose conduct was pronounced hateful. When a little later he wrote his gospel, John thought it expedient to explain more fully the personality and Deity of the Lord. The Greek term “Logos” had been brought into use among the captious critics, and the old apostle took up the term and boldly declared, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, . . . All things were made by him and apart from him nothing that exists came into being. In him was life and the life was the light of men.”

Sabellius asserted there is but one person in the Godhead, that the Word and the Holy Spirit were only virtues or functions of the Deity; that God the Father in heaven descended into the virgin, became a child, and was born of her as a Son, and that having accomplished the mystery of salvation he diffused himself on the apostles in tongues of fire and was then denominated the Holy Spirit.

THE ANCESTRY OF JESUS CHRIST

Arius maintained that the Son of God was totally and essentially distinct from the Father; that he was the first and noblest of those beings whom God had created, the instrument by whose subordinate operations he formed the universe; that the Holy Spirit was not God, but created by the power of the Son.

Socinus taught that Jesus was a mere man; but by the union of the divine Word with the man Jesus, Christ might, though improperly, be called God; that he had no existence before he was conceived by the Virgin Mary; that the Holy Spirit is no distinct person. In this manner men claiming to be Christian philosophers dissented from the teachings of the Gospels.

John, emphasizing the testimony he gave for his Master in the Fourth Gospel, repeats in his first general epistle, “It is what existed from the beginning, that we announce; what we have heard, what we have seen with our own eyes, what we have beheld, and touched with our hands; it is the very message of life—for life has been revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it and announce to you that eternal life that was with the Father and has been revealed to us—it is what we have seen and heard that we announce to you also, so that you may share our fellowship, for our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ, and we write this to you to make your happiness complete. This is the message that we have heard from him and announce to you; God is light; there is no darkness in him at all.”

Dr. Bitting calls this the autobiography of the apostle John. He regards the author of the Gospel as saying in plain terms, “that he heard, that he saw and handled, and experienced the life, and is as a result declaring it to others that they might have fellowship with him.” He uses literature for the same purpose. The introduction of his letter, and the end of his Gospel tell the same story. “These things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing you may have life in his name.” This eminent scholar, with beautiful candor, says, “What could be more modern? What could more accord with our present-day ideas of things? What is this but the old story, as old as the first germ or cell of life, and as up-to-date as the morning’s birth—the truth that guarantees our food and ourselves, the law of reproduction; the fact that life produces life; the charter of creation, ‘be fruitful and multiply,’ translated into the region of the spiritual ”

The ancestry of our Lord is perpetuated in the brotherhood of man. God passed by the angels and took our bodily form to house the Son during his earthly ministry. The incarnation will be fruitful in proportion to its reproduction in human life. President Mullins, of the World’s Congress of Baptists, considers this idea fundamental in the teachings of Jesus Christ: “It is the great meaning of the incarnation, the mastery of the inner life of other men by his truth and ideals through whom these should be propagated. It meant an unbroken succession of such men through time. This and nothing less would permanently introduce him to the race of men in an effective, saving way.”

Bitting says, “Here is the real apostolic succession, not the mechanical formality of ceremony whether of induction into a continuous hierarchy, or into an unbroken chain of baptismal administrators, but that of the very ideals and spirit of Jesus absorbed by us from him who lived ‘because of the Father.’ ”’ Some people think it bad theology to write the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, but we shall find Jesus the Son of God laying more emphasis on his spiritual ancestry than his physical origin. Thought leaps back from century to century, along the genealogical trail of natural ancestry to find where Jesus Christ first determined to enlist in our company and put on our uniform, but vast cycles must be traversed to find his birthhood in the essential being of God.

THE ANCESTRY OF JESUS CHRIST

There were probably as many as a half-hundred apocryphal gospels written, few of which still exist. None of them established a position as inspired books. The so-called history of Joseph, Mary and the Childhood of Jesus, are fairly ingenious fiction, but would not contribute toward establishing the record of our Saviour. Some of the numerous prophetic allusions may be cited as evincing the character of Jesus the Christ. That he would spring from the tribe of Judah, of the seed of David, should be born of a virgin, birth should occur in Bethlehem, that he would be preceded by a remarkable messenger, that he would possess unparalleled excellence of character, that he would work miracles, that he would be rejected by his own countrymen, that he would be a King, that he would die a vicarious sacrifice for the sins of the world—and other equally pertinent statements already verified. The early fathers held that the theophanies of the Old Testament were of Christ.