The Christ of the Gospels

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Preface

I HAVE sought to carry out the purpose of the Founder of this Lecture as indicated in the Trust- Deed, and, with others, I have found it difficult in a single treatise to meet the needs of a popular audience, and to satisfy the demands of those already versed in biblical study and criticism.

The subject committed to me is one which will exhaust powers far greater than those which I possess, but such study as I have been able to secure has convinced me of its supreme importance at the present time, and I have endeavoured to bring before those who have entered into the Methodist Communion of the Christian Church the findings of recent criticism of the Gospels, and to indicate the effect: of such criticism on the message which those Gospels declare.

The lecture makes no claim to originality. Thoughts gathered from many authors will appear in the pages which follow; and while I have sought 1x x Preface to make what acknowledgement was possible, a considerable amount of indebtedness must remain unexpressed. My colleagues on the Staff of Handsworth College have laid me under great obligation for wise counsel generously given. I am specially indebted to Dr. Tasker and to the Rev. R. N. Flew, the latter of whom has been kind enough to read and correct the proofs.

W. W. Hoipsworts.

HaNnpDswortH COLLEGE, June 1911.

SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY - ~ ~ ns m - 3

The word ‘Gospel’ is not sufficiently definitive; it stands for both vehicle and content.

The challenge in the Personality presented in the Gospels. Are the terms ‘ Jesus’ and ‘ Christ’ mutually exclusive? The methods of modern Criticism are twofold. Compara- ‘tive Religion ; the apotheosis of the human. The critical study of the Record. Prejudice against the supernatural a petitio principi.

A higher synthesis finds room for both ‘Jesus’ and ‘ Christ.’

There is thus a doctrine of the Person of Christ in the New Testament, and the basis of this doctrine is found in the Gospels.

Chapter II The Christology Of The New Testament - 21”

The Christology of the New Testament may be studied in three sections :— 1. The Epistle to the Hebrews. The underlying spiritual, the permanent element in world of change, revealed by Christ. The significance of His Sonship.

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Exposition of cardinal passages indicating the transcendent nature of this divine Son. This Son is the historic Jesus.

2. Pauline Christology. Examination limited to three undisputed Epistles. The Epistle to the Galatians. The note of Deity in the position assigned to Christ is joined to that of a real humanity. The Christ is Jesus. The Epistles to the Romans and to the Corinthians reveal the same synthesis.

3. Petrine Christology—The First Epistle of St. Peter, and the speeches of the same Apostle as given in the Acts of the Apostles. ‘This Jesus’ is both ‘Lord and Messiah.’

This examination shows that to account for the Deification of Jesus as another case of common apotheosis is impossible; the Deification is complete and the interval of time is not sufficient.

At the back of the spiritual aspect of Christ’s Person there is a clear historic basis.

The metaphysical issues are in keeping with the facts stated; given the history, St. Paul’s conclusions are inevitable.

Can we trace this current of thought any nearer to its source?—Do the Gospels support the interpretation of the Apostolic Church P

CHAPTER III THE GOSPEL RECORD = be “ E . 55

A treasure in earthen vessels—a divine content in human setting. The sources of the Gospel are to be found not in oral tradition, but in documents :—

1. The Markan element in the three Synoptic Gospels. Three editions of the Memoirs of St. Peter’s preaching drawn up by St. Mark. Indications of this three-fold work in the Markan narrative. Behind St. Mark—himself a contemporary of Christ—stands St. Peter.

2. The Matthaean Logia. A collection in Aramaic

Contents xiii of the Sayings of Christ. ‘Q’ in all probability an earlier collection of Sayings thrown together without purpose or plan. The Matthaean arrangement is to be found in the First Gospel. It consists of five blocks of Sayings, each block bearing upon some aspect of ‘ The Kingdom of Heaven.’ The Logia in the Third Gospel were taken not from St. Matthew’s collection, but from ‘Q’ or from some earlier collection.

3. The special sources of St. Luke. The Prologue of the Third Gospel. The Markan section. St. Luke’s use of the Logia differs from that of St. Matthew. The Travel Document. Its relation to other sections of the Third Gospel. Was its author a woman?—Joanna, the wife of Chusa, Herod’s steward. The Nativity section. Its connexion with chapter xxiv. The Resurrection Story. St. Luke’s departure from the Markan account.

4. The Johannine Supplement. The difference between the Fourth Gospel and the Synoptics. This is more in treatment than in subject-matter. The claim of the Fourth Gospel to be historical. Its scene is Judaean rather than Galilean. This accounts for differences in geographical setting, and in the dramatis personae. The raising of Lazarus. Why this critical episode is not related in the Synoptic Gospels. The Eucharistic teaching of the Fourth Gospel. The discourses of Christ in the Fourth Gospel. The subjective element in the account of these. The interpretative method. Whoever the writer may have been, he was in a position in which he was qualified to interpret.

Chapter IV The Synoptic Jesus - - - - -*. 129

A candid examination of the Gospels increases their authority.

They reveal a human Person. Our Lord’s divinity is best discovered in and through His perfect humanity. The modern call for a fuller presentation of His humanity.

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This is given, though not exclusively, in the Synoptic Gospels.

Three stages in the developing self-consciousness of Christ are given in the Markan narrative.

The increasing claim of Messianic functions—‘ The Son of Man.’

The Messianic significance of the Eucharistic Feast.

The Matthaean ‘Sayings,’ not being chronologically arranged, reveal all stages of this development in the consciousness of Jesus.

The Sermon on the Mount—a new view of God and the World—contains the germ of Pauline and Johannine teaching.

The Sayings of Jesus indicate the position He assumes (Matt. xi. 25-30).

The Apocalyptic element in the teaching of Jesus.

CHAPTER V THE JOHANNINE CHRIST - - « - a AGT

The interpretation of the Person of Christ in the early Church.

Similar notes in the Johannine interpretation.

This interpretation implicit in earlier Gospels.

The development of consciousness in Jesus is not before St. John. He starts with the accepted divinity and shows its significance for faith.

The central idea of Christ’s Person in this Gospel is that of sonship. Sonship implies Fatherhood in God, a fellowship of love in the Godhead.

The doctrine of the Logos. The Logos related to both God and man. :

‘Fellowship in the Life Eternal’ is the theme of both prologue and Gospel.

Fellowship in Judging.

The doctrine of the Eucharist.

This fellowship described in terms of ‘knowledge’ and ‘life.’

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Faith the means of attaining to this life. The doctrine of faith in the Fourth. Gospel.

Such an interpretation of the Person of Christ is an essential part of the Gospel of the Grace of God.

CHAPTER VI THE HIGHER SYNTHESIS—JESUS CHRIST - tr Soe

The modern antithesis—Jesus or Christ.

The Christian Church has accepted a synthesis difficult to explain.

Antioch and Alexandria—the historical and the transcendental view.

The modern emphasis on the former. The Eschatological School. Jewish Apocalypses. Eschatology, which is only one element in the teaching of Jesus, if exclusively considered, is only a partial basis of interpretation. The Kingdom of Heaven differs from the Messianic kingdom of the apocalyptists.

The teaching of the Apocalyptic School is destructive of Christianity.

The Theological method. The doctrine of Kenosis. Does modern Psychology afford any hope of solution?

The experimental method. The experience of the grace of God is in general agreement with the doctrine of Kenosis. »

Beginning with experience we may use philosophy to explain the problem of the Incarnation and to correct extravagance, and then we may turn to the facts of history to verify our conclusions.

CHAPTER VII THE GOSPEL MESSAGE - = = - mets ee

The Gospels, whether considered as history or as interpretation, reveal an attractive personality.

The homage rendered to the Incarnate Christ is more than a mere aesthetic or intellectual appreciation; it stands

Xvi Contents for a recognition of the possibility of a true communion between man and God.

Fellowship with God is a common element in all religious thought.

Two perils which beset the doctrine of union with God: (i.) The Greek failure. The lack of Personality in the Platonic conception of the Good. (ii,) The Oriental failure. The lack of real existence in the world.

Both of these are avoided by the Christian doctrine of union with God in Jesus Christ.

Three lines of approach in the presentation of this doctrine. (i.) The dogmatic. Its limitations. (ii.) The historical. A possible weakening in authority. (iii.) The experimental.

The Ritschlian contribution—its dangers.

How may man enter into this experience?—Faith, the means to life.

Faith demands for its reasonable exercise both ‘ Jesus’ and ‘ Christ.’

Union with God is the spring of the highest morality.

It is the true basis of all philanthropic service.

It makes possible the unity of the Christian Church.

It accounts for the rapture of the Saints of God.

This Fellowship of Eternal Life is revealed in and ietragh Jesus Christ—the Gospel of the Grace of God,

Tur Gospels are the records of the words and works of Christ, and these are the vehicles of revelation about the nature of God and His will in a degree to which no others can approximate, inasmuch as their author was one who was not, like the prophets of old, expressing truth about God of which He had become conscious, but was Himself the manifestation in human nature of the divine life.

Rev. W. C. Auten, Contentio Veritatis, p. 240.

We may feel assured that the tradition as we have it is substantially accurate, but the Synoptics give us something better than a mere chronicle. They give us what a mere accurate collection of facts cannot yield, a true impression of Jesus. They are artists, and not chroniclers; but the art of the Synoptics is not the art of an individual, though there are individual touches enough to make each Gospel distinct. The art is chiefly the unconscious art of spiritual selection working in the community. Im the course of the formation of the tradition those events and sayings were selected which were serviceable for the needs of the spirit and the demands of the life. We see Jesus, not indeed as He was in the entirety of His life—one half has not been told us—but as He was of value for the needs of the Church, as He inspired her faith and impelled her spirit.

E. E. ANDERSON.

Chapter I Introductory

Tue word ‘ Gospel’ is one of the most beautiful in all language. It has become familiar by reason of common use, and is now fraught with an infinite significance. But it is not a word which can be considered to be finally determinative. It may connote very different ideas. It may stand for a book or for its teaching. We may use it to describe God’s purpose for the human race, or to describe man’s attempt to record that purpose. Sometimes it is a vehicle; sometimes the diviner content. It may be to us the channel through which has flowed the river of the grace of God, or it may be that river itself, cleansing, refreshing, and quickening all that it touches. A modern writer has very happily differentiated the one use from the other. Dr. Du Bose speaks of ‘ The Gospel in the Gospels,’ and we must always be careful to distinguish the one from the other. For the casket may be constructed of materials exposed to uncertainties of many sorts, but it may nevertheless contain and preserve for us a precious treasure, the pledge of a ransom for the race of man. Many anxious questions arise out of the relation of this vehicle to its content. The connexion between them cannot be ignored. The credentials of the one are to be found, at least in part, in the history of the other. To a certain extent the thought finds its guarantee in the circumstances attending the formation of the record. When we are considering the message we are bound to scrutinize the way in which it has come before our attention. Thus our examination of the Gospels is of necessity twofold. We have to consider the purport of the message, but also the means by which it has been brought within the range of our consciousness. Now the message meets us with a challenge the most august, the most important that has ever been presented to the human mind. It sets before us the history of a striking personality, and we are taught that that personality embodies the purpose of God for all mankind. We are taken behind the mere record of events, and we are asked to consider in the person of Jesus Christ the thought of God concerning man. ‘The Old Testament,’ Dr. Forsyth says,’ ‘ is valuable not as a history of Israel, nor as a history of religion, but as a history of revelation, of grace, of redemption. . . . The apostles do not so much give us Israel, as what God meant by Israel.’ Similar words may be used with equal truth of the

1 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, p. 169. 4

New Testament records. They give us not so much the history of Jesus, as what God meant by Jesus. There is a measure of biography, but there is also an interpretation of the Person described.

In all biography two elements are constant—the history or record of work done, and the explanation of the underlying personality. They may be treated together or separately, but they certainly exist, and the one is essential to the delineation of the other. The activities of the man lack coherence, motive, and purpose unless we see behind his deeds and words an adequate personality; and the personality is lacking in definiteness and force unless it finds expression in work. Both of these elements are to be found in the Gospels. We have the record of deeds and words in the Synoptic Gospels; we have their significance in the Fourth. The experience of the one class is followed by the interpretation of the other. After that flash of illumination which came to them with the ascension of their Lord, and its promised sequel at Pentecost, the followers of Jesus remembered and understood. Words came back to them filled with a new significance. The Spirit brought to their remembrance whatsoever Jesus had said. That same Spirit took of that which was of the very nature of their Lord and revealed it unto them. Out of the common fact sprang the underlying spiritual: ‘ This

Jesus ’ was seen to be ‘ both Lord and Christ.’ The cardinal doctrine of the Christian faith is that of the Person of our Lord. The whole sum of man’s neediness, as well as the infinite provision which God 5

,has in Himself for meeting that need; all man’s thought of God, and all God’s thought of man; the ‘divine purpose from all eternity, and the utmost

, destiny of the human race,—these things are all summed up in the doctrine of the Person of Christ.

_ The unity of that Person, as that of the God-man in whom the divine and human natures meet, is set

' before us as the supreme truth of revelation. It lays a heavy burden upon the human mind, but it carries the weight of a gracious and eternal purpose, and it

‘is charged with man’s sublimest and ultimate hope.

—s

| It gives us the essential truth in a final and comprehensive religion, because it brings together the two

' great concepts ‘God’ and ‘ Man,’ and shows us that _ there may be after all a true relation between them. _ The gospel is no baffling antithesis in which we are presented now with the divine and now with an irreconcilable human. It is a synthesis the truest and the most sublime. It shows us God and Man as

_one in Jesus Christ.

In the pages which follow an attempt is made to consider this great gospel message not by laying down rules for dealing with the record, which by eliminating the transcendental really beg the whole question of that Person, nor again by considering only those things which correspond to what we find in other religious systems to the neglect of all those things which make it their fulfilment, but rather by considering as parts of one final revelation both history and interpretation. If it be found that there is no correspondence between the two, or if it appear

3 6 that the history has no sufficient guarantee, then indeed we may have to consider whether we must not accept the sharply drawn division with which we are presented to-day, and proceed to take our several positions with the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels or with the Christ of St. Paul.

But let us at the outset recognize what such separation means. In the one case our Lord is relegated to the position occupied by all leaders or heroes real or imaginary; in the other He becomes a figment of the mind of the most visionary of men, the mere extravagance of an emotional nature. If we accept the one, worship—the common instinct of the human race—is reduced to an aesthetic appreciation of an individual who lacks the necessary sanctions of Deity; and if we limit ourselves to the other, we impose upon ourselves the invention of a brain which some might say was diseased. If the two terms ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ’ are to be taken as mutually exclusive, we must accept that the one lacks both finality and comprehensiveness in the sphere of religion, while the other is the conception, uncertain and unguaranteed, of a merely human mind.

Modern criticism, in so far as it may be described as destructive criticism, approaches this supremely important question along two very different lines. The position which our Lord occupies in the thought and worship of His followers is accounted for by the application of certain evolutionary principles which are found to be operative in human systems of religion. Those who follow this line account for Christianity much as they account for the apotheosis of Krishna. They conceive of the earliest Christian community as being attached to the Man Jesus by reason of the personal charm and the wisdom of a great teacher, and as being led after His death to a deification of their Master by reason of their reverence and superstition. The points of correspondence, many of them close and striking enough, between Christianity and other systems are pointed out. Such correspondence is said to lie not only in the sayings attributed to the central figure of the system, not only in the incidents related concerning Him, but also in the method by which the transition was made from the human—more or less heroic —to the divine, claiming and compelling both personal reverence and devotion and finally worship. But such correspondence as exists, instead of weakening the Christian position really strengthens it. It shows that Christianity is part of a world-movement in the sphere of religion, the centre and governing impulse of which is the only living and true God,’ who ‘has not left Himself without witness among men,’ who ‘ lighteneth every man coming into the world,’ who has spoken ‘in many parts and in many ways, and finally in His Son.’ This last revelation, then, will correspond with every broken light that may in other ages have made the darkness visible. This divine ‘Son’ will gather up into Himself, into one final and complete illumination, all that may be * See Nolloth, The Person of Our Lord, pp. 286 ff. 8 called ‘light.’ There will be correspondence, but there will be transcendence also. This is ‘true light.’?

The method in which the transcendental element in the person of Christ came to be recognized by the Church is of the greatest importance in this connexion. The order is the very reverse of that which is continually assumed. The Gospels were written to preserve for the Church the historic basis of a doctrine of Christ already recognized as transcending human limitations. It was not that some simple historic fact became sublimed in human thinking so that reverence passed into superstition until the miraculous obscured the human event, but rather that in a spiritual illumination it was seen and accepted that the tabernacle of God was already with men, and that He dwelt among them. That. illumination gave unity and interpretation to all the experiences of three memorable years; it filled the disciples of Jesus with both confidence and hope; and this backward and forward reference knit into one great and powerful community of believers the separate and comparatively ineffectual individuals that had followed Jesus, until they ‘ turned the world upside down.’* They did not begin by sublimating

* The expression ‘true Light’ (1 John ii. 8) means not true as distinguished from false, but rather ideal, comprehensive, and all-inclusive. See Findlay, Fellowship in the Life Eternal, in loco.

? See Nolloth, ut supra, pp. 77, 217, 306; Denney, Jesus and the Gospels, p. 377; and Streatfeild, The Incarnation, humanity; they were caught up into the all-embracing sweep of Deity. They allowed it to obliterate all long-established distinctions, both racial and religious. A new conception of the human society began to appear. They had all things in common. They dwelt in the consciousness of an immanent Deity, a divine Parousia, one day to be made evident to the world. The ‘history,’ on the other hand, sprang out of their new-found need to instruct those who, as time went on, began to attach themselves to the new community. It was the demands of the Gentile Church for something other than interpretation, which might be merely subjective after all, that led to the recording of memories too precious to be lost. And so St. Mark wrote down his memoirs of St. Peter’s preaching, and St. Matthew drew up his collection of priceless sayings, and St. John Patient stated much of the Lord’s life Forgotten or misdelivered, and let it work.’

But it was the transcendental that came first in the consciousness of the Church.? The history as recorded was an afterthought, made necessary in the progress of events. We have at least four letters written by St. Paul which have received universal acceptance as genuine. But the Christ presented in these very early documents is no human being, passing in the twilight of man’s fading recollection into divine or semi-divine authority. Whether we consider the

* Browning, A Death in the Desert. ? Forsyth, op. cit. p. 323.

Epistles to the Thessalonians or that to the Galatians } to be the earliest of his writings, Christ is presented in each as already invested with divine honour and - authority, and this in the thought of one who had shown himself to be a bigoted upholder of that Judaism to which the thought of more than one God was anathema. There is only one possible cause for such an effect.’ If we accept as genuine the speeches of St. Peter as given in the Acts of the Apostles—and there is no reason why we should not do so—we come upon the same thing. That with which the Christian Church starts is the transcendental Christ. We need time for the mythical process to bring about the apotheosis common in other systems. Here the apotheosis springs into completeness from the first. :The only sufficient explanation of the fact is that , Jesus had been ‘declared Son of God in power by ,His resurrection from the dead.’

The other side from which criticism approaches the question before us is that of a critical study of the record. We are told? that a

—

‘We must submit the material transmitted in the Gospel to a careful sifting even in the case of the earliest Evangelists. The first process in this sifting is the getting behind the later writings

_ to their sources. St. Matthew and St. Luke are dependent upon St. Mark, and in their records of sayings upon another source containing utterances of our Lord, and these must be considered.’

* Matheson, John’s Portrait of Christ, p. 44. ? Arnold Meyer, Jesus or Paul, p. 68.

No exception can be taken to this; but we are not to stop there:

‘General considerations must come into play even in dealing with our earliest accessible sources. They are set in a miraculous narrative. The early Christians in their enthusiastic love and their joyous faith in the miraculous were disposed to a steady accumulation of miracle, and were prone to see in the miraculous element that which was essential and divine in Jesus.’

So this sifting process really means the removal from the record of everything that appears to savour of the miraculous. However authentic it may be, it is sufficient for its rejection that it bears the mark of the miraculous. Such criticism is really based upon the familiar axiom that ‘ Miracles are impossible.’ It is sufficient for our present purpose to claim that such a statement is no axiom, but rather the negation of the proposition. That proposition is that once at least the miracle of miracles did take place, and Deity, personal Deity, tabernacled in human flesh, the entirely divine becoming entirely human. To lay down as axiomatic the negation of all miracle is to foreclose this all-important question. Criticism of this kind starts with a theory and makes the facts fit in as best they may, at the cost of much paring and shaping, and even by the summary and arbitrary rejection of those that prove refractory.’ It seeks to differentiate between the human and the divine in a gospel which is no gospel unless it contains them both.

* See Nolloth, op. cit. pp. 346 ff.

It would distinguish between the historic object and the subjective interpretation. Too often it does so by denying one or other of the two great terms with which it deals. It presents us with the historic Jesus at the expense of the spiritual Christ. In its concentration upon the one it either ignores the other, or rejects as an unnecessary intrusion any appearance 1t may make upon what it considers to be the one and only plane of investigation. Its methods are unjust, and they are doomed to failure. The metaphysical refuses to be excluded. There is a worthy subjectivity which forces itself upon the objective with which we deal. No recorded fact can be separated from the subjective interpretation in which it is presented to us. Here the thing in itself does not exist apart from the mind that receives the conception. An experience is # fact as realized by a thinking subject; that subject is affected by it; a certain reaction follows in the recording mind; interpretation follows; and we cannot state the fact without the accompanying interpretation. We cannot admit either that the historic is missing from the teaching of St. Paul, or that the transcendental is lacking in the Synoptic Gospels. To pit these two writings against one another, to claim that they are antithetic, and then to call upon the world to choose between them, is the falsest of all issues. There isa higher synthesis which finds room for both ‘ Jesus’ and ‘ Christ,’ and this synthesis is the very heart of the Gospels.

Nor must such a synthesis be ruled out as inadmissible on the ground that it is apostolical. After all, the early Church was in a far better position for judging whether it was admissible or not than we can ever hope to be, and we find that the testimony of that Church is given without hesitation. To it had been given in the experience of its first teachers that which silenced all questions as to whether it was possible or not that the two terms ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ’ referred to one Person, and that Person One who possessed a definite historical position as well as a divine significance. The question whether it was so or not never seems to have been raised in the days when experience was immediate and conclusive. There was a sharp division of opinion as to the authority of the Mosaic statutes in the Church, whether they were or were not binding upon all its members. The Church was almost rent in two by a question concerning the particular day upon which our Lord celebrated the last Paschal Feast. But there is no suggestion of any conflict of opinion as to whether Jesus did or did not rise from the dead ; and in the light of that fact it is claimed from the earliest days that He was both Lord and Christ, that is to say, that He was both divine in Himself and that He fulfilled all that Jews had hoped to find in their Messiah.*

+The title ‘lord,’ Kvpios, is used both by St. Peter and frequently by St. Paul, together with the names ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ,’ in the same way as in the LXX it is used of God. Dalman says (Words of Jesus, p. 329): ‘As soon as Jesus entered into His state of kingly majesty, it

This was received as a matter of common acceptance. It was the experience which interpreted all that had taken place before. It was confidently appealed to, and as readily allowed. The Church of that day was not rent by Christological controversy, as it was in after days, when the appeal to experience as a matter of history had, in the natural order of things, become impossible. The resurrection of our Lord had led the Church to a brilliant, an inevitable, and a final interpretation. We have seen that there can be no revelation without interpretation, and it is worth while noticing here that the apostles claim the power to interpret. In a remarkable passage (1 Cor. 11. 1) St. Paul, speaking of the ‘ mystery,’ or according to some texts the ‘testimony,’ of God, declares that this is to be found in Jesus Christ and Him crucified. He then proceeds to show that in this matter discrimination is the product of a spiritual endowment. It is hidden from the became among His followers an acknowledgement of sovereignty; and when they addressed Him as the Son of God, then ‘‘ Our Lord’’ was not widely separated from the same designation for God. But it must be remembered that the Aramaic-speaking Jews did not, save exceptionally, designate God as ‘‘ Lord ’’; so that in the Hebraist section of the Jewish Christians the expression ‘‘our Lord’’ was used in reference to Jesus only, and would be quite free from ambiguity. But Hellenists had, and used frequently, the term as a designation for God.’