The life and teachings of Jesus Christ; a continuous narrative collated from the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John

Introduction

TO

"THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF

JESUS CHRIST."

Dean Stanley tells the story that, on one occasion, when he visited the great German scholar and theologian Heinrich von Ewald, a little New Testament which was lying on the table happened to fall to the ground. Ewald, who was then regarded by many narrow and ignorant persons as a terrible heretic, stooped and picked it up, and as he laid it back on the table exclaimed, with a glow of indescribable enthusiasm, " In this little book is contained all the best wisdom of the world." True of the New Testament as a whole, Ewald's remark would be yet more immediately true of the record of the Life and Teaching of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ as contained in the Four Gospels. These Gospels depict the one perfect example, furnish the one infallible guide, for the sons of men. They are the unmingled wellspring of religion pure and undefiled. In the following pages the reader will find the pure and unadulterated Gospel, for they consist simply of an arrangement of the fourfold narrative of the Evangelists, in which special prominence is given to the actual words of Christ.

Let us speak first of the Life of Christ as set forth to us in the Four Gospels. They are the sole source of our knowledge. There are many apocryphal gospels, and they are full of interest as illustrative of the views of early Christians; but they do not add a single trustworthy fact to those recorded by the Evangelists. Nay, taken as a whole, they are little more than imaginative romances, and in every particular they are quite immeasurably inferior to the Four Gospels of our Canon. They do not elevate but dwarf, they do not brighten but only dim and blur, the figure of the living Christ. This is specially true of the various gospels of the Infancy. Most of the anecdotes they tell are not only impossible but repellent. They try to weave a garland round the brows of the Child Christ; but we instantlv see that it is an ugly and disfiguring wreath of flowers, which are always artificial and sometimes poisonous. It is a memorable testimony to the truth of the Gospels, that in comparison with these inventions they are as sunlight to darkness; and it is one of numberless incidental proofs of the Divine supremacy of Christ, that the moment human invention endeavours to supplement the true narrative of His years on earth, its only tendency is to lower and degrade.

It is the same with the records of Christ's Teaching. There were current in the early Church many unrecorded sayings of Christ, known as Agrapha Dogmata^ which are found in Origen, Clement of Alexandria, and other early Fathers. To these Logia, or " sayings/' belong those recorded in the little fragment of papyrus found last year in the grave-mounds of Oxyrrhyncus. There is only one saying of Christ's unrecorded in the Gospels on the genuineness of which we may rely with absolute certainty. It is the one mentioned by St. Paul in Acts xx. 35 : " Remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how Himself said, It is more blessed to give than to receive." Of all the other Zogia, at least twenty in number, some are only variations and illustrations of His words as recorded in the Canon, while others are often enigmatical and always of most dubious authenticity. Invention could as little add to Christ's teaching as it could enrich the annals of His life.

Let us speak first of the Life of our Saviour; then of His Teaching.

IN TROD UCTION.

I

i. Nothing is more remarkable than the profound and holy reticence of the narrators. The mother of Christ, after His crucifixion, lived in the home of one of the Evangelists — the beloved disciple, St. John — and there is an indescribable touch of delicacy and brightness about the story of the Nativity as described by St. Luke which seems to mark that it was derived from the lips of the Virgin Mary. The existence of so many apocryphal attempts to reproduce the events of the Infancy shows how strong was the desire to penetrate the holy veil of reserve and silence. But it was not intended so to be. We are told of various events before His birth, — the Annunciation; the doubt of Joseph; the visit to Elisabeth; the enrolment in Bethlehem. We are told of the incidents which clustered about His earliest infancy, — the birth in the stable of the inn at Bethlehem ; the humility of the manger-cradle. We have the exquisite verses which tell of the shepherds and the angel-song; the visit of the Magi; the Circumcision; the Nunc Dimittis of Simeon; the massacre of the Innocents; the flight into Egypt ; the return in the reign of Archelaus ; the retirement to provincial Nazareth of Galilee. These, however, are only attendant circumstances. But as regards the Child Christ Himself no word, no anecdote, is preserved beyond the sweet and simple fact that " He grew in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man." We know that His early years as a little child were " as the flower of roses and the spring of the year, and as lilies by the watercourses"; but we know no more. The spurious narratives surround his childhood in the house of the Galilean peasant with the blaze of portent and miracle. In reality — and this fact, little as we should a priori have expected it, is full of instruction — it was passed like any other childhood, distinguishable only by its wisdom and its innocency, as of a child who grew and waxed strong, becoming full of wisdom, and the grace of God was upon Him. The silence is an eloquent proof of the simple truthfulness of the Evangelists. They record nothing, because there was nothing special which it was essential to record. It was not meant that the holy veil of those secluded years should be uplifted, and therefore those who had witnessed them would not gratify a vain curiosity by giving rein to their imaginations in the invention of unreal scenes. And herein the Evangelists furnish an undesigned but very decisive proof of the authenticity of the things they did record.

ii. We come next to Christ's early boyhood. Here again we have no stories of His companions, or of His home amusements, of His schooldays and His relations to parents and teachers, as in the spurious evangelists. All that we are told is the single anecdote of His visit to Jerusalem, with His parents, at the Passover, when He was twelve years old. In this case also all is surprising. Believing what the Evangelists did believe, that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the Living God, if they had not been telling the simple unsophisticated truth, we should have found in their narratives the same assumptions of Omniscience and of Superiority over the assembled Rabbis which we find in the imaginary records. Even in many of the mediaeval and modern pictures of the scene Christ is represented rather as refuting and instructing the Rabbis and Pharisees, than as " sitting in the midst of them, both hearing them and asking them questions." In St. Luke's story we see, as incidentally as in the narratives of the Infancy, that the perfect Divinity of Christ in no way clashes with His perfect Humanity. He grew up like other boys, distinguished only by blameless innocence, and growing " in wisdom" no less than " in stature," and " in favour with God and man."

iii. It is a curious circumstance that the only recorded utterance of the Son of God for thirty years should have been almost universally misunderstood. What Jesus said to His sorrowing parents was not " How was it that ye sought Me ? Wist ye not that I must be about My father's business V The answer was far more simply natural, for the hour had not yet come when the Lord of

Life had formally or publicly entered upon His mission. What He said (as was decisively proved by the Rev. Dr. Field of Norwich to the Revision Company of 1882) was, " Wist ye not that I must be in My Father's House ?" Although the Temple had been degraded by priests, scribes, and Pharisees into a " a den of thieves," it remained to the last the favourite scene of the Lord's teaching, and it was in those hallowed, though now dishallowed, courts that He uttered, in later years, some of the Divinest addresses. The meaning of what He said to Joseph and His mother was not, " You might have known that I should be engaged in furthering the work of God," but, " Strange that you should have sought Me sorrowing, and not have come first to the House of My Father, of which now for the first time I behold the glories and the worship."

This, then, is the only sentence spoken by Christ for thirty years — from His birth in the cradle to the beginning of His ministry — which has been preserved for us. It is but one short remark, called forth by the circumstances of the moment, when He had become what the Jews called " a son of the Covenant," or had been, as we should say, " confirmed." Further than this nothing is made known to us but one fact about His boyhood, and one about His youth and early manhood.

iv. The rest of His boyhood is summed up in the clause that " He we?it with His parents, and came to Nazareth, and He was subject unto them" Even in this clause we have an implicit contradiction of the inventions of the apocryphal narratives in which the young Jesus is represented as a worker of superfluous and meaningless portents, and as assuming an wholly unbecoming tone towards His leaders and teachers. Our Lord in His addresses did not disdain to inculcate those rules of simple modesty and courtesy which add so much to the sweetness and dignity of life. In an age when reverence and the fearfulness of modest duty have, as a rule, vanished from the self-confident and too often disrespectful bearing of the young, it is a most needful lesson to us that, when the King of kings and Lord of lords was a boy at

Nazareth, He was modest and obedient. This fact may serve to illustrate the words of the English poet — which do not sound irreverent to those who know how highly our Lord and His Apostles valued the virtue of Imeixzta, or " sweet reasonableness" — that

the best of men That e'er wore earth about Him, was a sufferer ; A pure, meek, patient, gentle, tranquil spirit, The first true gentleman that ever breathed.

v. This calm, obscure life of uninterrupted labour revealed to the world the truth which it has never adequately grasped, that " a man's life consisteth not in the multitude of things which he possesseth" ; and that all the things for which men most toil and moil, and sell their souls, and destroy themselves — wealth, luxury, pleasure, rank, fame, power, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the vainglory of life — are but insignificant earthly accidents, which have nothing at all to do with the true riches and the true nobleness. They only affect the merest outside of life, and have no connection with its immortal dignity or true essence. The humble poverty and obscurity of the life of Jesus in the workshop of the Galilean peasant reveals to us that blessedness is in the reach of all, and that a man, on whom the world may look down from the whole altitude of its inferiority as the humblest of mechanics, may yet be incomparably greater and happier than any king.

vi. The single word which sums up all that we know of the outward facts of our Lord's life is found in the surprised questions of the Nazarenes, who, in accordance with the experience that a prophet has no honour in his own country, " were offended in Him." " Is not this, they asked, the carpenter ?" (Mark vi. 3). Ignorant and biassed copyists have altered the reading into, " Is not this the son of the carpenter ?" But there is no doubt as to the true reading, and it reveals to us the inestimably precious fact that Jesus earned with His own hands His daily bread. The value and significance of this fact are immense. It constitutes a correction of the immemorial

&nd still continued pride and -error of the world. The ancients utterly despised manual labour: to the Greeks it was vulgar (fidvaocros) , to the Romans it seemed degrading. Such an expression as a "base mechanic" shows that, even for long centuries after the Dayspring had dawned upon the world, the haughty and the noble were far from having learnt that " labour honours the labourer." St. Paul felt it to be a subject not for humiliation but for honest pride that " his own hands had ministered to his necessities." It is the lot of the vast majority of the human race that they have to earn their own living by the toil of their hands and the sweat of their brow. It is a blessing and a consolation to these unnumbered myriads to know that their humble and toilsome poverty was deliberately chosen for His own lot by " the Lord of life and all the worlds."

vii. It was when Jesus " began to be about thirty years old" that, leaving the shop of the village carpenter, He obeyed the Divine call to enter upon His public ministry. For the brief three years and a half during which that ministry lasted, while we have abundant records of His life, there is not one which serves to gratify a merely superficial curiosity. To the early Christians the human Jesus was so utterly merged into the King Eternal, Immortal, Invisible, that they retained in their memories only those acts which were the signs of His Divine mission, or which involved the illustration of His doctrine. They did not preserve a single relic of His human life, which in the later ages of superstitious corruption would have been degraded into an idol or a fetish. They did not even care to indicate to future ages the exact localities of His birth, His transfiguration, His crucifixion, the grave where they laid Him, the mountain in Galilee where after His resurrection He appeared to His more than five hundred disciples. Nay, more, it is a supremely singular and almost unprecedented circumstance that every vestige even of traditio?i respecting the personal appearance of the Son of Man was so completely obliterated that it was a subject of controversy among the early Christians whether he was, as the Greek Fathers believed, " small and ill-favoured" (jitxpd? xai duaetd7j$) • or whether, as Jerome and the Latin Fathers thought and argued, there was, and must have been, a " starry something" (sidereum quiddum) in His countenance, and an ethereal loveliness which hung about His earthly presence, and commanded the passionate devotion of all who believed in Him, while it often overawed the hatred of the opponents, and even the fury of the multitude.

viii. It was only after the commencement of Christ's ministry that His life was summoned to assume an aspect which differs from the normal conditions of our human existence. " The trivial round and the common task" had now to be abandoned, and during the short remainder of His life He had to enter on conditions which are never represented as other than exceptional. The Apostles and the disciples were also summoned to follow Christ in His wandering homelessness ; but myriads of Christians might have been saved from futile practices had they observed that such a call was special and individual in its character. The vast multitudes whom Christ addressed were never bidden to sell all that they had, but only to carry out in their ordinary lives the spirit of His teaching. The inner and essential meaning of Christ's example cannot be, in the most distant degree, apprehended by the impossible attempt to reproduce the external conditions of His life. We can only follow Him by suffering our souls to be pervaded by His Spirit. It should be remembered that if the brief ministry was devoted to teaching and preaching and working miracles, all the previous thirty years were spent among "brothers and sisters," in the poor provincial home, in the every-day routine of common daily duty. How could the Lord have better illustrated the sacred beauty of those holy homes which are, or may be, to suffering men, the most precious of heavenly boons ? It is in the retirement of homes where Christ abides that

Love his golden shafts employs, there lights His constant lamp and waves his purple wings, Reigns there and revels.

ix. One of the most material and perplexing facts of our human life is the burden of its trials. We all experience in turn that, because we are men, we cannot escape suffering, since "man is born to sorrow as the sparks fly upwards." We may enjoy many years of peace, as doubtless Jesus did, in the village home, and during such years scarcely a single wave of trouble may roll over our breasts. But the day comes when all God's waves and storms seem to go over us. We suffer from accident, or bitter disappointment, or incessant care; or else we reap the fruits of our own misdeeds; or envy, and calumny, and hate, and pain molest us. Christ faced for us these manifold sorrows of mortal life, and taught us the blessed experience that "to suffer with Him is not to suffer." The first year of His ministry has been called " the Galilean Spring" ; but after that golden year the fury of religious and political hatred burst upon Him. The gladness of His early success was followed by a year of flight and persecution, and by long months of concealment and imminent peril, ended by a crisis of agony and a death of shame. The Lord Jesus not only endured all this for our sakes, but also to show us by His example how we may find not a curse but a beatitude in poverty, and humility, and persecution, and malediction. The record of Christ's trials has been for mankind a transfiguration of sorrow. It has also been a revelation of the Divineness of sympathy and compassion. Christ came not only to love as none ever loved before, but also to extend that love to those whom none had loved. The Pharisee would not notice even his own wife if he happened to pass her in the street, and he drew in his garments lest they should be defiled by touching such inferior creatures as he deemed women to be. Even the disciples were amazed that by the lonely well Jesus should talk to a woman ! Yet not for women only, but for women who were sinners — the most friendless, the most fallen, the most degraded, even for the penitent harlot who washed His feet with her tears and wiped them with the hairs of her head, even for the miserable adulteress as, amid her tangled hair, she ro THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF JESUS CHRIST.

sobbed before him on the Temple floor — He had a wellspring of tender compassion. The Apostles rebuked those who brought little children to Christ, but He took them in His arms, laid His hands upon them and blessed them. He chose among His teachers not only one who had been a bigoted zealot, but, in most opposite contrast to him, the utterly despised and hated publican whom every rigid Jew regarded with immense disdain. None were too low, none too wretched, for the tender and loving care of Him who came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.

x. One anguish, indeed, of human life our Lord did not and could not suffer. For the sting of all sorrow, as of death itself, is sin, and He came to show us a Sinless Ideal. Christ's sinlessness is the most unique proof that He was indeed the Son of God, the Saviour of the world. For of no other human being since time began can such sinlessness be predicated. Of all the hundreds of thousands of men who have lived, as Jesus did, in the blaze, not only of publicity, but of hostile publicity; of all the myriads, alike in public and private life, whose biographies have been recorded, or the facts of whose life are known, not one has ever ventured to say, " Which of you convinceth me of sin?" Of not one man has it ever been pretended, by his most enthusiastic admirers, that he was free from all human faults; nor has any human being, who has revealed to us the secrets of his own heart and life, ever pretended that he was not a sinner. But the life of the Saviour, in its fourfold record, has, for eighteen centuries, been subject to the most minute, intense, searching, and even indignant gaze, and yet no one has ever found in Him the shadow of any iniquity, or has been able to fix on Him even a trivial fault. He stands forth for example for ever " holy, harmless, undefined, and separate from sinners." It has been said that " what we all want is some one Pearl of great price, into which all the dispersed preciousness and fragmentary brilliances that dazzle the eyes shall be gathered. We want a Person, a living Person, a present Person, a sufficient Person, who shall satisfy our hearts, our whole

INTRODUCTION. II

hearts, and that at one and the same time, or else we shall never be at rest." That was the need of the world, and God supplied it when " the Dayspring from on high" dawned upon us. The ancient Christians sometimes played on the assonance of Christos and Chrestos ("gracious" or "precious"), and St. Peter (i Pet. ii. 7), perhaps in allusion to this, says, " to you that believe is the preciousness."

xi. And is not the inestimableness of God's gift to us in Christ illustrated by the unspeakable change which His coming has wrought in the world? Crime after crime has been suppressed ; wrong after wrong has died away, pierced through and through with the arrows of the Dawn. In the ancient world, as I have said before, the Gospel expelled cruelty; it curbed passion; it branded suicide; it punished and repressed the execrably frequent crime of infanticide ; it drove the infamous yet shameless impurities of heathendom into congenial darkness. There was hardly a class whose wrongs it did not remedy. It rescued the gladiator; it freed the slave; it protected the captive; it nursed the sick; it sheltered the orphan; it elevated the woman; it shrouded as with a veil the sacred innocence of the tender years of the child. In every region of life its ameliorating influence was felt. Christianity changed pity from a weakness into a virtue. It elevated poverty from a curse into a beatitude ; it ennobled labour from a degradation into a dignity and a virtue; it sanctified marriage from little more than a burdensome convention into little less than a blessed sacrament. In all lands it has created hearts so pure, and lives so peaceful, and homes so sweet, that angels seem to have whispered to men's despairing hearts, "Though ye have lien among the pots, yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove that is covered with silver wings, and her feathers like gold."

xii. And all this is still going on. The dark places of the world, which were for so many years the abodes of cruelty, have one after another been illuminated into Christian brightness. This has generally been achieved by the irresistible strength of weakness, as illustrated by the lives of a handful of poor and despised missionaries. The Gospel conquered Greece — her intellect, her philosophy, her satire, her glory; it conquered Rome — her immemorial traditions, her trebly hundred triumphs, the diadems of her all-powerful Caesars, the swords of her thirty legions; it conquered Jerusalem with her fifteen centuries of gorgeous worship and sacred memories ; it conquered the rushing tide of warlike barbarians; it won the Goths by the Bible of Wulfila ; it made Attila, and Genseric, and Totila respect unarmed priests; it said to the warlike Clovis, flushed as he was with his great victory at Tolbiac, " Sicambrian, burn what thou hast adored, adore what thou hast burned." But the triumphs of the Gospel ceased not there. The same Christianity afterwards won Northern and Central Europe; and then as the centuries went on — thanks to men like Las Casas, and St. Francis Xavier, and Brainerd, and John Eliot, and Adoniram Judson, and Marsden, and Carey, and Martyn, and Morrison, and Hannington, and Coleridge Patteson — it prevailed among Red Indians, and Hindoos, and Chinese, and Japanese, and Burmese, and Kaffirs, and Zulus, and the far-off cannibals of the Pacific Isles. And as we watch its still unceasing progress, can we for a moment doubt that the olden prophecy shall be fulfilled, and that at last " the knowledge of the Lord shall cover the earth as the waters cover the sea" ?

II

But now we turn from the facts of Christ's life to the characteristics of His teaching.

i. One of these was its tone of majestic authority. Christ had never passed through the training which in His days was regarded as indispensable for the position of a teacher. " How knoweth this man letters, having never learned?" asked the amazed and disgusted Pharisees. But they were impotent to resist the truth of His words, and the power and graciousness with which He spake, in spite of the furious taunts which they hurled at His poor adherents, whom they scornfully described as

" this multitude which knoweth not the law, and are accursed." Their own teaching had dwindled, as all religiosity tends to dwindle, into scholastic pettinesses, elaborate ritual, and endless repetitions. The contemporary Rabbis scarcely ever ventured to pronounce a judgment without appealing to the decisions of many Rabbis before them. Christ's method at once swept aside all this second-handness, and with intense bitterness the long-robed teachers, with their blue fringes and large phylacteries, saw the multitudes desert them and their schools to listen to a young man preaching from a boat or seated among the mountain lilies.

What was it ye went out to hear, By sea and land, from far and near?

A teacher ? Rather seek the feet Of those who sit in Moses' seat!

Go, humbly seek and bow to them, Far off in great Jerusalem.

What is it that ye came to note ? — " A young man preaching in a boat."

A prophet ? Boys and women weak,

Declare, or cease to rave.

Whence is it he hath learned to speak ?

Say, who his doctrine gave ?

A prophet ? Wherefore prophet he

Of all in Israel's tribes ? — M He teacheth with authority,

And not as do the scribes."

ii. Another character of our Lord's teaching was its absolute originality. Well might the astonished hearers exclaim, "What is this? A new teaching I" Judaism, since the days of Ezra, had dwindled more and more into mere Halachoth — rules of ceremonialism — many of them based on preposterous deductions from untenable propositions. A famous Rabbi on being asked, " Which is the greatest commandment ?" had answered, "The law about fringes." Christ's teaching was exclusively moral and spiritual. Not one Halachah could claim Him for its author. For fringes, phylacteries, ablutions of cups and platters, vain repetitions, sham fasts twice in the week, long praying, and the whole paraphernalia of conventional and cumbrous ceremonial, He expressed a profound contempt. Living in the miasma of hypocritical Pharisaic ordinances, His one rule was, "If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments," and those Ten Commandments He reduced to their essential principle in the one Law of Love. In a single sentence He abolished the agelong distinction between clean and unclean meats which lay at the root of all Jewish exclusiveness. He said that what came from within, not from without, defiles the man ; and this He said, " making all meats clean" (Mark vii. 19). Pure Christianity has been again and again defiled by turbid alien influxes of Eastern superstition — Mariolatry, unnatural self-maceration, false views of what God requires, priestly usurpation, and the miserable, unctuous, effeminate artificiality of mere external religiousness. Against all these the Church, whenever it desires to be wise and sincere, will find the effectual antidote in the pure and unsophisticated words of Him who came that all who see Him should have seen the Father.

iii. Again — as is shown by this little volume, in which all the actual words of Christ might be printed on a few pages — the teaching of the Son of God was unique in the amazing power of its compression. If we read any theological treatise, we shall find thousands of pages given to the verbal accuracies of theological distinctions. The vast folio of St. Thomas Aquinas was not regarded as at all too long for his Summa Theologice. But on ninetenths of the questions treated in the interminable and ponderous volumes of the Schoolmen our Lord Jesus Christ had nothing to say. He went to the heart of conduct and life, with which the nice technicalities of scholastic orthodoxy have, for the vast majority of the human race, little or no concern. His Divine power of compression is seen most of all in the Parables. They are absolutely unique among the utterances of human language. Fables and apologues are found in endless abundance, especially in the literature of the East. But is there one among them all to be compared for infinite instructiveness to the shortest and humblest of our Lord's parables ? Was so much ever revealed in one brief story as in the Parable of the Prodigal Son ? Were such worlds of meaning ever compressed into utterances which scarcely occupy five minutes as we find in the Parables of the Good Samaritan or of Dives and Lazarus? If the choice had to be between these brief stories and all the theological treatises ever written, who would hesitate for one instant to make his selection ?