The Jesus of History | Page 8

his lifetime the Gospels
reveal much about Jesus that in contemporary opinion would degrade
him--sighs and tears and fatigue, liability to emotion and to pain,
friendship with women.
With these revelations of character we may group passages where the
Gospels tell of Jesus surprising or shocking his disciples--startling them
by some act or some opinion, for which they were not prepared, or
which was contrary to common belief or practice--passages, too, where
he blames or criticizes them for conventionality or unintelligence.
It has been remarked that the frequency and fidelity of Jesus' own
allusions to country life, his illustrations from bird and beast and flower,
and the work of the farm, are evidence for the genuineness of the

tradition. Early Christianity, as we see already in the Acts of the
Apostles, was prevailingly urban. Paul aimed at the great centres of
population, where men gathered and from which ideas spread. The
language of Paul in his epistles, the sermons inserted by Luke in the
Acts, writings that survive of early Christians, are all in marked
contrast to the speech of Jesus in this matter of country life. When we
recall the practice of ancient historians of composing speeches for
insertion in their narratives, and weigh the suggestion that the sermons
in the Acts may conceivably owe much to the free rehandling of Luke
or may even be his own compositions, there is a fresh significance in
his marked abstention from any such treatment of the words of Jesus. It
means that we may be secure in using them as genuine and untouched
reproductions of what he said and thought.
This leads us to another point. The central figure of the Gospels must
impress every attentive reader as at least a man of marked personality.
He has his own attitude to life, his own views of God and man and all
else, and his own language, as we shall see in the pages that follow. So
much his own are all these things that it is hard to imagine the
possibility of his being a mere literary creation, even if we could
concede a joint literary creation by several authors writing independent
works. Indeed, when we reflect on the character of the Gospels, their
origin and composition, and then consider the sharp, strong outlines of
the personality depicted, we shall be apt to feel his claim to historicity
to be stronger than we supposed.
Finally, two points may be mentioned. The Church from the very start
accepted the Gospels. Two of them were written by men in Paul's own
personal circle (Philemon 24; Col. 4:10, 14). All found early
acceptance and wide use,[6] and after a century we find Irenaeus
maintaining that four Gospels are necessary, and are necessarily
all--there are four points of the compass, seasons and so forth; therefore
it is appropriate that there are four Gospels. The argument is not very
convincing; but that such an argument was possible is evidence to the
position of the Gospels as we have them. We must remember the
solidarity of that early Church. The constituency, for which the Gospels
were written, was steeped in the tradition of Jesus' life, and the

Christians accepted the Gospels, as embodying what they knew; and
there were still survivors from the first days of the Gospel. When
Boswell's Life of Johnson was published, the great painter, Sir Joshua
Reynolds, a lifelong friend of Johnson, said it might be depended upon
as if delivered upon oath; Burke too had a high opinion of the book. In
the same way the Gospels come recommended to us by those who
knew Jesus, though, it is true, we do not know their names.
The Gospels do not tell us all that Christians thought of Jesus, but they
imply more than they say. The writers limited themselves. That Luke,
for years a friend of Paul's, so generally kept his great friend's theology,
above all his Christology, out of his Gospel, is significant. It does not
mean divergence of view. More reasonably we may conclude
something else: he held to his literary and other authorities, and he was
content; for he knew to what the historical Jesus brings men--to new
life and larger views, to a series of new estimates of Jesus himself. He
left it there. In what follows, we must not forget in our study that
behind the Gospels, simple and objective as they are, is the larger
experience of the ever-working Christ.
There are three canons which may be laid down for the study of any
human character, whether of the past or of to-day. They are so simple
that it may hardly seem worth while to have stated them; yet they are
not always very easy to apply. Without them the acutest critic will fail
to give any sound