The Jesus of History | Page 9

account of a human character.
First of all, give the man's words his own meaning. Make sure that
every term he uses has the full value he intends it to carry, connotes all
he wishes it to cover, and has the full emotional power and suggestion
that it has for himself. Two quite simple illustrations may serve. The
English-born clergyman in Canada who spoke of a meeting of his
congregation as a "homely gathering" did not produce quite the effect
he intended; "home-like" is one thing in Canada, "homely" quite
another, and the people laughed at the slip--they knew, what he did not,
that "homely" meant hard-featured and ugly. My other illustration will
take us towards the second canon. I remember, years ago, a
working-man of my own city talking a swift, impulsive Socialism to

me. He was young and something of a poet. He got in return the
obvious common sense that would be expected of a mid-Victorian,
middle-aged and middle-class. And then he began to talk of hunger--the
hunger that haunted whole streets in our city, where they had indeed
something to eat every day, but never quite enough, and the children
grew up so--the hunger that he had experienced himself, for I knew his
story. With his eyes fixed on me, he brought home to me by the quiet
intensity of his speech--whether he knew what he effected or not--that
he and I gave hunger different senses. He gave the word for me a new
meaning, with the glimpse he gave me of his experience. Since then I
have always felt, when men fling theories out like his--schemes, too,
like his--wild and impracticable: "Ah, yes! what is at the heart of it all?
What but this awful experience which they have known and you have
not--the sight of your own folk hungering, life and faculty wasted for
want of mere food, and children growing up atrophied from the cradle"?
It is not easy to dissociate the language and the terms of others from the
meaning one gives to them oneself; it means intellectual effort and
intellectual discipline, a training of a strenuous kind in sympathy and
tenderness; but if we are to be fair, it must be done. And the rule
applies to Jesus also. Have we given his meaning to his term--force,
value, emotion, and suggestion? In a later chapter we shall have to
concentrate on one term of his--God--and try to discover what he
intends that term to convey.
The second canon is: Make sure of the experience behind the thought.
How does a man come to think and feel as he does? That is the
question antecedent to any real criticism. What is it that has led him to
such a view? It is more important for us to determine that, than to
decide at once whether we think him right or wrong. Again and again
the quiet and sympathetic study of what a man has been through will
modify our judgement upon his conclusions; it will often change our
own conclusions, or even our way of thinking. We have, then, to ask
ourselves, What is the experience that leads Jesus to speak as he does,
to think as he does? In his case, as in every other, the central and
crucial question is, What is his experience of God? In other words,
What has he found in God? what relations has he with God? What does
he expect of God? What is God to him? Such questions, if we are

candid and not too quick in answering, will take us a long way. It was
once said of a man, busy with some labour problem, that he was
"working it out in theory, unclouded by a single fact." Is it not fair to
say that many of our current judgements upon Jesus Christ are no better
founded? Can we say that we have any real, sure, and intimate
knowledge of his experience of God? The old commentator, Bengel,
wrote at the beginning of his book that a man, who is setting out to
interpret Scripture, has to ask "by what right" he does it. What is our
right to an opinion on Jesus Christ?
The third canon will be: Ask of what type and of what dimensions the
nature must be, that is capable of that experience and of that language.
One of the commonest sources of bad criticism is the emphasis on
weak points. The really important thing in criticism is to understand the
triumphs of the poet or painter, let us say, whom we are studying. How
came he to achieve poem or picture, so profound and so true? In what
does he differ from other men, that he should do work so fundamental
and so eternal? Lamb's punning jest at Wordsworth--that Wordsworth