The Jesus of History

ith and slain him that had the power of death (Hebrews 2:14), but not without gre

it was long before they realized that he meant any such thing. The cross was to them a strange idea, and for a long time they did not seriously face the matter. Once the cross was an accomplished fact, Christians could not, and did not wi

the way, going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was moving on before them; and they began to wonder; and as they followed they began to be afraid." He is moving to Jerusalem with a purpose. They do not understand it. He is wrapped in thought; and, as happens when a man's mind is working strongly, his pace quickens, and

we know about Jesus. The discovery of our ignorance is the beginning of knowledge. Plato long ago said that wonder is the mother of philosophy, and he was right. John Donne, the English poet, went farther, and said: "All divinity is love or wonder." When a man then begins to wonder about Jesus Christ in earnest, Jesus comes to be for him a new figure. Historical criticism has done this for us; it

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his disciples; one at least revolted, and we have to ask what it meant to Jesus to live with Judas, to watch his face, to recognize his influence in the little group-yes, and to try to win him again and to be repelled. "He learnt by the things that he suffered" that Judas would betray him; but the hour and place and method were not so evident, and when they were at last revealed-what did it mean to be kissed by Judas? Do we feel what he felt in the so-called trials-or was he dull and numbed by the catastrophe? How did he bear the beating of triumphant hatred upon a forsaken spirit? How did the horrible cry, "Crucify him! crucify him!" break on his ears-on his mind? When "the Lord turned and looked upon Peter" (Luke 22:61), what did it mean? How did he know that Peter was there, and what

bad criticism to give to the words of genius the value or the connotation they would have in the lips of ordinary people. To a great mind words are charged with a fullness of meaning that little people do not reach. The attempt has been made to recapture more of his thoughts by learning the value given to some of the terms he uses as they appear in the literature of the day, and of course it has been helpful. But we have to remember always that the words as used by him come with a new volume of significance derived from his whole personality. Everything turns on the connotat

it. It is to be a new beginning, an initiation, leading on to what we shall see but do not yet guess, though he gives us hints. We shall not easily fathom the depth of his idea of the new life, but along with it we have to study the width and boldness of his purpose. This new life is not for a few-for "the elect," in our careless phrase. He looks to a universal scope for what he is doing. It will reach far outside the bounds of Judaism. "They shall come from the east and from the west, and

e calls for men to come after him, to come behind him (Mark 1:17, 10:21; Luke 9:59). He emphasizes that they must think out the terms on which he enlists them. He does not disgu

is and the new age it was to bring. References to such a coming are indeed found in the Gospels as we have them, but we are bound to ask whence they come, and to inquire how far they represent exactly what he said; and then, if he is correctly reported, to make sure that we know exactly

was Sophocles. He is greater. Here is one who penetrates far deeper into things. His treatment of the psychology of sin itself shows how much more than an example was needed. Here, as in the other chapters, but here above all we have to remember the clearness of his insight, his swiftness of penetratio

Man is to save the lost, and if the lost are in danger so real, it follows that he must think of a thoroughly effective salvation, and that its achievement will be no light or easy task. "To give one's life as a ransom for many," says a modern teacher, "is of no avail, if the ransom is insufficient." What, then, and how much, does he mean by "to save," and how does he propose to do it? When the soul of man o

he whole doctrine of "Karma", vital to Buddhism and Hinduism, is, if I understand it aright, a strong and clear warning to us that the remission of punishment is no easy matter. Not only Eastern thinkers, but Western also, insist that there is no avoidance of the consequences of action. Luther himself, using a phra

nature, and as a repudiation of God. Two questions arise: Is it possible to recover lost moral qualit

or suggests, is primarily a question between Father and son, and he tries to lead us to believe how ready the Father is to settle that question. Once it is settled, we find, in fact, Father and son setting to work to mend the past. The evil seed has been sown and the sad crop must be reaped, the man who sowed it has to reap it-that much we all see. But Jesus hints to us that God himself loves to come in and help his reconciled son with the reaping; many hands make light work, especially when they are such hands. And even w

erry" ("Euphranthomen"). If we hesitate about it, Jesus calls us once more to "think like God," and tells us other stories, with incredible joy in them-"joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth." We must go back to his central conception of God, if we are to realize what he means by salvation. St. Augustine (Conf., viii. 3) brings out the value of these parables, by reminding us how much more we care for a thing that has been ours, when we have lost it and found it again. The shepherd has a new link with his sheep lost and found again, a new story of it, a shared experience; it is more his than ever. And Jesus implies that when a man is saved, he is God's again, and more God's own than ever before; and God is glad at heart. As for the man; a new power comes into his heart, and a ne

his purpose; and in order to do it, as we said before, his first step is to induce men to re-think God

gence and grasp of what moves and is real, his knowledge (a strong word to use, but we may use it) of God-with this purpose in his mind, thought out and understood, he deliberately and quietly goes to Jerusalem. He "s

borne in on me, it came to me: reasons? He cannot tabulate reasons; the thing, he says, was so clear that I was a long way past reasons. And yet he was right; he had reasons enough. What parent ever analysed reasons for loving his children, or would tabulate them for you? Jesus does not explain his reasons. We find, I think, that we are apt to have far more reasons for doing what we know is wrong, than we have for doing what we know is right. We do not want reas

e great phrase, "Go with him twain" (Matt. 5:41), was not likely to limit himself in meeting men's needs. He was bound to do more than we should expect, when he saw people whom he

. He sits with his disciples at a meal-the men whom he loved-he watches them, he listens to them. Peter, James, John, one after the other, becomes a call to him. They need redemption; they need far more than they dream; they need God. That pressure is there night and day-it becomes intercession, and that grows into inspiration. Our pra

love of God. He must secure that it is for every man the greatest reality in the world, the one great flaming fact that burns itself living into every man's consciousness. He sees that for this God calls him to the cross, so much so that when he prays in the garden that the cup may pass, his thou

tinct from us, closely as he is identified with us-and all this from a son of fact, who is not insane, who is not a quack, whose eyes are wide open for the real; whose instinct for the ultimate truth is so keen; who lives face to face with God. What does it mean? This, for one thing, that most of us have not given attention enough to this matter. I have confined myself in these chapters to the Syn

g else he ever did. It has in it more of him. Whoever he was, whoever he is, whatever our Christol

was he right? or

whatever it was, and the history of the Church is unintelligible. We live in a rational world-a world, that is, where, however much remains as yet unexplained, everything has a promise of being lucid, everything has reason

s of Palestine, whom they saw done to death in ignominy and derision-sitting at the right hand of God. Taken by itself, we might call such a belief mere folly; but too much goes with it for so easy an explanation. The cross was not the end. As Mr. Neville Talbot has recently pointed out in his book, "The Mind of the Disciples", if the story stopped with the cross, God remains unexplained, and the story ends in unrelieved tragedy. But it does not end in tragedy; it ends-if we can use the word as yet-in joy and faith and victory; and these-how should we have seen them but for the cross? They are bound up with his choice of the cross and his triumph over it all. Death is not what it was-"the last line of all," as Horace says. Life and immortality have been brought to light (2 Tim. 1:10). "The Lamb of God taketh away the sin of the world." So we read at the beginning of the Fourth Gospel, and the historical critic may

said that pain is a good thing; he cured it. But he chose it. The ancient world stumbled on that very thing. God and a Godlike man, their philosophers said, are not susceptible to pain, to suffering. That was an axiom, very little challenged. Then if Jesus suffered, he was not God; if he was God, he did not s

religious communities and in all governing classes: the sense of the value of themselves, their preconceptions and their judgements-a strong feeling of the importance of the work they have to do, along with a certain reluctance to face strange facts, and some indifference as to what happens to other people if the accepted theory of the C

he cry of Jesus on the cross. I have sometimes thought there never was an utterance that reveals more amazingly the distance between feeling and fact. That was how he felt-worn out, betrayed, spat upon, rejected. We feel that God was more there than ever. As has bee

le as Jesus does, if we understood them as sympathetically and cared as much for them, the cross would be far more intelligible to us? But if, in plain fact, we do not see why we should bear the cross for others, why we should deny and obliterate self on this scale for the salvation of men-how, I ask, to people of such a mind should Jesus be intelligible? It is not to be expected. In no other sph

by calling it incredible. Think of it. It takes your breath away. If that is true, does not the whole plan of my life fall to pieces-my whole scheme of things for the world, my whole body of intellectual conceptions? And the man to whom this happens may well say he is afraid. He is afraid, because it is so strange; because, when you realize it, it takes you into a new world; you cannot grasp it. A man whose instinct is for truth may hesitate-will hesitate about a conception like this. "Is it possible," he will ask himself, "that I am deluded?" And another thought rises up again and again, "Where will it take me?" We can understand a man being afraid in that way. I do not think we have much right not to be afraid. If it is the incarnation of God, what right have we not to be afraid? Then, of course, a man will say that to follow Christ involves too much

are uneasy. But when all is said, the figure on the road ahead of them, waitin

tory began with-he chose twelve that they might "be with him." To understand him, we, too, must be with him. What takes men there? After all, it is, in the familiar phrase, the love of Jesus. If one l