^ Cf. O. Schmiedel, Die Hauptprohleme der Lehen-Jesu Forschungs 1906, p. 35: "The early Church in whose circles the narratives of the life of Jesus originated, . . . was at one in its acknowledg- ment of Christ, its exalted Lord."
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latest. In the seventh decade of the first century, there- fore, it was of faith in the Christian community that Jesus Christ was a divine person. And this evidence is retrospective. What was with such firmness uni- versally believed of the nature of the founder of the Christian religion in the seventh decade of the first century, had not first in that decade become the faith of the Church. But only a short generation, as we conventionally count generations — something like five and thirty years — intervened between the death of Jesus and the composition of the Synoptic Gospels. It is impossible to suppose that the conception of Jesus had radically altered in this brief interval; that a primi- tive humanitarlanism for example had in the course of thirty or forty years been transformed into a universal conviction of the deity of Jesus, such as is expressed with simplicity and unstudied emphasis in our Gospels. The witness of the Synoptic Gospels is accordingly a witness to the aboriginal faith of Christians.
Nor is the force of this conclusion weakened by at- tempting to get behind our Gospels and appealing to Earlier the yet earlier documents out of which Documentary they may be thought to have been Basis framed. Grant that our Gospels belong
to the second generation of documents; and that behind them lie still earlier documents upon which they de- pend. These earlier documents cannot be presumed to have presented a portrait of Jesus radically different from that which all three of their representatives have derived from them. We have simply pushed back ten, fifteen, or twenty years our literary testimony to the deity of Jesus: and how can we suppose that the de- terminative expression of the Church's faith In A. D,
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50 or A. D. 40 differed radically from the Church's faith In A. D. 30 — the year In which Jesus died? The assurance that our Gospels rest on earlier documentary sources becomes thus an additional assurance that the conception of the person of Jesus which they present in concert is the conception which held the mind and heart of the Church from the very beginning.
How fully justified this conclusion Is may be illus- trated by examining the conception of Jesus imbedded The Sources in the hypothetical sources which the of the several schools of criticism reconstruct Synoptics £qj. ^^j. Synoptics. In each and all of them is found the same portrait of the supernatural Christ. Probably the theory of the origin of the Syn- optics most in vogue just now is still the so-called " two- source " theory, in some one or other of its forms. According to this theory, our three Synoptics in their main substance are compounded out of two important primitive documents, which may be conveniently called ' the original Mark ' and ' the Matthean sayings.' The former of these is supposed to be substantially and, in the view of many critics, very closely indeed, rep- resented by our present Mark; while from the latter a good portion of the material In Matthew and Luke not also contained In Mark is thought to be derived, — certainly what is common to these two Gospels apart from Mark, and doubtless also something not repro- duced in both of them. According to the present most fashionable form of this theory, then, we are reading substantially a primitive evangelical document when we read our present Mark. Some suppose the primi- tive Mark to have been a longer document than our present Mark, some suppose it to have been a shorter
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document, some suppose It to have differed from It not more than one textual recension may differ from another, — say a " Western " MS. of Luke from a " Neutral " one. But few would care to contend that the general portrait of Jesus drawn In It differed markedly from that which lies on the pages of our present Mark. The Jesus brought before us In our present Mark, however, Is, as we have seen, distinctly and distinctively a supernatural person: and It must have been this same distinctly and distinctively super- natural Jesus, therefore, which was set forth In the primitive Mark.
Indeed, we can demonstrate this without difficulty. For It Is easy to show that It Is Impossible to construct