It Is not necessary to spend much time upon this demand in its simplest form, that, namely, which would The Reportorial merely separate out from the Synoptic Element in the Gospels as they stand the words attrib- Gospels \xtQ,d to Jesus, and seek to ascertain from them Jesus' witness to the nature of His person and the quality of His dignity. It must have been ob- served as we ran over the designations applied to our Lord In the Gospels and sought to estimate their sig- nificance, that the most remarkable of them are drawn from the words of Jesus. The fact Is too patent and striking to have failed to attract attention: the higher teaching of the Gospels as to our Lord's person Is embodied very especially In His own words. It Is on His lips, for example, that the term ' Lord ' appears when employed In Its loftiest connections. It Is He alone who applies to Himself the significant title of ' Son of Man,' the vehicle of the most constant claim for Him of a superhuman nature. It Is He alone who, speaking out of His own consciousness, proclaims Him- self superior to those highest of God's creatures, the angels (Mk 13^-, Mt 24^^) : represents Himself as living In continuous and perfect Intercommunion with the Father, knowing Him even as He Is known by Him and acting as the sole adequate mediator alike of the knowledge of God and of the grace of God to men (Mt ii-^ Lk lO") : and In His great closing utterance places Himself, along with the Father and Holy Spirit and equally with them, even In the awful precincts of the Divine Name Itself (Mt 28^^). To separate between the narrative and reportorial elements of the Gospels, therefore, only brings home to us with peculiar poignancy the testimony they bear to the deity
The Synoptic Jesus Primitive 157
of our Lord, resting this testimony, as they do, on the firm basis of our Lord's own self-testimony — a self- testimony in which He at times lays bare to us the in- nermost depths of His divine self-consciousness.
There can be no question of the deity of our Lord, therefore, if we can trust the report which the evangel- ists give of His words. It is at this point, however, Trustworthiness that the assault on the validity of their of the Evangel- representation Is made. We are not
ical Report asked to distinguish between what the evangelists say in their own person and what they say in the person of Jesus. We are asked to distinguish between what Is really theirs in their account of the life and teaching of Jesus and what is really Jesus' own transcribed Into their narratives. It is suggested that they may have, or rather that they must have, and actually have, attributed much to Jesus which He never said; that they have read back their own ideas Into His teaching, and unconsciously — or more or less con- sciously— placed on His lips what was In point of fact the dogmatic elaborations of the later Christian com- munity. And It Is demanded that we, therefore, sub- ject the whole body of the evangelic representation of Jesus' teaching to the most searchingly critical scrutiny with a view to sifting out from It what may really be depended upon as Jesus' own. Thus only, we are told, will it be possible to find firm footing. Faith Is the foe of fact : and In the enthusiasm of their devotion to Jesus It was Inevitable that His followers should clothe Him In their thought of Him with attributes which He did not possess and never dreamed of claiming: and It was equally Inevitable that they should Imagine that He must have claimed them and have ended by
158 The Designations of Our 'Lord
representing Him as claiming them. We shall never know the truth about Jesus, therefore, we are told, until we penetrate behind the Jesus of the evangelists to the Jesus that really was.
The situation might not have been so bad, we are told, if the evangelists had been merely transmitters
_ . , , „ of a tradition, like, say, the rabbinical Faith the Foe , , n 1 . • , i-r