is in Him is in ' the True God ' and has ' the Eternal Life, — ' the Eternal Life ' that was in the Father and has been manifested in His ' Son Jesus Christ,' and is now declared by the Apostle in order that his readers, too, may enter into that fellowship which he was him- self enjoying " with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ" (i^). The Epistles of John, also, thus culminate not only in calling Christ ' God,' but in so calling Him ' God ' as to throw out into emphasis r t , that He is all that God is. James calls Him ' the P>v |A^' Glory': Peter ' theT^HSt* God 'V Paul 'God over ^-*«-'*'^*^' all ' : John ' the Real God.'^** It was because he so con- ceived Jesus as God's unique Son (i Jno 4^) that John is able to speak of the fo-rgiveness of sins " through His Name" (i Jno 2^^), and of faith "in His Name" securing eternal life (5^^, cf. 3"^), and even (3 Jno 7) of the whole Christian course turning on loyalty to ' the Name,' — that is, obviously, Jesus' Name, — ' without further definition. Clearly, to him, ' the Name of Jesus ' was the Name that is above every
name.^^
Even a rapid glance like this over the designations
applied to Christ in the Epistles written by Christ's How Our Lord's iiTin^sd'^t^ companions will suffice to Companions show that the estimate put upon His Thought of Him personality by Paul has nothing in it peculiar to that writer. There may meet us, as we pass from Epistle to Epistle, varying methods of giv- ing expression to the faith common to all: but it is common to all to look upon Jesus Christ as a divine
-^ Dr. Westcott in an additional note on i Jno 3-^, p. 129 seq., gives a careful study of the names of our Lord in 1 John. Cf. also p. 189 seq., where he discusses the term ' the Christ.'
-^ Cf. Westcott, Epistles of St. John, pp. 129 and 232.
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person. So far as appears it did not occur to anyone in the primitive Christian community to put a lower es- timate upon His personahty than that; and writer vies with writer only in his attempts to give his faith in his divine Redeemer clear and emphatic expression. If there was a more primitive conception than this of Jesus' dignity it had died away and left no trace be- hind it before the Christian community found a voice for itself. Whether that can be conceived to have happened in the course c^f the few years which inter- vened between the public career and death of Jesus and the rise of a Christian literature, — say, in James, — or, say, in Paul, — or, say, in the evangelic docu- ments,— each one must judge for himself. But in seek- ing to form an opinion on this matter, it should be borne in mind that there intervened only a very brief period indeed between the death of Christ and the beginnings of Christian literature: that much of this literature credibly represents itself as the product of actual companions of our Lord: and that it was all written in the presence of such companions, reflects their opinions, and was published under their eye. That absolutely no trace of a lower view of the person of Christ is discernible in any portion of this literature seems in these circumstances not only a valid sugges- tion but a convincing proof that no such lower view had been prevalent in the Christian community: that, In a word, the followers o-f Jesus must be supposed to have been heartily convinced of His deity from the very beginning.
THE WITNESS OF THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS
The Epistle to the Hebrews enters no claim to be the composition of one of our Lord's immediate follow- ers. Neither does it represent the thought of a period antedating the composition of the Epistles of Paul. It synchronizes in its date rather with that of the later half of these Epistles (c. A. D. 64). It comes to us like its own Melchizedek, " without father, without mother, without genealogy," bearing its own independ- ent witness to how Jesus was thought and spoken of by the Christian community in the seventh decade of the first Christian century; or, at least, by a special and very interesting group of Christians living at that time, made up of those Jews who had seen In Jesus the promised Messiah and accepted Him as their longed-for Redeemer.
In the designations it applies to our Lord in gen- eral, this Epistle reflects, of course, the usage of the
first age of the Church, which has al- Prevalence of 11 1 j • ^i_ ^l t- •
•Christ' ready been observed m the other Epis- tles: but equally of course not without its own peculiarities. As in the Epistles of Paul, the most frequently occurring of the simple designations is 'Christ' (36-14 5^ 6' 911-14,24,28 ^26) 1 xhe simple * Jesus,' however, is employed relatively much more
* ' Christ * is used everywhere as a proper name — even when it has the article: cf. Davidson, Ep. to the Heb., 73, note i. In some passages the term * Son ' is almost or quite a proper name : cf. Riehm 272, Da- vidson, loc. cit., note 2.
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Witness of Epistle to the Hebrews 277