And so, in fact, is the mere fact that He made these claims. We have seen that the fact that He made Not Supposable these claims is not only asserted by all that Jesus made His followers, but is safeguarded by False Claims the;,- faith in His deity, which were in- explicable without it. But it is evident that He could not have made such a claim unless what He claimed was true. We are not absurdly arguing that the claim to be God is one which cannot be made by a human being untruly. What is it that the folly or wickedness of men will not compass? But why should we absurdly argue that Jesus may be supposed to have done what- ever we think within the compass of human folly or human wickedness? Was Jesus the silliest of men; or the most wicked? The point is not that no man could make such a claim untruly, but that Jesus could not make it untruly! Many men there have been, and are, who might do so; some have done so — men who were vilely impostors or wildly insane. Is Jesus to be classed with these men? Are we to ask with Renan how far Jesus may be supposed to have gone in assuming a role He knew He had no claim upon? Are we to ask, with Oscar Holtzmann, was Jesus a fanatic? These are the alternatives: grossly deceiving; grossly deceived; or else neither deceiving nor deceived, but speaking the words of soberness and truth. He, the flower of human sanity; He, the ripe fruit of human perfection; can He be supposed to have announced to His followers that He was above all angels, abode continually in equal intercourse with the Father, shared with Him in the ineffable Name — and It not be true? As Dr. Gwatkin' crisply puts it,
2 The Knoivledge of God, i., 120.
The Issue of the Investigation 303
" There is a tremendous dilemma here which must be ■faced: assuming that the tremendous claim ascribed to Him Is false, one would think It must have disor- dered His life with Insanity If He made It Himself, and the accounts of His life If others Invented It." This witness Is true. Neither Jesus nor His follow- ers could have Invented the claims to deity which Jesus Is reported to have made for Himself: for the truth of these claims Is needed to account both for Jesus and for His followers.
We have no Intention of stopping here to argue these points; If Indeed to establish them they need more
The Issue the argument than their mere statement. It
Sufficient u i. z.
Evidence of ^^^ necessary, however, to suggest
the Source them In order to Indicate the gain we register upon ascertaining, as we have ascertained, that the entire Christian community from the very first was firmly convinced of the deity of Its Lord. That fact established, It carries with it the truth of the convic- tion. For the conviction, in the circumstances In which it was formed and held, cannot be accounted for save on the assumption of the existence of compelling evi- dence for it, and this compelling evidence must include in it the claims of Jesus, which in turn cannot be accounted for save on the assumption of their truth. Grant that Jesus was really God, in a word, and every- thing falls orderly into its place. Deny It, and you have a Jesus and a Christianity on your hands both equally unaccountable. And that is as much as to say that the ultimate proof of the deity of Christ is just — Jesus and Christianity. If Christ were not God, we should have a very different Jesus and a very dif- ferent Christianity. And that Is the reason that mod-
304 The Des'ignatio7is of Our Lord
ern unbelief bends all its energies in a vain effort to abolish the historical Jesus and to destroy historical Christianity. Its instinct is right: but its task is hope- less. We need the Jesus of history to account for the Christianity of history. And we need both the Jesus of history and the Christianity of history to account for the history of the world. The history of the world is the product of the precise Christianity which has actually existed, and this Christianity is the product of the pre- cise Jesus which actually was. To be rid of this Jesus we must be rid of this Christianity, and to be rid of this Christianity we must be rid of the world-history which has grown out of it. We must have the Chris- tianity of history and the Jesus of history, or we leave the world that exists, and as it exists, unaccounted for. But so long as we have either the Jesus of history or the Christianity of history we shall have a divine Jesus.
INDEXES
These Indexes have been, with great kindness, prepared by the Rev. Dr. John H. Kerr, Secretary of the American Tract Society. Thanks are due to Dr. Kerr also for whatever ac' curacy has been attained in printing the text of the book.
INDEXES
I. Index of the Designations of our Lord.