The passage just quoted (Ac I-'*-) is practically coterminous with the oldest form of Gospel which we possess. ' Beginning from the baptism of John unto the day that he was taken up ' : these are the limits within which lies the Gospel according to Mark. Hence we might say that to preach this gospel is to preach Christ, on condition, of course, that it is preached in its connexion with Jesus exalted. Merely to narrate the history of Jesus, even if we had the materials for it, would not be to preach Christ. We need, of course, to know the historical Jesus, as the qualifications for Apostleship show ; but to preach Christ means to preach that Person as present in the sovereignty of His resurrection. It is not preaching Christ if we tell the story of the life and death merely as events in a past continually growing more remote. It is not iweaching Christ though we tell this story in the most vivid and moving fashion, and gather round it, by the exercise of historical imagination or dramatic skill, the liveliest emotions ; it is not preaching Christ to present the life and death of
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Jesus as a higli and solemn tragedy, \\ith l)o^vel• in it to purify the soul bj- pity and terror. There is no preaching of Christ, posses^sed of religious signi- ficance, that does not rest on the basis on which the Apostolic preaching rested : His exaltation in power, and therefore His peri)etual presence. The liistorical Jesus is indispensable : but if we are to have a Christian religion, the historical must be- come present and eternal. This it does through the resurrection as apprehended by faith.
3. P'or the purposes of this article it is assumed that the Sj'noptic Gospels give such a knowledge of the historical Jesus iis is sutticient for the preacher's ends. No doubt He is dejjicted for us there by writers who believed in Him iis the Christ, and for whom the light of His exaltation wiis reflected on the lowliness of His earthly career ; but this light is not necessarily a distort- ing one. We have no reason to say that there is anything in these Gospels which is untrue to the historical personality of Jesus, anything which represents Him in mind, in will, in temper, in character, in His consciousness as a whole of His relations to God and man, as other than He really was. Extravagant things luwe been said by many writers of Lives of Jesus, from Strau.ss down- wards, on the imperfection of our knowledge, and on the way in which the real Jesus has been dis- guised from the very beginning by the idealization of His figure in the faith and love of those who preached Him — and especiall}' in the Gospels. If we concenti\ate our attention on the character of Jesus, on the spirit of His words and deeds and death, on His consciousness of His relations to God and men — in a word, on what He was and achieved in the spiritual world — it is the present writer's con- viction that we shall feel the very reverse of this to be the truth. "We may be dubious about this or that word, this or that incident in the Gospels, but we have no dubiety at all about the Person. The great life that stands out before us in the Gospels is more real than anything in the world ; and Jesus is so far from being hidden from us that it is no exaggeration to say that we know Him better than anybody who h;is ever lived on earth.
It does not follow from this that we accept the Evangelists' proofs that Jesus was the Christ, or that in preaching Christ we employ the same argu- ments as they to show that Jesus has the unique significance for religion which was represented for them by the ^lessianic title. Broadly speaking, these arguments were two — one from jirophecy and one from miracles. Both may be accepted in prin- ciple without being accepted in form. The argu- ment from prophecy is an assertion of the con- tinuity of revelation, of the one purpose of God running through it all, and culminating in Jesus. Jesus is the fulfilment of all the hopes contained in the ancient revelation, and we look for no other : ' How many soever are the promises of God, in him is the yea' (2 Co 1-'^) ; we recognize this, and the absolute signiHcance which it secures for Jesus in religion. But we no longer prove it to ourselves 1)V emphasizing, in the manner of the First Gospel, particular correspondences between incidents in the life of Jesus and passages in the OT. There is no religious and no intellectual value for us in such fultilments of prophecy as Mt •2'^- '*• ^. We should apply the Pauline principle (2 Co l-^') quite ditt'er- ently, recognizing that correspondence is one tiling, fultilment another. Jesus did not reallj- come to fulfil prophecy in the sense of carrying out a programme the details of which were Hxed before- hand ; He came to fulfil Himself, or to fulfil the will of the Father, as the Father made it plain to Him from steji to step ; and though, on one occa- sion (Mk 11'"'"), He Himself arrange<l an incident in which a literal correspondence with a prophecy