In compiling the later Acts of the Martyrs, Christians were better off. For one thing, these subsequent trials were usually deliberate ; occasionally they were expected for some time, so that the Church was not taken by surprise, and in any case attention was piously paid to the last words and experiences of the saint. By the 4th cent, the shorthand reports of the trials became also accessible to the martyrologist ; he was thereb.v enabled to write dialogues which had the merit of expressing not only what the accused and the accusers should have said, but sometimes what they did say.* The trial of Jesus found His adherents quite unprovided for any such record of what happened. ' The sudden Roman faces and the noise,' the circumstances of horror and surprise which attended the arrest of their Master, the haste of the proceedings, and the shock of fear which overtook them, were enough to prevent the disciples from realizing what was going on. All was over before they could steady their minds to anything except the general fact of the Master's arrest and execution. Afterwards, they were able to piece together, from their own observation and from the information of councillors like Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathsea, or of sympathizers in the crowd, or of some of the women, several of the words and experiences
* Cf. F. C. Conybeare, The Apology and Acts of Apollonius, pp. 6-7.
of their Lord before the Council and the procurator. The exigencies of controversy with the Jews and the natural desire to remember as vividly and completely as possible the details of the scene, would foster this movement towards a recollection of the trial. The extant records show how comparatively scanty was the harvest of memory. But their very scantiness proves that the instinct for embroidering the facts with unhistorical fancies did not operate to any serious extent within the primi- tive Christian traditions, while their tone of moderation tells in favour of the essential historicity of the method in which tliey record actions of the Jews and Romans which must have outraged and shocked the later Christian conscience. There is neither reprobation of the accusers and judges, nor any effusive sympathy shown with the Sufferer. The Evangelic narratives do not burn emotional incense before the figure of Jesus. Nor are they tinged with serious and direct censure. Thus St. Luke, e.(f., is content to record the painful story without pointing a moral or adorning the tale ; he does not stop or step aside to blacken Judas or tierod, as 'Thucydides has exposed Cleon and Hyperbolus, or as many subsequent writers in Christianity have treated the Jewish and Roman actors in the Passion-storj-. Against the sentimental, unhistorical rhetoric of the latter class, John Stuart Mill's protest may stand. In the second chapter of his essay On Liberty, he remarks : ' The man who left on the memory of those who witnessed his life and conversation, such an impression of his moral grandeur, that eighteen subsequent centuries have done homage to him as the Almighty in person, was ignominiously put to death, as what? as a blasphemer. Men did not merely mistake their benefactor ; they mistook him for the exact contrary of what he was, and treated him as that prodigy of impiety, which they themselves are now held to be, for their treatment of him.' These men, he proceeds to argue, ' were, to all appearance, not bad men — not worse than men commonly are, but rather the contrary ; men who possessed in a full, or somewhat more than a full measure, the religious, moral, and patriotic feelings of their time and people ; the very kind of men who, in all times, our own included, have every chance of passing through life blameless and respected. The high priest who rent his garments when the words were pro- nounced which, according to all the ideas of his country, con- stituted the blackest guilt, was in all probability quite as sincere in his horror and indignation as the generality of respectable and pious men now are in the religious and moral sentiments they profess.' This estimate is, of course, too roseate to stand the scrutiny of historical research. Even a Jewish authority like Jost admits the illegality of ohe verdict against Jesus. Mill forgets, too, that some of the blackest crimes of history ha\e been connived at, if not started, by men of quite respectable character. Sincerity is no essential proof of innocence, even if it could be shown that Caiaphas and the other priests were open- minded people who acted in good faith when they misunder- stood their prisoner. But the spirit which Mill properly de- siderates in an estimate of such men is wonderfully preserved in the Gospels. Their records have no trace of the outraged partisan, any more than of a pious desire to cast some ad- ventitious halo round Jesus ; and when one considers how numerous were the temptations to make capital against the Jews out of this Passion -story, or to decorate it with trivial and extravagant circumstances (as is the case in most of the re- levant Apocryphal Gospels), one can better appreciate the sober and wonderfully restrained character of the Evangelic traditions.
To receive the due religious impression of the Evangelic narratives, it is generally enough to read each by itself. But while devout feeling is seldom perturbed by any discrepancies, such differences do exist both in conception and in de- tail, and the juxtaposition of the four Gospels in the canon obliges faith to look at the variety of the records and make some attempt at a historical estimate of their relative contents. The main business is to appreciate their religious interests. Yet, whilst these are both obvious and independent of critical research, a comparative inquiry into the different traditions is imperative. ' Investigations of this kind, Avhich attempt to weigh the merits of conflicting or parallel accounts, have always a some- what cold-blooded and judicial spirit in tiiem, a spirit which cannot but be out of harmony with that in which Ave can study the Passion of our Tyord to our soul's profit. Yet these historical questions must be faced, if otxr estimate of the gospel is to be lifted out of the region of mere in- herited sentiment.' * Fortunately, verbal accuracy is not equivalent to inner veracity. The occasional divergences of the records do not affect seriously either the religious truth or the historical value of the traditions as a whole.