THE NEW SCHAFP-HERZOG
culminating miracle of the raising of Lazarus, which is required to account for the incidents of the Passion- Week. It presents no different Jesus from the Jesus of the Synoptists, and it throws the emphasis at the same place — on his expiatory death and rising again; but it notably supplements the narrative of the Synoptists and reveals a whole new side of Jesus' ministry, and if not a wholly new aspect of his teaching, yet a remarkable mass of that higher aspect of his teaching of which only occasional specimens are included in the Synoptic narrative. John's narrative thus rounds out the Synoptical narrative and gives the portrait drawn in it a richer content and a greater completeness.
This portrait may itself be confidently adduced as its own warranty. It is not too much to say with Nathaniel Lardner that " the history of the New Testament has in it all the marks 11. Gospel of credibility that any history can Portrait have." But apart from these more of Christ usually marshaled evidences of the Not trustworthiness of the narratives, there Invented, jg the portrait itself which they draw, and this can not by any possibility have been an invention. It is not. merely that the portrait is harmonious throughout — in the allusions and presuppositions of the epistles of Paul and the other letter- writers of the New Testament, in the detailed narratives of the Synoptists and John, and in each of the sources which underlie them. This is a matter of importance; but it is not the matter of chief moment; there is no need to dwell upon the impossibility of such a harmony having been maintained save on the basis of simple truthfulness of record, or to dispute whether in the case of the Synoptics there are three independent witnesses to the one portrait, or only the two independent witnesses of their two most prominent " sources." Nor is the most interesting point whether the aboriginality of this portrait is guaranteed by the harmony of the representation in all the sources of information, some of which reach back to the most primitive epoch of the Christian movement. It is quite certain that this conception of Christ's person and career was the conception of his immediate followers, and indeed of himself; but, important as this conclusion is, it is still not the matter of primary import. The matter of primary significance is that this portrait thus imbedded in all the authoritative sources of information, and thus proved to be the conception of its founder cherished by the whole of primitive Christendom, and indeed commended to it by that founder himself, is a portrait intrinsically incapable of invention by men. It could never have come into being save as the revelation of an actual person embodying it, who really lived among men. " A romancer," as even Albert Rgville allows, " can not attribute to a being which he creates an ideal superior to what he himself is capable of conceiving." The conception of the God-man which is embodied in the portrait which the sources draw of Christ, and which is dramatized by them through such a history as they depict, can be accounted for only on the assumption that such a God-man actually lived, was seen of men, and was painted from the life. The miracle of the in-
vention of such a portraiture, whether by the conscious effort of art, or by the unconscious working of the mythopeic fancy, would be as great as the actual existence of such a person. Of this there is sufficient a posteriori proof in the invariable deterioration this portrait suffers in its secondary reproductions— in the so-called " Lives of Christ," of every type. The attempt vitally to realize and reproduce it results inevitably in its reduction. A portraiture which can not even be interpreted by men without suffering serious loss can not be the invention of the first simple followers of Jesus. Its very existence in their unsophisticated narratives is the sufficient proof of its faithfulness to a great reality.
II. The Portrait of Jesus: Only an outline of this portrait can be set down here. Jesus appears in it not only a supernatural, but in all the sources alike specifically a divine, person, who came into the world on a mission of mercy to sinful man. Such a mission was in its essence a humiliation and involved humiliation at every step of its accomplishment. His life is represented accord- 1. His ingly as a life of difficulty and con- Humili- flict, of trial and suffering, issuing in a ation. shameful death. But this humiliation is represented as in every step and stage of it voluntary. It was entered into and abided in solely in the interests of his mission, and did not argue at any point of it helplessness in the face of the difficulties which hemmed him in more and more until they led him to death on the cross. It rather manifested his strong determination to fulfil his mission to the end, to drink to its dregs the cup he had undertaken to drink. Accordingly, every suggestion of escape from it by the use of his intrinsic divine powers, whether of omnipotence or of omniscience, was treated by him first and last as a temptation of the evil one. The death in which his life ends is conceived, therefore, as the goal in which his life culminates. He came into the world to die, and every stage of the road that led up to this issue was determined not for him but by him: he was never the victim but always the master of circumstance, and pursued his pathway from beginning to end, not merely in full knowledge from the start of all its turns and twists up to its bitter conclusion, but in complete control both of them and of it.
His life of humiliation, sinking into his terrible death, was therefore not his misfortune, but his achievement as the promised Messiah, 2. His by and in whom the kingdom of God Messiah- is to be established in the world; it ship and was the work which as Messiah he Deity. came to do. Therefore, in his prosecution of it, he from the beginning announced himself as the Messiah, accepted all ascriptions to him of Messiahship under whatever designation, and thus gathered up into his person all the preadumbrations of Old-Testament prophecy; and by his favorite selfdesignation of " Son of Man," derived from Daniel's great vision (vii. IS), continually proclaimed himself the Messiah he actually was, emphasizing in contrast with his present humilia-