RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Jesus Christ
tion his heavenly origin and his future glory. Moreover, in the midst of his humiliation, he exercised, so far as that was consistent with the performance of his mission, all the prerogatives of that " transcendent " or divine Messiah which he was. He taught with authority, substituting for every other sanction, his great " But I say unto you," and declaring himself greater than the greatest of God's representatives whom he had sent in all the past to visit his people. He surrounded himself as he went about preaching the Gospel of the kingdom with a miraculous nimbus, each and every miracle in which was adapted not merely to manifest the presence of a supernatural person in the midst of the people, but, as a piece of symbolical teaching, to reveal the nature of this supernatural person, and to afford a foretaste of the blessedness of his rule in the kingdom he came to found. He assumed plenary authority over the religious ordinances of the people, divinely established though they were; and exercised absolute control over the laws of nature themselves. The divine prerogative of forgiving sins he claimed for himself, the divine power of reading the heart he frankly exercised, the divine function of judge of quick and dead he attached to his own person. Asserting for himself a superhuman dignity of person, or rather a share in the ineffable Name itself, he represented himself as abiding continually even when on earth in absolute communion with God the Father, and participating by necessity of nature in the treasures of the divine knowledge and grace; announced himself the source of all divine knowledge and grace to men; and drew to himself all the religious affections, suspending the destinies of men absolutely upon their relation to his own person. Nevertheless he walked straight onward in the path of his lowly mission, and, bending even the wrath of men to his service, gave himself in his own good time and way to the death he had come to accomplish. Then, his mission performed, he rose again from the dead in the power of his deathless life; showed himself alive to chosen witnesses, that he might strengthen the hearts of his people; and ascended to the right hand of God, whence he directs the continued preparation of the kingdom until it shall please him to return for its establishment in its glorious eternal form.
It is important to fix firmly in mind the central
conception of this representation. It turns upon
the sacrificial death of Jesus to which the whole
life leads up, and out of which all its
3. Central issues are drawn, and for a perpetual
Concep- memorial of which he is represented tions. as having instituted a solemn memorial feast. The divine majesty of this Son of God; his redemptive mission to the world, in a life of humiliation and a ransoming death; the completion of his task in accordance with his purpose; his triumphant rising from the death thus vicariously endured; his assumption of sovereignty over the future development of the kingdom founded in his blood, and over the world as the theater of its development; his expected return as the consummator of the ages and the judge of all — this is the circle of ideas in which all accounts move. It is
the portrait not of a merely human life, though it includes the delineation of a complete and a completely human life. It is the portrayal of a human episode in the divine life. It is, therefore, not merely connected with supernatural occurrences, nor merely colored by supernatural features, nor merely set in a supernatural atmosphere: the supernatural is its very substance, the elimination of which would be the evaporation of the whole. The Jesus of the New Testament is not fundamentally man, however divinely gifted: he is God tabernacling for a while among men, with heaven lying about him not merely in his infancy, but throughout all the days of his flesh.
III. Attempts to Naturalize the Portrait of Jesus : The intense supernaturalism of this portraiture is, of course, an offense to our anti-supernaturalistic age. It is only what was to be expected, therefore, that throughout the last century and a half a long series of scholars, imbued with the anti-supernaturalistic instinct of the time, have assumed the task of desupernaturalizing it. Great difficulty has been experienced, however, in the attempt to construct a historical sieve which will strain out miracles and yet let Jesus through; for Jesus is himself the greatest miracle of them all. Accordingly in the end of the day there is a growing disposition, as if in despair of accomplishing this feat, boldly to construct the sieve so as to strain out Jesus too; to take refuge in the counsel of desperation which affirms that there never was such a person as Jesus, that Christianity had no founder, and that not merely the portrait of Jesus, but Jesus himself, is a pure projection of later ideals into the past. The main stream of assault still addresses itself, however, to the attempt to eliminate not Jesus himself, but the Jesus of the evangelists, and to substitute for him a desupernaturalized Jesus.
The instruments which have been relied on to effect this result may be called, no doubt with some but not misleading inexactitude, literary and historical criticism. The attempt has 1. Literary been made to track out the process by
and His- which the present witnessing docu-
torical ments have come into existence, to Criticism, show them gathering accretions in this process, and to sift out the sources from which they are drawn; and then to make appeal to these sources as the only real witnesses. And the attempt has been made to go behind the whole written record, operating cither immediately upon the documents as they now exist, or ultimately upon the sources which literary criticism has sifted out from them, with a view to reaching a more primitive and presumably truer conception of Jesus than that which has obtained record in the writings of his followers. The occasion for resort to this latter method of research is the failure of the former to secure the results aimed at. For, when, at the dictation of anti-supernaturalistic presuppositions, John is set aside in favor of the Synoptics, and then the Synoptics are set aside in favor of Mark, conceived as the representative of " the narrative source " (by the side of which must be placed —
Jesus Christ