Part I
MARK I. I.
The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
In these Lectures I propose to make a threefold division of the New Testament Scriptures. I shall begin with the first three Gospels: I shall go on to the Epistles of St. James, St. Peter, and St. Paul, connecting the Acts of these Apostles with their writings; I shall then consider all the books which are ascribed to St. John.
It may seem a strange, almost a monstrous, undertaking, to treat of such subjects within the space that I can allot to them. I am thankful for the limitation of that space. For the purpose which I propose to myself a large field would be a temptation rather than an advantage. I desire to inquire whether there is a leading truth which goes through these documents, which binds them together, which explains the differences of their form, and their apparent incongruities. Such a truth, if it exists, ought to present itself to us on their very surface. It should bear to be tested by minute criticism, but yet it should reveal itself in the general course of the narrative, in the enunciation of the discourse. No ingenuity should be needed for the detection of it; the only business of the lecturer should be to show that this principle compels the reader to acknowledge a coherency in these writings, even though his theories incline him to deny it.
But if this is all that I hope to do, where lies the need of such an argument? These books have been the food of Christian men in all lands for centuries; learning has been exhausted upon them; harmonists, apologists, commentators, have devoted themselves to the defence and exposition of them. Must not the very suggestion, that the principle upon which they are written requires to be brought to light in the year 1846, involve either a sentence upon their truthfulness, or upon the sanity of the person who presumes to illustrate them?
I think so. If the principle which I am proposing to set forth has never been expressed in any of the Creeds of Christendom, or has only occupied a subordinate place in them—has never been felt to be the central one upon which every proposition in them is based—if this principle has had no influence upon the order and constitution of society in Christendom, if doctors, and schoolmen, and commentators are now to be informed of it for the first time, I confess at once that it cannot be what I pretend that it is, a key to the interpretation of Scripture, and to some of the greatest difficulties that have beset the recent study of it. But all that I desire to do is to bring forth into clearness and prominence, that which we are most of us professing to acknowledge, that which has determined, as I shall hope to show in some future lectures, the course of events and the formation of society in the modern world from the destruction of Jerusalem down to the present time. It seems to me that we have gone astray in the study of Scripture, not from excess of simplicity, but from excess of refinement, from looking to a distance for that which lies at our feet, from refusing to take words as they stand, and to believe that the writers meant what they say they meant. If so it may be a duty, a useful though a humble duty, to claim the books of the New Testament as a possession for the wayfarer. When he realizes that possession, he will, I am satisfied, be more ready than ever to confess his obligations to the scholar.
I will at once explain what I mean by this statement. We commonly describe the first three Gospels as biographies of Jesus of Nazareth. We assume that they describe the different acts and discourses which showed Him to be the most perfect of men, the greatest of Prophets; that they give an account of miracles which proved His mission to be divine; that then by certain phrases and expressions of great value and significance, though scattered up and down the narratives, not forming the most prominent and obvious part of them, they claim for Him an altogether superhuman nature and origin. We say that it was reserved for the fourth Gospel to declare this nature and origin clearly and fully. We say that this fourth Gospel is far more than the rest a doctrinal Gospel, one from which the transcendent dogmas of the Creed have been deduced. We suppose that the main support, however, of those dogmas is to be sought for in the Epistles, especially in the Epistles of St. Paul. We make the great difference between the Gospels and Epistles to consist in this, that the Epistles tell us what we are to believe, that the Gospels set before us the divine example of life and action. This distinction, it is admitted, is not strictly accurate; the Epistles are practical as well as doctrinal, the Gospels embody high doctrine as well as an image of holy practice. Still, it is held that the division is good enough for ordinary purposes; it points out what are the leading characteristics which we are to look for in each class of writings. The Apocalypse, we are told, is less easy to define. Some would say it lies wholly beyond the line within which the every-day Christian should confine his studies; others affirm, that it is the development of a subject of great practical importance, less clearly treated of elsewhere—that second appearing of our Lord, which stands in such direct contrast to the humble appearance whereof the Gospels speak.
I fancy that I have given a tolerably fair view of the current popular apprehensions in this country, respecting the books which we all hold with more or less distinctness, to possess an authority and character different from all other books. I shall not enlarge upon views which have been adopted elsewhere by persons who deny their authority and inspiration altogether. But I wish you to remark that these views, even those which strike us as the most extravagant, start from the premiss on which our popular notions rest. The modern Tubingen school, which has carried its speculations respecting the contradictions of Apostles and Evangelists further than any other, which assumes a direct contrast between the spiritual school of Paul and the Judaical school of James, Peter, and John, which limits the genuine Epistles of St. Paul to four or five, which affirms the book of Revelation to be really the work of St. John, because it is in direct opposition to St. Paul’s doctrine; which takes the fourth Gospel to be a work of the second century, one that for the first time established Christian theology upon an Alexandrian basis; this school has brought its erudition and its modern philosophy to explain those discrepancies in the character and primary object of the books of the New Testament, which it supposes us all tacitly to admit, though we may express ourselves in ambiguous language respecting them. Now I do not say that if the notions which our commentators, our apologists, and our harmonists, have sanctioned, those which have crept into our schools, and are more and more pervading all our minds, are admitted, there is no refuge except in the conclusions of Bauer and his disciples, or in some others which may grow out of them. But I must confess my opinion, that the conflict with the learning of these teachers will be a very hard one, and ultimately a very useless one, if we are not prepared to reconsider the grounds which we and they have in common. We may now and then defeat them in a war of posts; they may be detected in perversions of ecclesiastical history, or in abuses of their critical skill; but the on-lookers will regard it as a question for critics to settle among themselves. Without entering into it, or understanding the arguments on either side, they will practically throw all their weight into the scale of the assailant; for they will say, “You are resting your faith upon books which wise men, not positively repudiating Christianity, affirm to teach a number of different faiths. It requires much ecclesiastical lore to vindicate them, if you do vindicate them, from that charge. How can you ask ordinary laymen to take such books for the guide of their thoughts and actions as individuals and as members of society? Whatever they are, these books are not what our fathers deemed that they were.”
There might be more difficulty in arriving at this conclusion if no attempts had been made to explain the Gospel narratives upon a principle which is compatible with the utter rejection of them as historical documents. A long tradition and habit of feeling are great protections against mere critical ingenuity. People would say, “These documents must have some common meaning; their opponents are bound to show what that is before they ask us to cast them aside.” I need not tell you that the rationalist is aware of this demand, and is ready with an answer to it. A writer whose influence has been much more extensive among laymen and ordinary readers, than that of a more learned school like Bauer’s can ever be, undertook to show, several years ago, what worth there might remain in the life of Jesus, though almost all the records of it were taken to be mere mythical stories. “It exhibits,” he said, “a great idea of humanity; it is one of a number of experiments of the human spirit to conceive its own greatness and glory; it explains that notorious tendency of men to raise their benefactors into kings and gods, of which the heathen records present so many examples. It came in at a time when other religions were worn out, and when there was an evident craving for something more general, more democratic than the old national faiths: Its rise and progress were altogether consistent with what one might have expected from our previous knowledge of the state of the world, and of the decay of that which had been most venerable in it. The Christian Mythology succeeded to the older Mythologies because it had a more comprehensive human basis, and because its falsehoods as well as its truths were adapted to the state of the period in which it appeared. It is not adapted,” continue these Doctors, “to the state of our age. There is the same decay visible in its influence, the same timidity and unbelief in its professors, which were to be seen in the Jewish and Heathen worlds at the time it was proclaimed. But there is also a power among philosophers, and even among ordinary men, of appreciating the beneficent and human idea of it, which has not existed in any former age. Now is the time when we may disentangle that idea from its surrounding elements, and may present it to the world as the last result and essence of the facts and doctrines to which they have for so many centuries given credence.”
No one, I think, can be so inattentive an observer of the thoughts and movements of our time, as to suppose that these words would have been uttered distinctly and formally by one man, if that which engendered them had not been working in the hearts of thousands. And therefore, whatever faith we may attach to the assertions of the divines of the country in which this doctrine was first openly propagated, that its teacher has not now any great influence over their schools, that he has long since been thrown into the distance by other and more rapid runners in his own direction, that he himself, and still more his followers, have seen the untenableness and impossibility of the half-faith which he tried for a while to preserve, we may yet remain just as strongly convinced that all the reasonings of these orthodox divines, and even all the earnest faith which their reasonings imply, have not made the dogmas of Strauss insignificant to them or to us. If we look, we shall find that they are silently adopted by a very large class of thinking and half-thinking people, not in one, but in every, section of our countrymen. We shall find that they have hold of the minds of the old as well as of the young, of the poor as well as of the rich. We shall find that they stand their ground against all the arguments which Paley and his school have urged in proof of the authenticity of the Divine Records; nay, that they are brought forward in the most popular forms, and before the most humble audiences, as a triumphant evidence that these arguments are superseded. Nay more, the propagators of this doctrine maintain that Christianity has gained in their hands, that they have more reverence for its principles and essential power than we have. They ask, what the narratives which our harmonists present us with, of journeys to Nazareth and Capernaum, are to the recognition which they make of the wonderful, living, divine Truth, in the maxims and the life of Jesus of Nazareth? What our dry attempts to establish the greatness of His mission by miraculous evidence are, to their ready acknowledgment that His moral teaching undermined more falsehood and established more truth than that of any other man? What our endless debatings and controversies, to their recognition that He preached and exhibited an all-comprehending charity and humanity?
I hope the existence and the prevalency of such thoughts may furnish some excuse to those who want it, for the inquiry into which I am now entering. I have said that I believe numbers of students of the Scriptures, starting from the belief that the Gospels are primarily records of our Lord’s life as a Teacher of Nazareth, and that the Epistles and the fourth Gospel are the main witnesses to His Divinity, will end in the conclusions of Bauer respecting the essential diversity of the Gospels and Epistles. I say now that I think a number of practical people who can scarcely be called students at all, but who have just that habit of thought about the New Testament which characterizes our popular teaching, will fly to the system of Strauss, and will fancy for a time that they have gained in their religious sympathies and faith by the exchange. But as I believe that neither one of these classes nor the other knows what it will ultimately lose, I do not say in religious faith and sympathies only, but in the love of truth, in the acknowledgment of any moral basis for individual and social life, above all, in that humanity for which they are ready to sacrifice every thing else; as I think that this Straussian doctrine is essentially feeble and narrow, in spite of all its pretensions, is essentially destructive of all the blessings which the Gospel has brought and will bring to the poor man, though it seems to be devised for his sake; I do not care how much I lose of their respect, or of the respect of those who oppose them, while I endeavor to resist their falsehood by confessing what seems to me a great and perilous one of our own.
Instead of beginning from our Lord considered simply as the Man of Nazareth, it seems to me that the first three Gospels, just as much as the fourth, begin with assuming Him to be the Son of God, and the King of men. To show how He fulfilled these characters is their object. All the discourses and acts which they attribute to Him are simple and natural upon that hypothesis, unintelligible and incoherent upon any other. It will be the purpose of my first Lecture to make good these assertions, first from a consideration of those facts which are common to the three Gospels, then by an examination of their characteristic differences. In the next Lecture I shall endeavor to show that the Epistles of St. James, St. Peter, and St. Paul, illustrating and illustrated by the events recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, exhibit the Gospel of the Son of God and His Kingdom in another stage, and under three distinct aspects; but just as personally, just as livingly as the Evangelists themselves do. Finally, that the Gospel and Epistles of St. John harmonize those aspects of this Kingdom which we have traced in the other Evangelists, and in the other Apostles, and that the Apocalypse conducts the history to a crisis which all the other books had been prophesying of, a crisis which is the full manifestation of the Son of God and His Kingdom, and shows that as it was the Kingdom which fulfilled the meaning of all Jewish institutions and prophecies, so it would be the real foundation of all human society after these institutions were dissolved. If the facts looked at in the most simple manner, should seem to bear out these conclusions, the arguments which Bauer and his school have used to prove the diversity and contradiction of the New Testament books, will establish their unity. The arguments which Strauss and his school have used to prove that they embody the conception of something transcendently human, will show that their basis is essentially divine. Finally, the belief of their authority will not depend upon an acquaintance with old traditions, or upon our power of understanding ingenious special pleas, but upon the testimony of eighteen centuries, which will declare whether such a kingdom as that which the New Testament says would come into existence, has come into existence or no. The last inquiry I have said belongs to another division of these Lectures: upon the former I enter to-day.
When I make quotations from records which occur in all the three Gospels, I shall take them from St. Matthew, because his is said to be emphatically the Ebionite Gospel, that which is most directly opposed to the doctrine of St. Paul, the teacher of the Gentiles.
The Preaching of John
1st. The first announcement which is common to all the Evangelists is this: “In those days came John the Baptist preaching in the wilderness of Judæa, and saying, Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
The words “kingdom of heaven” meet us at the outset of our inquiry. They seem to be significant words. Possibly the description given of St. John’s preaching and of his acts may help us to determine what their significance is.
Those who suppose St. Matthew to have been a bigoted Jew, and merely to have engrafted a carnal Christianity upon his old Hebrew notions, will readily admit that he intended by this phrase an actual sovereignty. They will say at once that he derived his notion of that sovereignty from the Jewish Scriptures. He was dreaming of the restoration of the kingdom of David. He calls it a Kingdom of Heaven, because he believed its power was derived from the Lord God of Israel. He does not the less mean one that was to be established upon earth. These views of the phrase, I say, will be at once admitted as especially applicable to St. Matthew by those who give him the character which Neological critics assign him; as applicable also to St. Mark, and in a somewhat less degree to St. Luke. I cannot conceive how we can adopt any other conclusion. For a Jew to use this word Kingdom, and merely to intend by it what modern theologians intend when they speak of a “Christian dispensation,” or a “divine and miraculous doctrine,” is utterly impossible. Whatever notion any old Prophet attached to the words Divine Kingdom, when he spoke of it in connection with the son of Jesse, or with Solomon, or with Hezekiah, that we are bound to believe it must have borne in the mind of an Evangelist who had been bred up in the faith of these Books, and was thoroughly devoted to them.
What sense then did these words bear when they were used by Isaiah or Jeremiah? Did the kingdom of Solomon or of Hezekiah differ, according to their conceptions, from the kingdom of Pharaoh or of Hiram in this, that it was more externally splendid? I take the Jewish kingdom at the moment of its greatest magnificence, just when the temple had been built, in those days when no man counted silver any thing, when the treasures of the world were pouring into Jerusalem. Would not any one of the Prophets have felt that the glory of this kingdom consisted precisely, as it consisted at the time of its greatest oppression,—when the armies of Sennacherib had destroyed all the fenced cities, and were laying siege to Zion,—in the fact that the visible king was a witness of an invisible one, in whom all the real dominion dwelt? On what other ground than this do the exhortations of the Prophets to their countrymen, when any great calamity was threatening them, rest? Do they not tell them that they are not acknowledging the invisible King, that they have forgotten His covenant with them, that they are bowing down before visible things, stocks and stones? Do they not tell them to return to Him from whom they have deeply revolted? Do they not declare that He is coming out of His place to show them that He is their King, and the Ruler over the whole earth? Do they not say that whether the house of David, the people, the priests, trust him or not, He will prove Himself to be the King of kings and Lord of lords? Does any one dream that this language, King of kings and Lord of lords, imports any thing less than this, or other than this, that He has dominion in a region which other kings are trying to reach, but cannot reach, that He sways the inner operations of nature, and orders the minds and wills of men? Does any one doubt that the seer is calling upon his people to turn from their gross, vulgar, slavish notions of mere external dominion, which were the root of all idolatry, to Him in whom all real, essential power dwelt without measure? So only would they understand the difference between a king of Judæa and a king of Babylon. So only would they understand what that full and perfect kingdom was which all their sore discipline was to prepare them for.
John, we are told, was clad in a raiment of camel’s hair, he had a leathern girdle about his loins, his meat was locusts and wild honey, he preached in the wilderness. All these signs surely testify that he, as much as any old Prophet, came to withdraw men from visible things to an invisible Ruler. His stern and simple words contain the very essence of the old prophetical discourse. The people felt that they did; they went out into the wilderness to him. They asked him whether he was Elijah? They were sure that he had a message to the nation, and to each member of it. Their consciences responded to that message. They were not apparently bowing down before any idols, there was nothing in their circumstances to suggest a resemblance between themselves and those whom Elijah called to renounce the worship of Baal. But their hearts confessed the resemblance; they knew that they were idol-worshippers as much as their fathers had been. They knew that they, with their synagogues in every city, were as much apostatizing from the Lord God of Israel, as those who had their groves in every high place.
John put their conviction to the test. He came baptizing with water. He called upon Jews to submit to a rite which admitted Gentiles to the privileges of the Temple-worship. They were to confess that they had need of purification. And what purification? John spoke of it as of the most inward kind. It was for the remission of sins. He did not shrink from explaining the meaning of his own sign. The most honored of the Jews were called a generation of vipers, were warned of a wrath to come, were told that they were not to say within themselves, We have Abraham to our father, for that God was able of those stones to raise up children unto Abraham. That no doubt might remain upon their minds whether this baptism imported the removal of some external defilements, or whether it denoted the most internal reformation, they were told that the axe was laid to the root of the trees, and that whatsoever did not bear good fruit would be hewn down and cast into the fire.
All this language, I submit, is perfectly consistent with itself; there are no symptoms of awkward patchwork in it, of some later refinement grafted upon a Judaical stock. Read it by the light of the Jewish Scriptures, by all means; you cannot read it by any other. But that light will show that at a time when the last gleam of native royalty had departed from Judæa, when it bore the most ignominious signs of a Roman province, when pretenders were continually arising who reminded the people of their ancient glories, and urged them to break the sceptre of the oppressor, there was a voice which spoke of the very kingdom which all devout Jewish rulers had acknowledged, as about to be manifested, which declared that to be the Kingdom of Heaven, because it was a kingdom over the inner man, over the spirit and heart, which insulted and set at nought all exclusive Jewish pretensions, at the very moment when it was asserting the greatness of Jewish privileges, which announced a crisis as at hand which would shake the whole of society, as it then existed, to its centre.
The Baptism of Christ
But say the three Evangelists, “John spake to the people, saying, I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance; but He that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear; He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost;” St. Matthew and St. Luke add, “and with fire.”
Whether we introduce those words or leave them out, the main idea of the passage is clearly the same. The expression fire, and the words respecting the fan in the hand, which follow, bring before us more distinctly the vision of One coming to purge, to sift, to judge, of One who will penetrate through all appearances, whose work is with the inner heart of the society, and of the individual. But the words, “He shall baptize with the Holy Ghost,” contain that meaning, and fix our thoughts upon the nature of the power which He of whom John spake would exercise. The call to repentance was the call to an internal, spiritual act. John declares that the greater One will carry out perfectly that which he has done imperfectly, will strike more at the root of the tree than he had been able to strike, would show what his baptism meant, would give the energy which would enable men to do that and be that which he told them they must do and be. Let us never forget that these carnal, Ebionitish, Jewish Gospels, make this the foundation of our Lord’s history. The ground of it, according to them, lies in the proclamation—“He comes to baptize with the Spirit and with fire.” I call your attention to this, as one of the most obvious, superficial indications of their common intention, one which it requires no skill to discover, one which the most careless reader cannot overlook. I call upon you to watch each step as we proceed, and to say whether this superficial fact is not the indication of something which goes through the heart of every narrative, and which it is just as rational to suppose was interpolated into them, as to suppose that a bricklayer interpolated the idea of the Parthenon.
The story goes on, “Then cometh Jesus from Galilee to Jordan, unto John, to be baptized of him. But John forbade Him, saying, I have need to be baptized of Thee, and comest Thou to me? And Jesus answering said unto him, Suffer it to be so now, for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness. Then he suffered Him. And Jesus when He was baptized went up straightway out of the water, and lo! the heavens were opened unto Him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon Him; and lo! a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”
What a central place this narrative occupied in the Gospel history, what importance it had in the scheme of Christian doctrine, all the elder heretics perceived. Every Gnostic was bound to give his interpretation of it, and to connect it with his theory of the relation between the Jesus and the Christ. Those in modern days who reject the early chapters of St. Matthew and St. Luke, are bound in consistency to regard this as the commencement of the Evangelical records. Assuredly neither the one nor the other can have erred in supposing that it did hold a most prominent place in the minds of the Gospel writers themselves, and that they connected with it all that they tell afterwards of our Lord’s Ministry. No doubt they have found a plea in the narrative itself for maintaining their charge of carnal and superstitious notions against these writers. If there are no visible signs of that which is invisible, if the belief of an actual Man being the Son of God is at once to be rejected as anthropomorphic, there need be no more debate upon the question; it is settled, by one comprehensive petitio principii. But if not, plain men will not be hindered by being told that the form of a Dove or the Voice from Heaven are merely Jewish or Pagan methods of projecting outwardly certain processes or experiences of our own minds, from perceiving that this record carries us into that deep and inward ground which philosophy is always seeking to reach, but has never found. That Kingdom of which John spoke as at hand, is declared to have its foundation in a living Person. He who had been always ruling it, is now revealed: “This is my beloved Son” is the revelation. It is of a Son of God, clothed with the Spirit of God that He may exercise dominion over the spiritual world and over all the inward powers of things, that the Evangelists are to testify. We are to see whether men so simple and brought up in so narrow a school, make good their magnificent pretensions; whether they do not betray, by some exaltation of the mere human Friend and Teacher, the vanity and incoherency of their dream; whether they really speak as men would speak who were commissioned to set forth one who derived nothing from the accidents of His position on earth, every thing from his relation to a divine and invisible Father.
The Temptation
The next step in the narrative bears the clearest marks, say all neological interpreters, of being mythical. It has nothing to do with the regular course of the story; it has been introduced, like all legends of great heroes, to give the common events significance, whereas it really disturbs their sequence, and shows what a curious mosaic the composition is. I quite admit that if the Gospels are the history of the journeyings of Jesus of Nazareth for one, or two, or three years, from Judæa to Galilee, from Galilee to Judæa—if it is by our skill in tracing out the times in which these took place and their coincidence with Jewish festivals, that we are to measure our knowledge of the facts of the Gospel history and of their relation to each other—the Temptation stands awkwardly in our way. If, on the other hand, we take the history of the Baptism to be what it seems to be; if Jesus was then declared to be the Son of God, if He was sealed with the Spirit, there seems precisely that connection between the history in the third and fourth chapters of St. Matthew, which the composers of our Litany recognized. “Thou art the Son of God,” is the assertion of the Baptism; “if Thou be the Son of God,” is the form of the Temptation. He is endued with the filial Spirit; he wrestles with the Spirit of disobedience. He will not separate Himself from Man by making stones into bread for Himself; for Man is to live by every word of God. He will not cast Himself from a pinnacle of the Temple; for it is written, “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” He will not take the kingdoms of the world from Satan; for it is written, “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God.” The idea of a Son claiming nothing for Himself, in all things trusting His Father, obeying His Father, is surely brought out here with a clearness, definiteness, simplicity, an absence of all pomp of words, of all the ordinary accidents and coloring of a legend, which is at least very very strange. The idea of a spiritual conflict, of a battle with a spiritual foe, is surely set out with a freedom from the material appliances of the most vulgar as well as of the greatest artists, which you would scarcely be prepared for in a Jewish tax-gatherer; still less if the story of that Jewish tax-gatherer was afterwards embellished by some theological doctor. But does it not, I shall be asked, give a personality to the Spirit of Evil, and is not that characteristic just what one looks for in a legend? Most assuredly, I conceive, one cannot read the story without feeling that our Lord was engaged in a personal battle with a personal foe. It is no shadow-fight. There is nothing in it which bears the look of a dream or a vision. Every thing is intensely real. But the wonder is that this reality and personality should be preserved and sustained with such an absence of materialism. No image of the Tempter is presented to us, neither such a one as a middle-age painter would have given, nor such a one as belongs to the Miltonic conception. We feel that the Son of God, clothed with a human body, was not a Person in virtue of that body. We feel that the personality which belongs to the opposing power has in like manner nothing to do with an outward shape or visible circumstances, We are led to feel that there is a deep, radical evil, a spirit of evil, underlying all the shapes and forms in which it presents itself to us on earth. We feel that He who could reach to that radical evil, and dispossess those shapes and forms of it, could alone assert the dominion of the God of Truth and Love over the world. We feel that this radical evil is nothing original, nothing which God created, that it is essentially the spirit of disobedience, a perverted, rebel will, and that He who has the true obedient will must be the destroyer of it, the Redeemer of the Universe from it. Such an introduction to a history of a series of acts of redemption or deliverance, bears no marks of being transferred from some other records to a place for which it was not intended. If it has a meaning at all, it is in its right position there. The want of it would be a cause of real perplexity.
The Preaching of Jesus
“Now when Jesus had heard that John was cast into prison,” says St. Matthew, “He departed into Galilee.” He quotes a passage which he says was fulfilled by His coming into the coast of Zebulon and Naphtali, and then proceeds, “From that time Jesus began to preach and to say, Repent; for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” St. Mark says, “Now after that John was put in prison, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the Gospel of the kingdom of God, and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent ye, and believe the Gospel.” St. Luke says, “And Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee, and there went out a fame of Him through all the region round about.” He then describes His coming to Nazareth, where He had been brought up, His reading the passage from Isaiah, where it is written, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor, He hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.” These passages will be connected, and reasonably connected, by a harmonist, as referring to the same visit to Galilee. I quote them to point out what seems to me a much more radical and important coincidence, that which concerns the nature of our Lord’s preaching, and its connection with the foregone history. He, when He comes to Galilee, begins preaching the Kingdom of God, begins saying, “Repent; for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” No other account is given in the first two Evangelists of the words spoken by Him who had been declared to be the Son of God except this. John the Baptist’s message is precisely the message of the Christ. There is the same announcement of a kingdom, the same call to repentance, the same allusion to the fulfilment of the time, to some approaching crisis. Only this announcement is now called a Gospel. It is good news that the kingdom is at hand, that the time is fulfilled. Men are to repent and believe this good news. St. Luke expands and explains the words of the other Evangelists. He begins with declaring that Jesus came in the power of the Spirit into Galilee. He shows, in a particular synagogue, what the kind of preaching was, which elsewhere, though not there, was glorified of all. His preaching is the announcement of One who was able to heal the sick and deliver the captives, because the Spirit of the Lord was upon Him—a Deliverer who was to undo chains which no one could undo who was not endued with a Spirit— the King who had dominion over the secret powers and the inner being of man was declared to be at hand. Men were to repent, that they might understand what His government over them was. To confess His dominion over them was to believe the Gospel.
Calling of the Disciples
“And Jesus,” says St. Matthew, “walking by the sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea; for they were fishers. And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men. And they straightway left their nets, and followed Him. And going on from thence, He saw other two brethren, James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, in a ship with Zebedee their father, mending their nets. And He called them. And they immediately left the ship, and their father, and followed Him.” St. Mark gives nearly the same account. St. Luke’s is connected with the wonderful draught of fishes. But these words, “From henceforth thou shalt catch men,” which are the key-words to his narrative, belong equally to both the others. Supposing we had no other narratives but these, supposing all that is peculiar to St. Luke’s Gospel was omitted, supposing we had heard nothing before of a Kingdom, or of a Son of God, our first conclusion, I think, would be, “This story, told with such severe simplicity, in such few words, is certainly intended to describe the way in which some royal person, claimed authority over the humble men about him, took them into his service, assigned to them some high office, the nature of which they were but little able to apprehend, but which implied some very remarkable influence and ascendancy over their fellow-creatures.” If then we found that all the previous records seemed to speak of such a King, of a mysterious authority which He exercised, and which He was come to assert and use on behalf of human creatures, we should certainly think that this narrative stood in a very close and natural relation to the other. Upon any other hypothesis than this, if any other feeling or conviction possessed the mind of the writer, we should certainly look for quite a different phraseology, one much less direct and simple, but also much less august.