Part I
MARK I. I.
The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
The passage: This is where the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begins.
In these lectures I will divide the New Testament into three parts. First, the first three Gospels; then the Epistles of James, Peter, and Paul, together with the Acts that record their doings; and finally all the books ascribed to John.
It may seem an outrageous undertaking to treat such subjects in so little space. But I am glad of the limit; for what I intend, a wide field would tempt rather than help me. I want to ask whether one leading truth runs through these writings, binds them together, and accounts for their differences of form and their apparent contradictions. If such a truth exists, it should show itself on the very surface. It should stand up to close criticism, yet also reveal itself in the general course of the narrative and the discourses. No cleverness should be needed to find it; my only task should be to show that it forces the reader to see coherence in these writings, even when his theories incline him to deny it.
But if that is all I hope to do, why is the argument needed? These books have fed Christian people everywhere for centuries; scholars have poured out their learning on them. Must not the very suggestion that their governing principle still needs to be brought to light in 1846 imply that either the books are untruthful, or the man who offers to explain them is out of his senses?
I think so. If the principle I mean to set forth has never been stated in any Creed, or has held only a minor place there rather than being felt as the central one on which every article rests—if it has had no influence on the order of society in Christendom, and scholars and commentators are now hearing of it for the first time—then I admit it cannot be what I claim, a key to Scripture and to some of its greatest recent difficulties. But all I want is to bring out clearly what most of us already profess to believe, and what, as I hope to show later, has shaped events and the making of society in the modern world from the fall of Jerusalem to now. It seems to me we have gone wrong in studying Scripture not from too much simplicity but from too much refinement—looking far off for what lies at our feet, refusing to take words as they stand and to believe the writers meant what they say. If so, it may be a humble but useful duty to claim the New Testament as the ordinary traveller’s own possession. When he grasps it, I am sure he will be readier than ever to acknowledge his debt to the scholar.
Let me explain what I mean. We usually call the first three Gospels biographies of Jesus of Nazareth. We assume they describe the acts and words that showed Him the most perfect of men and the greatest of prophets; that they record miracles proving His mission divine; and that then, by certain valuable phrases scattered through the story but not made prominent, they claim for Him a superhuman nature and origin. We say it was left to the fourth Gospel to declare that nature and origin clearly, and that this Gospel is far more doctrinal, the source of the Creed’s high dogmas. We suppose the main support of those dogmas lies in the Epistles, especially Paul’s. So we take the great difference to be that the Epistles tell us what to believe while the Gospels set before us a divine example of living. We admit this is not exact—the Epistles are practical too, and the Gospels contain high doctrine—but we think the division good enough for ordinary use, pointing to what to expect in each. The Apocalypse is harder to place: some say it lies beyond the everyday Christian’s study; others say it develops one great practical matter treated less clearly elsewhere—the second coming of our Lord, which stands in such contrast to the humble coming the Gospels describe.
I think I have given a fair account of the common views held in this country about these books, which we all regard, more or less clearly, as different in authority and character from all others. I will not dwell on views held abroad by those who deny their authority altogether. But note that even the most extravagant of those views start from the same premise as our popular notions. The modern Tübingen school has pushed further than any other its theories of contradiction among the Apostles and Evangelists: it sets Paul’s spiritual school against the Judaical school of James, Peter, and John; it grants Paul only four or five genuine Epistles; it holds Revelation to be genuinely John’s because it opposes Paul’s doctrine; it takes the fourth Gospel for a second-century work that first placed Christian theology on an Alexandrian footing. This school has brought its learning and philosophy to explain the discrepancies of aim and character in the New Testament books that it assumes we all quietly admit while speaking vaguely of them. I do not say that, if the notions our commentators and harmonists have sanctioned and spread through our schools are granted, there is no escape but the conclusions of Bauer and his followers. But I confess I think the fight against these scholars will be hard, and finally useless, unless we are ready to reconsider the ground we share with them. We may win a skirmish here and there, catching them twisting church history or misusing their criticism; but onlookers will treat it as a quarrel among critics. Without following the arguments, they will throw their weight to the attacker, saying: “You rest your faith on books that able men, not quite rejecting Christianity, say teach several different faiths. It takes much learning to defend them, if you can. How can you ask ordinary laymen to make such books their guide? Whatever they are, they are not what our fathers thought.”
Reaching that conclusion would be harder if no one had tried to explain the Gospel narratives on a principle that treats them as worthless as history. Long tradition and habit shield people from mere critical cleverness; they would say, “These documents must have some common meaning; let the opponents show it before asking us to throw them away.” But the rationalist knows this demand and has his answer. A writer whose influence among ordinary readers far exceeds that of a learned school like Bauer’s set out years ago to show what worth might remain in the life of Jesus even when nearly all its records are taken as mere myth. It shows, he said, a great idea of humanity; it is one of the human spirit’s attempts to conceive its own greatness; it explains the well-known human tendency to raise benefactors into kings and gods, as heathen records so often show. It came when other religions were worn out and there was a craving for something more universal and democratic than the old national faiths. Its rise fits everything we know of the world’s decay at that time. The Christian mythology replaced the older ones because it had a broader human basis, and because its falsehoods as well as its truths suited its age. “It does not suit ours,” these teachers go on. “The same decay, the same timidity and unbelief, now appear in its professors as appeared in the Jewish and heathen worlds when it began. But there is now, among philosophers and even ordinary men, a power to appreciate its kind, human idea that no earlier age had. Now is the time to separate that idea from its surroundings and offer it to the world as the final essence of the facts and doctrines men have so long believed.”
No careful observer of our times can suppose one man would have spoken these words so plainly if the same thing were not already working in thousands of hearts. So whatever we make of the assurances of divines in the country where this doctrine first arose—that its teacher has little influence in their schools now, that others have long outrun him in his own direction, that he and his followers have seen how impossible was the half-faith he tried to keep—we may still be sure that all their reasonings, and all the earnest faith behind them, have not made Strauss’s dogmas negligible to them or to us. Look, and you find them quietly adopted by a large class of thinking and half-thinking people in every section of our nation, old and young, poor and rich. They hold their ground against all the arguments Paley and his school urged for the authenticity of the Divine Records; indeed they are put forward in popular form before humble audiences as proof that those arguments are outdated. More, their propagators claim Christianity has gained in their hands, that they revere its principles more than we do. They ask: what are our harmonists’ accounts of journeys to Nazareth and Capernaum beside their recognition of the living, divine truth in the sayings and life of Jesus? What are our dry attempts to prove His mission by miracle beside their frank admission that His moral teaching overthrew more falsehood and set up more truth than any other man’s? What are our endless controversies beside their acknowledgment that He preached and lived an all-embracing charity and humanity?
I hope the existence and spread of such thoughts may excuse the inquiry I now begin. I have said I believe many students who start from the belief that the Gospels are mainly records of our Lord’s life as a Teacher of Nazareth, and that the Epistles and fourth Gospel are the chief witnesses to His divinity, will end in Bauer’s conclusions about the essential diversity of Gospels and Epistles. And I say now that many practical people, hardly students at all but sharing the habit of thought our popular teaching gives, will flee to Strauss’s system and fancy for a while they have gained in faith and sympathy by the exchange. But since I believe neither class knows what it will finally lose—not in religious faith only, but in the love of truth, in any moral basis for personal and social life, and above all in that very humanity for which they would sacrifice everything else; since I think this Straussian doctrine, for all its pretensions, is feeble and narrow, and destroys all the blessings the Gospel has brought and will bring to the poor man, though it seems designed for his sake—I do not care how much I lose their respect, or their opponents’, while I try to resist their falsehood by confessing what seems to me a great and dangerous one of our own.
Instead of beginning from our Lord simply as the Man of Nazareth, it seems to me that the first three Gospels, just as much as the fourth, begin by assuming Him to be the Son of God and the King of men. Their aim is to show how He fulfilled those characters. All the discourses and acts they attribute to Him are simple and natural on that assumption, and unintelligible on any other. My first lecture will make good these claims, first from the facts common to the three Gospels, then from their characteristic differences. In the next I will try to show that the Epistles of James, Peter, and Paul, seen together with the events in Acts, present the Gospel of the Son of God and His Kingdom at another stage and under three distinct aspects—but just as personally and livingly as the Evangelists do. Finally, that John’s Gospel and Epistles harmonize the aspects traced in the other writers, and that the Apocalypse brings the history to a crisis all the other books had foretold—the full showing of the Son of God and His Kingdom—and reveals that, as this Kingdom fulfilled the meaning of all Jewish institutions and prophecies, so it would be the real foundation of all human society after those institutions dissolved. If the facts, seen plainly, bear out these conclusions, then Bauer’s arguments for the diversity and contradiction of the New Testament books will actually establish their unity; and Strauss’s arguments that they embody a conception of something supremely human will show that their basis is essentially divine. And belief in their authority will rest not on knowing old traditions or following clever special pleading, but on the testimony of eighteen centuries, which will tell whether the Kingdom the New Testament said would come has in fact come. That last inquiry belongs to a later part of these lectures; today I begin the first.
When I quote records found in all three Gospels, I will take them from Matthew, because his is said to be emphatically the Ebionite Gospel, the one most directly opposed to the doctrine of Paul, the teacher of the Gentiles.
The Preaching of John
1st. The first thing all the Evangelists report is the same: “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” confront us at the very start. They seem to be important words. Perhaps the account of John’s preaching and actions will help us decide what they mean.
Those who take St. Matthew to have been a narrow Jew who merely grafted a physical Christianity onto his old Hebrew ideas will readily grant that by this phrase he meant a real sovereignty, drawn from the Jewish Scriptures. On their view he was dreaming of the restored kingdom of David, and called it a Kingdom of Heaven because he believed its power came from the Lord God of Israel—but he still meant one to be set up on earth. Such readers, who give Matthew the character the Neological critics assign him, will grant this most readily of him, and also of Mark, and somewhat less of Luke. I cannot see how we can conclude otherwise. It is impossible that a Jew using the word “Kingdom” meant only what modern theologians mean by a “Christian dispensation” or a “divine and miraculous doctrine.” Whatever the old Prophets meant by a Divine Kingdom when they linked it with the son of Jesse, or Solomon, or Hezekiah, that same meaning it must have carried for an Evangelist raised on those Books and devoted to them.
What, then, did the words mean when Isaiah or Jeremiah used them? Did the kingdom of Solomon or Hezekiah differ from the kingdom of Pharaoh or Hiram merely in being outwardly more splendid? Take the Jewish kingdom at its most magnificent, just after the temple was built, when silver was reckoned as nothing and the world’s treasures poured into Jerusalem. Would not any of the Prophets have felt that its glory lay in the same thing as in its worst oppression—when Sennacherib’s armies had destroyed the fortified cities and were besieging Zion—namely, that the visible king was a witness to an invisible one, in whom all real rule dwelt? On what else do the Prophets’ warnings rest, when calamity threatened? They tell the people they are not acknowledging the invisible King, that they have forgotten His covenant, that they are bowing before stocks and stones, and they call them to return to the God from whom they have revolted. They declare that He is coming out of His place to prove He is their King and Ruler of the whole earth—that whether king, people, or priests trust Him or not, He will show Himself King of kings and Lord of lords. Does anyone imagine that phrase means less than this: that He rules in a region other kings strive for but cannot reach, that He governs the inner workings of nature and the minds and wills of men? The seer is calling his people to turn from gross, slavish notions of mere outward dominion—the root of all idolatry—to Him in whom all real power dwells without measure. Only so could they see the difference between a king of Judæa and a king of Babylon, and only so could they grasp what the full kingdom was that all their hard discipline was preparing them for.
John, we are told, wore camel’s hair and a leather girdle, ate locusts and wild honey, and preached in the wilderness. All these signs testify that he, like any old Prophet, came to draw men from visible things to an invisible Ruler. His stern, simple words hold the very essence of the old prophetic speech, and the people felt it; they went out to him in the wilderness and asked whether he was Elijah. They were sure he had a message for the nation and for each person, and their consciences answered it. They were not openly worshipping idols; nothing in their situation obviously resembled those Elijah had summoned to renounce Baal. Yet their hearts confessed the likeness: they knew they were idolaters as much as their fathers, and that they, with a synagogue in every city, were falling away from the Lord God of Israel as surely as those who had groves on every hill.
John tested that conviction. He came baptizing with water, calling Jews to submit to a rite that admitted Gentiles to the Temple-worship—so they had to confess they needed purifying. And what purifying? John spoke of it as most inward: it was for the remission of sins. He did not shrink from explaining his own sign. The most honored Jews were called a brood of vipers, warned of coming wrath, and told not to say to themselves, “We have Abraham to our father,” for God could raise up children to Abraham from the very stones. So that no one could doubt whether the baptism meant washing off outward stains or the deepest inward reformation, they were told the axe was laid to the root of the trees, and whatever bore no good fruit would be cut down and burned.
All this language, I submit, is consistent with itself; there is no clumsy patchwork of later refinement grafted onto a Jewish stock. Read it by the light of the Jewish Scriptures—you can read it by no other; but that light shows that at a time when the last trace of native royalty had gone from Judæa, when it bore the shameful marks of a Roman province, when pretenders kept arising to recall the old glories and urge revolt against the oppressor, a voice spoke of the very kingdom all devout Jewish rulers had acknowledged as about to appear. It called that a Kingdom of Heaven because it was a kingdom over the inner man, the spirit and heart; it scorned all exclusive Jewish claims even while asserting the greatness of Jewish privileges; and it announced a crisis at hand that would shake the whole of existing society to its centre.
The Baptism of Christ
The passage: John told the people, “I baptize you with water for repentance, but One mightier than I is coming after me, whose shoes I am not fit to carry; He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit”—and Matthew and Luke add, “and with fire.”
Whether or not we include those words, the passage means the same. The word fire, and the mention of the fan in the hand that follows, show us One coming to purge, sift, and judge—One who sees through all appearances and works on the inner heart of society and of each person. But the words “He shall baptize with the Holy Ghost” already carry that meaning, and fix our attention on the kind of power this coming One will use. John’s call to repentance was a call to an inward, spiritual act. He says the greater One will do perfectly what he himself did imperfectly, will strike deeper at the root of the tree, will make plain what his own baptism meant, and will give men the energy to do and be what John told them they must. Note that these supposedly carnal, Ebionitish, Jewish Gospels rest our Lord’s whole history on this: their foundation is the proclamation, “He comes to baptize with the Spirit and with fire.” I point this out as one of the most obvious surface signs of their shared purpose—one needing no skill to find, one no careless reader can miss. And I ask you to watch, as we go on, whether this surface fact is not the sign of something running through the heart of every narrative—something that it is as reasonable to suppose was inserted into them as to suppose a bricklayer inserted the idea of the Parthenon.
The story continues: Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptized by John. John tried to stop Him, saying he himself needed to be baptized by Jesus, not the reverse; but Jesus said, “Suffer it to be so now, for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness,” and John consented. As Jesus came up from the water, the heavens opened, He saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and resting on Him, and a voice from heaven said, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”
All the older heretics saw how central this narrative is to the Gospel history and to Christian doctrine. Every Gnostic had to interpret it and fit it into his theory of the relation between Jesus and the Christ. And those today who reject the opening chapters of Matthew and Luke must, to be consistent, treat this as the start of the Gospel record. Neither group can be wrong in thinking it held a most prominent place in the Gospel writers’ minds, and that they connected everything they later tell of His ministry with it. No doubt the narrative itself gives them a pretext for charging these writers with carnal, superstitious notions. If there can be no visible signs of the invisible, and if believing an actual Man to be the Son of God is to be dismissed at once as anthropomorphic, then there is nothing left to debate; the matter is settled by one sweeping begging of the question. But if that is not granted, plain men will not be prevented—by being told the Dove or the Voice are merely Jewish or Pagan ways of projecting our own inner experiences outward—from seeing that this record carries us into the deep, inward ground that philosophy always seeks and never reaches. The Kingdom John said was near is declared to rest on a living Person. He who had always ruled it is now revealed: “This is my beloved Son” is the revelation. The Evangelists are to testify of a Son of God, clothed with the Spirit of God so that He may rule the spiritual world and all the inward powers of things. We are to see whether men so simple, raised in so narrow a school, make good their magnificent claims—whether they betray the emptiness of a mere dream by exalting a merely human Friend and Teacher, or whether they truly speak as men commissioned to set forth One who owed nothing to the accidents of His earthly position and everything to His relation to a divine and invisible Father.
The Temptation
All the neological interpreters say the next step in the story shows the clearest signs of being a myth. It has nothing to do with the regular course of events; like the legends attached to great heroes, it was inserted to give the ordinary happenings significance, but it actually disturbs their sequence and reveals what a curious patchwork the whole composition is. I fully admit that if the Gospels are simply the record of the journeys of Jesus of Nazareth over one, two, or three years, from Judæa to Galilee and back, and if our knowledge of the facts is measured by our skill in dating these journeys and matching them to Jewish festivals, then the Temptation is an awkward obstacle. But if we take the Baptism to be what it appears—if Jesus was there declared to be the Son of God and sealed with the Spirit—then there is exactly the connection between the third and fourth chapters of St. Matthew that the composers of our Litany recognized. The Baptism asserts, “Thou art the Son of God”; the Temptation takes the form, “if Thou be the Son of God.” He is endued with the Spirit of a Son and wrestles with the spirit of disobedience. He will not cut Himself off from Mankind by turning stones into bread for Himself, for Man is to live by every word of God. He will not throw Himself from the pinnacle of the Temple, for it is written that you shall not tempt the Lord your God. He will not receive the kingdoms of the world from Satan, for it is written that you shall worship the Lord your God. The idea of a Son who claims nothing for Himself, but trusts and obeys His Father in everything, is brought out here with a clearness, definiteness, and simplicity, and with an absence of all verbal pomp and of the usual coloring of a legend, that is at the very least strange. The idea of a spiritual conflict, a battle with a spiritual foe, is set out here without the material devices used by the crudest and the greatest artists alike—something you would hardly expect from a Jewish tax-gatherer, still less if his story had later been embellished by some theological doctor. But, I will be asked, does this not give a personality to the Spirit of Evil, and is that not exactly what one looks for in a legend? Certainly 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, and nothing in it has the look of a dream or a vision; everything is intensely real. Yet the wonder is that this reality and personality are sustained with such an absence of materialism. No image of the Tempter is offered—neither the kind a medieval painter would give nor the kind belonging to Milton’s conception. We feel that the Son of God, clothed in a human body, was not a Person by virtue of that body; and likewise that the personality of the opposing power has nothing to do with an outward shape or visible surroundings. 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 appears to us on earth; that He who could reach that radical evil and strip those shapes of it could alone assert the dominion of the God of Truth and Love over the world; and that this radical evil is nothing original, nothing God created, but essentially the spirit of disobedience, a perverted, rebel will, so that He who has the true obedient will must be its destroyer and the Redeemer of the Universe from it. Such an opening to a history of successive acts of redemption or deliverance shows no sign of having been transferred from some other record into a place it was never meant for. If it means anything, its meaning belongs right there; and to lack it would be a real cause of perplexity.
The Preaching of Jesus
The passage: When Jesus heard that John had been imprisoned, He went into Galilee and began to preach: “Repent, for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” Mark records that He came preaching the Gospel of the kingdom of God, saying the time was fulfilled, the kingdom near, and that men should repent and believe the Gospel. Luke says Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee, His fame spreading through the region, and that at Nazareth He read from Isaiah: the Spirit of the Lord was upon Him, anointing Him to preach good news to the poor, heal the broken-hearted, proclaim freedom to captives, sight to the blind, liberty to the bruised, and the acceptable year of the Lord.
Matthew tells us that when Jesus heard John had been imprisoned, He went into Galilee, and he quotes a passage he says was fulfilled by Christ’s coming to the region of Zebulon and Naphtali. From that time Jesus began to preach, “Repent, for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” Mark says that after John was imprisoned, Jesus came into Galilee preaching the Gospel of the kingdom of God: the time is fulfilled, the kingdom is at hand, repent and believe the Gospel. Luke says Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee, His fame going out through the whole region, and then describes His coming to Nazareth, where He was raised, and His reading the passage from Isaiah about the Spirit of the Lord being upon Him to preach good news to the poor, heal the broken-hearted, free the captives, give sight to the blind, release the bruised, and proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. A harmonist will reasonably connect these accounts as referring to the same visit to Galilee. But I quote them to point out a deeper and more important agreement, one concerning the nature of our Lord’s preaching and its connection with the earlier history. When He comes to Galilee, He begins by preaching the Kingdom of God and calling men to repent because it is at hand. The first two Evangelists give no other words spoken by Him who had been declared the Son of God than these. John the Baptist’s message is exactly the message of the Christ: the same announcement of a kingdom, the same call to repentance, the same reference to the fulfilling of the time and an approaching crisis. Only now this announcement is called a Gospel—good news that the kingdom is at hand and the time fulfilled; men are to repent and believe this good news. Luke expands and explains the others. He begins by saying Jesus came in the power of the Spirit into Galilee, and shows in one synagogue what kind of preaching it was that elsewhere won Him praise. His preaching announces One able to heal the sick and free the captives because the Spirit of the Lord was upon Him—a Deliverer who could undo chains no one else could undo, a King with dominion over the secret powers and inner being of man, now declared to be at hand. Men were to repent so 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
The passage: As Jesus walked by the sea of Galilee He saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and Andrew, casting a net, for they were fishers. He said, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men,” and at once they left their nets and followed Him. Going further, He saw two more brothers, James the son of Zebedee and John, in a boat with their father mending their nets. He called them, and they immediately left the boat and their father and followed Him.
St. Matthew tells this story, and St. Mark’s account is nearly the same. St. Luke joins it to the miraculous catch of fish, but his key-words, “From henceforth thou shalt catch men,” belong just as much to the other two. Suppose we had only these narratives, with everything peculiar to St. Luke left out, and suppose we had heard nothing beforehand of a Kingdom or of a Son of God. Our first conclusion, I think, would be this: told so plainly and in so few words, the story is clearly meant to describe how some royal person claimed authority over the humble men around him, took them into his service, and gave them a high office—one they could scarcely understand, but which implied a remarkable influence and mastery over their fellow human beings. And if we then found that all the earlier records seemed to speak of just such a King, exercising a mysterious authority that He had come to assert and use on behalf of human beings, we would certainly think this narrative stood in a close and natural relation to the rest. On any other supposition—if the writer’s mind had been filled with some other conviction—we would expect quite different language: far less direct and simple, and far less majestic.