Jesus Christ. It is obvious that any attempt to speak in a few pages of a life which was divine as well as human—of a life which stands at the very centre of the world's history as the fulfilment of all the past hopes of humanity, and as the highest ideal of all its future aims—can only be carried out by rigid limitation of the end in view. It will be impossible here to enter into any critical inquiries; or into profound theological discussions respecting the inter-relationship of the two natures in one person; or into a review of philosophical theories respecting the work and person of Jesus; or into a defence of the a priori possibility or credibility of miracles; or into a minute examination of conflicting systems of chronology; or into a harmony of the variations in the historical narratives which have been magnified into irreconcilable discrepancies. On such questions we can barely touch, referring for further information to the articles on CHRISTIANITY, CHRISTOLOGY, CHRONOLOGY, GOSPELS, JOHN, and MIRACLES.
The sources of our knowledge of the life of Jesus are almost exclusively biblical. The references to Him in Jewish and heathen literature are distorted by hatred, prejudice, and ignorance; and the only additions to our knowledge which can be gleaned from the Christian literature of the early centuries are dubious in authenticity, and insignificant in amount. Though legend has connected the name of Philo with the apostle Peter, the learned Alexandrian lived too early to be reached by the growing force of Christianity, and makes no allusion to it. Some critics have imagined the existence of Christian interpolations in Philo's account of the Therapææ. Josephus speaks briefly of John the Baptist, and of the martyrdom of James, the Lord's brother; but the authenticity of the famous passage about Christ is now given up in its present form, for it must in any case have been tampered with by some Christian scribe. The silence of Josephus can only have been due to perplexity or policy. From other Jewish references we learn nothing except the blinding fury of the malignity excited by the name of Christ. The blasphemous scandals and innuendoes of the Talmud, which culminate in such deplorable medieval calumnies as the Toldoth Jeshu, are lamented by all respectable Jews, and indeed they refute themselves by their preposterous anachronisms and impossible absurdities. Generally the Talmudists veil their hatred under distant allusions to 'so and so,' 'Absalom,' 'the fool,' 'the hung;' and they conceal a malediction under the form in which they write the name of Jesus. Suetonius only alludes to Christ (if at all) under the blundering notion that he ('Christus') stirred up troubles in Rome in the days of Claudius. Tacitus historically records the crucifixion, but is otherwise as grossly ignorant of every fact about the Christians as he is about the Jews. The only notion of Christianity entertained by him, by Suetonius, and by Pliny is derived either from the monstrous falsehoods of pagan enemies or from a confusion of Christians with the members of the vilest Jewish and Gnostic sects. Not one fact can be disinterred from the cynical persiflage of Lucian in his tract on the death of Peregrinus, or from the anonymous Philopseudes. Celsus, indeed, professes to have studied the documents of Christianity, but his views had been tainted, partly by the hostile prejudices of philosophy, and partly by his reliance on the invention of scandal-mongering Jews. It is more disappointing that no fact about Jesus can be derived from the earliest Christian literature. There is scarcely a single grain of gold in the accumulated rubbish-heap of legends contained in the apocryphal gospels; not a single fact in the allusions of the Fathers on which we can rely, unless it be the statement that the stable of the Nativity was a cavern; not a single unrecorded saying of Christ (ἄγραφον δόγμα), unless it be 'Prove yourselves good money-changers; or one or two others which—like 'He who is near me is near the fire'—are already implicitly contained in the records of the gospels.
We therefore turn to the New Testament, and here no facts of the life are preserved for us except those which are recorded in the gospels, and receive independent attestation from the references of St John, St Peter, and St Paul. St Paul preserves for us the one unrecorded precious maxim, 'It is more blessed to give than to receive,' but nothing more. The question therefore arises, 'May we rely on the four gospels as authentic and adequate?' That they are so might seem to be sufficiently proved by the existence and the ever-growing strength of Christianity and Christendom—the religion and the society which are based upon them. They have indeed been placed in the crucible and thrust into the hottest furnace of modern criticism, but only with this result that in these days scarcely a critic pretends to impugn the general historic truthfulness of the synoptic narratives, though many endeavour to eliminate the supernatural elements. The characteristics of the gospels themselves—their simplicity, their naïve confessions, their inimitable stamp of honesty and veracity (the simplex veri sigillum), the impossibility that the Character which they set forth should have been invented by fishermen and tax-gatherers, the historic verification of which they are capable—are the pledge of their authenticity. And of the various theories which have been adopted to explain away their significance one after another has hopelessly broken down. Paulus attempted to account for the gospels on naturalistic grounds, so that miracles were merely mistakes of enthusiastic observation; but after the crushing exposure of this hypothesis by Strauss it has never been revived. Strauss, with imposing wealth of learning and ability, tried to apply to them the principles of Hegel, and to explain them as myths generated by the idea; but after a temporary success he was himself forced to complain that his views had been swept away by the orthodox reaction. Even Renan says of Strauss's Leben Jesu, 'Ce Christ a priori, ou le divine bien, n'est pas encore le Christ historique'—Ét. d'Hist. Rel. pp. 157–58; and in point of fact Strauss was refuted by the intense and unique originality of the gospel story, and by the fact that no miracle was attributed to John the Baptist even at the zenith of his mighty influence. Baur and his able successors helped to nullify the arguments of Strauss, and in their turn applied to the story of the origins of Christianity the strong solvent of criticism; but his followers had to make larger admissions than he himself, and his attempt to show that the gospels were 'tendency-writings' proved itself so little satisfactory, and was so completely counteracted by the writings of Neander and others, that at Tübingen itself there is a
Tübingen school no more (Ewald, Gesch. Christus, Vorrede, p. xxvii. 3d ed.). Lastly there arose the eclectic schools of Schleiermacher and Renan. The medial system (Vermittelungs-Theologie) of Schleiermacher produced a powerful effect, but the day for half-views has gone by. The success of Renan was due mainly to the charm of style, but he was not sufficiently serious to captivate many proselytes. His Vie de Jésus was vitiated in part by the writer's own vacillations about the fourth gospel and in part by the indignant scorn which was kindled by his hypothesis that He whom the world has recognised as verax et verus et ipsa veritas lent Himself to wilful deception in the raising of Lazarus. The unshaken belief of the vast majority of Christians, even of those who have most thoroughly examined the literature of scepticism, is sufficient to prove that modern apologetics have been adequate to sustain the far fiercer battle of the forces which were routed in the earlier centuries by Origen and Athanasius, and in the 18th by Butler, Lardner, and Paley.
The attack on the authenticity of the fourth gospel has been longer and more determined, but the evidence has been exhausted with careful accuracy and stated with perfect candour, and we may point to the papers of Bishop Lightfoot and the edition of the Gospel of St John by Bishop Westcott as containing arguments which seem finally decisive against the destructive critics. On this subject the author of Supernatural Religion was practically driven out of the field, and the certainty that Tatian in his Diatessaron used the fourth as well as the other gospels—which has now been proved by the discovery of an Armenian translation of Ephraem's commentary in the library of the Mechtarist Fathers at Venice in 1836—is a strong addition to the weight of external evidence. This commentary of Ephraem was translated into Latin by Aucher in 1841, and published by De Mœsinger in 1876. Tatian was a hearer of Justin Martyr, and his undoubted acceptance of the fourth gospel gives certainty to the already strong probability that that gospel was accepted by Justin.
Before proceeding to set forth in its general idea the narrative of the gospels some preliminary considerations must be passed in review. It is essential to notice that the life of Christ, as related in the gospels, is partial and fragmentary. It has been calculated that in narrating the public ministry of Christ the synoptic gospels only deal with the events of fifteen months (450 days); but that so little consecutive is the narrative that not more than thirty-five days are distinctly touched upon, while there are lacunæ, in which the events of one, two, or even three months at a time are passed over in silence. Further, it has been observed that the records of two or three of these days—the day in the cornfield (Matt. xii. 1–xiii. 52), the day of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. v. 1–viii. 17)—occupy large fractions of St Matthew's Gospel; the day of the cursing of the fig-tree occupies one-seventh of St Mark's; and the story of five days (Luke, xx. 1–xxiv.) occupies one-fourth of St Luke's, exclusive of the story of the infancy. If this computation be accepted, the result is that the Synoptists move in the sphere of one-thirteenth part of a ministry of which the extent is uncertain, but which is generally believed to have covered little more than three years (see Dr Martineau's Seat of Authority in Religion, p. 185). It is a legitimate inference from this that much of our Lord's public activity is unrecorded; but this is what St John himself distinctly tells us (John, xxi. 25). The gospels were written to establish a faith, not to detail a biography; to record the essence of a teaching, and to testify to the majesty of a Personality, not to depict the minute incidents which had but a slight or secondary bearing on the great design. There are vast spaces in the heavens which are not sown with stars, and the 'economy,' both divine and human, which marks the scantiness of the evangelic narrative of the ministry is but a part of that simplicity and reticence which contented itself with so brief and (from the ordinary point of view) so meagre a reference to the thirty long years of the Saviour's growth and preparation.
On the very threshold of any attempt to speak of Christ we are met by the fact that, in the belief of one-third of the human race, He was not a simple man but a Divine man, the God-Man; the Son of Man as the unique representative of humanity at its best and greatest, but also preeminently—and in a sense transcendently different from that in which the phrase can be applied to men—the Son of God. To those who take the fact in a bare isolated way it may seem an insuperable stumbling-block: not so to those who do not disconnect it from the whole conception of God and the entire history of the world. Nothing is more unphilosophical than the a priori rejection of miracles, because miracles do not come under the range of ordinary experience. 'Historic problems cannot be thus settled by philosophic categories.' If we start with that belief in God which may be regarded as the normal datum of our human consciousness, and if we contemplate the historic fact of the fall and wretchedness of man, the belief that God—in compassion for and in order to redeem and elevate the countless millions of mankind in all their generations—became man, and took our nature upon Him in the person of His Son, so far from seeming a monstrous hypothesis, appears to be in exact accordance with His nature, as the best and highest that we know and can imagine. Those who, like Spinoza, identify God with Nature, which is but the sum total of His visible manifestations, exclude from Nature the sole element which explains it—viz. the element of a Divine and Supreme Will.
Nature alone can furnish us with no explanation of the manifestation of Christ, but it harmonises absolutely with that idea of God which we believe that He has Himself planted within us. So completely is this the case that—as was seen by the great German historian, Julius von Müller—apart from Christ all human history is reduced to a chaotic dream (see his letter to his friend, Karl Bonnet, quoted by Luthardt, Apolog. Vortr.; Eng. trans. p. 353). All the history of the past, up to the Incarnation, points to Him, and in Him finds its fulfillment; all the development of the ages since He appeared springs from the divine impulse which He gave. As Jean Paul Richter so finely said: 'He lifted the gate of the centuries from off its hinges with His bleeding hand.' The most sceptical of historians cannot fail to see that Jesus stands at the very centre of humanity. Not only was all which is most precious in Hebrew literature full of unspeakable yearnings for this Divine Deliverer, but even heathendom abounds in unconscious prophecies of His advent. Among the Persians we read in the Zend-Avesta of 'the victorious Saoshyant, the beneficent one who will benefit the whole bodily world, who will stand against the destruction of the bodily creatures to withstand the Drug of the two-footed brood.' He is the redeemer, born of Zoroaster, who shall crush the serpent-destroyer Ahriman (see Zend-Avesta, Yast xxviii., Sacred Books of the East, p. 220). So, too, in Brahmanism we have the redeemer Krishna, who is constantly represented as crushing and conquering the serpent. Among the Greeks we have the profound legend of Prometheus, the representative of suffering humanity, who can only be delivered from his fetters on the rock, and the tearing of the vulture's talons, when Herakles the son of Zeus descends for him into Tartarus. (Consider the remarkable lines, Æsch. Prom. 1026–30, one of the most striking of the unconscious prophecies of heathendom.) Socrates puts into the mouth of Plato his confession of the necessity for some divine deliverer who is at once both God and man (see Ackermann, Das Christliche in Plato, Hamburg, 1835); and some such figure has been dreamed of in all the higher forms of religion as a necessary inference from what we know both of God and man. The revelation of Christ springs as a necessary postulate from our faith in God. For some remarkable passages in the ancients, see Cic. De Legg., ii. 10; Sen. Ep. 52; and Schneider, Christliche Klänge.
But in speaking of the human life of Jesus it is unnecessary to entangle ourselves in the intense and prolonged theological battles which culminated in the 3d and 4th centuries. The result of those controversies is adequately summed up in the four technical terms ἀληθῶς, τελέως, ἀδιαίρετως, ἀσυγχύτως, decided on in the four councils of Nice, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon. As against the Arians, Christ was truly God; as against the Apollinarians, He was perfectly man; as against the Nestorians, He was indivisibly God-man; as against the Eutychians, He was distinctly God and man. Beyond these elementary decisions all attempts to deal with that arcenum of theology, the περιχώρησις or communicatio idiomatum, can only end in failure and absurdity (see Hooker, Eccl. Pol., Book V., liv. § 10). But if it be assumed that it is impossible or irreverent to narrate the earthly life of such a Being, the answer is that it has been done in the four gospels, and that to shrink from doing it would be only due to the false reverence of Apollinarianism—now quite as common in the church as Arianism is in the world—which denied the full humanity of Christ. It is most necessary, too, to bear in mind that throughout Christ's earthly life, from the Incarnation to the Resurrection, He voluntarily laid aside, in obedience to the perfect conditions of humanity, the divine attributes of omniscience and omnipresence. 'Being in the form of God, He thought it not a prize to be on an equality with God, but emptied Himself (ἐκένωσεν εἰαυτὸν), taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of man' (Phil. ii. 5, 6, Revised Version). The doctrine here revealed is known in theology as the doctrine of the kenosis or 'emptying,' and in speaking of Jesus we have constantly to bear it in mind, as the necessary condition of His being 'a man with man,' of His coming ut Judæus ad Judæos apud Judæos, of His 'wearing a tent like ours, and of the same material.'
We proceed then to sketch in barest outline 'those sinless years which breathed beneath the Syrian blue.' Jesus, as appears by both the genealogies recorded in the gospels, was of the royal house of David. The discrepancies and divergences of those genealogies are believed to be due to the differences between His legal and His natural descent, which in one or two places of the line was affected by a collateral adoption, or a levirate marriage. His virgin birth is attested and assumed by the evangelists, and St Luke, using Hebraic documents which seem to be directly traceable to the memories of the Virgin Mary, preserves for us particulars about the infancy of Jesus which are not found in the other Evangelists. The apocryphal gospels reveal in impossible and even revolting details, and stumbling on the very threshold, present us with a picture which would have been instantly destructive of our faith if it had been true. The canonical gospels vindicate their truthfulness and their supremacy by the severest reticence, which contains no word to mar that ideal which every effort of invention instantly degrades. After the marvels of the Nativity at Bethlehem, we are told of the circumcision, the presentation in the temple, the visit of the Magi, the flight into Egypt, and the massacre of the innocents. The exact date of these events cannot be determined with absolute certainty, but may be brought within narrow limits, and most scholars now acquiesce in the view which places the Nativity about four years earlier than our received era. The historic questions which the narrative raises have been sifted to the bottom, and the credibility of the gospel details has been triumphantly established.
After the infancy there is a deep silence which covers all but the concluding fragment of the life of Christ. From the return to Nazareth, while He was yet a very young child, to the baptism by John we have nothing preserved to us except a single anecdote by St Luke, and a single word in St Mark. It is exactly respecting this portion of the life of Christ that the apocryphal gospels most deeply betray incompetent falsity, and the gospels show that grace of superintendency without which they could not have recorded what the apostles had seen and heard when their hands handled the Word of Life. The anecdote of St Luke is Christ's visit to the temple with his parents at the Passover just before His thirteenth year, which marked the age of a Jewish boy's 'confirmation'—his admission to the rank of a 'son of the law' (ben hat-torah). It has been called 'the solitary floweret out of the wonderful enclosed garden of the thirty years, plucked precisely there when the swollen bud at a distinctive crisis bursts into flower' (Stier, Reden Jesu, i. 18). It is specially precious from the decisive way in which it shows that Christ possessed a human soul, and not only the Logos instead of it; and it exactly accords with the testimony of St Luke that our Lord's growth was that of a child in whom there was a gradual increase of knowledge (Luke, ii. 40, πληρούμενον not πεπληρωμένον). Indeed it seems to have been the special purpose of the third evangelist to give us at least one glimpse of Jesus at every phase of His human life, as an infant, a child, a boy, a youth, and a full-grown man.
The one word happily preserved for us by St Mark is 'the carpenter' in the question of the unbelieving Nazarenes, 'Is not this the carpenter?' which an irreverent reverence has altered into 'the son of the carpenter.' It shows us that, as a part of that infinite self-repression and obedience by which Christ 'abode with His parents and was subject unto them,' He shared with Joseph in the humble trade by which he earned his daily bread. Unanimous tradition, implied by the gospels themselves, agrees in the belief that Joseph died early, and that our Lord grew up in a family circle of those whom the evangelists call His 'brothers' and 'sisters.' In that family He was the first-born, and probably helped to support them all. To any imagination which was not divinely guided such a mode of spending all but three years of His life would have seemed impossible and derogatory; but the admission is one of the most striking proofs of the absolute veracity of the gospels. Their silence as to all other records of those thirty years preaches to us with the most majestic eloquence. Some of the greatest lessons of Christ's example are involved in the fact that He did not strive, nor cry, neither was His voice heard in the streets. The central lesson that 'Christ pleased not Himself' is written large over the closed golden portals of those unrecorded years. Coming to live for man, He chose the lot not of the few but of the countless multitudes, the immense majority. The town and the home which He chose were alike poor, provincial, insignificant. Thus He rebuked pride, which is one of the two great taproots of human aberration; He showed the sacredness of obscurity; He glorified the lot of labour which antiquity despised. Rebuking the restless passion for excitement and the desire to minister to self-importance, He showed to all mankind that the true life is the interior life, the life of calm, recollectedness, and companionship with the divine, passed in the sweet seclusion of a home and the ordered routine of lowly duties. It is impossible for most men to live as Christ lived during His brief ministry; but that unknown life of the artisan in dull, provincial Nazareth was meant to teach us that the commonplace ordinary life, which is the normal life of man, may yet be precious with the best sanctities of heaven's beatitude.
Thus ended the first and main part of the life of Jesus. At the age of thirty began the second phase of His life, the public ministry—ending with the Crucifixion and the Resurrection—which occupies all but a fraction of the gospels. St Peter's epitome of that ministry is that 'He went about doing good,' and it was by giving up everything which the earthly and sensual mind can desire that He left us an example that we should follow His steps. To detail the events of that ministry is obviously impossible here, nor is it necessary. We shall but indicate its great phases and divisions, and then touch on some of the considerations which it suggests. It falls into the following great divisions:
I. The call to the ministry in the baptism and preaching of John the Baptist, who first publicly recognised Jesus as the Messiah.
II. The temptation in the wilderness.
III. The call of the first apostles; the first miracle at Cana; the beginning of the preaching in Galilee.
IV. The first Passover visit to Jerusalem, the first cleansing of the temple. The question of the rulers, and the prophecy 'Destroy this Temple,' &c. The interview with Nicodemus; the retirement to Galilee; the discourse to the Samaritan woman at the well; the rejection by the Nazarenes.
V. The 'Galilean springtide' of the ministry amid the gladness of the multitudes; many miracles of healing; the choice of the twelve; the Sermon on the Mount; the message from the imprisoned Baptist; the intercourse with Pharisees, publicans, and sinners; the great day of parables; the visit to Gergesa; the day of Matthew's feast.
VI. The second visit to Jerusalem; the miracle at Bethesda; the murder of the Baptist; the return to Galilee.
VII. The feeding of the five thousand; the discourse at Capernaum; the Sabbath and other disputes, amid ever-deepening conflict and opposition.
VIII. The flight among the heathen; the Syro-Phœnician woman; the return to Decapolis; the epoch of rarer miracles; the feeding of the four thousand; the recognition of the Messiahship by the disciples; the Transfiguration; the healing of the demonic boy.
IX. The visit to Jerusalem at the Feast of Tabernacles; the woman taken in adultery; the healing of the man born blind; the return to Galilee.
X. The final farewell to Galilee. Incidents and teachings of a slow journey towards Jerusalem. Visit to Jerusalem at the Feast of Dedication. The last stay in Perea; the raising of Lazarus. Jesus, under a ban, withdraws to the town of Ephraim.
XI. The last visit to Jerusalem. The events of Passion Week—Palm Sunday; the day of parables; the day of temptations; the great denunciations; the farewell to the temple; the betrayal.
XII. The Last Supper; the last discourse; the agony in Gethsemane; the arrest; the threefold trials; the Crucifixion; the Resurrection; the great forty days; the Ascension.
Such being the great divisions and landmarks of the life, it only remains to touch on one or two of the important questions which it suggests. i. What was the length of our Lord's public ministry? We are unable to answer the question with certainty. This is due to the remarkable fact that the synoptic gospels occupy themselves almost exclusively with the Galilean ministry, while St John mainly dwells on the ministry in Judea and Jerusalem. Sceptics have vainly endeavoured to extort any discrepancy from this fact, since the Synoptists most distinctly imply that much of our Lord's time must have been spent in Jerusalem (see Luke, x. 38, xix. 42; Mark, xi. 11)—a fact, indeed, directly stated in the recorded πράξεις ('how often') in His lament over Jerusalem (Matt. xxiii. 37; Luke, xiii. 34). We may then decidedly reject the notion of a one-year's ministry, which has been most unwarrantably founded on the expression of Isaiah (lx. 2) and the reference to it by our Lord at Nazareth (Luke, iv. 19). This was the view of Origen (De Princ. iv. 5), and Clement of Alexandria (Strom. i. xxi. sect. 145), and of the two Gnostic teachers, Ptolemæus (Ep. ad Florum) and Herakleon; but not that of Melito and Irenæus. It has found powerful supporters in Browne (Ordo Sæclorum, pp. 342-91), and Keim (Jesu von Nazara); but the former can only maintain it by eliminating τὸ πᾶσα from John, vi. 4, in spite of all the manuscripts, and the latter by rejecting the authenticity and credibility of the fourth gospel. The majority of scholars agree in the well-founded inference stated as early as Hippolytus, the scholar of Irenæus, Eusebius (H.E. i. 10), Theodoret (in Dan. ix. 27), and Jerome, that Jesus died at the age of thirty-three, and that the ministry lasted more than two and a half years. Irenæus's extraordinary assertion (C. Hær. ii. 2515) that Jesus died between the ages of forty and fifty is a blunder (which in him is not isolated), falsely inferred from John, viii. 57. The only element of uncertainty for those who accept the fourth gospel is the identification of the unnamed feast mentioned by St John in v. 1. If that feast was the Jewish feast of Purim we see that St John groups his narrative round five festivals—(1) the Passover (ii. 13); (2) Purim (v. 1); (3) the Passover (vi. 4); (4) the Tabernacles (vii. 2); (5) the Dedication (x. 22); (6) the Passover (xi. 65). It is in accordance with this that Purim took place on Veadar 14 (about March 19), and that our Lord (some time before the feast) said to the woman of Samaria 'there are yet four months unto harvest' (John, iv. 35). Since, then, there were three Passovers during the ministry, and that ministry began some time before the first Passover, we see a reason for the view that it lasted about three years—a view which best accords with all the data. And though we cannot here discuss the chronology, the opinion that Christ's baptism by John took place in the summer of 26 A.D., and that He was crucified in the spring of 29 A.D., is probably not far wrong. ii. Without entering into the subject of apologetics, we may allude to the miracles which enter so largely into the life of Jesus, and which, as they were a support to the faith of former centuries, are regarded as a stumbling-block by modern science. St John puts us into the right point of view when he calls them works ('ἐργα—John, v. 20, and passim). Given the Personality of Christ, miracles were natural to Him; 'our supernatural was His natural.' Their occurrence becomes a question of evidence, and the supposed recondite and dangerous formula of Hume 'reduces itself to the very harmless proposition that anything is incredible which is contrary to a complete induction.' When Hume said that no evidence could establish a miracle, because it was more likely that evidence should be false than that a miracle should be true, his statement came to no more than this—that a miracle disturbs the mechanical expectation of a recurrence (Mozley, Bampton Lectures, p. 56). Hume did not argue for so unphilosophical an assertion as the impossibility of miracles, but he argued against their credibility, because his philosophy practically reduced life to a series of impressions and sensations. In answer, it is enough to say with Lord Bacon, 'the soul of man was not produced by heaven or earth, but was breathed immediately from God; so the ways and dealings of God with spirits are not included in Nature—i.e. in the laws of heaven and earth, but are reserved to the law of His secret work and grace.' The evidence for Christ's miracles, and above all for His Resurrection, has been sufficient to convince and potent to ameliorate the whole civilised world. iii. Christians rightly regard the Resurrection as the one fundamental historic miracle on which rests their historic faith. If any fact can be regarded as indisputable it is the fact that on the morning of the first Easter Sunday the astonished disciples found that there was no corpse in the rock-hewn sepulchre. So much is now freely conceded by the most advanced sceptics. The testimony in favour of the fact is overwhelming, and it is impossible to account for the existence of Christianity or of Christendom on any hypothesis other than the firm conviction in a miraculous Resurrection, of which all the early disciples regarded themselves as the chosen witnesses. The modern criticism of unbelief has only attempted to account for the empty tomb by theories which sink to the ground under the weight of their own impossibility. The notion of a merely apparent death from which Jesus was revived by the spices and the cool sepulchre; the notion that the apostles stole the body by night; the notion that Jesus was not crucified at all, but only someone in His place; the notion that 'the faith of Christendom is founded on the self-deception of an hallucinée'—have been in turn adopted and abandoned. Such naturalistic explanations are impossible, unless they be bolstered up by the preposterous supposition that, at some stage, deliberate deception was at work, and that the teachers of the religion which is pre-eminent in inculcating the sanctity of truth founded their preaching upon a lie. It is not possible here to develop the arguments, or to array the evidence, on which our faith in a literal Resurrection of Jesus in a glorified and spiritual body is founded. We must be content to refer to such works as those of Gebhardt (Gotha, 1864), Beyschlag (Berlin, 1865), Steinmeyer (Berlin, 1871), and Bishop Westcott on The Gospel of the Resurrection (Lond. 1884). iv. And it must be borne in mind that, if scepticism could eliminate from the gospels what is called the supernatural element, it would still be confronted with the superhuman grandeur of Christ Himself. So far from tending to discredit the narratives of the miracles which He wrought, it may rather be said that Science tends to throw light upon their accordance with the yet undeciphered laws of nature; but even were every miracle eliminated, Christ still continues to be what even those who have doubted of His divinity call Him, 'ein Mystrium, ein Unicum.' The proof of His divinity is involved in His perfect sinlessness, which not only transcends the attainments but even the ideal of humanity. Infinite in its many-sidedness, His character is yet supreme from every aspect in which it can be regarded. Not only is He the sole human being whom sinlessness has claimed, or of whom sinlessness can for a moment be predicated, but the ideal presented by His character stands apart, not only from that in the life of the best pagans, but even of those whose life was a professed imitation of His. And more even than this, imagination has again and again attempted at least to conceive and depict a character absolutely stainless, and yet, in the whole range of the world's poetry and fiction, has never attempted to do so without hopeless failure if it descended for a moment into details. Could the peasants of Galilee have invented the sole perfect ideal which the world has been able either to imagine or describe? To this is attributable the remarkable fact that even the most pronounced sceptics—even those opponents of Christianity who would gladly have got rid altogether of the admiration of Christ—seem to have been unable to contemplate Him without as it were falling on their knees. 'Between Him and whoever else in this world,' said Napoleon to General Bertrand, 'there is no possible form of comparison.' 'Jesus is in all unique,' says Renan, 'and nothing could be compared to him' (Vie de Jésus, p. 457). Strauss calls Him 'the Being without whose presence in the mind perfect piety is impossible.' Goethe called Him 'the Divine Man, the Saint, the type and model of all men' (Conversations with Eckermann, ii. 3). J. S. Mill said that 'it would not be easy even now, even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete than to endeavour so to live that Christ would approve our life.' The character of Jesus was sufficient to overawe even the flippancy of Voltaire, as we see in the story of his remarkable dream. v. Nothing short of a divine personality can account for the stupendous and inexhaustible effect produced upon the world by the life and teaching of Christ—a life so short that He died before the full completion of the powers of manhood; a ministry so confined in space, so contracted in time. That life, lived on a stage so narrow, furnished to mankind the sole perfect pattern and example; that teaching involved every element of pure and perfect spiritual religion. It was Christ alone who first brought home to the mind of man that God is love, and that man is the son of God; and first brought life and immortality to light. And as Christ thus became the Saviour of mankind by example and teaching, so also did He redeem the race by the self-sacrifice which culminated in the cross and passion, and which is continued by His Resurrection, Ascension, and session at the right hand of God. By this His life He has redeemed us from sin and death, and reconciled us unto God. That mighty work of individual regeneration which Christ began has been carried on by the gift of the Spirit, which, in the slow process of centuries, has made holiness a common attainment of His saints, and leavened, humanised, ennobled the thoughts, the lives, the families, the society, the kingdoms of mankind. And the Christian believes that that work will continue until 'the kingdoms of this world' become universally, and in reality as well as in name, the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ.
The literature of this subject is inexhaustible, and every year adds to its enormous accumulations. It begins with the gospels and epistles in the 1st century of the Christian era, and continues in unbroken succession through the Fathers, the Schoolmen, and the Reformers, down to modern days. The first attempt to write a consecutive life of Christ, outside the authentic and apocryphal gospels, was the Vita Christi, by St Bonaventura. The Paradise Regained of Milton was practically an effort in the same direction. The lives of Christ of later times are very numerous: in Italian, that by Capecelatro (Naples, 1868); in French, those of De
Pressensé, Dupanloup, Salvador, Wallon, and Renan; in German, those of Caspari, Ewald, Hase, Hofmann, Lange, Neander, Sepp, Strauss, Weiss, Keim, and many more; in English, those of Ellicott, Geikie, Edersheim, and, among others far too numerous to mention, that by the present writer in 1874, which has called out such a multitude of successors. See also the articles on JOSEPH and on MARY.