The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire

by T. R. Glover

CHAPTER IV

JESUS OF NAZARETH

When we hear any other speaker, even a very good one, he produces absolutely no effect upon us, or not much, whereas the mere fragments of you and your words, even at second-hand, and however imperfectly repeated, amaze and possess the souls of every man, woman and child who comes within hearing of them.—Plato, Symposium, 215 D (Jowett).

Dominus noster Christus veritatem se non consuetudinem cognominavit.—Tertullian, de virg. vel. 1.

Towards the end of the first century of our era, there began to appear a number of little books, written in the ordinary Greek of every-day life, the language which the common people used in conversation and correspondence. It was not the literary dialect, which men of letters affected—a mannered and elaborate style modelled on the literature of ancient Greece and no longer a living speech. The books were not intended for a lettered public, but for plain people who wanted a plain story, which they knew already, set down in a handy and readable form. The writers did their work very faithfully—some of them showing a surprising loyalty to the story which they had received. Like other writers they were limited by considerations of space and so forth, and this involved a certain freedom of choice in selecting, omitting, abridging and piecing together the material they gathered. Four only of the books survive intact; of others there are scanty fragments; and scholars have divined at least one independent work embodied in two that remain. So far as books can, three of them represent very fairly the ideas of an earlier generation, as it was intended they should, and tell their common story, with the variations natural to individual writers, but with a general harmony that is the pledge of its truth.

The Gospels

At an early date, these books began to be called Gospels[[1]] and by the time they had circulated for a generation they were very widely known and read among the community for which they were written. Apart from a strong instinct which would allow no conscious change to be made in the lineaments of the central figure of the story, there was nothing to safeguard the little books from the fate of all popular works of their day. Celsus, at the end of the second century, maintained that a good deal of the story was originally invention; and he added that the "believers" had made as free as drunk men with it and had written the gospel over again—three times, four times, many times—and had altered it to meet the needs of controversy.[[2]] Origen replied that Marcion's followers and two other schools had done so, but he knew of no others. It may to-day be taken as established that the four gospels, as we know them, stand substantially as near the autograph of their authors as most ancient books which were at all widely read, though here and there it is probable, or even certain, that changes on a slight scale have been made in the wording to accommodate the text to the development of Christian ideas.[[3]] This is at first sight a serious qualification, but it is not so important as it seems. By comparison of the first three gospels with one another, with the aid of the history of their transmission in the original Greek and in many versions and quotations, it is not very difficult to see where the hand of a later day has touched the page and to break through to something in all probability very near the original story.

This is the greatest problem of literary and historical criticism to-day. All sorts of objections have been raised against the credibility of the gospels from the time of Celsus—they were raised even earlier; for Celsus quotes them from previous controversialists—and they are raised still. We are sometimes told that we cannot be absolutely certain of the authenticity of any single saying of Jesus, or perhaps of any recorded episode in his life. A hypertrophied conscience might admit this to be true in the case of any word or deed of Jesus that might be quoted, and yet maintain that we have not lost much. For, it is a commonplace of historians that an anecdote, even if false in itself, may contain historical truth; it may be evidence, that is, to the character of the person of whom it is told; for a false anecdote depends, even more than a true story, upon keeping the colour of its subject. It may be added that, as a rule, false anecdotes are apt to be more highly coloured than true stories, just as a piece of colour printing is generally a good deal brighter than nature. The reader, who, by familiarity with books, and with the ways of their writers, has developed any degree of literary instinct, will not be inclined to pronounce the colours in the first three gospels at least to be anything but natural and true. However, even if one were to concede that all the recorded sayings and doings of Jesus are fabrications (a wildly absurd hypothesis), there remains a common element in them, a unity of tone and character, which points to a well-known and clearly marked personality behind them, whose actual existence is further implied by the Christian movement. In other words, whether true or false in detail, the statements of the gospels, if we know how to use them aright, establish for us the historicity of Jesus, and leave no sort of doubt as to his personality and the impression he made upon those who came into contact with him.

We may not perhaps be able to reconstruct the life of Jesus as we should wish—it will not be a biography, and it will have no dates and hardly any procession of events. We shall be able to date his birth and death, roughly in the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, more exactly fixing in each case a period of five years or so within which it must have happened. Of epochs and crises in his life we can say little, for we do not know enough of John the Baptist and his work to be able to make clear his relations with Jesus, nor can we speak with much certainty of the development of the idea of Messiahship in the mind of Jesus himself. But we can with care recapture something of the experience of Jesus; we can roughly outline his outward life and environment. What is of more consequence, we can realize that, whatever the particular facts of his own career which opened the door for him, he entered into the general experience of men and knew human life deeply and intimately. And, after all, in this case as in others, it is not the facts of the life that matter, but the central fact that this man did know life as it is before he made judgment upon it. It is this alone that makes his judgment—or any other man's—of consequence to us. It is not his individual life, full of endless significance as that is, but his realization thereby of man's life and his attitude toward it that is the real gift of the great man—his thought, his character, himself in fact. And here our difficulty vanishes, for no one, who has cared to study the gospels with any degree of intelligent sympathy, has failed to realize the personality there revealed and to come in some way or other under its influence.

So far in dealing with the religious life of the ancient world, we have had to do with ideas and traditions—with a well thought-out scheme of philosophy and with an ancient and impressive series of mysteries and cults. The new force that now came into play is something quite different. The centre in the new religion is not an idea, nor a ritual act, but a personality. As its opponents were quick to point out,—and they still find a curious pleasure in rediscovering it—there was little new in Christian teaching. Men had been monotheists before, they had worshipped, they had loved their neighbours, they had displayed the virtues of Christians—what was there peculiar in Christianity? Plato, says Celsus, had taught long ago everything of the least value in the Christian scheme of things. The Talmud, according to the modern Jew, contains a parallel to everything that Jesus said—("and how much else!" adds Wellhausen). What was new in the new religion, in this "third race" of men? The Christians had their answer ready. In clear speech, and in aphasia, they indicated their founder. He was new. If we are to understand the movement, we must in some degree realize him—in himself and in his influence upon men.

In every endeavour made by any man to reconstruct another's personality, there will always be a subjective and imaginative element. Biography is always a work of the imagination. The method has its dangers, but without imagination the thing is not to be done at all. A great man impresses men in a myriad of different ways—he is as various and as bewilderingly suggestive as Nature herself—and no two men will record quite the same experience of him. Where the imagination has to penetrate an extraordinary variety of impressions, to seize, not a series of forces each severally making its own impression, but a single personality of many elements and yet a unity, men may well differ in the pictures they make. Even the same man will at different times be differently impressed and not always be uniformly able to grasp and order his impressions. Hence it is that biographies and portraits are so full of surprises and disappointments, while even the writer or the painter will not always accept his own interpretation—he outgrows it and detests it. And if it is possible to spend a life in the realization of the simplest human nature, what is to be said of an attempt to make a final picture of Jesus of Nazareth? Still the effort must be made to apprehend what he was to those with whom he lived, for from that comes the whole Christian movement.

Celsus on "coarseness" of Jesus

Celsus denounced Jesus in language that amazes us; but when he was confronted with the teaching of Jesus, the moral worth of which a mind so candid could not deny, he admitted its value, but he attributed it to the fact that Jesus plagiarized largely from Greek philosophy and above all from Plato. He did not grasp, Celsus adds, how good what he stole really was, and he spoiled it by his vulgarity of phrase. In particular, Celsus denounced the saying "Whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also." The idea came from the Crito, where Socrates compels Crito to own that we must do evil to no one—not even by way of requital. The passage is a fine one, and Celsus quoted it in triumph and asked if there were not something coarse and clownish in the style of Jesus.[[4]]

Celsus forgot for the moment that the same sort of criticism had been made upon Socrates. "'You had better be done,' said Critias, 'with those shoemakers of yours, and the carpenters and coppersmiths. They must be pretty well down at the heel by now—considering the way you have talked them round.' 'Yes,' said Charicles, 'and the cowherds too.'"[[5]] But six centuries had made another man of Socrates. His ideas, interpreted by Plato and others, had altered the whole thinking of the Greek world; his Silenus-face had grown beautiful by association; the physiognomy of his mind and speech was no longer so striking; he was a familiar figure, and his words and phrases were current coin, accepted without question. But to Celsus Jesus was no such figure; he had not the traditions and preconceptions which have in turn obscured for us the features of Jesus; there was nothing in Jesus either hallowed or familiar, and one glance revealed a physiognomy. That he did not like it is of less importance.

The words of Jesus

Taking the saying in question, we find, as Celsus did, absurdity upon the face of it, and, as he also did, something else at the heart of it—a contrast between surface and inner value broad as the gulf between the common sense which men gather from experience and the morality which Jesus read beneath human nature. Among the words of Jesus there are many such sayings, and it is clear that he himself saw and designed the contrasts which we feel as we read them. This sense of contrast is one of the ground-factors of humour generally, perhaps the one indispensable factor; it is always present in the highest humour. If we then take the words of Jesus, as they struck those who first heard them—or as they struck Celsus—we cannot help remarking at once a strong individual character in them, one element in which is humour,—always one of the most personal and individual of all marks of physiognomy.

Humour, in its highest form, is the sign of a mind at peace with itself, for which the contrasts and contradictions of life have ceased to jar, though they have not ceased to be,—which accepts them as necessary and not without meaning, indeed as adding charm to life, when they are viewed from above. It is the faculty which lets a man see what Plato called "the whole tragedy and comedy of life"[[6]]—the one in the other. Is it not humour that saw the Pharisee earnestly rinsing, rubbing and polishing the outside of his cup, forgetful of the fact that he drank from the inside? that saw the simple-minded taking their baskets to gather the grape-harvest from bramble-bushes? That pleaded with a nation, already gaining a name for being sordid, not to cast pearls before swine, and to forsake caring for the morrow, because such care was the mark of the Gentile world—the distinguishing sign between Gentile and Jew? That told the men he knew so well—men bred in a rough world—to "turn the other cheek,"—to yield the cloak to him who took the coat, not in irony, but with the brotherly feeling that "his necessity is greater than mine"—to go when "commandeered" not the required mile, making an enemy by sourness of face, but to go two—"two additional," the Syriac version says—and so soften the man and make him a friend?[[7]]

What stamps the language of Jesus invariably is its delicate ease, implying a sensibility to every real aspect of the matter in hand—a sense of mastery and peace. Men marvelled at the charm of his words—Luke using the Greek charis to express it.[[8]] The homely parable may be in other hands coarse enough, but the parables of Jesus have a quality about them after all these years that leaves one certain he smiled as he spoke them. There is something of the same kind to be felt in Cowper's letters, but in the stronger nature the gift is of more significance. At the cost of a little study of human character, and close reading of the Synoptists, and some careful imagination, it is possible to see him as he spoke,—the flash of the eye, the smile on the lip, the gesture of the hand, all the natural expression of himself and his thought that a man unconsciously gives in speaking, when he has forgotten himself in his matter and his hearer—his physiognomy, in fact. We realize very soon his complete mastery of the various aspects of what he says. That he realizes every implication of his words is less likely, for there is a spontaneity about them—they are "out of the abundance of his heart"; the form is not studied; they are for the man and the moment. But they imply the speaker and his whole relation to God and man—they cannot help implying this, and that is their charm. Living words, flashed out on the spur of the moment from the depths of him, they are the man. It was not idly that the early church used to say "Remember the words of the Lord Jesus." On any showing, it is of importance to learn the mind of one whose speech is so full of life, and it is happily possible to do this from even the small collections we possess of his recorded sayings.

Quite apart from the human interest which always clings about the childhood of a significant man, the early years of Jesus have a value of their own, for it was to them that he always returned when he wished to speak his deepest thought on the relations of God and man. In the life and love of the home he found the truest picture of the divine life. This we shall have to consider more fully at a later point. Very little is said by the evangelists of the childhood and youth at Nazareth, but in the parables we have Jesus' own reminiscences, and the scenes and settings of the stories he tells fit in easily and pleasantly with the framework of the historical and geographical facts of his life at Nazareth.

The town lies in a basin among hills, from the rim of which can be seen the historic plain of Esdraelon toward the South, Eastward the Jordan valley and the hills of Gilead, and to the West the sea. "It is a map of Old Testament history."[[9]] On great roads North and South of the town's girdle of hills passed to and fro, on the journey between Egypt and Mesopotamia, the many-coloured traffic of the East—moving no faster than the camel cared to go, swinging disdainfully on, with contempt on its curled lip for mankind, its work and itself. Traders, pilgrims and princes—the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them—all within reach and in no great hurry, a panorama of life for a thoughtful and imaginative boy.

The history of his nation lay on the face of the land at his feet, and it was in the North that the Zealots throve. Was it by accident that Joseph the carpenter gave all his five sons names that stood for something in Hebrew history? Jesus himself says very little, if anything, of the past of his people, and he does not, like some of the Psalmists, turn to the story of Israel for the proof of his thoughts upon God. But it may be more than a coincidence that his countrymen were impressed with his knowledge of the national literature; and traces of other than canonical books have been found in his teaching. It implies a home of piety, where God was in all their thoughts.

His early life

The early disappearance of the elder Joseph has been explained by his death, which seems probable. The widow was left with five sons and some daughters.[[10]] The eldest son was, according to the story, more than twelve years old, and he had probably to share the household burden. The days were over when he played with the children in the market at weddings and at funerals, and while he never forgot the games and kept something of the child's mind throughout, he had to learn what it was to be weary and heavy-laden. His parables include pictures of home-life—one of a little house, where the master in bed can argue with an importunate friend outside the door, who has come on a very homely errand.[[11]] In a group of stories, parables of the mother, we see the woman sweeping the house till she finds a lost drachma, the recovery of which is joyful enough to be told to neighbours. We see her hiding leaven in three measures of meal, while the eldest son sat by and watched it work. He never forgot the sight of the heaving, panting mass, the bubbles swelling and bursting, and all the commotion the proof of something alive and at work below; and he made it into a parable of the Kingdom of God—associated in the minds of the weary with broken bubbles, and in the mind of Jesus with the profoundest and most living of realities. It was perhaps Mary, too, who explained to him why an old garment will not tolerate a new patch. Whatever is the historical value of the fourth Gospel, it lays stress on the close relation between Jesus and his mother.

One of the Aramaic words, which the church cherished from the first as the ipsissima verba of Jesus, was Abba. It was what Mary had taught him as a baby to call Joseph. The fact that in manhood he gave to God the name that in his childhood he had given to Joseph, surely throws some light upon the homelife. To this word we shall return.

Jesus had always a peculiar tenderness for children. "Suffer little children to come unto me," is one of his most familiar sayings, though in quoting it we are apt to forget that "come" is in Greek a verb carrying volition with it, and that Mark uses another noticeable word, and tells us that Jesus put his arms round the child.[[12]] Little children, we may be sure, came to him of their own accord and were at ease with him; and it has been suggested that the saying goes back to the Nazareth days, and that the little children came about their brother in the workshop there. Mr Burkitt has recently remarked[[13]] that we may read far and wide in Christian Literature before we find any such feeling for children as we know so well in the words of Jesus; and in Classical Literature we may look as far. To Jesus the child is not unimportant—to injure a child was an unspeakable thing. Indeed, if the Kingdom of God meant anything, it was that we must be children again—God's little children, to whom their Father is the background of everything. The Christian phrase about being born again may be Jesus' own, but if so, it has lost for us something of what he intended by it, which survives in more authentic sayings. We have to recover, he said, what we lost when we outgrew the child; we must have the simplicity and frankness of children—their instinctive way of believing all things and hoping all things. All things are new to the child; it is only for grown-up people that God has to "make all things new." Paul has not much to say about children, but he has this thought—"if any man be in Christ, it is a new creation, all things are made new." Probably the child's habit of taking nothing for granted—except the love that is all about it—is what Jesus missed most in grown men. Every idealist and every poet is a child from beginning to end—and something of this sort is the mark of the school of Jesus.

Jesus and nature

The outdoor life of Jesus lies recorded in his parables. Weinel has said that Paul was a man of a city—Paul said so himself. But Jesus is at home in the open air. The sights and sounds of the farm are in his words—the lost sheep, the fallen ox, the worried flock, the hen clucking to her chickens. This last gave a picture in which his thought instinctively clothed itself in one of his hours of deepest emotion. It is perhaps a mark of his race and land that to "feed swine" is with him a symbol of a lost life, and that the dog is an unclean animal—as it very generally is elsewhere. He speaks of ploughing, clearly knowing how it should be done; and like other teachers, he uses the analogies of sowing and harvest. The grain growing secretly, and the harvest, over-ripe and spilling its wheat, were to him pictures of human life.

Wild nature, too, he knew and loved. The wild lily, which the women used to burn in their ovens never thinking of its beauty, was to him something finer than King Solomon, and he probably had seen Herodian princes on the Galilean roads. (It is a curious thing that he has more than one allusion to royal draperies.) He bade men study the flowers (katamanthánein). It is perhaps worth remark that flower-poetry came into Greek literature from regions familiar to us in the life of Jesus; Meleager was a Gadarene. The Psalmist long ago had said of the birds that they had their meat from God; but Jesus brought them into the human family—"Your Heavenly Father feedeth them." Even his knowledge of weather signs is recorded. Not all flowers keep in literature the scent and colour of life; they are a little apt to become "natural objects." But if they are to retain their charm in print, something is wanted that is not very common—the open heart and the open eye, to which birds and flowers are willing to tell their secret. There are other things which point to the fact that Jesus had this endowment,—and not least his being able to find in the flower a link so strong and so beautiful between God and man. Here as elsewhere he was in touch with his environment, for he loved Nature as Nature, and was true to it. His parables are not like Æsop's Fables. His lost sheep has no arguments; his lily is not a Solomon, though it is better dressed; and his sparrows are neither moralists nor theologians—but sparrows, which might be sold at two for a farthing, and in the meantime are chirping and nesting. And all this life of Nature spoke to him of the character of God, of God's delight in beauty and God's love. God is for him the ever-present thought in it all—real too, to others, whenever he speaks of him.

An amiable feeling for Nature is often to be found in sentimental characters. But sentimentalism is essentially self-deception; and the Gospels make it clear that of all human sins and weaknesses none seems to have stirred the anger of Jesus as did self-deception. When the Pharisees in the synagogue watched to see whether Jesus would heal on the Sabbath, he "looked round about upon them all with anger," says Mark. This gaze of Jesus is often mentioned in the Gospels—almost unconsciously—but Luke and Matthew drop the last two words in quoting this passage, and do so at the cost of a most characteristic touch. Matthew elsewhere, in accordance with his habit of grouping his matter by subject, gathers together a collection of the utterances of Jesus upon the Pharisees, with the recurring refrain "Scribes and Pharisees, actors." The Mediterranean world was full of Greek actors; we hear of them even among the Parthians in 53 B.C., and in Mesopotamia for centuries; and as there had long been Greek cities in Palestine, and a strong movement for generations toward Greek ways of life, the actor cannot have been an unfamiliar figure. To call the Pharisees "actors" was a new and strong thing to say, but Jesus said such things. Of the grosser classes of sinners he was tolerant to a point that amazed his contemporaries and gave great occasion of criticism to such enemies as Celsus and Julian. He had apparently no anger for the woman taken in adultery; and he was the "friend of publicans and sinners"—even eating with them.

His sense of the real

The explanation lies partly in Jesus' instinct for reality and truth. Sensualist and money-lover were at least occupied with a sort of reality; pleasure and money in their way are real, and the pursuit of them brings a man, sooner or later, into contact with realities genuine enough. Whatever illusions publican and harlot might have, the world saw to it that they did not keep them long. The danger for such people was that they might be disillusioned overmuch. But the Pharisee lied with himself. If at times he traded on his righteousness to over-reach others, his chief victim was himself, as Jesus saw, and as Paul found. Paul, brought up in their school to practise righteousness, gave the whole thing up as a pretence and a lie—he would no longer have anything to do with "his own righteousness." But he was an exception; Pharisees in general believed in their own righteousness; and, by tampering with their sense of the proportions of things, they lost all feeling for reality, and with it all consciousness of the value and dignity of man and the very possibility of any conception of God.

Jesus had been bred in another atmosphere, in a school of realities. When he said "Blessed are ye poor, for yours is the Kingdom of heaven," his words were the record of experience—the paradox was the story of his life. He had known poverty and hand-labour; he had been "exposed to feel what wretches feel." Whatever criticism may make of the story of his feeding multitudes, it remains that he was markedly sensitive to the idea of hunger—over and over he urged the feeding of the poor, the maimed and the blind; he suggested the payment of a day's wage for an hour's work, where a day's food was needed and only an hour's work could be had; he even reminded a too happy father that his little girl would be the better of food. No thinker of his day, or for long before and after, was so deeply conscious of the appeal of sheer misery, and this is one of the things on which his followers have never lost the mind of Jesus. Poverty was perhaps even for himself a key to the door into the Kingdom of God. At any rate, he always emphasizes the advantage of disadvantages, for they at least make a man in earnest with himself.

There is a revelation of the seriousness of his whole mind and nature in his reply to the follower who would go away and return. "No man, having put his hand to the plough and looking back, is fit for the Kingdom of God." This every one knows who has tried to drive a furrow, and all men of action know only too well that the man, whom Jesus so describes, is fit for no kind of Kingdom. It is only the sentimentalism of the church that supposes the flabby-minded to be at home in the Kingdom of God. Jesus did not. The same kind of energy is in the parables. The unjust steward was a knave, but he was in earnest; and so was the questionably honest man who found treasure in a field. The merchant let everything go for the one pearl of great price. Mary chose "the one thing needful." We may be sure that in one shop in Nazareth benches were made to stand on four feet and doors to open and shut. The parables from nature, as we have seen, are true to the facts of nature. They too stand on four feet. The church laid hold of a characteristic word, when it adopted for all time Jesus' Amen—"in truth." Jesus was always explicit with his followers—they should know from the first that their goal was the cross, and that meantime they would have no place where to lay their heads. They were to begin with hard realities, and to consort with him on the basis of the real.

The world in the age of Jesus was living a good deal upon its past, looking to old books and old cults, as we see in Plutarch and many others. The Jews no less lived upon their great books. Even Philo was fettered to the Old Testament, except when he could dissolve his fetters by allegory, and even then he believed himself loyal to the higher meaning of the text. But nothing of the kind is to be seen in Jesus. His knowledge of Psalmist and Prophet excited wonder; but in all his quotations of the Old Testament that have reached us, there is no trace of servitude to the letter and no hint of allegory. He does not quote Scripture as his followers did. Here too he spoke as having authority. If sometimes he quoted words for their own sake, it was always as an argumentum ad hominem. But his own way was to grasp the writer's mind—a very difficult thing in his day, and little done—and to go straight to the root of the matter, regardless of authority and tradition. Like draws to like, and an intensely real man at once grasped his kinship with other intensely real men; and he found in the prophets, not reeds shaken with the wind, courtiers of king or of people, but men in touch with reality, with their eyes open for God, friends and fore-runners, whose experience illumined his own. This type of manhood needed no explanation for him. The other sort perplexed him—"Why can you not judge for yourselves?" how was it that men could see and yet not see? From his inner sympathy with the prophetic mind, came his freedom in dealing with the prophets. He read and understood, and decided for himself. No sincere man would ever wish his word to be final for another. Jesus was conscious of his own right to think and to see and to judge, and for him, as for the modern temper, the final thing was not opinion, nor scripture, nor authority, but reality and experience. There lay the road to God. Hence it is that Jesus is so tranquil,—he does "not strive nor cry"—for the man who has experienced in himself the power of the real has no doubts about it being able to maintain itself in a world, where at heart men want nothing else.

The temptations of Jesus

When so clear an eye for reality is turned upon the great questions of man's life and of man's relations with God, it is apt here too to reach the centre. From the first, men lingered over the thought that Jesus had gone to the bottom of human experience and found in this fact his power to help them. He was made like to his brethren; he was touched with the feeling of our infirmities; he was "able to sympathize" (dynámenon sympathêsai) for he was "tempted in all respects like us." In the Gospel, as it is handed down to us, the temptation of Christ is summed up in three episodes set at the beginning of the story and told in a symbolic form, which may or may not have been given to them by Jesus himself. Then "the devil left him"—Luke adding significantly "till a time." The interpretation is not very clear. Strong men do not discuss their own feelings very much, but it is possible now and then to divine some experience from an involuntary tone, or the unconscious sensitiveness with which certain things are mentioned; or, more rarely, emotion may open the lips for a moment of self-revelation, in which a word lays bare a lifetime's struggle. It will add to the significance of his general attitude toward God and man's life, if we can catch any glimpse of the inner mind of Jesus.

We have records of his being exhausted and seeking quiet. Biographers of that day concealed such things in their heroes, but the Gospels freely reveal what contemporary critics counted weaknesses in Jesus. He weeps, he hungers, he is worn out. He has to be alone—on the mountain by night, in a desert-place before dawn. Such exhaustion is never merely physical or merely spiritual; the two things are one. Men crowded upon Jesus, till he had not leisure to eat; he came into touch with a ceaseless stream of human personalities; and those who have been through any such experience will understand what it cost him. To communicate an idea or to share a feeling is exhausting work, and we read further of deeds of healing, which, Jesus himself said, took "virtue" (dynamin) out of him, and he had to withdraw. When the Syro-Phoenician woman called for his aid, it was a question with him whether he should spend on a foreigner the "virtue" that could with difficulty meet the claims of Israel, for he was not conscious of the "omnipotence" which has been lightly attributed to him. It was the woman's brilliant answer about the little dogs eating the children's crumbs that gained her request. The turn of speech showed a vein of humour, and he consented "for this saying."[[14]] If human experience goes for anything in such a case, contact with a spirit so delicate and sympathetic gave him something of the strength he spent. The incident throws light upon the "fluxes and refluxes of feeling" within him, and the effect upon him of a spirit with something of his own tenderness and humour. For the moment, though, his sense of having reached his limits should be noticed.

The church has never forgotten the agony in the garden, but that episode has lost some of its significance because it has not been recognized to be one link in a chain of experience, which we must try to reconstruct. It has been assumed that Jesus never expected to influence the Pharisees and scribes; but this is to misinterpret the common temper of idealists, and to miss the pain of Jesus' words when he found his hopes of the Pharisees to be vain. Gradually, from their pressure upon his spirit, he grew conscious of the outcome—they would not be content with logomachies; the end might be death. Few of us have any experience to tell us at what cost to the spirit such a discovery is made. The common people he read easily enough and recognized their levity. And now, in exile, as Mr Burkitt has lately suggested,[[15]] he began to concentrate himself upon the twelve. It was not till Peter, by a sudden flash of insight, grasped his Messiahship—a character, which Jesus had realized already, though we do not know by what process, and had for reasons of his own concealed,—it was not till then that Jesus disclosed his belief that he would be killed at last. From that moment we may date the falling away of Judas, and what this man's constant presence must have meant to Jesus, ordinary experience may suggest. Shrewd, clever and disappointed, he must have been a chill upon his Master at all hours. His influence upon the rest of the group must have been consciously and increasingly antipathetic. Night by night Jesus could read in the faces which of them had been with Judas during the day. The sour triumph of Judas when the Son of man was told to go on to another village after a day's journey, and the uncomfortable air of one or more of the others, all entered into Jesus' experience; and night by night he had to undo Judas' work. He "learnt by what he suffered" from the man's tone and look that there would be desertion, perhaps betrayal. The daily suffering involved in trying to recapture the man, in going to seek the lost sheep in the wilderness of bitterness, may be imagined. Side by side, King, Pharisee and disciple are against him, and the tension, heightened by the uncertainty as to the how, when and where of the issue must have been great. Luke's graphic word says his face was "set" for Jerusalem—it would be, he knew, a focus for the growing forces of hatred.

Day by day the strain increased. Finally Jesus spoke. The where and how of the betrayal he could not determine; the when he could. At the supper, he looked at Judas and then he spoke.[[16]] "What thou doest, do quickly." The man's face as he hurried out said "Yes" to the unspoken question—and for the moment it brought relief. This is the background of the garden-scene. What the agony meant spiritually, we can hardly divine. The physical cost is attested by the memory of his face which haunted the disciples. The profuse sweat that goes with acute mental strain is a familiar phenomenon, and its traces were upon him—visible in the torchlight. Last of all, upon the cross, Nature reclaimed her due from him. Jesus had drawn, as men say, upon the body, and in such cases Nature repays herself from the spirit. The worn-out frame dragged the spirit with it, and he died with the cry—"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

Turning back, we find in Luke[[17]] that Jesus said to his disciples "Ye are they that have continued with me in my temptations." Dr John Brown[[18]] used to speak of Jesus having "a disposition for private friendships." A mind with the genius for friendliness is not only active but passive. We constantly find in history instances of men with such a gift failing in great crises because of it—they yield to the friendly word; it means so much to them. Thus when Peter, a friend of old standing and of far greater value since his confession at Philippi, spoke and reinforced the impressions made on Jesus' mind by his prevision of failure and death, the temptation was of a terrible kind. The sudden rejoinder, in which Jesus identifies the man he loved with Satan, shows what had happened. But, if friendship carried with it temptation, yet when physical exhaustion brought spiritual exhaustion in its train, the love and tenderness of his friends upheld him. But, more still, their belief in him and in his ideas, their need of him, drove the tempter away. He could not disappoint them. The faces that softened to him,—all that came to his mind as he thought of his friends name by name—gave him hope and comfort, though the body might do its worst. It was perhaps in part this experience of the friendship of simple and commonplace men that differentiated the teaching of Jesus from the best the world had yet had. No other teacher dreamed that common men could possess a tenth part of the moral grandeur and spiritual power, which Jesus elicited from them—chiefly by believing in them. Here, to any one who will study the period, the sheer originality of Jesus is bewildering. This belief in men Jesus gave to his followers and they have never lost it.

Man's relations with God

It was in the new life and happiness in God that he was bringing to the common people that Jesus saw his firmest credentials. He laid stress indeed upon the expulsion of devils and the cure of disease—matters explained to-day by "suggestion." But the culmination was "the good news for the poor." "Gospel" and "Evangelical" have in time become technical terms, and have no longer the pulse of sheer happiness which Jesus felt in them, and which the early church likewise experienced. "Be of good cheer!" is the familiar English rendering of one of the words of Jesus, often on his lips—"Courage!" he said. One text of Luke represents him as saying it even on the cross, when he spoke to the penitent thief.

Summing up what we have so far reached, we may remark the broad contrast between the attitude of Jesus to human life and the views of the world around him. A simple home with an atmosphere of love and truth and intelligence, where life was not lost sight of in its refinements, where ordinary needs and common duties were the daily facts, where God was a constant and friendly presence—this was his early environment. Later on it was the carpenter's bench, the fisherman's boat, wind on the mountain and storm on the lake, leaven in the meal and wheat in the field. Everywhere his life is rooted in the normal and the natural, and everywhere he finds God filling the meanest detail of man's life with glory and revelation.

Philosophers were anxious to keep God clear of contact with matter; Marcus Aurelius found "decay in the substance of all things—nothing but water, dust, bones, stench."[[19]] Jesus saw life in all things—God clothing the grass and watching over little birds. To-day the old antithesis of God and matter is gone, and it comes as a relief to find that Jesus anticipated its disappearance. The religious in his day looked for God in trance and ritual, in the abnormal and unusual, but for him, as for every man who has ever helped mankind, the ordinary and the commonplace were enough. The Kingdom of God is among you, or even within you—in the common people, of whom all the other teachers despaired.

We come now to the central question of man's relation with God, never before so vital a matter to serious people in the Mediterranean world. Jew and Greek and Egyptian were all full of it, and men's talk ran much upon it. Men were anxious to be right with God, and sought earnestly in the ways of their fathers for the means of communion with God and the attainment of some kind of safety in their position with regard to him. Jew and Greek alike talked of heaven and hell and of the ways to them. They talked of righteousness and holiness—"holy" is one of the great words of the period—and they sought these things in ritual and abstinence. Modern Jews resent the suggestion that the thousand and one regulations as to ceremonial purity, and the casuistries, as many or more, spun out of the law and the traditions, ranked with the great commandments of neighbourly love and the worship of the One God. No doubt they are right, but it is noticeable that in practice the common type of mind is more impressed with minutiæ than with principles. The Southern European to-day will do murder on little provocation, but to eat meat in Lent is sin. But, without attributing such conspicuous sins as theft and adultery and murder to the Pharisees, it is clear that in establishing their own righteousness they laid excessive stress on the details of the law, on Sabbath-keeping (a constant topic with the Christian apologists), on tithes, and temple ritual, on the washing of pots and plates—still rigorously maintained by the modern Jew—and all this was supposed to constitute holiness. Jesus with the clear incisive word of genius dismissed it all as "acting." The Pharisee was essentially an actor—playing to himself the most contemptible little comedies of holiness. Listen, cries Jesus, and he tells the tale of the man fallen among thieves and left for dead, and how priest and Levite passed by on the other side, fearing the pollution of a corpse, and how they left mercy, God's own work—"I will have mercy and not sacrifice" was one of his quotations from Hosea,—to be done by one unclean and damned—the Samaritan. Whited sepulchres! he cries, pretty to look at, but full of what? of death, corruption and foulness. "How can you escape from the judgment of hell?" he asked them, and no one records what they answered or could answer.

Jesus the liberator

It is clear, however, that, outside Palestine, the Jews in the great world were moving to a more purely moral conception of religion—their environment made mere Pharisaism impossible, and Greek criticism compelled them to think more or less in the terms of the fundamental. The debt of the Jew to the Gentile is not very generously acknowledged. None the less, the distinctive badge of all his tribe was and remained what the Greeks called fussiness (tò psophodeés).[[20]] The Sabbath, circumcision, the blood and butter taboos remained—as they still remain in the most liberal of "Liberal Judaisms"—tribe marks with no religious value, but maintained by patriotism. And side by side with this lived and lives that hatred of the Gentile, which is attributed to Christian persecution, but which Juvenal saw and noted before the Christian had ceased to be persecuted by the Jew. The extravagant nonsense found in Jewish speculation as to how many Gentile souls were equivalent in God's sight to that of one Jew is symptomatic. To this day it is confessedly the weakness of Judaism that it offers no impulse and knows no enthusiasm for self-sacrificing love where the interests of the tribe are not concerned.[[21]]

The great work of Jesus in this matter was the final and decisive cleavage with antiquity. Greek rationalism had long since laughed at the puerilities of the Greek cults; but rationalism and laughter are' unequally matched against Religion, and it triumphed over them, and, as we see in Plutarch and the Neo-Platonists, it imposed its puerilities—yes, and its obscenities—upon Philosophy and made her in sober truth "procuress to the lords of hell." It was a new thing when Religion, in the name of truth and for the love of God, abolished the connexion with a trivial past. Jesus cut away at once every vestige of the primitive and every savage survival—all natural growths perhaps, and helpful too to primitive man and to the savage, but confusing to men on a higher plane,—either mere play-acting or the "damnation of hell." Pagan cults he summed up as much speaking. Once for all he set Religion free from all taboos and rituals. Paul, once, on the spur of the moment, called Jesus the "Yes" of all the promises of God—a most suggestive name for the vindicator and exponent of God's realities. It is such a man as this who liberates mankind, cutting us clear of make-believes and negations and taboos, and living in the open-air, whether it is cloud or sun. That Jesus shocked his contemporaries with the abrupt nakedness of his religious ideas is not surprising. The church made decent haste to cover a good many of them up, but not very successfully. A mind like that of Jesus propagates itself, and reappears with startling vitality, as history in many a strange page can reveal.

We must now consider what was the thought of Jesus upon God and how he conceived of the relation between God and man. He approached the matter originally from the standpoint of Judaism, and no attempt to prove the influence of Greek philosophy is likely to succeed. The result of Greek speculation upon God—where it did not end in pure pantheism—was that of God nothing whatever could be predicated—not even being, but that he was to be expressed by the negation of every idea that could be formed of him. To this men had been led by their preconception of absolute being, and so strong was the influence of contemporary philosophy that Christian thinkers adopted the same conclusion, managing what clumsy combinations they could of it and of the doctrine of incarnation. Clement of Alexandria is a marked example of this method.

To the philosophic mind God remains a difficult problem, but to the religious temper things are very different. To it God is the one great reality never very far away, and is conceived not as an abstraction, nor as a force, but as a personality. It has been and is the strength and redemption of Judaism, that God is the God of Israel—"Oh God, thou art my God!" How intuition is to be reconciled with philosophy has been the problem of Christian thinkers in every age, but it may be remarked that the varying term is philosophy. To the intuition of Jesus Christians have held fast—though Greeks and others have called it "folly"; and in the meantime a good many philosophies have had their day.

The central thought of Jesus is the Fatherhood of God. For this, as for much else, parallels have been found in the words of Hebrew thinkers, ancient and contemporary, and we may readily concede that it was not original with Jesus to call God Father. The name was given to God by the prophets, but it was also given to him by the Stoics—and by Homer; so that to speak of God's Fatherhood might mean anything between the two extremes of everything and nothing. Christian theology, for instance, starting with the idea of the Fatherhood of God, has not hesitated to speak in the same breath of his "vindicating his majesty"—a phrase which there is no record or suggestion that Jesus ever used. There may be fathers who vindicate their majesty, as there are many other kinds, but until we realize the connotation of the word for men who speak of God as Father, it is idle to speak of it being a thought common to them. The name may be in the Old Testament and in Homer, but the meaning which Jesus gave to it is his own.

Jesus never uses the name Father without an air of gladness. Men are anxious as to what they shall eat, and what they shall drink, and wherewithal they shall be clothed—"your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things." Children ask father and mother for bread—will they receive a stone? The women had hid the leaven in the three measures of meal long before the children began to feel hungry. And as to clothes—God has clothed the flower far better than Solomon ever clothed himself, "and shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?" The picture is one of the strong and tender parent, smiling at the child's anxiety with no notion of his own majesty or of anything but love. So incredibly simple is the relation between God and man—simple, unconstrained, heedless and tender as the talk round a table in Nazareth. Jesus is greater than the men who have elaborated his ideas, and majesty is the foible of little minds. The great man, if he thinks of his dignity, lets it take care of itself; he is more interested in love and truth, and he forgets to think of what is due to himself. Aristotle said that his "magnificent man" would never run; but, says Jesus, when the prodigal son was yet a great way off, "his father saw him, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him." This contrast measures the distance between the thought of Jesus and some Christian theologies. It is worth noting that in the two parables, in which a father directly addresses his son, it is with the tender word téknon, which is more like a pet name. It adds to the meaning of the parable of the prodigal, when the father calls the elder brother by the little name that has come down from childhood. It was a word which Jesus himself used in speaking to his friends.[[22]] The heavenly Father does not cease to be a father because his children are ungracious and bad. He sends rain and sun—and all they mean—to evil and to good. The whole New Testament is tuned to the thought of Jesus—"the philanthropy of God our saviour."[[23]]

Plato had long before defined the object of human life as "becoming like to God." Jesus finds the means to this likeness to God in the simplest of every day's opportunities. "Love your enemies and do good, and ye shall be sons of the Highest, for he is good and pitiful." "Blessed are the peace-makers," he said, "for they shall be called children of God." This is sometimes limited to the reconciliation of quarrels, but the worst of quarrels is the rift in a man's own soul, the "division of his spiritual substance against itself" which is the essence of all tragedy. There are some whose least word, or whose momentary presence, can somehow make peace wherever they go, and leave men stronger for the rest they have found in another's soul. This, according to Jesus, is the family likeness by which God's children are recognized in all sorts of company. To have the faculty of communicating peace of mind—and it is more often than not done unconsciously, as most great things are—is no light or accidental gift.

Jesus lays a good deal more stress upon unconscious instinct than most moralists do. Once only he is reported to have spoken of the Last Judgment, which was a favourite theme with the eschatologists of his period, Jewish, pagan, and Christian. He borrowed the whole framework of the scene, but he changed, and doubly changed, the significance of it. For he discarded the national or political criterion which the Jew preferred, and he did not have recourse to the rather individualistic moral test which Greek thinkers proposed, in imitation of Plato; still less did it occur to him to suggest a Credo. With him the ultimate standard was one of sheer kindness and good-heartedness—"inasmuch as ye did it to one of the least of these my brethren." But it is still more interesting to note how this standard is applied. Every one at the Last Judgment accepts it, just as every one accepts the propositions of moralists in general. But the real cleavage between the classes of men does not depend on morality, as the chilly suggestion of the mere word reminds us. Men judge other men not by their morality, professed or practised, so much as by their unconscious selves—by instinct, impulse and so forth, the things that really give a clue to the innermost man. The most noticeable point then in Jesus' picture of the Last Judgment is that, when "sheep" and "goats" are separated, neither party at once understands the reasons of the decision. These are conscious of duties done; the others have no very clear idea about it. Elsewhere Jesus suggests that, when men have done all required of them, they may still have the feeling that they are unprofitable servants; and it is precisely the peace-makers and the pure in heart who do not realize how near they come to God. The priest and the Levite in the parable were conscious of their purity, but Jesus gives no hint that they saw God. The Samaritan lived in another atmosphere, but it was natural to him and he breathed it unconsciously. The cultivation of likeness to God by Greek philosophers and their pupils was very different. Plutarch has left a tract, kindly and sensible, on "How a man may recognize his own progress in virtue," but there is no native Christian product of the kind.

The Kingdom of God

From what Jesus directly says of God, and from what he says of God's children, we may conclude that he classes God with the strong and sunny natures; with the people of bright eyes who see through things and into things, who have the feeling for reality, and love every aspect of the real. God has that sense which is peculiar to the creative mind—the keen joy in beauty, that loves star and bird and child. God has the father's instinct, a full understanding of human nature, and a heart open for the prodigal son, the publican and the woman with seven devils. "In his will is our peace," wrote the great Christian poet of the middle ages. "Doing the will we find rest," said a humble and forgotten Christian of the second century.[[24]] They both learnt the thought from Jesus, who set it in the prayer beginning with Abba which he taught his disciples, and who prayed it himself in the garden with the same Abba in his heart. "In the Lord's prayer," said Tertullian, "there is an epitome of the whole Gospel."[[25]]

At this point two questions rise, which are of some historical importance, and bear upon Jesus' view of God. It is clear, first of all, that the expression "the Kingdom of God" was much upon the lips of Jesus, at least in the earlier part of his ministry. It was not of his own coining, and scholars have differed as to what he really meant. Such controversy always rises about the terms in which a great mind expresses itself. The great thinker, even the statesman, has to use the best language he can find to convey his ideas, and if the ideas are new, the difficulty of expression is sometimes very great. The words imply one thing to the listener, and another to the speaker who is really trying (as Diogenes put it) to "re-mint the currency," and how far he succeeds depends mostly upon his personality. To-day "the Kingdom," or more accurately "the Kingship of God," is in some quarters interpreted rather vigorously in the sense which the ordinary Jew gave to the phrase in the age of Jesus; but it is more than usually unsound criticism to take the words of such a man as meaning merely what they would in the common talk of unreflective persons, who use words as counters and nothing else. There was a vulgar interpretation of the "Kingship of God," and there was a higher one, current among the better spirits; and it is only reasonable to interpret this phrase, or any other, in the light of the total mind of the man who uses it. It is clear then that, when Jesus used "the Kingship of God," he must have subordinated it to his general idea of God; and what that was, we have seen. To-day the phrase is returning into religious speech to signify the permeation of society by the mind of Christ, which cannot be far from what it meant to the earliest disciples. It is significant that the author of the fourth gospel virtually dropped the phrase altogether, that Paul preferred other expressions as a rule, and that it was merged and lost in the idea of the church.

Closely bound up with the "Kingdom of God" is the name Messiah, with a similarly wide range of meanings. The question has also been raised as to how far Jesus identified himself with the Messiah. It might be more pertinent to ask with which Messiah. On the whole, the importance of the matter can be gauged by the fate of the word. It was translated into Greek, and very soon Christos, or Chrestos, was a proper name and hardly a title at all except in apologetics, where alone the conception retained some importance. The Divine Son and the Divine Logos—terms which Jesus did not use—superseded the old Hebrew title, at any rate in the Gentile world, and this could hardly have occurred if the idea had been of fundamental moment in Jesus' mind and speech. If he used the name, as seems probable, it too must have been subordinated to his master-thought of God's fatherhood. It would then imply at most a close relation to the purposes of God, and a mission to men, the stewardship of thoughts that would put mankind on a new footing with God. The idea of his being a mediator in the Pauline sense is foreign to the gospels, and the later conception of a purchase of mankind from the devil, or from the justice of God, by the blood of a victim is still more alien to Jesus' mind.

The cross

These are some of the features of the founder of the new religion as revealed in the Gospels—features that permanently compel attention, but after all it was not the consideration of these that conquered the world. Of far more account in winning the world was the death of this man upon the cross. It was the cross that gave certainty to all that Jesus had taught about God. The church sturdily and indignantly repudiated any suggestion, however philosophic, that in any way seemed likely to lessen the significance of the cross. That he should taste the ultimate bitterness of death undisguised, that he should refuse the palliative wine and myrrh (an action symbolic of his whole attitude to everything and to death itself), that with open eyes he should set his face for Jerusalem, and with all the sensitiveness of a character, so susceptive of impression and so rich in imagination, he should expose himself to our experience—to the foretaste of death, to the horror of the unknown, and to the supreme fear—the dread of the extinction of personality; and that he should actually undergo all he foresaw, as the last cry upon the cross testified—all this let the world into the real meaning of his central thought upon God. It was the pledge of his truth, and thus made possible our reconciliation with God. If we may take an illustration from English literature, Shakespeare's Julius Cæsar may suggest something here. It has been noticed how small a part Cæsar plays in the drama—how little he speaks; what weakness he shows—epilepsy, deafness, arrogance, vacillation; and how soon he disappears. Would not the play have been better named Brutus? Yet Shakespeare knew what he was doing; for the whole play is Julius Cæsar, from the outbreak of Cassius at the beginning—

Why! man he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a colossus,

to the bitter cry of Brutus at the end—

O Julius Cæsar, thou art mighty yet!

Cæsar determines everything in the story. Every character in it is a mirror in which we see some figure of him, and the life of every man there is made or unmade by his mind toward Cæsar. Cæsar is the one great determining factor in the story; living and dead, he is the centre and explanation of it all.

What was written in the Gospels of the life and death of Jesus, might by now be ancient history, if the Gospels had told the whole story. But they did not tell the whole story; and they neither were, nor are, the source of the Christian movement, great as their influence is and has been. The Jesus who has impressed himself upon mankind is not a character, however strong and beautiful, that is to be read about in a book. Before the Gospels were written, men spoke of the "Spirit of Jesus" as an active force amongst them. We may criticize their phrase and their psychology as we like, but they were speaking of something they knew, something they had seen and felt, and it is that "something" which changed the course of history. Jesus lives for us in the pages of the Gospels, but we are not his followers on that account, nor were the Christians of the first century. They, like ourselves, followed him under the irresistible attraction of his character repeating itself in the lives of men and women whom they knew. The Son of God, they said, revealed himself in men, and it was true. Of his immediate followers we know almost nothing, but it was they who passed him on to the next generation, consciously in their preaching, which was not always very good; and unconsciously in their lives, which he had transformed, and which had gained from him something of the power of his own life. The church was a nexus of quickened and redeemed personalities,—men and women in whom Christ lived. So Paul wrote of it. A century later another nameless Christian spoke of Christ being "new born every day over again in the hearts of believers," and it would be hard to correct the statement. If we are to give a true account of such men as Alexander and Cæsar, we consider them in the light of the centuries through which their ideas lived and worked. In the same way, the life, the mind and the personality of Jesus will not be understood till we have realized by some intimate experience something of the worth and beauty of the countless souls that in every century have found and still find in him the Alpha and Omega of their being. For the Gospels are not four but "ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands," and the last word of every one of them is "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world."

Chapter IV Footnotes:

[[1]] Justin, Apology, i, 66.

[[2]] Quoted by Origen, contra Celsum, ii, 26, 27.

[[3]] Cf. Mr F. C. Conybeare's article on the remodelling of the baptismal formula in Matthew xxviii after the Council of Nicæa, Hibbert Journal, Oct. 1902.

[[4]] Origen, c. Cels. vii, 58, agroikóteron.

[[5]] Xen. Mem, i, 2, 37. Cf. Plato, Symp. 221 E. Gorgias, 491 A. See Forbes, Socrates, 128; Adam, Religious Teachers of Greece, i, 338.

[[6]] Plato, Philebus, 50 B.

[[7]] On "playfulness" in the words of Jesus, see Burkitt, the Gospel History, p. 142. See also Life of Abp Temple, ii. 681 (letter to his son 18 Dec. 1896), on the "beam in the eye" and the "eye of the needle"—"that faint touch of fun which all Oriental teachers delight in."

[[8]] Luke iv, 22, ethaúmazon epì toîs lógois tês charitos.

[[9]] George Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, ad loc.

[[10]] Matthew xiii, 56 says pâsai, and Mark uses a plural.

[[11]] Luke xi, 5.

[[12]] Mark ix, 36, enagkalisámenos.

[[13]] Gospel History, p. 285.

[[14]] I believe that the allusion to dogs has been thrown back into Jesus' words from the woman's reply, and that she was the first to mention them. Note Mark's emphatic phrase dià toûton tòn lógon; vii, 29.

[[15]] Gospel History, p. 93 f. (with map).

[[16]] The steady gaze and the pause are mentioned by the Gospels, in more than one place, as preceding utterance. There are of course great variations in the accounts of the last supper.

[[17]] xxii, 28.

[[18]] The author of Rab and his Friends.

[[19]] ix, 36.

[[20]] Cf. ad Diognetum, cited on p. 177.

[[21]] I quote this from a friend to whom a Jew said as much; of course every general statement requires modification. Still the predominantly tribal character of Judaism implies contempt for the spiritual life of the Gentile Christian and pagan. If the knowledge of God was or is of value to the Jew, he has made little effort to share it.

[[22]] e.g. Mark x, 24.

[[23]] Titus iii, 4.

[[24]] Second Clement (so-called), 6, 7.

[[25]] Tert. de Or. 1 (end). Cf. also c. 4, on the prayer in the Garden; and de fuga, 8.