“Wherefore (he) saith,
Awake thou that sleepest
And arise from the dead
And Christ shall shine upon thee.”
This perhaps is our only specimen of the earliest Christian hymnals. Surely then it is noticeable that in three lines of this unique specimen there are three metaphors, and in the second line a metaphorical use of the word “dead” which—as I have pointed out above—has probably elsewhere resulted in serious misunderstanding.
After the hymn would come the sermon. The preacher would stand up like Apollos to “prove from the Scriptures,” that is, from the Old Testament, that Jesus is the Christ. If you wish to know how some of the Christian Preachers would probably discharge their task you should look at the Dialogue with Trypho written (about a hundred years after Apollos) by Justin Martyr—who, I take it, was very much superior in judgment, learning, and ability, to the great mass of Christian Preachers in the first and second centuries. There—among many other instances of the adaptation of history to preconception—you will find Justin declaring that Jesus was born in a cave, and that the ass on which He rode into Jerusalem was tied to a vine, simply because certain prophecies of Isaiah mention a cave and a vine, and because he is determined to find fulfilments of them in the life of Christ. But in the early times of Apollos, and during the next twenty or thirty years, before the Gospels had been committed to writing, there must have been a far stronger gravitation towards the Old Testament and a far more powerful tendency to find something in the life of Christ to fulfil every prediction about the Messiah and to correspond to every miracle wrought by Moses and the prophets. Judged in the light of these considerations, our present record of Christ’s life ought to surprise us not by the number, but by the paucity, of the fulfilments of prophecy and the miracles contained in them.
Against these arguments for the antecedent probability that miracles would be baselessly imputed to Jesus (to be followed presently by a few instances to shew that they have been so imputed) I know nothing that has been recently urged except a consideration drawn from the life of John the Baptist: “To the Baptist no miracle has been imputed by the Gospels; to Christ miracles have been imputed; why not to both? What is the reason for this distinction except that the former did not perform miracles, while the latter did?” Two reasons can be given. In the first place Christ worked “mighty works,” while John did not; and since many of these “mighty works” could not in the first century be distinguished from “miracles,” they served as a nucleus round which a miraculous narrative might gather; in the history of the Baptist there would be no such nucleus. The second and perhaps more important reason is, that, as a counterpoise to the natural exaggerative tendency which might have led men to attribute miracles to the Baptist, there would be also a tendency to heighten the contrast between the Servant and the Master. This tendency appears to me to increase in the later Gospels till at last in the Fourth we come to the express statement, “John worked no miracle” (John x. 41). But whether I am right or not in this conjecture, it is quite certain that the attitude of the Christians towards the mere forerunner of the Messiah—about whom the Prophets had simply predicted that he would “turn the hearts of the children to the fathers”—would not be such as to render likely any imputations of miracles to him. At Ephesus, in the days of St. Paul, there were some quasi-Christians who had received none but “John’s Baptism,” and had “not so much as heard whether there is a Holy Ghost.” That gives us a much stronger impression of the Prophet’s influence, and a much weaker impression of the prevalence of the doctrine about the Holy Spirit in the earliest Christian teaching, than we should have inferred from what we read in the Fourth Gospel: was it likely, when the Baptist’s influence seemed to the contemporaries of St. Paul still so powerful (perhaps too powerful) that they would be tempted unconsciously to magnify it by casting round him that halo of miraculous action which naturally gathered around the life of Christ?
Does it seem to you very hard, and almost cruelly unnatural, that the life of the Baptist—in whom the world takes comparatively little interest—should be handed down with historical accuracy (at least so far as miracles are concerned) while the life of Christ, the centre of the hopes and fears of the civilized world, has been permitted by Providence to become a nucleus for illusion and superstition as well as for the righteous faith and love of mankind? It is hard; it is not unnatural.
“When beggars die there are no comets seen;
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.”