To rightly understand the faith of the disciples in the risen Christ, we must look below the stories of sense-appearance in which that faith clothed itself. What they essentially felt—what distinguished their faith from a mere opinion or dogma—was not a mere expectation, "The dead will rise;" not a mere fact of history, "Some one did rise;" it was the conviction and consciousness, "Our friend is living." It was an experience—including and transcending memory and hope—of present love, present communion, present life.
Sight and speech lent their forms to clothe the ineffable experience of Mary and the disciples. For us, the story of outward events—the visible form, the eating of bread and fish, the conversations, the floating up into the clouds—all this fades away as a mirage. The reality below this symbol—the sense of the human friend's continued and higher life—this abides and renews itself; not as an isolated historic fact, but as an instance and counterpart of the message which in every age comes to the bereaved heart—of a love greater than loss, a life in which death is swallowed up.
The religion of the followers of Jesus became a centring of every affection, obligation, and hope, in him.
For the first few years all this was merged in the eager expectation of his return. While this lasted in its fullness, even memory was far less to them than hope. They did not attempt any complete records of his earthly life,—what need of that, when the life was so soon to be resumed? The bride on the eve of her marriage is not reading her old love-letters,—she is looking to the morrow.
That first eager flush had already passed when the earliest gospels were written. By that time hope had begun to prop its wavering confidence, by looks turned back even to a remote past. Hence the constant appeals to the supposed predictions of the Old Testament; hence even the imagining of special events in the life of Jesus to fulfill those predictions.
The Old Testament as conceived by the writers of the New is fantastically unlike the original writings. The Evangelists found Messianic prophecies everywhere. The writers of the Epistles, Paul and the rest, dealt with ceremonies and histories as a quarry out of which to hew whatever allegory or argument suited their purpose.
In Luke's Gospel we first see fully displayed the idea of Christ which took possession of the common mind, and has largely held it ever since,—a personal Savior,—a gracious, merciful, all-powerful deliverer. It is a gospel of the imagination and the heart—inspired by the actual Jesus, but half-created by ardent, adoring imagination.
This conception grew up side by side with Paul's. It is far closer to the popular mind and heart than Paul's idea,—his was philosophic and metaphysic; this is pictorial. Paul has been studied by theologians, but the Gospels have given the Christ of the common people.
The early church was divided into two parties, of which one was led by Paul, who stood for the free inclusion of all who would accept Jesus as the Messiah, and would impose no further requirement of ceremony or dogma, trusting all to the guidance of "the Spirit"—the Spirit of which the sufficient fruit and evidence was "love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance." The other party, led by disciples who had known and followed Jesus himself, maintained that the entire Jewish law was still in force, and treated Paul as a dangerous heretic. To narrate the struggle and the final reconcilement is beyond the purpose of this book, but we must pause a moment on the figure of Paul.
It marks the extraordinary force and vividness of Paul's character, that in a few pages of letters, in which the autobiography is only brief and incidental, he has so displayed himself that few historical characters are more familiar.