When matter has come down by oral tradition, men can hardly worship the letter of it. We possess only brief memoirs collected by men, the dates and history of the composition of which are far from certain, so that room is left for criticism and judgment. The revelation of God is, therefore, not so direct that men will be awestricken and shut their minds at the sight of it; but human intelligence can be brought to bear on the records, whereby their meaning is brought out, and men's intellects are braced by the exploration of lofty regions. Men may without irreverence raise the question, whether the narrator had rightly understood Christ's sayings, and properly connected them with the circumstances out of which they arose.
Our Lord, in Galilee at any rate, spoke Aramaic, [pg 015] and we have merely the Greek; we have only fragments of His teaching; we possess different versions, agreeing indeed in essentials, but with such differences, that we are forced to admit in the writers a human possibility of error. We have our Lord's words it is true, but not in the order, or in the connection, in which they were spoken. There is not only room for human judgment but a necessity for it. Hence the form in which our Lord's utterances have come down to us is suited to the plan which seems to run through all our Lord's teaching; it calls for the free play of the human mind, and leaves room for the admission of a certain choice as to what we accept as revealed truth.
It is true that some Divines have endeavoured to do what our Lord was careful not to do—they have, by theories of verbal inspiration, endeavoured to put our Gospels in the position that actual writings of our Lord would have held; and, so far as they have succeeded, they have brought about the evils which attended the notions of the scribes. But the form in which we have the Gospels does not lend itself to such a theory. If men go wrong in this way they have only themselves to blame.
There is another way in which this form of the Gospels answers to the plan of Christ's teaching. He impressed men, above all, by His Personality, and the record of His life is preserved to us in that form which is best adapted to preserve personality [pg 016] and store it up for the future, viz. the form of memoirs put together by contemporaries, or by those who were familiar with contemporaries.
History and literature furnish many instances of men who have made their mark in virtue of a striking personality; whose reputation rests, not on any visible tokens,—not on kingdoms conquered, institutions founded, books written, or inventions perfected or anything else that they did,—but mainly on what they were. Their merely having passed along a course on earth, and lived and talked and acted with others, has left lasting effects on mankind.
This may serve to put us in the way of understanding what was wrought by the Personality of Christ: for our Lord's disciples followed Jesus of Nazareth for this above all,—that he was Jesus of Nazareth. Those of His own time had felt this Personality working on them while they saw Him and listened to Him. It is consistent, then, with what we gather of His prospective care, that He should so provide, that after generations should have as nearly as possible, the same advantages as that with which He lived upon the earth. This is effected by His being presented to them in the Gospels, not as a writer is in his works, not as a lawgiver is in his codes, but as the man Christ Jesus, mixing with men, sharing their feasts, helping their troubles, going journeys with them, and in all these occasions turning their thoughts, gently, with a touch that is [pg 017] scarcely observed, towards that knowledge of God which He came to bring.
Which is it that sways us most? Is it the teacher who tells us,—This is the way you are to think, this is what you are to believe and what you are to do? Or is it the friend who blends his life and heart and mind with ours, with whom we argue and differ, but take something each from the other, which assimilates with what is most our own? Surely we yield more freely to the one who helps to foster our particular personality than to him who would thrust it aside, and replace it by his own.
Now Christ, as portrayed in the Gospels, is such a friend. He trusts to men's believing that the Father is in Him, not because He has declared it in set dogmas, but because He has been “so long with them.” He is a friend who lifts us out of our common selves, and helps each one of us to find his own truest self: we catch fire from the new light which he kindles in us, and we become conscious of a new force, a spiritual one. When the narrative brings us to the sacrifice on the Cross, we see what the spectators saw, and something more, for we see this new inward force transcending all outward violence. When we turn to the Sufferer on the Cross, we say “after all, the Victory is there.”
But not only is our Lord's Personality presented to us in the literary form in which it can best be put forth, that of the informal memoir, but we [pg 018] are given four such memoirs, each regarding its subject from a different point. We have then four different projections of what we want to construct. The help of this is obvious; and it is worth mentioning that hereby there is more scope for man's mental action than if we had only one Gospel. By diligently comparing and fitting in each with the other, we cultivate our mind's eye to catch the lineaments of Christ's figure. A painter, who has to produce a portrait from four photographs, has a less simple task than if only a single photograph existed; but his work will be more intellectual; it will do him more good, and the result will be more of a conception and less of a copy.
I believe that the education of man to a knowledge of God is part of the Divine purpose running through God's ways, and I detect in the narrative form in which our knowledge of Christ has been delivered to us, a wise tenderness for the spiritual freedom of man and a help to keep his faculties alive.