But the direct statement of Paul is corroborated, not only by the institution of the Supper, but also by this fact, that the doctrine, that Christ died for our sins, is an integral part of the teaching of Jesus as that is handed down to us in the Gospels. We have already seen that He held that His death was necessary for the establishment of the Kingdom. We must now set out His teaching on this subject with a little more fulness. We shall restrict ourselves to a single Gospel. In the earliest saying that refers to it, His death is a future event, coming inevitably, and destined to bring sorrow to His disciples. “And Jesus said unto them, Can the sons of the bride-chamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them? but the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then will they fast.”[[275]] In the next it is much more clearly defined. Its necessity is emphasized; we are told that the agents are to be the religious leaders of Israel; and it is to be followed by the resurrection. “From that time began Jesus to shew unto His disciples, how that He must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and the third day be raised up.”[[276]] Twice over this same prophecy is repeated, the last time with more detail.[[277]] Then follows a most striking saying, in which He speaks of His death as voluntary: it is a giving away of His life; and it is explained as the climax of His life of service; for the gift is ‘a ransom for many,’ that is a price paid, in order to redeem many from sin. “The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many.”[[278]] We need not linger over the next sayings, though each has its own interest.[[279]] The last saying occurs in the account of the institution of the Supper. In these words He teaches in the clearest way, first, that His death is to be the ground of forgiveness, and secondly, that after His death He is to be the source of the spiritual life and strength of His followers. “And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and brake it; and He gave to the disciples, and said, ‘Take, eat; this is My body.’ And He took a cup, and gave thanks, and gave to them, saying, ‘Drink ye all of it; for this is My blood of the covenant, which is shed for many unto remission of sins.”[[280]] The teaching of Jesus is an organic whole, and is incomplete without this, His own interpretation of His death of shame.

Jesus, then, gave Himself up to death as the sacrifice for the sins of men. Our Christian documents go on to declare that He rose from the dead on the third day, and that this resurrection of His was God’s confirmation of the sacrifice of His Son. That men should at first sight disbelieve the astounding assertion, that the crucified Jesus rose from the dead, is not to be wondered at; but the fact remains. Sceptical scholars have laboured for centuries to explain away this extraordinary occurrence, but no one of these scholars themselves will venture to say that any explanation hitherto given is satisfactory. The latest attempt, that made by Schmiedel in the Encyclopædia Biblica, is a farcical failure. The following are the adamantine facts which no rationalism has ever yet succeeded in crushing or melting:—(a) the Christians declared that they had seen Christ and spoken with Him after His resurrection; (b) they were absolutely sincere in this belief[[281]]; (c) the Christian Church arose as a result of this conviction; (d) the grave was empty. The account of Christ’s appearances given in the fifteenth chapter of our Epistle is well worth study. Those who wish to look into this question further may consult Ballard’s Miracles of Unbelief, pp. 135 ff.

We have thus, by a serious historical inquiry, reached the conclusion, that Jesus of Nazareth, the founder of the Christian religion, declared, before His crucifixion, that He was about to die for the sins of men, and that this assertion of His was sealed with the divine approval by the unique miracle of the resurrection. We have also seen that this was the Good News, which Paul and all the other Apostles preached, and on which the early Church was founded. It is this that has won for Jesus the love of myriads; it is this that has been the magnet to draw them away from sin. It is the source of the joy and vital power of the Christian life.

Now let us recollect the poem upon The Servant of Jehovah, which we considered in our third chapter. How marvellously Jesus corresponds to the extraordinary idea which that poem discloses, the despised and oppressed prisoner who endures in uncomplaining meekness the uttermost shame of a violent death, and is finally recognized as having been “pierced because of our trangressions, and crushed because of our iniquities.” That anyone should write such a poem, seems strange in the extreme; that Jesus should have fulfilled it, is infinitely more wonderful.

How comes it that this Jewish carpenter, with His three years of public life and His cross of shame, fulfils so many ideals and aspirations? He brings in the new age which Virgil and his contemporaries sighed for; He is Plato’s just man; He utters from His own self-consciousness such things as the author of the Gītā imagined an incarnate god would say; He gives Himself up to death, in sheer love, as a sacrifice for sin, thus fulfilling the deepest needs of man, as expressed by the old Hebrew seer; and He is the only human being whom men of every race and clime can heartily admire and unhesitatingly imitate. Nor is this all: many other convergent lines of thought might be suggested, in the light of which Jesus stands out as the ideal of our common humanity and the fountain of the love of God.

How is all this to be explained? Wide chasms sever the Hindu sage, the Greek philosopher, the Hebrew prophet and the Roman poet; yet in Jesus their several ideals are reconciled in a loftier unity. Once in the course of the centuries East and West have actually met! Nor was the meeting merely the resolution of antitheses in a wider conception: what the Jew and the Indian, the Greek and the Roman, dreamed of as the unattainable, that Jesus actually accomplished in this work-a-day world of ours, amid storms of the cruellest hatred and calumny.—What is your candid opinion about Him, brother? How are you to solve the problem raised by His life, death and place in history? Can He be better described than in His own words, SON OF MAN and SON OF GOD?

APPENDIX.
NEO-KRISHNA LITERATURE.

The Neo-Krishna movement is about twenty years old. Before 1880 Vaishnavism does not seem to have been in great favour with the higher castes of Bengal. Traditionally they were Saivas or Sāktas rather than Vaishnavas; and English education, which bore very heavily for half a century on every form of Hinduism seems to have told with peculiar severity on Krishnaism. But shortly after 1880 a great change becomes visible: Krishna begins to be praised on every hand, and ancient Vaishnava books are read and studied with avidity. The new movement seems to have owed its origin, on the one hand, to the teaching and influence of Ramkrishna Paramhansa, Keshub Chundra Sen, Bijoy Krishna Goswami and Shishir Kumar Ghose; and on the other, to the efforts of two or three noteworthy literary men, who threw themselves into the task of painting the character of Krishna with extraordinary enthusiasm. The Gītā at once leaped into greater prominence than ever: numberless editions and translations of it have been published. Many essays have appeared comparing Krishna with Christ and Vaishnavism with Christianity. Thus a large Krishna literature, both in English and Bengali, has sprung up. The following seem to be the more important books of this literature:—

1884

Essays in Prachār on Krishnacharitra by Bunkim Ch. Chatterji.