St. John's Portrait of Christ

In the great modern controversy regarding the authenticity of St. John’s narrative, there is one avenue of inquiry which, in my opinion, has not been sufhciently trodden; I mean the spiritual side. We have had any amount of testimony from the fathers. We have had a mass of evidence drawn from correspondence or seeming want of correspondence between the’ Fourth Gospel and the other three. We have had copious A

AiO discussions as to the accuracy of geographical details and the conformity with the existing customs. These are all arguments derived from matters of fact. But there is a great question left behind — the argument from matters of photograph. It may be a very interesting point to determine whether the day assigned to the Crucifixion by Matthew, Mark, and Luke is the same day as is given by the Fourth Evangelist. But all such questions sink into insignificance before a great spiritual problem which is independent of times and days — Is the portrait of Christ in Matthew, Mark, and Luke consistent with the portrait in the Fourth Evangelist? It is a purely inward study. It

- demands no scholarship, it asks no extraneous reading, it does not involve even a collection of Bible facts; it makes its appeal exclusively to the spirit. Yet, uncritical as it seems, it comes near to the root of the matter and closer to the point of solution than has yet been reached by any linguistic knowledge or has yet been rendered possible by any patristic research.

I have asked if the portrait in the first three Gospels is consistent with the portrait in the Fourth. I have not asked if they are identical; consistency is compatible with difference. I have not asked if they are finished pictures when viewed separately; consistency often lies in the imparting of a fresh touch to things that are wnfinished. It may be that the very congruity of the two paintings is centred in the fact that there is a colour in each of them which is not found in the other, and that in each case the supply of this colour is the thing which makes the picture consistent with itself. If any man should arrive at the conclusion he will have to reverse his vocabulary. He will no longer speak of ‘The Christ of St. John and the Christ of the earlier Gospels.’ He will recognise the fact that the one painting could not exist without the other. He will see that the Christ of St. John is mutilated without the colours presupposed in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and that the Christ of Matthew,

Mark, and Luke does not reach its own proportion till it has been invested with the tints that glow on the canvas of John. Perhaps the latter of these transferences will seem to the reader the more paradoxical. I do not think any one would doubt that the Fourth Gospel presupposes the Christ of the other three; but it will startle him to be told that the other three presuppose the Christ of the Fourth. Yetitis this point which has specially impressed me. It has mainly impressed me at the very beginning of the three Synoptic narratives. When I study the opening chapter of Mark and the first four chapters of Matthew and Luke, there is one thing which peculiarly strikes.

me — the sense of a gap in the human development of Jesus. In Mark He seems to burst from the sky without father or mother or descent; in Matthew and Luke we behold His descent, but He comes in the frailty of infancy and grows in the subjection of childhood. In all the three, He breaks upon the world at a bound. There is no dawn between night and noonday. He leaps from humiliation into immediate glory. We see Him take His place among the sinners on the banks of Jordan. Then we see Him in the wilderness enduring hunger, privation, weariness — enduring, in the temptation of Satan, a deeper abasement still — receiving suggestions of the doubts of His own

Messiahship and requiring the support of creatures inferior to Himself. The darkest hour of the Son of Man was, according to these Gospels, immediately before the day.

And according to these Gospels, that day came suddenly. It was like the glory that burst by night upon the plains of Bethlehem; it had no morning; it mounted at once into noon. One moment we see Jesus in the wilderness — obscure, unknown, depressed, not yet decided as to His plan of action. The next He is at the summit of authority — proclaiming the near advent of the Messianic Kingdom, and exhorting men to shape their lives for it. His influence seems not only instantaneous but magical. He sees Peter and Andrew apparently for the first time; He commands them to follow Him and He is immediately obeyed. He meets James and John apparently for the first time; He bids them join His cause and they linger not. He gathers within the briefest period a band of twelve leading, and seventy subordinate workers. He stands upon a hill-and addresses them in the accents of Mount Sinai — accents of imperative authority that give a new law to the world. The Christ of the First Gospels rises at a bound into glory from the baptismal subservience on the banks of Jordan, and the solitary humiliation in the hands. of the tempter.

Now is this natural? We feel that it is not. It is not that we object to any of the facts. What we miss is a link between the facts. We feel that there is a gap in the narrative. We are in the position of the evolutionist; we want to connect a higher with a lower order of life. But we have not found the bridge that joins them. We are accustomed to speak of the abruptness of. Christ’s entrance in St. Mark’s Gospel; but in truth there is a transition equally abrupt in the narrative of Matthew and Luke. From the manger of Bethlehem to the subjection at Nazareth, from the subjection at Nazareth to the baptism in Jordan, from the baptism in Jordan to the temptation in the wilderness, there is one continuous course of a dependent stream; immediately afterwards there is the waving of a wide ocean. Where is the arm of the sea that connects the one with the other, that breaks the magical character of the transition between them? In the first three Gospels it is not to be found; can we find it anywhere?

Yes, in the Gospel according to John. Here is supplied the gap in the narrative of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. It is St. John’s narrative that indicates and makes consistent that of his predecessors. With him there is no abruptness in the passage from the baptism to the glory. The chasm is filled by a statement that does not occur elsewhere — that after being with the Baptist in the attitude of a disciple Christ was with him in the position of a Coadjutor. The narrative of the Fourth Gospel presupposes that Christ was in the air before the outburst in Galilee. We meet Him in the wilderness, no longer as a mark for the tempter, but as a saviour of the tempted. He is already recognised as a teacher, a rabbi, a master in Israel. He has begun by what He considers small wonders — recognitions of character by clairvoyance; but He declares these to be only preliminary to the vision of an open heaven, and of a communion between heaven and earth. He has already converted five men of future prominence — perhaps fifty of no future prominence. Among the former are Peter, Andrew, Philip, and to all appearance John. His subsequent call of these men to His ministry was only the result of His deep knowledge of them; He made them apostles because He had previously made them converts. The ministry of Jesus according to His Gospel was in evidence previous to Galilee. When Nathanael expressed doubt, the answer was not ‘Consider the testimony of the Baptist,’ but, ‘Come, and see.’ He is referred to the results of a Judean ministry, a ministry which had already made Jesus His own evidence. The reign in Galilee had not yet begun. It was, no doubt, in

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