Part I
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
Galilee that Jesus met Nathanael; but He had come there only on a flying visit. He had been invited to a marriage feast in Cana. He was invited to that feast not on account of Galilean but of Judean successes. He was invited not as a private individual but as a public man — as the head of a school, as a teacher of theology. He was not bidden for His own enjoyment but for the consecration of the ceremony — for the bestowal of a blessing on the wedded pair. His invitation came, not from memory of the home at Nazareth, but from observation of the work in Judea. And when the feast was over it was to Judea He again repaired — no longer to its wilderness but to its metropolis. The ministry begun with the Baptist in the desert is continued by Jesus, alone, in Jerusalem. So says the Fourth Gospel. The other three never speak of such a ministry. Yet it seems to me that the events recorded of it by St. John wonderfully supply certain gaps which I feel in the earlier narrative. I think that without the incidents of this initial Jerusalem ministry, there are interesting passages in the Galilean narrative to which we should lose the key. Let me illustrate what I mean.
It is frequently said that the sayings of Jesus in the earlier Gospels are plain, direct statements bearing on the practical life, and exactly suited to a community of Galilean peasants.
Iwas taught this in my days of pupilage. Personal study has forced me to reverse the judgment. That they bear on the practical life is indisputable; that they are easy to understand is contrary to the fact. In order to understand them, a Galilean peasant, or any other peasant, would require a previous training. Take, for example, that which is set forth as the nucleus of Christ’s Galilean teaching — the Sermon on the Mount. It is intended to describe the substance of His inaugural address to His disciples. Knowing this, the reader persuades himself that it is very elementary; he runs through the opening verses and says, ‘ That is teaching which any one will understand.’ The truth is, if uttered for the first time, it, would be teaching quite above the heads of the audience. That the poor in spirit are best qualified for the heavenly kingdom, that the mourning have a special promise, that the meek are on the road to an inheritance, that those who feel they are in want of righteousness are happy — these are not precepts which commend themselves to the natural mind of any nation, least of all to the natural mind of Israel. The kingdom which Israel sought was one which could not be found by poorness of spirit, by mourning, by meekness, by the sense of insufficiency. It required exactly the opposite qualities — pride, exultation, violence, self-confidence. It is to the Christian consciousness, the evangelical consciousness, that these precepts appeal; and at the time when they were uttered, if you admit no other guide than the Galilean narrative, the evangelical consciousness did not exist. There is a gap in the record, a hiatus, a want of congruity. We are told that we are in the presence of the primitive Christ; yet this primitive Christ teaches what is far from primitive — teaches what presupposes another revelation, an earlier revelation, a revelation which went nearer to the root of the matter and expounded from the outset the principles of the evangelic faith. Now we find this revelation in the first of the Jerusalem ministries recorded in the Fourth B
Gospel. It is highly probable that the future apostles were there present as disciples; it is certain that if they were, they received a training which prepared them for the Sermon on the Mount. For, what is the burden of the Jerusalem ministry and of that Samaritan ministry which immediately followed it? From beginning to end it has one note — the impotence of man and his need of help from a Divine hand. It begins with the cleansing of the temple. We see the Son of Man revealed from the very outset as wounded by the sins of the world, and consumed by the desire to root them out. Then we have the announcement to Nicodemus that man must be born anew, born from above — that no patching of the old material will suffice for one whose garments are so thoroughly moth-eaten and whose robes are so utterly faded. Then comes the painting of the brazen serpent. Men are told that they are in the condition of the wounded Israelites in the desert and that they must look up to be healed. Next we have the rich proclamation at Samaria’s well. We see the Son of Man pointing to a fountain of living water which He alone can unlock, and inviting to drink of it one whe had been deeper dyed in sin than most of her sisters. We hear the denouncing of the pride both of Jerusalem and of Samaria, and the call to exchange national arroganceforindividual solemnity.
The note through all these earlier chapters of the Fourth Gospel. is one and the same — that the natural faculties of man are insufficient to supply him with his needed sustenance, and that his life can only be made eternal by his accepting as a charity a new gift from God.
This, I submit, is the real introduction to the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount. Without that introduction the initial chord of Christ’s Galilean teaching is a grammar without an alphabet. It addresses men from a height which they themselves have not reached. It leaves a gap in the development against which the logical student cries out. The Fourth Gospel makes the Christ of the earlier
Gospels intelligible both to His
own disciples and to modern times. It furnishes a bridge across an otherwise impassable river, and shows us how simple peasants could be trained to understand paradoxes.
Take another saying of Christ which occurs in the Galilean narrative. It is the attempt He makes to prepare His disciples for coming adversity. He tells them solemnly that they are going up to Jerusalem — a place where the Son of Man must inevitably meet death. The critics exclaim: ‘ This shows that the Fourth Gospel is wrong in saying that Jesus had been already in Jerusalem; does not the solemn dread with which the journey is contemplated prove conclusively that Christ was going there for the first time?’ To me the opposite conclusion seems the truth. On the supposition that this was the first visit, why should Jerusalem have been viewed as a source of special danger? We know that it was very dear to the heart of Jesus. True, He recognised its sins, as He did those of Capernaum and the other cities of Galilee where His mightiest works were done. But He felt a tenderness for Jerusalem that He never felt for Capernaum; it was one of the two objects that woke His tears. Did Jesus suppose that Jerusalem would put Him to death for claiming to be the Messiah? He knew far better than that. He knew that to one of His nation the claim to Messiahship involved no blasphemy — that the crucial question was’ not, Are you the Christ? but, What do you consider the Christ to be? There was no blasphemy in calling Himself the Son of Man; there was, in calling Himself the Son -of God. The truth is, the Galilean narrative by itself does not account for the shrinking from the metropolis. In that narrative, Christ up to this time had uniformly styled Himself the Son of Man, and even where His followers penetrated deeper He had always enjoined secrecy. If this represents His entire teaching, why should He have feared to go to Jerusalem?
But Jesus knew that He had conducted a previous ministry — a ministry in Jerusalem, where He had taught something much more pronounced. He knew that He had already incensed Jerusalem, not by proclaiming, as in Galilee, the Messiah to be the Son of Man, but by asserting that the Messiah was the Son of God. (JouNn 11. 16.) He knew that in the vicinity of the capital had been announced that doctrine repugnant to every Jew — that the Christ was the only begotten Son in the bosom of the Father and the only presence that could reveal the image of the invisible God. (JoHN 1. 18.) He knew why such a doctrine had incensed the Jewish mind.* It was
1 The words in Marruew 111. 16 are only a private revelation to Jesus Himself.
tantamount to saying that the Messiah could claim another channel of descent besides the stock of Abraham. Had not He Himself within the walls of Jerusalem disparaged the holy house where His ancestors were wont to worship, and cried within its precincts, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days, I will raise it again’? If Jesus was apprehensive of Jerusalem, it was not a forecast, but a memory. He dreaded it because He had been there, because He had said there what He had not said in Galilee, and had in consequence experienced a bitterness there which He had never found in Galilee. The record of the Fourth Gospel has here, in my
opinion, again supplied a gap in the early narrative, and rendered clear and luminous what, if it stood alone, would be dark and inexplicable.
I will mention what I regard as one other instance in which the earlier photograph of Christ is made consistent by the later — I mean His attitude toward His own death. In a very ancient document, which by general admission expresses the faith of the first Christian century, it is written of Christ that ‘in the days of His flesh He poured forth His soul with strong crying and tears unto Him that was able to save Him from death, and was heard in the thing He feared.’ The reference is of course to the Garden of Gethsemane. But the striking feature of the passage is the declaration that the Gethsemane prayer was an answered prayer, ‘ He was heard in the thing He feared.’ Judging from the first three Gospels alone, we should be apt to conclude that the prayer was unanswered. We see there the sufferer at the approach of death pouring forth his soul, ‘Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me,’ and ending with the sublime resignation, ‘If this cup may not pass from me except I drink it, Thy will be done.’ It is not said there was a refusal; but the spirit of resignation seems the sequel to a refusal. What appears to seal the refusal is the fact that Christ is not saved from His hour; He returns from His prayer to die.
But now turn to the Fourth Gospel. It does not record the scene in ‘The Garden’; but it tells the trouble in Christ’s heart when He was about to enter it. And what was that trouble? The words of Jesus as recorded by St. John are before us. We are all familiar with them — so familiar that perhaps we are apt to lose sight of their full meaning. Let me try to express their import rather by paraphrase than by direct quotation, rather in order of thought than in sequence of verses. ‘Father, the hour is come; and now is my soul troubled. What shall I pray in this trouble? Shall I say, ‘“Father, save me from this hour of dying”? How can I say that? Was it not for the purpose of dying that I came into the world? Not by escaping the hour of dying do I ask the removal of the cup. I do not refuse to drink it; but let it be removed after I have partaken of it! It is not dying, but death, that I want to be saved from. Let Thy name be glorified in my rising! Do not let me rest in the tomb! Assert my holiness by a resurrection, that I may assert Thine by proclaiming to all flesh the power of eternal life!’
Every word of this is implied in the sayings of Jesus which St. John attributes to Him under the shadow of death. If so, the link is supplied that in the earlier narrativeismissing. Webegintounderstand what it was from which
Jesus recoiled. We begin to see that it was not dying, but death. We begin to feel that His agony was compatible with undeviating adherence to His mission. We begin to realise that this agony was a struggle for that which was really a part of His mission — resurrection. Above all, we begin to appreciate the truth of what the writer to the Hebrews says — that He was heard in the thing He feared, that the prayer in Gethsemane is an answered prayer. With this last conviction the Fourth Gospel rises in value. It becomes areconciler of history, and thereby claims its right to be itself historical. It supplies a missing link. It illuminates spots that were in shadow. Instead of lowering the earlier Gospels by its successful rivalry, it invests them with a higher honour. It makes their own photograph of Jesus a consistent and possible picture, and enables us for the first time to understand the full beauty, and for the first time to comprehend the finished proportions, that mould the form and features of the Man of Nazareth.