The Importance of the Teaching of Jesus
‘I “‘HE present generation is under the impression that it has discovered the teaching of Jesus. It would be absurd, indeed, to speak as if our own age had been the first to appreciate the beauty and the power of our Lord’s words; for since the Christian Church began, the sentences of the Sermon on the Mount have found a lodgment in the memory of Christendom more secure than any other words whatever; the Parables have never in any century failed to charm; and the Farewell Discourses in the Gospel of St. John have in every generation been the solace of the Christian heart in its most solemn moods. Nevertheless, in our own day our Lord’s words have obtained a prominence never accorded to them before. We now separate them from the rest of Scripture, with which formerly they were indiscriminately mingled, and assign them a commanding authority. Their unique theological value is acknowledged. It is recognised, in short, that Jesus is the best teacher of His own religion.
This change is due to deep causes, to trace which thoroughly would be a long and arduous task.
Perhaps it may be best assigned to one of those mysterious movements in the depths of the human spirit which it is difficult to scrutinise and account for, but by which, under the guidance of Providence, one epoch is made to end and another to begin. Suddenly, you can hardly tell how or why, one way of thinking about things, which has long appeared to be the only possible way, becomes disused, and a new way becomes so easy and universal that people can hardly realise that things have not always been seen in this light. At the Reformation the Pauline mode of conceiving Christianity fitted into the necessities of experience; and the Christian mind rose up to take possession of its heritage as it is unfolded in the Pauline Epistles. The forms of truth there deposited are so priceless that it took long to bring them fully to light; the theological consciousness was aware of profiting by the robust efforts which it had to put forth in the process of acquisition; and so the predominance of this view of Christianity lasted long. But it could not last forever, because the Bible is rich enough to contain other ways of conceiving Christianity; and these were certain, some time or other, to get their turn. What Novalis says of Shakspeare — that in his works “the last and deepest of observers will still find new harmonies with the infinite structure of the universe, concurrences with later ideas, affinities with the higher powers and senses of man” — is far truer of the Bible. Humanity, under the training of history, is always being made ready to understand and appreciate some new portion of the Word of God, and some book or section of Scripture is big with a secret which it can only disclose to those providentially prepared for its reception. Everyone is aware how at present, in the Old Testament, the writings of the prophets, after being long neglected, are coming into such prominence that every young minister of ability is discoursing from them; and in the same way, in the New Testament, we are moving from the Epistles to the Gospels. Rabbi Duncan was one of those lofty and sensitive spirits which catch the first rays of an approaching time, and he foretold this change: “I have certainly,” he said, “more of the Pauline Epistles than of the four Gospels in my nature; but, were I a younger man and to begin my studies again, the Gospels would bulk more prominently in my attention than they have done.” As has been hinted, there is an overruling Providence in the matter: when the flock have long been in one section of the pasture and have nibbled it bare, the great Shepherd leads them into another, where the grass is lush and uncropped; and there they abide till the fields which they have left have had time to grow again.
It may only be another way of stating the same reason to say, secondly, that the recognition of the importance of the words of Jesus has been prepared for by the extraordinary attention bestowed in the present century on His life. At the Reformation it was on the work of Christ that the thoughts of men were concentrated; and this long remained the supreme and ruling conception of theology. Ever and anon, however, J I is person came into prominence; and in the present century the most intense study has, owing to a variety of causes, been directed upon the details of His earthly life. Archaeology, the exploration of Palestine, the history of the century in which He was born, and many other subsidiary sciences have been pressed into the service; and the Son of man has been made to walk forth in breathing reality before the eyes of men, who have eagerly followed every step of His course from the manger to the cross. But under this close inspection of the records His words could not fail to attract attention. Accordingly everyone who wrote of His life expressed the hope to write some day on His words likewise. At last the press begins to teem with this new burden; and in the next fifty years the books on the teaching of Jesus will probably be as numerous as in the last fifty have been those on His life. Observers who watch closely the signs of the times in the theological world are wont to keep an eye on the young Privatdocenten in the German universities. When these begin, as if by general consent, to write on any topic, it may be taken for granted that this subject is in the air, and will be heard of everywhere before long. And of late they have been taking, in full cry, to the teaching of Christ. The first monograph on the subject which I remember came from the pen of a French theologian, M. Meyer, in 1883*; then followed, at a considerable interval of time, The Kingdom ofGodoi Dr. Bruce; then Wendt’s Teaching of Jesus but now it is scarcely possible to take up a theological catalogue without seeing the announcement of one or more monographs on the whole or on some special aspect of the subject.
* Le Christianisme du Christ, dealing only with the words of Jesus recorded by St. Matthew.
f Dr. Robertson’s excellent handbook in the Guild Series of the Church of Scotland deserves special notice as the first popular presentation of the subject.
And the demand in the public mind is equally keen; for multitudes are saying, that they only need to know for certain what Jesus believed in order to believe the same.
Another cause which has stimulated interest in this subject has been the rise of Biblical Theology.* The old view of the Bible was that it is a unit, all its parts forming one glorious whole and conspiring to convey one divine message; and this view expresses an eternal truth. But it is also manifest that the Bible is a library of books, differing enormously as to age, style and contents. If they all convey one message, yet they severally embody different parts and aspects of it; and, if the unity of Scripture is a grand truth, its variety lies more obviously on the surface. To see how revelation grew from simplicity to complexity, and how the germ unfolded into leaf, flower and fruit, is to follow the course of a spiritual romance; and it brings Biblical knowledge into line with the ideas of evolution so characteristic of our time in all the other departments of knowledge. In the New Testament we see how elementary conceptions of Christianity,
* This is the science which defines the circle of ideas belonging to each prominent writer of Scripture, or group of writers, and, by arranging these types of thought in chronological order, seeks to trace from stage to stage the growth of revelation.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE TEACHING OF JESUS g
in the Book of Acts and the Epistles of St. James and St. Peter, expand into the comprehensive and philosophical system of St. Paul, and how the development is crowned by the mystic views of St. John. But the question could not but be asked, Where do Christ’s own views come in? They stand at the commencement of the volume in the Gospels; but is this their place in the development? Are they really overtopped and overshadowed by the teachings of the Apostles? This was virtually the place assigned them in the older handbooks of Biblical Theology. But, as time has gone on, they have been allowed more and more space, till in the latest specimen — the handbook of Holtzmann* — they obtain nearly half of the whole room to themselves. The question will undoubtedly force itself more and more to the front, Is the teaching of Jesus a rudimentary form of Christianity which the others transcend, or is it the perfect form, which they only supplement?
Whatever may be the answer given to this question, there can be no doubt that the tendency
* Since this was penned, Stevens’ Theology of the New Testament has appeared; and all English-speaking people are to be congratulated on now having accessible from so able and trustworthy a hand an extended treatise, written originally in their own tongue, on this great subject.
to attach supreme importance to the words of Christ is a healthy one. It is in accordance with the mind of Christ Himself; for He frequently spoke of His own words in terms the grandiosity of which it would be difficult to surpass. The very first lesson which a student of Christ’s teaching should take is to collect the sayings of Jesus about His own words. In the first place, He took a very high and unusual view of the value of words in general. There is nothing which to the ordinary man appears more trivial than a word. What is it? A breath converted into sound: out it goes on the air, and is carried away by the wind; and there is an end of it. No, said Jesus, it does not end there, and it does not end ever: when once it is called into existence by the creative force of the will, it becomes a living thing separated from our control; it goes ranging through time and space, doing good or evil; and it will confront us again at the last day — “Every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof at the day of judgment.” * At that solemn crisis the influence of our words on our destiny will be extraordinary; for “by thy words thou shalt be justified and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.” There is nothing of which the
*Matt. xii. 36.
fMatt. xii. 37.
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average man is more surely convinced than that his tongue is his own, and that he can at will make it utter words either good or evil. Very different was Christ’s estimate: words are inevitable: if the speaker be good, then they are good, but, if he be evil, then they are inevitably evil: for as much control as he seems to have over them, he cannot alter their character unless he first alter his own; for “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.” *
Such was Christ’s conception of words; and such were His own words: they were the overflowings of His heart, an effluence from His character, bits of Himself. No wonder if virtue resided in them. Poets and thinkers have sometimes boasted, half in jest, that their words would survive the most permanent works of man — pyramids of kings and monuments of brass; but Jesus declared, in sober earnest, that His would outlive the most stable works of God — “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away.”
He spoke of attachment to His words as attachment to Himself, and as the test of discipleship — “If ye continue in My word, then are ye My disciples indeed, and ye shall know the truth, and
* Matt. xii. 34.
Luke xxi. 33.
the truth shall make you free”; “If a man love Me, he will keep My words, and My Father will love him; and We will come unto him and make Our abode with him. He that loveth Me not keepeth not My sayings; and the word which ye hear is not Mine, but the Father’s who sent Me.” * When Mary was seated at His feet listening to His words, He declared that she was doing the one thing needful. f
He attributed to His words the power of regenerating and sanctifying the soul — “Now ye are clean through the word that I have spoken unto you “; “The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life “; “Verily, verily, I say unto you, if a man keep My sayings, he shall never see death.” And those who first heard His words confirmed out of their own experience the justice of these claims, when St. Peter said in their name, “Lord, to whom can we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.”
It was only the logical consequence of this when Jesus alleged, that the eternal destiny of His hearers would depend on the attitude they assumed to His words —” He that rejecteth Me and receiveth not
* John viii. 31; xiv. 23, 24.
f Luke x. 42.
J John xv. 3; viii. 51; vi. 68.
My words hath one that judgeth him: the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him at the last day.” * He wound up the Sermon on the Mount with the well-known imagery of incomparable solemnity: “Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of Mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house: and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock. And every one that heareth these sayings of Mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.” f
I have considered it worth while to quote all these sayings in detail; because they show not only how high was the estimate placed by Jesus on His own words, but how frequent a theme of thought and speech this was with Him. He claimed for Himself as a teacher a position far above all who had preceded Him, when He said to His hearers that many prophets and kings had desired in vain to hear the things which they were blessed enough to be hearing
♦John xii. 48. t Matt - v “- 2 4” 2 7- from His lips; and still more decisively did He place Himself above all who should come after Him, when He said, “Be not ye called Rabbi, for One is your teacher; and all ye are brethren.”* There could not be a more emphatic warning against placing the apostles on the same level as the Master.
From the point of view of the old doctrine of inspiration an objection might be raised: indeed, I have heard it said, “Why should the words of Jesus be considered more important than the rest of the Bible? all the Scriptures are utterances of God, and what more are the words of Christ?” But even from the old point of view this objection can be met with a decisive answer. It is true that in one sense all parts of Scripture are equally important; because they are parts of a whole which would be mutilated if any of its constituent parts, even the smallest, were absent. In the same sense the smallest joint of the smallest finger is as important in the human body as the head, because it is essential to the perfection of the whole. But manifestly there is another sense in which a finger is by no means as important as the head. The members of the body differ in dignity, the eye being a far more glorious member than the ear, and the
* Matt, xxiii. 8; “even Christ” is unauthentic.
majesty of manhood far more fully exhibited in the face than in the foot. In a similar sense some portions of Scripture may be spoken of as more important and glorious than others. This has never been questioned by even the strictest orthodoxy. The nature of God is more fully revealed in the pages of Isaiah than in the lines of Nahum; and no one would think of comparing the message of St. James for glory with that of St. Paul. When God made use of inspired men, He did not destroy their individuality or make them all speak in the same strain, but, like one playing on instruments of different shapes and sizes, He transmitted one element of revelation through one and another through another. He let the light of the knowledge of His glory shine through a great variety of media; but some of these were larger and more transparent than others, and let more of the light of revelation through. If this is recognised, it is impossible to deny a unique value to the words of Jesus; for of all the media ever employed by God for purposes of revelation none can be compared to Him: in no other mind did the spirit of revelation obtain such ample room, and never, either before or after, did it find such perfect channels of outlet as through His organs of thought and speech. This is the very least that must be conceded from even the most orthodox point of view; and it is enough to place the words of Jesus above all human words — even those of revelation.
By some this contrast, however, is carried much further, and it is proposed to convert the teaching of Christ into a standard with which to criticize and to correct the rest of Scripture. Formerly the whole Bible was looked upon as a single authority; but first the Old Testament was dropped and the New adopted as the sole authority; and now the narrowing process is carried further: not the New Testament as a whole, it is contended, is the authority, but the teaching of Christ alone; and some go so far as to draw a circle of exclusion even inside the teaching of Christ, maintaining that the Sermon on the Mount is an ample norm both of faith and practice. This is the position taken up by Dr. John Watson in The Mind of the Master. ‘The religion of Protestants,” he says, “or let us say Christians, is not in the Bible in all its parts, but first of all that portion which is its soul, by which the teaching of Prophets and Apostles must itself be judged — the very words of Jesus”; and he goes on to argue that even of the words of Jesus those contained in the Sermon on the Mount are sufficient.
To suggestions of this sort the reply has often been given, that Jesus expressly intimated at His departure that He had not been able to utter all He had to say, but would find means of conveying it to His Church after He was gone; and that the teaching of inspired apostles was the virtual continuation of His own: “I have yet many things to say unto you, but yet cannot bear them now; howbeit, when He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He shall guide you into all truth; for He shall not speak of Himself; but whatsoever He shall hear that shall He speak; and He will show you things to come; He shall glorify me; for He shall receive of Mine, and shall show it unto you.” * For one thing, the resurrection and ascension of our Lord entirely altered the point of view. As long as He was on earth, He had perforce to speak from the level of the earth, the minds of the disciples obstinately refusing to take the hint of anything higher; but, after He had risen and ascended, He was to all who believed in Him the Lord of glory; and it is from this point of view that the latter half of the New Testament is written. It is especially contended that within the very extensive promise of illumination quoted
*John xvi. 12-15.
above, the full truth about His own death was included, because it was impossible, or at least unnatural, that He should speak fully about this event before it had taken place, and before the minds of the disciples were opened to credit it. Even if Jesus had spoken fully on this subject from His own point of view — that is, the point of view of the Giver of salvation — it would still have been necessary that it should be fully and authoritatively explained from the opposite point of view — that of the receivers of salvation. Jesus might speak of salvation, but He was never Himself saved; and there would have been an intolerable blank in the Bible had not inspired men, when the forces of salvation, in their first freshness, were doing their work in their soul and life, committed their experience to the pages of Holy Writ. This is the value of the writings of St. Paul, St. John and St. Peter, who tell what Christ was to themselves as Saviour and Lord.
A still weightier argument is, that Christ Himself is more than His words. Stier, the commentator on our Lord’s sayings, calls them “the words of the Word” — a most suggestive title, because it reminds us that Christ Himself is the great and final Word of God, of which His detailed words are only fragments. Even all of these in combination are not equal to Him; for there are other words of the Word: His earthly history, His miracles and His sufferings are all words of the Word, on a level with His spoken words. His association with publicans and sinners was no less significant than were the parables of St. Luke xv.; His weeping over Jerusalem was more eloquent than anything He said on patriotism; His sufferings and death were far more suggestive than anything He ever said about sin. We are wont in modern thought to draw a distinction between revelation and inspiration — revelation being the grand, primary fact in God’s relation to men, whereas inspiration is subsidiary and ministerial. Revelation did not take place, as the old orthodoxy assumed, through whispers of truth communicated to the prophets, but through the institutions, the events and the personages of a divine history; and inspiration was the power of interpreting this history and putting its meaning into words. Now, that which was perfected in Christ was the revelation: in Him the divine history culminated and the divine love was fully disclosed. It may no doubt be argued that the inspiration culminated in Him likewise, and was adequate to the revelation. But at all events even His inspiration did not exhaust the revelation embodied in Himself, which invited the attention of other inspired personalities, to interpret it from the point of view of their own experience. And this is the reason why, instead of merely collecting His words and commenting on them, the apostles go straight themselves to the revelation made in Christ and give it an original interpretation out of the fulness of their own experience.
There is a double objection to the exaggerated way of putting the matter on which I am commenting. First, it tempts to disparage St. Paul and the other New Testament writers in order to exalt Christ. This temptation Dr. Watson has not escaped. “If,” he says, “one may be pardoned his presumption in hinting at any imperfections in the Apostle of the Gentiles, is not his style at times overwrought by feeling? Are not some of his illustrations forced? Is not his doctrine often rabbinical, rather than Christian? Does not one feel his treatment of certain subjects — say marriage and asceticism — to be somewhat wanting in sweetness?” In the fancied interest of Jesus, it is net uncommon at present to hit in this style at inspired men. But would Jesus accept such championship? The truth is, Jesus Himself could be criticized in this tone to His disparagement. And this is the other side of the objection: it tempts those who vindicate the apostles to depreciate Jesus, or at least to put Him in the background. “The specifically Christian consciousness,” it is argued, “which has to be scientifically developed by the theologian, is not the consciousness of Jesus, it is the consciousness of reconciliation to God through Jesus;” * and the teaching of Jesus, being thus, by means of an ingenious definition of theology, excluded from the immediate materials of the theologian, no specific place is assigned to it at all.
Of course, the decisive question is, whether St. Paul and the other apostolic writers are at variance with their Master. If they are, then undoubtedly they must go to the wall; and Dr. Watson is quite justified when he contends that St. Paul must be read in the light of Christ rather than Christ in the light of St. Paul. Only he and others are constantly taking it for granted that St. Paul cannot stand this test, but that a considerable portion of the apostolic teaching must be cast aside as inconsistent with that of Jesus, although Dr. Watson himself is vague and meagre in the extreme, when he comes to particulars. There can be no question that Jesus abolishes a great deal of Moses; for He does so in express terms;
* These words are from Dr. Denney’s Inaugural Lecture on Dogmatic Theology (published in The Expositor, December, 1897); perhaps, however, it is scarcely fair to criticize thus a mere obiter dictum.
but it is gratuitous to assume that He would have done the same to St. Paul. Even in the Synoptists the germs are to be found of all that the Epistles contain; and, if St. John be taken into account, the Christian theologian may without hesitation undertake to prove the substantial identity of the teaching of the Master and that of the disciples, He speaking from the point of view of the Saviour and they from that of the saved.*
I have spoken of the importance of the words of Jesus in themselves, and of their comparative importance when contrasted with the apostolic writings; but I should like to add something about their importance in relation to dogma.
Dr. Watson speaks as if the words of Jesus were the long neglected but rich source of dogmas, where anyone can lay his hand on them, as on the eggs in a discovered nest, and find his creed made-andready. In fact, he gathers a creed from them, in half-a-dozen lines, and says that, if only a church could be found to adopt it, men would come from the north and the south, the east and the west, to press into its membership. Experiments have not, however, been wanting to found churches on very
* Compare the preface to the new edition of Dr. Robertson Nicoll’s The Incarnate Saviour.
abbreviated creeds. Their success has not been conspicuous. And it may be doubted whether articles of belief thus found made-and-ready would be of much utility, whatever might be their origin — even if it were in the words of Jesus. I have found, in preaching, that to tell people how little Abraham believed or what were the precise limits of Isaiah’s theology does not affect them much; and that merely to expound a doctrine as having been that of St. Paul or even that of Jesus does not make much impression. Herein lies perhaps the weakness of all Biblical theology, which to a student is in many ways so fascinating: it is apt to become a mere branch of archaeology; whereas the truth which affects the human mind is that which has on it a streak of warm blood. Personal conviction is the soul of religious testimony.*
But, besides, when we go to the words of Jesus for the articles of a creed, is not this to mistake the genus to which these words belong? The difference between religion and theology may be hard to define, but it is not hard to feel; and surely the words of Christ belong not to theology but to religion.
* What underlies my friend Dr. Watson’s argument, which I have ventured to criticize so freely, is the perfectly just perception, that the teaching of Jesus is predominantly ethical, and that theology has done no sort of justice to the Ethics of Jesus.
They are kerygma, not dogma; nature, not science. Rothe denies that there are any dogmas in the Bible;* and perhaps he is right. Many parts, indeed, of the writings of St. Paul approach pretty near to the dogmatic type; yet even they are perhaps best considered as kerygma — warm outbursts of emotion and experience — rather than scientific theology. At all events the words of Jesus are at the opposite pole from scientific statements. Who has not felt the transition from a confession of faith or a dogmatic treatise to the Parables and the Sermon on the Mount? It is like the change from the atmosphere of a library to the open air, or from a museum, stuffed with skeletons and specimens, into a fair garden, where the flowers are in bloom and the dew of the morning is glistening on every blade of grass.
A strong corroboration of this view may be found in the form in which Jesus left His words. He did not write them down Himself, but entrusted them to the memory of His disciples, although these were not men of literary culture. This was not because He was indifferent on the subject. On the contrary,
* “Ich ziehe naturlich nicht in Abrede, dass es eine religiose Lehre in der Bibel gibt; aberich bestreite, dass der religiosen Lehre in der Bibel bereits die Qualitat eignet, vermoge welcher sie den Namen des Dogmas ansprechen kann.” — Zur Dogmatik, p. 18.
never has there lived a son of Adam to whom it has been so imperative a necessity to be remembered after death; and He took the most elaborate and far-sighted measures to secure this end. But His anxiety was not that of the professor, who dictates the ipsissima verba of his paragraphs, or of the jurist, who inscribes his decrees on tables of stone. He could trust the memory even of humble men, supplemented, as He knew it would be, by the living epistle of their life.
There is a widespread desire among theologians at present to find at least the organizing idea of the theological system in the teaching of Christ. Thus in Ritschl’s small handbook of Christian Instruction the Kingdom of God is the organizing idea, and this is a favourite notion of the whole Ritschlian school. But, although Jesus published His Gospel under the form of a doctrine of the Kingdom of God, it may be doubted whether He did this strictly on His own motion or rather under stress of circumstances, adapting His teaching to the modes of thinking current in His time. Principal Fairbairn takes the Fatherhood of God to be the centre of Christ’s teaching and proposes to make it the centre of theology*; and this is a proceeding which falls
* In Christ in Modern Theology..
in with the tendencies of the modern mind. But, like the Kingdom of God, the Fatherhood of God is a figure of speech of extremely uncertain application, even in the teaching of Christ sometimes describing the relation of all men to God and at other times the peculiar relation of believers. Other great ideas might be lifted from Christ’s teaching and made the ruling conceptions of theology. There is Righteousness, for example, which is certainly the ruling idea ‘of the Sermon on the Mount*; and I have been much interested in a work on the teaching of Jesus by Titius.f one of the younger German writers, who proposes to investigate not it only, but the whole teaching of the New Testament, from the standpoint of Blessedness — to my mind a most central and comprehensive idea. Of course all such proposals must be tested by their success, when the attempt is actually made to organize by their means the whole mass of theological material; but, if the attempt be successful, this will be due, I venture to think, not to the idea being that of Jesus, but to its being that of the thinker himself.
This desire to find dogmas ready-made in the teaching of Jesus, or at least to borrow from Him
* Dante said it was the theme of The Divine Comedy. Die y. T. Lehre von der Sdigkcit. Erster Theil: Jesu Lehre vom Reiche GotUs. 1S95.
the organizing conception of theology, savours too much of the old notion that the Bible is a vast collection of proof-texts, and that the work of dogmatic theology is merely, to arrange and systematize them. Dogmatic theology is not, indeed, at present very sure of its own definition; but at all events, since Schleiermacher, it is pretty certain that it has a close relation to Christian experience. Some would define it merely as the science of dogmas, and restrict the material with which it has to deal to the creed of the church to which the theologian belongs; others would make its material to consist rather of the living faith of the Church — that is, of the dogmas modified by opinion — while others still would emphasize most strongly the Christian experience of the dogmatist himself. But at all events dogma is more than the mere datum of Scripture: it is this taken up into the mind of the Church in combination with all the knowledge of which it may at any stage be possessed and viewed under the providential light shining at the time. It is not a mere report by the Church to the world that such-and-such a statement was made by Isaiah or Moses, by St. Paul or Jesus, and, therefore, must be true; but it is an affirmation by the Church of its own present conviction: “I know and declare this to be true, not merely because the Bible says it, but because I have experienced it, and because it is at this moment throbbing in my heart as the power of God unto salvation.”
The old view was, that a perfect theology could only have one form, and that the organizing idea must be either the right or the wrong one. But does not the whole history of theology prove that the intention of nature is different? The form is continually changing; and new organizing ideas emerge with every new generation, every spiritual movement, and every original thinker. Even the individual, if his religion be progressive, does not see truth always from the same point of view. John Bunyan’s experience is normal in this respect; who, in Grace Abounding* tells, that, preaching ever what he saw and felt, he moved every two years or so from one standpoint to another, being now absorbed with the curse and doom of sin, then with the offices of Christ, and again with union to Christ. So the Church at large, if its mind is not stagnating, must quit one point of view and move on to another. This is because its own historical position is shifting. While Scripture is meant to explain all the changing aspects of providence, providence, on the other hand, likewise casts on Scripture an ever-changing light. The organizing thought of theology is with one
* Pars. 276 to 278.
thinker the Sovereignty of God, with another Justification by Faith; but, if the Church is progressing instead of stagnating, it will neither be the one nor the other forever. In our day the best ruling idea may possibly be the Kingdom of God or the Fatherhood of God; but, if so, it will be, not because this was the supreme conception of Jesus, but because it is the thought which corresponds most intimately to the knowledge and the temper of the age.
The use of Scripture, and especially of the Words of Jesus, is not to supersede the spiritual and intellectual processes of the Church’s life by supplying her with dogmas ready-made, but to give stimulus and direction to these processes. The Scriptures have the same relation to the thinking and testimony of the Church as the influences of the atmosphere have to the products of the soil. Let the mind of the Church be continually refreshed with the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms, with the Epistles of St. Paul, the Writings of St. John, and, above all, the Words of Jesus, and it will think both copiously and correctly; but, let it cease to absorb into its experience these divine oracles, or let it deal with them carelessly and deceitfully, and its thinking, as well as the other manifestations of spiritual life, will suffer. Thus there is always an appeal from the teaching of the Church to the truth as it is in Jesus, and the Scripture is always above the Church, but not in the sense of a creed or a doctrinal system. The Scripture is like the rain from heaven, without the continual soaking of which through the soil the rivers, lakes and reservoirs would soon dry up and every green thing perish from the face of the earth. And this shows what should be the aim of a revival of the teaching of Jesus — not to set up a creed of Christ in opposition to the creeds of the churches, which would simply be to revive in the twentieth century the arrogance of those who in the first said at Corinth, “We are of Christ,” but to facilitate such a saturation of the Christian mind with the words and the spirit of the Author of Christianity that from the soil, thus nourished, all forms of good thinking as well as all manner of good living may spontaneously spring.
It will be observed that, in this course of lectures, I propose to derive the teaching of Jesus from the Synoptical Gospels, to the exclusion of St. John. One reason for this is the present state of criticism. At one time the Gospel of St. John — the pneumatic gospel, as it was called, or gospel of religious genius — enjoyed singular favour among the most advanced critics, who declared, that in it, if anywhere, was to be found the authentic portrait of Jesus; but at present the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme, and this gospel is spoken of in terms of great dubiety, if not of condemnation; and in these circumstances, whatever one may think of the merits of the case, it is advisable to adduce the’ evidence for the teaching of Jesus concerning Himself from the two sources separately. There is, besides, another reason, which to my mind is still more cogent: the Gospel of St. John is a work of unique character, in which the shape given even to the teaching of Jesus is due to the peculiarities of the Evangelist; and the whole hangs together so compactly that the parts cannot without some violence be separated from the whole, in order to supplement the outline of the Synoptists. In short, the system of the thoughts of Jesus, as it is presented in St. John, ought always to be developed from its own centre. Dr. Wendt, the author of the most important monograph which has yet appeared on the teaching of Jesus, does not follow this course, but gives, under each leading article, first the account supplied by the Synoptists and then the corresponding section from St. John. This is extremely interesting; in fact, it is the most striking feature of Dr. Wendt’s performance; and many readers must have been astonished at the identity of thought which he has often been able to demonstrate as existing beneath both the plain language of the Synoptists and the mystic phraseology of the Fourth Evangelist. Yet it must also have been felt that this method scarcely does justice to St. John, whose ideas are torn from their natural connexion and not infrequently somewhat distorted in the process.
We have not, however, done with critical questions when we leave St. John out, but, on the contrary, are face to face with the Synoptic Problem, the most perplexing of literary riddles. It is known how interminable has been the controversy about the order of the first three Evangelists and their relation to one another; but it seems to me that those who have contended for the priority of one or another have seldom taken sufficient time to consider what is the precise value of priority, even if it could be made out. As a rule, it is taken for granted that priority must necessarily imply superiority; but to a student of the words as distinguished from the acts of Jesus this must appear a doubtful proposition. Suppose three authors of our own time were to write memoirs of a life belonging to about the middle of the century, would the one who wrote in 1880 have a very great advantage over the one who wrote in 1890, or he over the one who wrote in 1900? Might not any such advantage be far outweighed by superior ability or access to special information? I do not pretend that the cases are exactly parallel, but, on the other hand, I do not know that there is any very great difference, unless we are to assume that in the Christian circles of the first century there was at work a strong mythopoetic propensity, which was engaged in adorning with legendary marvels the memory of Jesus. The distance between St. Mark and St. Matthew, or St. Matthew and St. Luke, is so inconsiderable that the question of priority is of only secondary importance.* Far more worthy of notice are the evidences which the contents of these books themselves supply of special aptitude for investigation or presentation. St. Mark, to whom the priority in time is now generally conceded, has seemed to many to possess a remarkable gift for indicating the movement and energy of the life of Jesus, together with the sequence and articulation of its periods; and through his rough, hasty and graphic sketches there is conveyed an image of the facts which carries on its face the signature of veracity. But St. Mark has no such gift for rendering the words of Jesus. This belongs to St. Matthew, who inspires me, as a student during many years of the words of Jesus, with the same enthusiasm
* The dates given by Harnack in his great work on Chronology are — St. Mark 65-85, St. Matthew 70-75, St. Luke 78-93.
as students of the events feel for St. Mark. Evidently St. Matthew had a passion for the words, and he diligently searched them out. They were treasured in his mind, where they arranged themselves in the pregnant forms in which he has reproduced them. For he does not render them in chronological order, but in groups, as a goldsmith arranges gems in such settings that one precious stone is set off by another. The supreme instance of this is the Sermon on the Mount; but only less conspicuous are the parables grouped together in chapter xiii., the succession of sayings on Offences in chapter xviii., and the discourses on the Last Things in chapters xxiv. and xxv. St. Matthew has penetrated down through the original sayings to the spirit moving beneath them all, and everywhere in his record we feel the height, the wisdom and the subtlety of the mind of Him who spake as never man spake. In the Gospel of St. Luke, as a whole, I feel more of the atmosphere of a later time;* yet how little the faithfulness of his reporting has been impaired by greater distance from the events may be realised by recalling the parables which we owe to him alone, such as the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son.
Of course it would be different if we could get
* A striking illustration of this is the frequent occurrence of “the Lord” as a name for Jesus.
back much nearer to the life of Jesus than the date of the Synoptic Gospels; and at this problem scholarship is labouring at the present time with astonishing enterprise. It is believed that the words of Jesus were the first memorials of Him which His followers collected in written form, and that there existed such a collection from the pen of the Apostle Matthew, upon which the authors of the canonical St. Matthew and St. Luke, and possibly St. Mark, drew in compiling their gospels. By the close scrutiny of the Gospels as we now have them, and especially by gathering together the common element which they exhibit, it has been recently attempted to reproduce this assumed document.* In a critical volume published by Dr. Wendt before his work on the Teaching of Jesus which has been translated into English, this original St. Matthew is printed verse by verse in Greek. Another German scholar, Dr. Resch, well known for his profound studies on the forms in which the words of Jesus appear in the earliest postcanonical literature, has gone further: holding that the original St. Matthew contained, besides discourses, an element of narrative, he has reproduced narrative and logia together; and, since
* Besides the works described in the following sentences, mention should be made also of The Apostolic Gospel, by J. Fulton Blair, B.D., 1896.
Papias, to whose information the idea of the original St. Matthew is due, says that it was written in Hebrew, he has supplied a Hebrew rendering of his own in addition to the Greek.* Finally, Dr. Dalman, an eminent Aramaic scholar, in the first volume, just published, of a work on the Words of Jesus, maintains that the Hebrew of the original St. Matthew was really Aramaic; although he does not propose to retranslate back into that language, but only to make constant use of Aramaic, which he believes to have been the tongue in which Jesus spoke, in order to throw light on the sayings in general and in detail.
The attempt, not only to prove the existence of a written gospel earlier than the canonical Gospels, but actually to reconstruct the document, must be felt to be of profound interest. Dr. Resch believes that we are thus carried back to a date not later perhaps than four years after the death of Jesus, when, he supposes, St. Matthew committed his recollections to writing,
* Die Logia Jesu, 1898. The author holds that the Hebrew, as the sacred and literary language, would in any case have been employed for such a purpose.
f Die Worte Jesu, 1898. The impression left on my mind by the arguments of Dalman, who speaks with great contempt of the knowledge of Aramaic possessed by his predecessors, is that there do not exist sufficient remains of the language or dialect spoken by Jesus to make it possible to determine with any great amount of certainty the actual vocables He used.
if he did not actually keep notes of his Master’s utterances from day to day; though of course this is only the conjecture of a sanguine specialist. It would be gratifying to learn that any of our Lord’s words or acts could be traced back, in written records, so near to the confines of His actual life. But the use made of the results thus obtained falls in rather with German ideas than with ours; for it is proposed to employ this gospel above the Gospels as a standard by which to try the other contents of the canonical Gospels. German scholarship, even of a comparatively orthodox type, takes quite naturally to the idea, that even among our Lord’s words there must be distinctions made between those the authenticity of which is of first rank and others belonging to a secondary or tertiary formation, in which His actual sentiments are compounded with later elements caught from the atmosphere of the apostolic age. Indeed, a German theologian is never quite happy unless, in dealing with a book of Scripture, he is making use of one portion to test, and generally more or less to invalidate, the rest. In this country scholarship is more modest: we at least keep open the possibility that the application of the test may justify all the sayings. We are not unfamiliar, indeed, even in this country, with the fact that for reasons of edification an evangelist may have omitted words in his possession, and I have alreadyreferred to the influence of St. John’s genius on his reporting; there may be modifications due to other causes of like kind; but it does not seem to me reasonable to suppose that a first sketch such as is attributed to St. Matthew would contain all that was vital in our Lord’s teaching; and I prefer to start with the presupposition that all the sayings are authentic till strong evidence is forthcoming to the contrary.
No other words ever uttered possess in the same degree the power of self-authentication. As a painter of the highest genius, like Raphael or Rubens, has a style of his own by which his work may be recognised, so the words of Jesus are full of peculiarities by which they can be identified.
One of their prominent characteristics is Pregnancy. No other speaker ever put so much into few words. Yet the matter is not too closely packed: all is simple, limpid, musical. This virtue was studied in the rabbinical schools, and it was realised in a high degree in the Wisdom Literature of the Old Testament, where, it may not be irreverent to suppose, Jesus admired and studied it. But in His case it was chiefly due to the cast and habit of His own mind. It is when truth has been long and thoroughly pondered that it embodies itself in brief and memorable language, as it is the ore thoroughlysmelted which flows out in an uninterrupted stream and crystallizes in perfect shapes; and such intense and convinced thought was so habitual to Jesus that the most striking sayings were often coined by Him on the spur of the moment, as when He said in controversy, “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things which are God’s.” Sentences of this kind stick like goads and nails. No other words have adhered as those of Jesus to the memory of mankind. Let almost any of His sayings be commenced, and the ordinary hearer can without difficulty finish the sentence. But, if we can retain them so easily since they have been written, the first hearers could remember them as easily before they were written.
Another very prominent characteristic is Imaginativeness. The style of Jesus is intensely figurative. He never says, “You ought to exert a good influence on your fellow-creatures,” but, “Ye are the salt of the earth; ye are the light of the world”; never, “All events are ordered by Providence,” but, “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? yet one of them shall not fall to the ground without your Father.” Never abstract statements or general terms, but always pictures, full of life, movement and colour! Of course the use of imagery was a feature of the sacred books He studied. In many a verse, for example, of the Book of Proverbs a moral truth is embodied in a picture borrowed from the realm of nature; and, indeed, the Hebrew word for a proverb means a simile. The psalmists and the prophets have a grasp of nature such as can be found in no other ancient literature. But, whatever influence Jesus may have derived from this quarter, the peculiarity of His language was due, in the fullest sense, to Himself — to His insight into the secret of beauty, His sympathy with every aspect of human life, and His perception of the play of natural law in the spiritual world. It is frequently said that the use of parables is common in the rabbinical schools, as, indeed, it is native to the Oriental mind; but the specimens produced from Indian and Jewish sources only illustrate the perfection of His by contrast; and, although His have been so long before the world, they have never been imitated with even tolerable success. The early Christians have not infrequently been credited with inventing the miracles, but the man would only betray his own intellectual and literary incapacity who ventured to say that they invented the parables.*
* Just and choice remarks on what may be called the Style of Jesus will be found in Wendt’s Teaching of Christ and Holtzmann’s N. T. Theologie y also in Julicher’s introductory
These characteristics, however, are only external; and far more significant are those which concern not the form but the substance of His teaching, such as the sublimity and simplicity of His conception of God, which answers perfectly to the idea sunk at creation in the texture of human nature, and His conception of man, which ennobles while it humbles, at once dwarfing all human attainment and yet opening up boundless vistas of progress. In all great teaching the speaker is more than the word spoken; and this is pre-eminently true of the teaching of Jesus. Behind the qualities of the words we divine a personality in which they are all united — -a personality serene and harmonious, solid and firm at the centre and yet shading off at the circumference into the most ethereal nuances of beauty, revealing God so perfectly because of its perfect union with God, and appealing to all that is great and tender in man because of the comprehensiveness of its own human experience.
volume on the Parables. The latter work is a powerful plea for what is now the recognized method of interpreting the parables — illustration and truth being regarded not as two flat plates, meeting at every point, but as a sphere resting on a plate and touching it at a single point. But the correct theory is carried too far. Jesus Himself uses the word “parable” loosely for any figure of speech, and was probably unconscious of the literary structure of His illustrations. Julicher writes as if He had never taken His eye off a rhetorical model.
By characteristics such as these the words of Jesus authenticate themselves; and I am not without the expectation that there may yet be founded on them a powerful apology even for His miracles; because the words are inextricably mixed up with the acts — words so original and characteristic that they must have been His, and, at the same time, so obviously occasioned by the miracles, in the midst of which they stand, that the latter must have been actual also. At all events the words support and vindicate one another; for they bear the stamp of the same incomparable mind, and the study of them as a whole will make it increasingly evident that they form the constituent elements of one harmonious circle of truth.*
* This brief discussion of the sources is supplemented in Appendix A.