SECTION I

an attempt to exhibit the gospel history in its unity

The Gospel history has ever presented itself, in its essential features, to the eye of Christian faith as a unity. Faith has ever found the Gospel in the Gospels. It is one of the marks of matured believers, that Christ has been formed in them. They have an enlightened spiritual perception of His nature and history. Their knowledge must, from its very nature, be ever increasing in clearness and fulness. But it has not come to perfection until all the essential contents of the Gospel history, as found in the four Gospels, have their place in the harmonious image resulting from this one perception of the life of Christ. And faith is striving after the same end as theological science, when the latter is seeking to exhibit that unity from the four Gospels.

But both in the assumption on which this effort is founded, and in the process whereby it is to be realized, science may depart from the point of view occupied by faith. At all events, science must differ from faith at every step of this effort in this respect, that while faith is rejoicing in the spiritual unity she has found in the life of Christ, science is endeavouring to exhibit this unity in the fulness of those historical features displayed in the Gospels. Consequently, while faith has ever rejoiced in the unity of Christ as experienced at its centre, the high aim of science has ever been, and still is, to exhibit its whole circumference.

This effort of science cannot but be regarded as the expression of a noble and essential impulse of the mind. The mind everywhere seeks unity, whether in history or nature; it cannot but seek it, because its own nature is the free unity of varieties. Variety, indeed, cannot oppress it, so long as it can either perceive or anticipate therein the fulness of unity. But if variety seems, to obstruct unity by its mysterious nature, or to obliterate it by obvious contradictions, the mind becomes uneasy and excited, and finally seeks it at any cost. The moral and religious capacity for discovering unity in variety is indeed very various. The Monotheist, e.g., finds in the infinite variety of the world the bright and certain manifestation of one Spirit; the Polytheist finds therein the confused separateness of countless gods. The former finds unity because he goes to the cause; the latter loses it because he is prejudiced by the outward effect. So also will a strong, healthy, evangelical mind see the unity of the Gospel in all the Gospels; while a mind fixed upon outward matters of detail and of the letter, fancies it discovers a complication of contradictions.

Even in their assumption concerning the relation of the four Gospels to the one Gospel history, the decisions of science and faith are often widely different. Christian faith cannot but regard it as an advantage to possess the Gospel in this four-fold form and development; science, on the contrary, is almost accustomed to see in this circumstance a deficiency, an injury. The former would not part with one of the Gospels, because each serves more clearly to display the infinite riches of Christ in a special aspect; science, on the contrary, seems often inclined to give up all four, for the first best scientific representation of the life of Christ, or even for a negative criticism of the evangelical narratives.¹

This difference is still more strikingly displayed in the respective methods of procedure of these two mental tendencies. While faith finds the same Christ and the same presiding Spirit of Christ in each separate occurrence of the Gospel narratives, and even looks upon discrepancies in details as corroborations of the truth and freedom of this spirit, the scientific impulse, which is more or less alien to faith, desires the perfect external unity, or even uniformity, of the evangelical narratives. This impulse, in its Christian form, produces that positive harmony which regards the external accordance of the Gospels as a condition of their internal agreement, or indeed confounds the two, and makes faith dependent upon the fact of the Gospels exhibiting the lawyer-like exactness of a statute-book. In its non-Christian form, however, this same impulse produces negative harmony, which finds not only in actual discrepancies of detail between the several Gospels, but even in every mere appearance of discrepancy that can be raked up, signs of their legendary nature. Both kinds of harmony suffer from the same lack of feeling for the vividness with which mind is wont to express itself, and terminate in a complete talmudistic minute criticism with respect to the externals of the Gospels, corresponding with their utter misconception of their inner life. These two forms of harmony stand in the same polar relation to each other as Popery and Separatism, or as despotism and anarchy. The one annihilates the peculiarity of the Gospels, to exhibit more forcibly the uniformity of the Gospel; the other, on the contrary, denies the powerful unity of spirit manifest in every feature of the separate Gospels, and sees in them an endless complication of apocryphal mental activity, living particles capriciously jumbled together from every quarter.

It is the problem of faith ever more and more to introduce the separate features of the Gospel narratives, viewed in their mutual harmonious relations, into the Church’s contemplation of the life of Jesus, viewed as a whole. It is the problem of theological science, on the contrary, ever more and more to strive, by successive approximations, to exhibit from the materials at hand the perfect unity of the life of Jesus. When the tasks of both are completed, both must meet at the same place. But, meanwhile, faith cannot exact of science that she should hurry her task, or even, with lawyer-like partiality, solve her problem at any cost, as though she were concerned to save the life of a threatened client. Such an exaction was indeed long ago made by little faith, till science, which she had enslaved, breaking through her bonds, thenceforth conducted the cause of the Gospels in an opposite direction, with the vindictive spirit of a fugitive slave. When, however, science would, on her part, enforce upon faith results which assume and involve another view of the world than the Christian one, she must in this form appear to faith under the same aspect as Jewish or Mohammedan arguments would, when dealing in an antichristian manner with the Gospels. Such science no longer stands in polar relationship to faith, but has nothing to do with it. Christian science starts from the assumption of the central unity of the four Gospels. She seeks to follow this vital unity of spirit into the very veins of their several details. Having, however, to deal with the analysis of four great individualities in their respective performances, and in their relation to the Gospel history, her task seems an endless one. But it is not only the subject itself which makes this task a difficult one. In estimating it, we must also take into account the imperfect state of science, both as being still in process of development, and limited by human weakness. Hence her several decisions are arrived at without the confidence of full assurance. Nothing could more retard her progress than to convert her conclusions or views into settled maxims. The more cautiously she proceeds, the more assurance may she express, because she proceeds upon the certainty of a firm foundation, and has the certainty of a real end in view. It is in this sense that our attempt to give a single delineation of the Gospel history is to be made. With regard to the extent of this representation, it will, for the sake of obtaining a comprehensive view of the whole subject, go beyond the limits of the four Gospels, e.g., with regard to a description of the secular circumstances among which the life of Jesus was passed. With regard to its execution, however, this representation will consist only of a sketch of the subject, since the full consideration of the matter will be given in the development of the four separate Gospels.

1) [ʽM. Renan a voulu, comme il le dit, nous faire lire un cinquieme evangile, extrait des quatre autres.’—Pressensé, L’Ecole Critique et Jésus Christ, p. 14.—ED.]