INTRODUCTION

Usual form of the argument.—Another species of proof—Earthly life of Jesus not sufficiently investigated.—His humanity alone assumed here.—Inspiration not essential in this argument.—General historical validity of the Gospels assumed.—The life they record not mythical, but real.—“Behold the Man.”

A CHANGE in the form of the argument for the proper deity of Jesus Christ seems to be demanded in our day. Accepted and familiar proofs may not have lost their strength, but they have lost their freshness, and they are wanting in adaptation to the peculiar intellectual culture and structure of the present age. Sacred criticism, directed to the historical, prophetical, and devotional books of the Old Testament, and to the Gospels and Epistles of the New Testament, has long submitted its methods and their results to the judgment of the world. Dogmatic theology, also, connecting itself closely with the reigning logic and metaphysics, has long announced its expositions of sacred truth. Arguments on this subject have been accumulated in astonishing number, and have long maintained an acknowledged prescriptive authority. But it is 20conceivable that an excess of resources may prove, in certain cases, hardly less fatal than a palpable deficiency. Men are provoked to resist that which, instead of asking favor, commands and compels submission. It is sometimes wise to take not the very highest ground which it is possible to maintain, but the lowest and if; on this lowest ground, we can succeed in producing an unlooked-for amount of materials, the feeling of surprise conciliates the heart, and assists, instead of obstructing, the mental process which issues in conviction. Perhaps the earthly life of Jesus, apart from subtle criticism and from systematic, metaphysical theology, may be found to offer original and extraordinary evidences of His divinity evidences which, by their number, their harmony, and their force, shall amount to positive proof of this great mystery. This region, owing to the productiveness of others better known, has never been cultivated with the pains which it deserves. But the peculiar kind of proof; nevertheless, which it yields, we presume to think is at once the most intelligible and the most convincing which on such a subject can be offered to reason and conscience.

A temperate and conciliatory spirit is demanded toward those to whom we present the claims of religion and the exhibition of such a spirit can not injure or endanger Christianity. With perfect safety we may forego, for the time, the inheritance 21of evidence and of argument bequeathed from the past, by the researches and the erudition of enlightened men. Demanding nothing more than the simple humanity of Jesus of Nazareth, we shall venture from this platform to assert and expound his true divinity. Dismissing all preconceptions, however fondly cherished, and however long adopted into the faith of the churches, assuming nothing which is not virtually and even formally admitted by enemies as well as friends we hope to show that the manhood of Christ, as it appealed to the senses and the minds of the men of his own times, supplies and sustains the proof of his godhood.¹¹   The pre-supposition (voraussetzung) with which Neander commences his Life of Christ is certainly fatal to it as an argument, although its value as an exposition of the Gospels, and a critical defense of their authenticity, is in no degree affected by this circumstance. What he calls “the Christian consciousness” (das Christliche Bewustseyn) is not innate but acquired, the result of education, and therefore of no authority.—Das Leben Jesu Christi, Hamburg, 1855, Einleitung, s. 4.

A still larger sacrifice, in the same spirit of conciliation, will be found compatible with safety and honor. The inspiration of the Christian records is not to be demanded here. No collection of writings has passed through a fiercer ordeal than the books of the New Testament. The severity of criticism, it may be safely said, the venomous malignity with which they have been assailed, has no parallel in the history of literature, or of the religions 22of the world. The facts, the chronology, the references to contemporaneous history, to political and social interests, to science and philosophy, the doctrines and the ethical principles of the New Testament, the honesty, intelligence, and capacity of the writers, and the character of their production as a whole, have been subjected to the scrutiny, often intensely prejudiced, of all nations and of all orders of intellect for eighteen centuries. It is at least grateful to think, that, owing to this very cause, an astonishing amount of power, otherwise unrevealed, has been evoked and effectively put forth in defense of these holy writings. But the inspiration of the New Testament, as that is popularly understood, shall not be insisted on in the present argument; and it shall suffice for us, if this book be allowed to stand only not lower than other equally ancient productions. Whatever abatement from its historical validity can be plausibly demanded on account of the remoteness of the period, the character of the age, or the position of the writers, it shall be conceded. For the sake of argument, though only for this, it shall be granted that the Evangelists were not secured against mistake, and that therefore the justice of all their sentiments, and the accuracy of all their details, are not unquestionable. We go farther; let all in these sacred records which belongs to the sphere of the miraculous be ascribed, for the present, to the 23habit of the Jewish mind, to the influence of their national history, or to the common tendency to exaggeration. We assume nothing more than this, that the Gospels, in a broad and general sense, are historical and veritable; and this, in point of fact, is virtually granted by all.

By far the ablest of the modern adversaries of the validity of the New Testament, who has subjected it to the most severe analysis, and has brought to his task the largest amount of learning and of philosophic power, has admitted at least a basis, even a broad basis, of historical truth in the Gospels. He concedes that Jesus of Nazareth lived on earth, and that his character, saving the miraculous element so largely blended with the delineation of it, substantially was what it is represented to be by the Evangelists.²²   ”Das Leben Jesu.” Even Germany now consents that this attempt to place the Christian Gospels in the same category with heathen mythologies is only an ingenious fallacy, an elaborate defeat. One thing we must be permitted to mark: Strauss begins his criticism by aiming to create a prejudice, at all events a prejudgment Surely this cannot be too severely reprobated; it is unscientific, it is unphilosophical, it is morally wrong. This admission indeed can not be withheld, without encountering even graver difficulties than are created by conceding it. The antiquity of the records being granted—and it is granted at this day by all who have seriously investigated the subject, and who, on the ground of scholarship and of intellectual and moral competency, 24are entitled to consideration—one or other of two hypotheses is unavoidable. Either such a man as Jesus of Nazareth really appeared on earth about the time which the Christian records fix, or the writers of the Gospels gave form and life to a mere idea which never had an outward realization, and existed no where but in their minds. No third supposition is conceivable on any rational ground; one or other of these two must be accepted; and in truth there is no choice between them, for the difficulties involved in the latter are wholly insurmountable. On the supposition that Jesus of Nazareth never actually existed, it is not within the range of rational belief that the idea of such a being was formed in that country, that age, and in the minds of such men as the Evangelists are held to have been, and as in point of mental endowment and culture and social rank they certainly were. When it shall have been fully ascertained what that being who is presented to us in the Gospels really was, the evidence will be irresistible that this is not within the range of rational belief, but is so unlikely and unnatural as to be morally impossible. It would contradict all experience and all legitimate induction from experience, and be as utterly out of the course of human things as any miracle ever recorded. It is abundantly demonstrable, and the evidence will accumulate as the present investigation advances, that the Evangelists, 25instead of embodying a conception of their own minds, must have witnessed the life which they describe, never could have conceived it unless they had first witnessed it, and were able to represent it in the manner they have done, only because it had actually passed under their immediate and frequent observation.

The Gospels, then, contain the history of a life once actually spent on this earth. The writers relate on the whole what they saw and heard, and on the whole convey the impression which was left on their minds by a real, living being. It is enough. This lowest stand-point is enough. Take only the earthly life of Christ, suppose only that in a broad general sense it is faithfully represented—behold only the Man—He shall indicate and demonstrate union with absolute Godhead. Such a Humanity as his is utterly inexplicable, except on the ground of true Divinity.