Christ Among the Doctors

WHEN Holman Hunt painted The Light of the World, his clear intention was to make a symbolic picture. Every detail was designed to carry a spiritual meaning. Hoffmann’s Christ among the Doctors seems, in comparison, a piece of realism. The ideal figure of the eager Child is surrounded by rabbis attired with archæological accuracy, whose faces seem to reproduce the features of actual Semitic persons. But this picture is as symbolic as the other. It is a portrayal of contemporary intellectual attitudes.

The difference is plain between the treatment of the theme by Hoffmann and its treatment by any mediæval painter. A mediæval master would have made the Christ the centre of adoration. There would have been kneeling figures in the lower corners, and angels in the upper ones. Hoffmann’s men are both hearing Him and asking Him questions, but the questioners are in majority. The context, ‘And all that heard Him were astonished at his understanding and answers,’ enters but slightly into the picture. The doctors are for the most part independent persons, superior and critical. Some of them are kindly disposed and sympathetic, even reverent; but others are indifferent or hostile. There is little indication of discipleship. They are like the philosophers who listened to St. Paul at Athens, intellectually interested, but remote from any probability of conversion.

The picture might have been used for a frontispiece for Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus,¹ for this review of the endeavors to write a Life of Christ shows a series of questioning doctors most of whom are antagonistic. ‘There is no historical task,’ says Schweitzer, ‘which so reveals a man’s true self as the writing of a Life of Jesus. No vital force comes into the figure unless a man breathes into it all the hate and all the love of which he is capable. The stronger the love, or the stronger the hate, the more lifelike is the figure which is produced. For hate as well as love can write a Life of Jesus, and the greatest of them are written with hate.’

For many centuries after the apostolic age, neither of these impulses directed men to undertake this work. The Apostles’ Creed represented the emphasis of interest. Of the ministry of Christ, and of his teaching, the creed says nothing. And therein it reflects the whole New Testament, except the Gospels. When St. Paul said that he had no great desire to know Christ according to the flesh, he expressed the common feeling. His concern was in the death rather than in the life of Christ; in the death of Christ as related to the doctrine of the Atonement, and in the resurrection of Christ as an assurance of the life everlasting. He was interested in Christ doctrinally, not historically.

The same emphasis appears in the sermons of St. Peter in the Acts. There is hardly a reference either to the ministry or to the teaching of Jesus. No endeavor is made to continue his characteristic messages. Instead of trying to teach what He had taught, the whole effort is to set forth his personality. The emphasis is upon his person, not upon his instruction. Indeed, this interest is so strong and so exclusive that the wonder is, not that the Gospels tell us so little about his life, but that they tell us anything at all. The appearance of these historical Gospels in an age intent on doctrine is a remarkable phenomenon.

This feeling about the facts of the ministry of Jesus continued until recent times. The shrines of Italy and Germany represent to this day the general mind: in Italy, the shrines show the Madonna; in Germany, the crucifix. Inside the churches, the lives of the saints are depicted with much more detail than the life of Jesus. As for the construction of a coherent narrative, harmonizing the accounts given in the different Gospels, Luther said that the endeavor was not worth the effort. ‘The Gospels,’ he said, ’follow no order in recording the acts and miracles of Jesus, and the matter is not, after all, of much importance. If a difficulty arises in regard to the Holy Scripture, and we cannot solve it, we must just let it alone. ’ This is the method which Mr. Moody advised when he compared reading the Bible to eating fish. ‘Don’t try,’ he said, ‘to eat the bones; put them on the side of the plate.’

The study of the Gospels as historical documents with the purpose of finding the true order of events, and of interpreting the life of Christ in the light of contemporary literature and history, was begun only about a hundred years ago.

Indeed, as is pointed out by Montefiore, in the introduction to his commentaries on the Synoptic Gospels,² it was not safe, until very recent times, for one to set about the free study of the Gospels. Suppose that he were to come to conclusions counter to the customary beliefs; suppose that his studies were to contravene the conventional doctrine of the inspiration of the Scriptures: he would find himself in a position of considerable discomfort, if not of immediate peril. As for the central faith of all, the faith in the divinity of Christ, any hesitation at that point would have exposed him to the stake or to the sword; at the least and gentlest, to loss of place and opportunity, and to the disesteem of his neighbors. Thus Strauss said of his Life of Jesus, ‘ I might well bear a grudge against my book, for it has done me much evil.’

The result was that when the historical study of the life of Christ was actually undertaken, a century ago, the men who engaged in it did so in the spirit of revolt. They reacted from the universal and oppressive reign of dogma. Their purpose was controversial. They were interested in the Gospels, not for the sake of their own souls, but in the hope that by means of the Gospels they might be able to disprove the creeds. They brought forward the Christ of history that He might dispossess the Christ of dogma. ‘They were eager to picture Him as truly and purely human, to strip from Him the robes of splendor with which He had been appareled, and clothe Him once more with the coarse garments in which He had walked in Galilee.’

The effort of the new biographers to commend their work to their own consciences was pleasantly satirized by Semler in his reply to Lessing. Lessing had begun the whole movement by his publication of papers found among the manuscripts of Reimarus. Disregarding the advice of his friends, and ‘inwardly trembling for that which he himself held sacred, he flung the torch with his own hand.’ Semler said that he was like the man who was arrested on the charge of burning down a house. There was no denial of the cardinal fact. He admitted that he had gone into the house and put a bundle of hay over a burning candle. But he defended himself stoutly. ‘Yesterday,’ he said, ‘ about four o’clock, I went into my neighbor’s store-room, and saw there a burning candle which the servants had carelessly forgotten. In the course of the night, it would have burned down, and set fire to the stairs. To make sure that the fire should break out in the daytime, I threw some straw upon it. The flames burst out at the sky-light, the fire-engines came hurrying up, and the fire, which in the night might have been dangerous, was promptly put out.’ ‘But why,’ asked the judge, ‘did you not pick up the candle yourself, and put it out?’ ‘Because, your honor, had I put the candle out, the servants would not have learned to be more careful!’ The judge committed the defendant to an asylum for persons of disordered mind, and this seemed to Semler a proper disposal of Lessing and all the others who were trying to preserve the Gospels by destroying them.

Anyhow, the fire was kindled, and the straw at least was burning briskly; it remained to be seen whether the fire companies could save the house, or not.

In the opinion of Reimarus, the story of Jesus was founded upon a deliberate imposture on the part of the disciples. Jesus, indeed, really lived, and the Gospels are right in the main features of their account of Him; for the records show a career of failure, ending on the cross. But the apostles invented the resurrection, and all the supernatural elements of the narrative came with it. Strauss found the basis of the Gospels, not in imposture, but in myth. He attributed the supernatural events to what he gently called ‘ creative reminiscence.’ For example, the transfiguration which Paulus had explained as the impression made on the half-awake disciples by the sight of the Master coming down the hill in the first brightness of the rising sun, was ascribed by Strauss to a bringing over of the old story of the shining face of Moses. Bauer’s theory was that of literary invention: some imaginative person wrote a Life of Jesus, and the evangelists copied it.

The honest purpose of these students of the Gospels was to cut away the ground beneath the feet of dogma. Their motive was frank hostility to the current faith in the supernatural. They were followed by a considerable company of ingenious writers who were impelled not so much by hostility as by the interest of novelty. The earlier critics, after some experiences of martyrdom, had demonstrated the fact that the time had come when one might say whatever one pleased, even in contradiction of the central positions of orthodoxy, and suffer no great harm. And this gave access to a new field. It disclosed a new liberty. It was like opening to occupation a new territory, and settlers swarmed in by hundreds, some for purposes of settlement, some for purposes of speculation.

Many clever students were desirous to contribute to a better knowledge of the Bible, and had, at the beginning, no other intention. But a contribution consists of that which we did not possess before. The aim of the ambitious student was to make discoveries, to propose a theory which nobody had thought of, to tell us something positively new. This process materially depreciates the old. Between two possible interpretations, one of them supported by councils and commentaries, and the other appearing at that moment at the open door of the student’s mind, the novel interpretation was given the ‘ glad hand ’ of hospitality. The privilege of difference had been so long denied, that men now made the most of it. Propositions had been prized in proportion to their age. So they were still, but the advantage now was on the side of youth. It was perceived that it was no longer possible to make an interesting book by quoting from the fathers. Then Bahrdt and Venturi suggested that the true hero of the gospel story was Nicodemus, the head of a secret order of Essenes who made Jesus their instrument. And Noach proposed the theory that the Fourth Gospel was written by the beloved disciple — Judas!

It can hardly be said that this destructive work went on under the protection of any policy of toleration. The conservatives would gladly have silenced these defiant persons, by the old methods. But the times had changed. It was possible to fling the stones of controversy, but the use of actual paving material was discredited. Somehow, by common consent, the final argument of Saul in his debate with Stephen was no longer held to be a fair resort. It therefore became possible at last to test the effect of free speech by experience. The main value to-day of the long series of lives of Christ is in the opportunity thus afforded to see how so perilous a liberty really works.

It must be confessed that at the beginning it seemed like the opening of the bags of contrary winds by the sailors of Ulysses. There was an immediate storm. Under the impulse of hostility and of novelty, men attacked everything in sight. The conclusions of the past became points of departure. Finding themselves free to disagree with the Bible, the critics disagreed jubilantly. They had a certain joy in contradicting the prophets and apostles. As for the fathers and the councils, what they believed was discredited by the fact that they believed it. If they ascribed the Gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the presumption was that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John had nothing whatever to do with them. Conservative people were grievously alarmed. Even the stoutest maintainers of the doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture felt that there was something amiss in the proposal to give the tares a chance. They could not believe that it was good gardening.

But gradually the situation changed. It appeared that the early freedom was for the sake of freedom. It was like the irresponsible independence of youth. It was the audacity of adolescence. It seemed menacing enough, at the moment, and was distressingly destructive, but it had its place in those patient processes according to whose wise providence destruction is one of the natural exercises of new strength. All proper children are destructive. That is their way of finding out what things are made of. But they get over it. It is not well to take their inconvenient activities too seriously. The critics, too, get over it.

At first, in the season of revolt, they only were accounted ‘liberal’ whose minds were open to the new ideas. It was presently perceived, however, that genuine liberalism is an attitude, not toward novelty, but toward truth. He alone is liberal who welcomes truth under all conditions, and is as ready to recognize it in the formularies of the past as in the theories of the present. And he is the best ‘conservative’ who is so sure of the truth that he is not nervous about it. He watches the critic digging at the Bible, as he watches the geologist digging at the hill. He has no fear that either of these monuments will fall down.

The critics dug away with great fierceness, and reinforced their picks and spades with occasional charges of dynamite, and for a good while the conservatives stood by, holding their breath. But, after all, nothing happened. And at last it became pretty plain that nothing was likely to happen.

Of course, there were times when the violence of the explosions seemed to signify tremendous destruction. Before the smoke had cleared away, men felt that the very foundations of the faith had been blown up. But, on examination, there they were as ever. The critics who had contracted to remove the mountain made enthusiastic reports of progress. Now they had taken away the Gospel of St. John, now they had reduced the other three to two chief sources, an account mainly of the life of Christ in Mark, and an account mainly of the teachings of Christ in Matthew; now Schmiedel had cleared everything away except nine texts, the ‘foundation-pillars,’ as he said, ‘of a really scientific Life of Jesus,’ authenticated by the fact that they ‘could not have been invented.’ But readers of these reports who went out expecting to find in the place of the everlasting hill only these nine flat stones, discovered to their surprise that no serious alterations had taken place in the landscape.

Thus, after all the activities of hostile criticism, Dr. Hastings issues his Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels,³ Dr. Fairbairn publishes his Studies in Religion and Theology,⁴ and the fellows and scholars of the Hartford Seminary complete their translation of Zahn’s Introduction to the New Testament.⁵ The writers are men the competency of whose scholarship is unquestioned. They are fully acquainted with all the operations of destructive criticism. They are honest men, who may not be suspected of thinking one thing and saying another. And their minds are undisturbed. They perceive, indeed, that there are difficulties which were not so evident before. Some of them they solve, some they do not solve. It appears, even in these conservative pages, that the critics have demolished the old doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture. But that was only a wooden fence which cautious persons had built around the hill. The hill itself remains, from whose heights, as of old, men see God.

That is, after a hundred years of free criticism, much of it hostile, the changes in the old positions are mostly in detail. It has been proved by long experience that even the life of Christ may be subjected to rigorous analysis, not only with impunity, but with profit. The critics disclosed new aspects of the work of Christ. Moreover, as the early antagonists lost their bitterness, and criticism ceased to be a partisan contention with orthodoxy, the critics reëxamined the conservative and traditional positions with a new respect. Gradually, the dates given to the Gospels were set further back. Harnack’s return to the Lukan theory of the authorship of the Third Gospel is significant and representative.

Thus the progress of criticism vindicates the free study of religion. The students of the Gospels grow continually more patient, more appreciative, more conservative, and more religious. They are less inclined to dogmatic negation. In fact, almost everything has now been said which even the most radical or the most hostile critic can find it in his heart to say. How much better to have it frankly said! How much wiser the policy of free speech than the policy of prudent repression! For the conservation which grows in the field of freedom strikes its roots deep into the soil, and is a part of the abiding nature of things. The conservation which is maintained by authority is a tender plant, which needs constant and anxious care, and even then may perish in a night. Free conservatism is a slow growth, but it is worth the expenditure of any amount of pain and patience.

When Johannes Weiss, in 1892, published his work on The Preaching of Jesus concerning the Kingdom of God, his readers were amazed to find that it was all contained in seventy-six pages. They were at first disposed to doubt the value of so brief a writing. Whoever, they argued, has a message of importance, will intrust it to the hands of a grown man. The small book seemed informal and undignified, like a small boy. But Weiss’s brevity was highly significant. It meant that criticism was passing from the study of the documents to the study of the essential mission of Jesus.

Schweitzer specifies three alternatives in this discussion. There is, first, the debate between those who hold that the central Person of the Gospels was purely historical, and those who hold that He was purely supernatural. This discussion is fairly represented by the papers reprinted from the Hibbert Journal under the title “ Jesus or Christ?” ⁶ One phase of it appears in such books as Meyer’s Jesus or Paul,⁷ and Weiss’s Paul and Jesus.⁸ The second alternative is the choice between the first three Gospels and the fourth as the ultimate source of knowledge concerning the meaning and mission of Jesus. This is represented by Scott’s Historical and Religious Value of the Fourth Gospel,⁹ and Bacon’s Fourth Gospel in Research and Debate.¹⁰ The third question is as to the definition of the Kingdom of God. Did Jesus proclaim a Kingdom to be realized gradually by increasing obedience to the will of God, or to be realized suddenly by the appearance of the Son of Man, and the ending of all terrestrial things?

It is contended by some German theologians that between these alternatives one must be taken and the others left. But this is not acceptable to most thoughtful persons in this country or in England. The Germans, who make fun of a ‘qualifying-clause’ theology, and deride such saving phrases as ‘yes, but,’ and ‘on the other hand,’ and ‘notwithstanding,’ do not commend their thorough-going assertions to our minds. Such positiveness seems to us an academic fallacy, made possible by residing altogether in a library and a lecture-room, without much acquaintance with the larger course of human life. We like better the saying of Frederick Robertson that truth is to be found not by choosing one extreme to the denial of the other, still less by a compromise whereby neither extreme shall retain its original meaning, but by a holding of the two extremes together. Why must the Person of Christ be either historical or supernatural? Why not historical and supernatural at the same time? Why, if we take the first three Gospels, must we reject the fourth? Why must the two theories of the mission of Christ be mutually exclusive?

As a matter of fact, the great debates go on because both sides are right. Each contributes to the fuller knowledge of the truth. The formula ‘ either —or ’ is for lawyers, whose business is to leave the other side out of account, not for scholars who desire the truth. We approach to-day a better understanding and a better theology by its formula ‘yes, but’: ‘yes’ being an acceptance of the truth which is newly brought to our attention by those who differ from us; and ‘but’ being a maintenance still of our own previous truth which the new truth does but enrich and illuminate. The fathers at Nicæa very likely knew their own business better than we do, but they appear to have acted as politicians rather than as statesmen when they deliberately searched for a creedword which Arius could not possibly accept. What we need for our better unity in faith and order is a comprehensive statement which shall have room for varying emphases and temperaments, and differences of opinion. The note is set by the doctrine of the Incarnation, that Jesus Christ is at the same time God and Man.

The heart of the whole matter is a certain spiritual attitude. The Gospels were not composed by individual authors, but by companies of Christian believers. They represent the impression which Jesus made upon his disciples. There is a social element in them which of necessity produces differences, because differences existed in the human nature of the believers. They reported what they saw and heard, some more, some less. The accounts of the discourses of Christ in the Fourth Gospel differ much from the accounts in the First and Third, but the difference is scarcely greater than that which appears between the preaching of St. Paul as it is reported in the Acts and as it is given in his own words in the Epistles. Such variations do not present serious difficulties to persons who are living under the social conditions out of which the Gospels proceeded. The books are alive, and the mystery which pervades them is the elusive and indefinable mystery of life. The trouble with many of the German scholars is that they live in closets. They are professional persons who do not come into close contact with people. They were first pupils and then teachers, without the instructive intervention of any parochial experience. They have preached no sermons, and ministered to no souls. Thus they come to the study of these documents, and of Him concerning whom the documents were written, somewhat as Sir Christopher Wren might have undertaken a commentary on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Wren was an architect and thought in terms of length and height ; Shakespeare thought in terms of passion and emotion.

The most reassuring recent book for those who are perplexed between the alternatives of criticism is Dr. Denney’s Jesus and the Gospel.¹¹ He undertakes to answer two vital questions: ‘Has Christianity existed from the beginning only in the form of a faith which has Jesus as its object, and not at all in the form of a faith which has had Jesus simply as its living pattern?’ and ‘Can Christianity, as even the New Testament exhibits it, justify itself by appeal to Christ?’ Thus he encounters two ideas which are present, more or less consciously, in many minds: the idea that the early disciples in their enthusiasm for a noble teacher exalted their admiration into adoration; and the idea that such adoration is remote from Christ’s own conception of Himself. These are at the centre of negative criticism. The critic who arrays the Christ of History against the Christ of Dogma honestly believes that a Galilean saint, against his own will and in disregard of his own teachings, was lifted by his disciples into the clouds. Dr. Denney finds no basis for this supposition, either in history or in psychology.

At the same time, he insists upon the difference between faith and doctrine, between a certain spiritual relation to Christ and the expression of it in the changing phrases of contemporary thought. He would substitute for all clerical subscriptions the form which was used by the assembly which made the Westminster Confession: — ‘I will maintain nothing in point of doctrine but what I believe to be most agreeable to the word of God: nor in point of discipline but what may make most for God’s glory, and the peace and good of this Church.’ And for all creeds, this comprehensive statement: ‘I believe in God through Jesus Christ His only son, our Lord and Saviour.’ For creeds and subscriptions are intended mainly for defense, and to put an end to the assaults of debate. But the best approach to truth and peace and unity is to follow Wesley’s maxim: ‘Think and let think.’ It seems a fair conclusion from the actual results of the free criticism of the life of Christ.