doubt, a few clear outlines have been well made out, which we may hope will not be blurred by any future investigation. These outlines are, however, as different as possible from those of the popular Christian exposition. The gist of this exposition is that the Messianic hope originated in the time of Abraham, was cherished by Moses, attained its most complete development in the age of the prophets, from 800 to 400 B.C., and then retired into comparative obscurity for centuries, to await its consummation and fulfilment in the birth and life and death of Jesus Christ, Jesus the Christ, that is to say, the Anointed, the Messiah. Such is the popular Christian exposition, and the commentary which an intelligent and scientific criticism makes upon it is this: The Messianic hope displayed itself most characteristically and powerfully, not from 800 to 400 B.C., but from 175 B.C. to 135 A.D., and that from the birth of Jesus onward to the final extinction of the Jewish nation by the Emperor Hadrian was the period of its most remarkable growth. This criticism assures us that the Messianic element in the prophetic writings is entirely subordinate; that much that is accounted Messianic is the reflection back upon the prophets of the Messianic ideas of a later time." "The Jewish hope of a Messiah became in the Christian the hope of Jesus' second coming 'in the clouds of heaven with great power and glory.' The forms taken upon itself through all this. period by the Messianic hope were exceedingly diverse. The factor of a personal Messiah was frequently wanting altogether. But in one form or another it was omnipresent and omnipotent. From the death of Herod, 4 B.C., to the death of Bar-Cochba, 132 A.D., no less that fifty different enthusiasts set up as the Messiah, and obtained more or less following. No one of these attained to general recognition before Bar-Cochba, under whose leadership the hope was quenched in seas of blood. Some saw the Messiah even in Herod the Great! This was the lowest point reached by the Messianic ideal."

18.-Jesus the Messiah.

That Jesus should come at length to think of himself as the Messiah was not so strange as the simultaneous conclusion that he must be a suffering Messiah; for, the Messianic idea was so omnipresent to the Jewish mind that, for a man conscious of a great mission not to connect his mission in some way with that

idea, was quite impossible. It was the grandeur of his spiritual ideal that compelled Jesus to identify his mission with the Messianic office. He remained the herald of the kingdom so long as he could consistently do so. The Messiah must be the incarnation of the highest possible ideal. To himself Jesus was this. This wonderful self-confidence on the part of Jesus did not necessitate self-righteousness, only an absolute devotion to the moral welfare of mankind,-only an absolute conviction that righteousness and love were fundamental facts in the new order. It was as representative of these that he demanded personal allegiance."

"The first thing we have to do, then, is to take the record of the facts, if we can, absolutely without the warp of any preconceived opinion, or any theological dogmatism. Looking at them so, it appears plain that what we call the Messianic consciousness of Jesus, which is so intense and even predominant towards the close of his ministry, was a comparatively late development in him. To put it in theological phrase, his generation as son of God was anterior to his appointment as Messiah of the Jews. In the language we usually apply to human experience, his vocation as a moral and spiritual teacher was recognized first; and only as an after-result came his strong conviction that he was the chosen deliverer of his people, though by a way they could not

understand or follow."

19.-The Gospel according to the Hebrews.

"Time was when our New Testament Matthew was thought to be a translation of the Gospel according to the Hebrews. But one of the fixed facts of modern criticism is that our Matthew is not a translation. And still its relation to the Gospel according to the Hebrews is one of the most interesting questions of New Testament criticism. The agreements of the two are many, and where they disagree the uncanonical work sometimes preserves the more reliable tradition. The Gospel of the Hebrews seems to have existed in various forms, in this respect being in no wise different perhaps from the New Testament gospels. Whether its earliest form was the germ of our own Matthew, or the two branched from a common stock, is a dilemma which impales on either horn an equal number of New Testament scholars. This much, however, is tolerably certain: that through

out the second century the Gospel according to the Hebrews enjoyed a reputation not inferior to that of our New Testament gospels. The decline of its reputation synchronized with the decay of Jewish Christianity."

"It is even possible that Matthew arrived at a written form before the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. It contains sentences that could not have originated after that event, and the crudity of the method of aggregation is evinced by the fact that these sentences are allowed to stand and bear the contradiction of events. The result at which we finally arrive, therefore, is this: That from thirty to forty years after the death of Jesus the tradition of his life and ministry and death had shaped itself into the basis of our present Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The contents of this fundamental tradition (fundamental to our Gospels, but in its turn, no doubt, the result of various accretions)—the contents of this tradition are as flattering to the anti-supernaturalist as he could reasonably expect. Accounts of miracles are here, even some of the most startling; but there is not a hint of the miraculous birth of Jesus, nor of the legends of his infancy, and the tradition ends with the discovery that his tomb is empty, without a word to signalize that he was seen again by any woman or disciple. In this tradition the personality of Jesus is revealed in lines so firm and strong that the accretions of a later time add little to their force. The man behind the myth is there, no thin abstraction, but an individual with blood in his veins, and in his heart the love of human kind."

20.- The New Testament Miracles.

"The strangest thing of all in this connection is that the Fourth Gospel, cherishing a conception of Jesus as the pre-existent Logos, nevertheless does not avail itself of the miraculous birth, but plainly intimates that Jesus was the son of Joseph in the line of human generation."

"There is, indeed, much better evidence for the miracles recorded by St. Augustine than for any recorded in the New Testament. We come much nearer the events, and we know something of the narrators, where in the New Testament we know nothing. Never was there a place and time where and when stories of prodigy and miracle were more likely to be fashioned

without any basis of reality, and to obtain credence without any evidence, than in the years immediately succeeding the lifetime. of Jesus. Considering the place and time, the wonder is that the miraculous element in the New Testament is not much more obtrusive than it is, much more extravagant."

"There was no conflict here with modern science. For diseases of the imagination, to this day the most effective remedies are psychological. Much more must it have been so in the time of Jesus, when all concerned were alike under the dominion of an appalling superstition, the belief in demoniacal possession. But given a few cures of the so-called demoniacs by Jesus, also the spiritual soil and atmosphere of Palestine, and these cures would bring forth in a dozen or twenty years a crop of miraclestories so extensive that not one quarter of its bulk could be husbanded within the limits of the New Testament. And a few cures of this sort, or temporary alleviations, are, I am persuaded, the bottom facts which underlie the entire structure of the miraculous in the New Testament, and in Christian history."

sure.

21.-Our Synoptic Gospels.

"Of the three Gospels that still remain to us the relative values are still in some dispute. That we are certain of the authorship of any one of them only a very ignorant or exceedingly dogmatic person would be likely to declare. Nor of the time when they assumed their present shapes can we be more than proximately We are for the first time definitely aware of their existence as Matthew's, Mark's, and Luke's, from 170 to 180 A.D. Nor are we aware of their existence in any shape or under any name at a much earlier period. Writing in the middle of the second century, Justin Martyr quotes from certain "Memoirs of the Apostles," as he calls them, so freely that a consistent biography of Jesus might be collected from his quotations. But he never names the authors of these memoirs. His quotations from them often disagree with our Gospels, and seldom agree with them; and if our Gospels (the Synoptics) were used by him, they were used in conjunction with others which were apparently as highly, if not more highly, esteemed. If we had only external evidence to rely upon, it would be quite impossible to predicate the existence of our Synoptic Gospels earlier than the middle of the second century."

22.-The Fourth Gospel.

"The idea of the Logos or Word came into Jewish thought from two sides, from Persia and from Greece; from Persia by way of Babylon, from Greece by way of Alexandria. The Persian-Zoroastrian religion taught that God created all things by his word. The cosmology in Genesis is of Persian origin. 'God said let there be light, and there was light.' His word is the creative power. Before the time of Jesus this Word of God had become personified in Jewish thought, most frequently under the name of Wisdom. Wisdom hath been created before all things,' we read in the Book of Proverbs; 'Wisdom has been created before all things,' in Ecclesiasticus; and in the Wisdom of Solomon, 'She is a reflection of the everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the power of God, and the image of his goodness.' The Greek influence contributed to the same tendency of thought. The later followers of Plato, the Neo-Platonists, had personified his doctrine of the divine idea or reason. They called it the first born Son of God, born before the creation of the world, itself the agent of creation. It was the image of God's perfection, the mediator between God and man. Philo Judæus, who was born about twenty years before Jesus, was possessed with these ideas and endeavored to connect them with the Old Testament teachings."

"Thus it was that the writer of the Fourth Gospel found this doctrine of the Logos; and on the other hand he found a conception of Jesus expressed in terms the most exalted, and bearing a very strong resemblance to the terms of the Logos doctrine of Philo. True, Philo had never dreamed of a human incarnation of the Logos, and Paul had never identified his exalted Christ with the Alexandrian Word. The first to do this was pretty certainly not the writer of the Fourth Gospel. It occurred to many writers at about the same time. To effect an alliance between Christianity and Alexandrian Platonism was the one passionate enthusiasm midway of the second century. Of this enthusiasm the Fourth Gospel is the grandest monument. The Fourth Gospel is not less valuable on this account. Only its value henceforth is that of a contribution to our knowledge of second-century ideas. Every true word that it contains is just as true as ever. Every beautiful thought is just as beautiful now as before."