Christ in art/Preface
PREFACE.
REAT pains have been taken in the construction of this work, to give the narrative the
roundness, unity, and fluency that are so essential to the interest and picturesqueness of
the story, and to a conception of the life of
the Lord Jesus in its oneness and consecutiveness. Without doubt the best way to
study Christ is to read each of the Gospels in its unity. Supplementary to this the
scholar is able to construct for himself, by
a laborious study of learned works and a
diligent comparison of the several Gospels,
a conception of the life of Christ as a
whole. It is to assist the general reader in
forming such a conception that the present
consolidation is made.
It is now two hundred and twenty years since the learned Dr. Lightfoot published his celebrated harmony of the four Gospels; and very many others have labored in this Held during these two centuries. But the plan and purpose of the present work differs in some regards from all that have gone before. For this is not a harmony, properly so called. No endeavor has been made to reconcile apparent discrepancies. Where there were variations in the minor details of an incident as given in the Gospels, I have followed that which was the fullest and the most vivid. I might have gone further in piecing together the narratives, but this sort of patchwork has been often made at the expense of fluency and interest in the history. To have woven into the narrative all the varying phrases of the four historians, even at the expense of clearness and grammatical construction, would have been to sacrifice to a masoretic veneration for the letter of the sacred text the interest and usefulness of the work. All marginal readings, and all references to the several Gospels, and all marks of chapters and verses in the Gospels, have been carefully omitted, that the attention of the reader might never be diverted from the narrative itself, and that the picture of Christ s life might be presented with that unbroken continuity to which we are accustomed in reading modern books. The preface to Luke, as pertaining to but one Gospel, and the two genealogies, have been omitted; since, however valuable they may be in their places, they would not help, but rather hinder, the purpose of this compilation. The present arrangement, therefore, is in the exact words of the authorized version of the Gospels; there is nothing added, nothing changed. But it makes no pretension to include every word of all the Gospels. It is better to be useful than ingenious.
The order of time is chiefly that marked out by Dr. Ellicott in his Hulsean Lectures. In minor arrangements and adaptations of the text much assistance has been derived from an anonymous Diatesseron published in Oxford in 1837.
I am fully aware that the principal attraction of the book is not the part which fell to my share, but the illustrations after Alexandre Bida's magnificent designs. The artist s pencil has hardly ever told THE STORY so effectively. To these the publishers have added a series of exegetical illustrations that serve exceedingly well to explain those portions of the narrative which refer to Oriental customs.
I sincerely hope that these pages may contribute something to a better comprehension of the life of the Son of Man, who "came not into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved."
November, 1874.