will be given them at the moment what they shall say; it is not they but God who speaks, only through them.
Yet spite of these obvious defects in his scheme of doctrine, which ought not to astonish us or to be denied, there is such a deep, fresh, manly piety in his teachings, such love for man under all circumstances, poor, oppressed, despised, and sinful, as we find nowhere else in the whole compass of antiquity. God is a Father even to the Prodigal, goes out after him, falls on his neck with welcoming delight that the lost is found, and the dead come back alive once more. Men are to be brothers, each neighbour to all mankind: the greatest is to serve the least; even enemies must be forgiven seventy times seven, and prayed for spite of their active cursing. According to one biographer, on the cross he prayed “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
But this synoptical doctrine alone was felt to be inadequate to the wants of Man; so many other gospels were written, which were variously received and found acceptance with the great writers of the Christian Church till the third and fourth century.[1] The fourth canonical Gospel contains much which is fair and good but utterly foreign to the other three; yet while free from Jewish limitation other new restrictions are therein put on the free development of Religion: men must believe that Jesus is the Messiah and the Logos. No doubt the teaching of Jesus in the Synoptics was thought too external and exclusively practical by some, and the fourth Gospel, with divers others, was written to supply a conscious want. The Epistles of Paul betray the same thing.
To sum up the main points of the matter more briefly;
in an age of gross wickedness, among a people arrogant,
and proud of their descent from Abraham—a mythological
character of some excellence; wedded to the ritual Law,
which they professed to have received, by miracle from
God, through Moses—another and greater mythological
hero—in a nation of Monotheists, haughty yet cunning,
- ↑ See how they were used by Tatian, whose Diatessaron was a Diapente, Justin Martyr, Ignatius, the Clements of Rome and Alexandria, Origen, &c. The lost work of Papias would doubtless settle many curious questions. See Credner's Beiträge, and Ewald in his Jahrbücher, B. V. p. 62, et seq.
