Page:EB1911 - Volume 15.djvu/380

 somewhat different forms. There is the same use of parables from nature, the same incisiveness of speech and employment of paradox, the same demand to sacrifice all to Him and for His cause, the same importunate claim made by Him on the human soul.

But the contrast between the two writers is even more important for our purpose. No one can read through the passages to which we have pointed without feeling the solemn sternness of the great Teacher, a sternness which can indeed be traced here and there in St Mark, but which

does not give its tone to the whole of his picture. Here we see Christ standing forth in solitary grandeur, looking with the eyes of another world on a society which is blindly hastening to its dissolution. It may be that if this document had come down to us in its entirety, we should have gathered from it an exaggerated idea of the severity of our Lord’s character. Certain it is that as we read over these fragments we are somewhat startled by the predominance of the element of warning, and by the assertion of rules of conduct which seem almost inconsistent with a normal condition of settled social life. The warning to the nation sounded by the Baptist, that God could raise up a new family for Abraham, is heard again and again in our Lord’s teaching. Gentile faith puts Israel to shame. The sons of the kingdom will be left outside, while strangers feast with Abraham. Capernaum shall go to perdition; Jerusalem shall be a desolate ruin. The doom of the nation is pronounced; its fate is imminent; there is no ray of hope for the existing constitution of religion and society. As to individuals within the nation, the despised publicans and sinners will find God’s favour before the self-satisfied representatives of the national religion. In such a condition of affairs it is hardly surprising to find that the great and stern Teacher congratulates the poor and has nothing but pity for the rich; that He has no interest at all in comfort or property. If a man asks you for anything, give it him; if he takes it without asking, do not seek to recover it. Nothing material is worth a thought; anxiety is folly; your Father, who feeds His birds and clothes His flowers, will feed and clothe you. Rise to the height of your sonship to God; love your enemies even as God loves His; and if they kill you, God will care for you still; fear them not, fear only Him who loves you all.

Here is a new philosophy of life, offering solid consolation amid the ruin of a world. We have no idea who the disciple may have been who thus seized upon the sadder elements of the teaching of Jesus; but we may well think of him as one of those who were living in Palestine in the dark and threatening years of internecine strife, when the Roman eagles were gathering round their prey, and the first thunder was muttering of the storm which was to leave Jerusalem a heap of stones. At such a moment the warnings of our Lord would claim a large place in a record of His teaching, and the strange comfort which He had offered would be the only hope which it would seem possible to entertain.

4. Additions by the Gospel according to St Matthew.—We have now examined in turn the two earliest pictures which have been preserved to us of the life of Jesus Christ. The first portrays Him chiefly by a record of His actions, and illustrates His strength, His sympathy, and His

freedom from conventional restraints. It shows the disturbing forces of these characteristics, which aroused the envy and apprehension of the leaders of religion. The first bright days of welcome and popularity are soon clouded: the storm begins to lower. More and more the Master devotes Himself to the little circle of His disciples, who are taught that they, as well as He, can only triumph through defeat, succeed by failure, and find their life in giving it away. At length, in fear of religious innovations and pretending that He is a political usurper, the Jews deliver Him up to die on a Roman cross. The last page of the story is torn away, just at the point when it has been declared that He is alive again and about to show Himself to His disciples. The second picture has a somewhat different tone. It is mainly a record of teaching, and the teaching is for the most part stern and paradoxical. It might be described as revolutionary. It is

good tidings to the poor: it sets no store on property and material comfort: it pities the wealthy and congratulates the needy. It reverses ordinary judgments and conventional maxims of conduct. It proclaims the downfall of institutions, and compares the present blind security to the days of Noah and of Lot: a few only shall escape the coming overthrow. Yet even in this sterner setting the figure portrayed is unmistakably the same. There is the same strength, the same tender sympathy, the same freedom from convention: there is the same promise to fulfil the highest hopes, the same surrender of life, and the same imperious demand on the lives of others. No thoughtful man who examines and compares these pictures can doubt that they are genuine historical portraits of a figure wholly different from any which had hitherto appeared on the world’s stage. They are beyond the power of human invention. They are drawn with a simplicity which is their own guarantee. If we had these, and these only, we should have an adequate explanation of the beginnings of Christianity. There would still be a great gap to be filled before we reached the earliest letters of St Paul; but yet we should know what the Apostle meant when he wrote to “the Church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ,” and reminded them how they had “turned from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for His Son from heaven, whom He raised from the dead, even Jesus who delivereth us from the wrath to come.”

If these two narratives served the first needs of Christian believers, it is easy to see that they would presently stimulate further activity in the same direction. For, to begin with, they were obviously incomplete: many incidents and teachings known to the earliest disciples found no place in them; and they contained no account of the life of Jesus Christ before His public ministry, no record of His pedigree, His birth or His childhood. Secondly, their form left much to be desired; for one of them at least was rude in style, sometimes needlessly repetitive and sometimes brief to obscurity. Moreover the very fact that there were two challenged a new and combined work which perhaps should supersede both.

Accordingly, some years after the fall of Jerusalem—we cannot tell the exact date or the author’s name—the book which we call the Gospel according to St Matthew was written to give the Palestinian Christians a full account of Jesus Christ, which should present

Him as the promised Messiah, fulfilling the ancient Hebrew prophecies, proclaiming the kingdom of heaven, and founding the Christian society. The writer takes St Mark as his basis, but he incorporates into the story large portions of the teaching which he has found in the other document. He groups his materials with small regard to chronological order; and he fashions out of the many scattered sayings of our Lord continuous discourses, everywhere bringing like to like, with considerable literary art. A wide knowledge of the Old Testament supplies him with a text to illustrate one incident after another; and so deeply is he impressed with the correspondence between the life of Christ and the words of ancient prophecy, that he does not hesitate to introduce his quotations by the formula “that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet.”

His Hebrew instinct leads him to begin with a table of genealogy, artificially constructed in groups of fourteen generations—from Abraham to David, from David to the Captivity, and from the Captivity to the Christ. The royal descent of the Messiah is thus declared, and from the outset His figure is set against the background of the Old Testament. He then proceeds to show that, though His lineage is traced through Joseph’s ancestors, He was but the adopted son of Joseph, and he tells the story of the Virgin-birth. The coming of the Child draws Eastern sages to his cradle and fills the court of Herod with suspicious fears. The cruel tyrant kills the babes of Bethlehem, but the Child has been withdrawn by a secret flight into Egypt, whence he presently returns to the family home at Nazareth in Galilee. All this is necessarily fresh material, for the other records had dealt only with the period of public ministry. We have no knowledge of the source from which it was drawn. From the historical standpoint