Page:Jesus and the Gospel.djvu/33

Rh not to believe that this Christology of the speeches of Peter must have come from a primitive source.' Perhaps what it is most important to notice is that from the very beginning there really is a Christology. The question which Jesus put to His disciples while He was with them, Whom say ye that I am? was one which they could not help putting to themselves. If we hold that the Son, properly speaking, has no place in the gospel, but only the Father, then the question is a misleading one; it sets the mind off spiritually on a wrong track. This seems, in spite of ambiguities, to be the conviction of scholars like Harnack, who thinks that Christology is a mistake, and would lighten the distressed ship of the gospel by throwing it overboard. He goes so far as to censure the primitive Church for turning aside from its proper duty — teaching men to observe all things that Jesus had commanded — to the apologetic task of proving that Jesus was the Christ. Our present question, we repeat, is not whether Peter and the other early preachers fulfilled their calling well or ill, but what it was that they actually did, and of this there can be no doubt. Their own relation to Jesus, as we see it in Acts, depends finally upon His Resurrection and His gift of the Spirit; and though these may be said in a sense to transcend history, they do not lie beyond experience. Peter had seen the Risen Jesus and received the Holy Spirit: in virtue of these experiences, Jesus had a place in his life and his faith which belonged to Him alone. He was both Lord and Christ, and there was nothing in the religious world of the apostle that was not henceforth determined by Him. It is this religious significance of Jesus, rather than the Christology of Peter, in the strict sense of the term, which it is our purpose to exhibit.

The apostle starts in his preaching from the historical