The Interpretation.—The phenomena which we have been collecting and classifying taken together constitute the fact of Jesus, the fact whose impact on certain of His contemporaries is necessary to account for the emergence of the Christian Fellow ship or Church. We have now to recall the successive attempts to interpret this fact, to place it rightly in its context of human history and Divine purpose. Jesus Himself invited reflection on this problem : "Whom say men that I am?" And the Synoptic Gospels record the earliest stages of the solution. The people whose knowledge of Him was comparatively superficial said that He was a prophet, or "one of the prophets" specifying certain names. And Jesus accepted the description. Those whom He had chosen to be "with Him" recognized in Him "the Messiah," em ploying, as we have seen, the highest category which could be applied to a human being, yet one which fell short of exhaustively describing the totality of the impressions He had made upon them. When in these Gospels we find Him also referred to as "the Son of David" or "the Son of God," nothing is really added to the description of Him as Messiah, as even the second of these phrases is drawn from the traditional description of the ideal king. It seems probable that He accepted the designation "the Messiah" even as they conferred it, with a sense, much deeper than theirs, that it was the best available, and that it was a true conception only in so far as its contents were such as He put into it.
But neither "prophet" nor "Messiah" gave a complete account of what the disciples had felt and found in Jesus. In particular, the ideas connected with the Suffering Servant and with Sonship were still waiting to be subsumed under some larger, loftier con ception. Not till after the Crucifixion and the Resurrection were even all the materials ready for a complete and final interpretation of Jesus; and even then we see the primitive Church fumbling after such an interpretation. He was "a Prince and a Saviour," "Lord and Christ." But even here the title Lord is at the stage of transition from its use as an address of courtesy in the Gospels to its use in the fullest religious sense by Paul. Nevertheless, "the language of words always lags behind the inner secret of Chris tianity," and we see in the Acts evidence of that "surrender of soul which precedes the articulate utterance of the creeds." Men and women "believed on" Jesus even before they were prepared to give dogmatic expression to their faith : they looked up to Him as in Heaven, "at the right hand of God"; they offered prayer to Him, and worship, which probably means that they reverently sought to realize His fellowship in the breaking of bread ; they were inexpressibly grateful to Him because, as they believed, He had died "for their sins." Yet, in the matter of dogmatic interpre tation there is no evidence that they got beyond Peter's "God was with him." It was left to Paul setting all he knew (and it was not little) of the life and teaching, the character and personality, of Jesus, in the light of Christian experience, to draw the next of the widening circles, and include much that the previous inter pretation had omitted. He proclaimed that at and through the Resurrection Jesus had been publicly instated as Son of God with power; and if the phrase has not wholly lost its official Messianic connotation, it certainly includes a reference to the personal Sonship, which Paul elsewhere makes clear by speaking of Him as God's "own Son" "the Son of his love." It may not be possible to decide whether it was the primitive community or Paul himself who first put full religious content into the title "Lord" as used of Christ. Probably it was the for mer. But the Apostle undoubtedly adopted the title in its full meaning, and did much to make that meaning clear by transfer ring to "the Lord Jesus Christ" many of the ideas and phrases which in the Old Testament had been specifically assigned to the Lord Jehovah. God "gave unto Him that name that is above every name—the name of 'Lord.' " At the same time by equating Christ with the Wisdom of God and with the Glory of God, as well as ascribing to Him Sonship in an absolute sense. Paul claimed for Jesus Christ a relation to God which was inherent and unique, ethi cal and personal, eternal. While, however, Paul in many ways and in many aspects, equated Christ with God, he definitely stopped short of speaking of him as "God." While the Hellenic world light-heartedly added to its pantheon one after another of its mystery-heroes or saviours of their country, the Christian Church was withheld by the conception of God which it inherited from Judaism, from giving this form of expression to its conviction regarding Jesus and its experience of the living Christ until at least the close of the first century. That final step in the inter
pretation of Jesus, is recorded, if it is recorded in the New Testa ment at all, in the Fourth Gospel ; and it is not certain that we find it even there.
The Fourth Gospel.—We come lastly to the witness of the Fourth Gospel, placing it here not only because this Gospel is the latest of the documents relevant to our purpose, but because the writer, whoever he was, combines to a singular degree dependence on the teaching which we find in Paul with striking originality of his own. It is now generally understood that his work has much less the character of an historical record than of an interpretation of Jesus, an interpretation in the light of Christian experience and of the situation of the Church towards the end of the first cen tury. That is not to say that "John" does not confirm, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, many parts of the story of Jesus which are familiar to us from the Synoptic Gospels. There are even matters on which he appears to have preserved a more trust worthy tradition than the Synoptic Gospels. But alike in the selec tion of the material and in the way in which it is handled the Evangelist is guided by the interpretation which has now been put upon Jesus and by his desire to commend that interpretation to men. His work is not best described as an allegory or as a series of allegories but as a series of transparencies, episodes, actions and teaching through which and behind which is seen not obscurely the glory of a Divine Being, who is the Life and the Light of men. This does not mean that the truly human nature of Jesus is either overlooked or obscured. Rather is it insisted on with em phasis; but it is treated as the vehicle for the self-revelation of the Logos which, having been in the beginning, and with God, and "divine," had entered human life and history as the Word "made flesh." It was this interpretation which took up into itself and fused into one all the factors predicated by Paul, but made a further advance upon Paul by relating the religious convictions of the Church concerning Jesus to the philosophical language and ideas of the time. But the identification of Jesus with the Logos was not tantamount to recognizing Him as "God." Neither the "Word of God" in Hebrew nomenclature nor the Logos in Greek speculation was "God," though it was definitely "divine." And it is not certain that even the words which Thomas addressed to Jesus (xx. 28) meant what they suggest in the English version. They may mean, "it is Jesus himself, and now I recognize him as Divine" (Burkitt). If so, the final step in the interpretation of Jesus, the recognition of his Deity belongs to the truth into which the Spirit has led the Church since the New Testament was com plete. The New Testament enshrines a rich and variegated record of the experience and teaching of Jesus, of the impression on His followers into which these were translated, of the convictions to which the impression and their own experience of the living Christ gave rise. And if the intellectual conclusion drawn within the first century is most truly expressed by saying that the Church gave Jesus "the value of God," it is clear also that there was still some thing in the record waiting to be subsumed in a final interpreta tion, the fact that Jesus has given new values to God. If God were to appear upon earth to-day, the Christian world would expect him to be like Jesus.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.-OUt of the vast mass of literature a small selection has been made of those works which combine scientific knowledge with religious insight. (a) Sources: H. G. Wood in The Parting of the Ways (1912) ; F. C. Burkitt, The Gospel History and its Trans mission, 3rd ed. (i9ii); B. H. Streeter, The Four Gospels (1924). (b) History: W. Sanday, Life of Christ (19o7) ; Edward Meyer, Ursprung and Anfiinge des Christentums, 3 vols. (1921-23) ; von Gall, Basileia Theou (1926) ; E. F. Scott, The Kingdom and Messiah 0910 . (c) Interpretation: C. Gore, The Doctrine of Christ (1922) ; B. Latham, Pastor Pastorum; W. M. Macgregor, Jesus Christ the Son of God (1907) ; G. A. Smith, Jerusalem (1907) ; A. E. Rawlinson, The New Testament Doctrine of the Christ (1926) ; Joh. Weiss, Christ, the Beginnings of Dogma (191I) ; Jesus im Glauben des ipten Jahr hunderts; Leipoldt, Das Gotteserlebniss Jesu (1927) ; H. R. Mackin tosh, The Doctrine of the Person of Christ (1912) ; A. Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (2nd ed., 1911) (an analytic account of the modern treatment of the subject). (C. A. Sc.)