JES17S THE CHRIST, LIFE OF.
(1) Records and Chronology. Palestine was a small country on the far eastern edge of the great Roman Empire. The Jewish people were despised and ignored because they were a small Oriental nation, bigoted and exclusive in spirit, austere in morals, and fanatical in religion. The career of Jesus, brief, uneventful and obscure to the general observer of his day, attracted almost no attention outside of his own land. It was nearly thirty-five years after Jesus' death before the Empire came to regard his followers as any thing more than a particular Jewish sect. We need not, therefore, expect, nor do we in fact find, much reference to Jesus in the Roman history of this period. The only clear statement about him is contained in Tacitus' "Annals," xv :44: "They called them Christians. Christ, from whom the name was given, had been put to death in the reign of Tiberius, by the procurator Pontius Pi late." There are also some corroborating allu sions to Jesus and his followers in other Roman writings. The great Jewish writers of the centu ry, Philo and Josephus, give us practically noth ing. Philo nowhere mentions Jesus, perhaps from ignorance of him, although Philo lived until after 4o A. D. Josephus barely mentions "the Christ" in Antiquities xx, ix, t (unless some portion of the famous passage xviii, iii, 3 can be called genu ine). His silence is intentional, due to Jewish hatred of Jesus. Small, therefore, but very valu able, is the extra-biblical record of Jesus' life.
Within the New Testament, the earliest record is contained in certain epistles of Paul, written not later than the years A. D. 53-63, and whose authorship and historicity is unquestioned. From these letters we learn of his Davidic descent, his unique personality, his exalted character, his preaching of the Kingdom of God, his appoint ment of apostles, his Messiahship, his betrayal, crucifixion and resurrection. From James, Peter and Hebrews also can be gathered facts about Jesus' life.
But the Gospels have explicitly recorded for us Jesus' life. They contain memorabilia of Jesus. Fragmentary Acounts of what Jesus did and said have been brought together for use and preserva tion. From a time even before his death, the im portant events, the significant acts, and the weighty teachings of Jesus, were reported among his followers, taught to the new converts (Acts ii :42), and circulated wherever the Gospel was carried. The words and acts of Jesus were the
substance of Christianity throughout the apostolic age. For many years this historical material was transmitted orally, according to the Jewish cus tom of the time. Gradually the records passed from Aramaic, their original language, into Greek, that they might be given also to the Gentiles and to the Jews of the Dispersion. After a time some of the material was committed to writing, and oral and written tradition went along hand in hand. The first attempt to gather up these frag mentary records was probably made by the apostle Matthew, who collected many of Jesus' sayings in their Aramaic dress, perhaps as early as A. D. 5o. This collection is known as the "Logia." Some years later, Mark supplemented Matthew's work by making a collection of the records of the events and deeds of Jesus' public ministry.
And as the generation of eye and ear witnesses of what Jesus had done and said was now pass ing away, many attempts were made (Luke i: 1-4) to collect the floating material into a more complete and durable form. Our four canonical gospels are such final collections. They came into existence at four different centers of Christian teaching and activity in the apostolic age, and grew out of the cycle of tradition which each cen ter had in its possession. The Gospel of Mark (about 66 A. D.) is the earliest of the four. The Gospel of Matthew is not the "Logia" of the apostle, but an original work in Greek (about A. D. 7o-8o) by an unnamed author, who used a Greek form of the earlier "Logia" as a source of his material, and drew also from the Gospel of Mark, and from various other sources of oral and written tradition. The Gospel of Luke was also compiled (about A. D. 7o-8o) from a Greek edition of the "Logia," from Mark's Gospel, and from other sources of oral and written tra dition. The fourth Gospel comes from the Apostle John, and contains a cycle of tradition not often parallel to that of the synoptic gospels, but of a peculiar type which John seems to have cherished. This gospel is either directly from the apostle (about A. D. 8o-96), or indirectly, through some disci* of his who, after his master's death, collected certain characteristic. material from the apostle's teaching and put it forth under John's name (about A. D. too-13o).