Christian thought. These religions exerted no influence upon Jesus, nor in the Palestine in which He lived. But the thought of Paul, and the growing thought of the church after Christianity spread from the Semitic into the Græco-Roman world, it is claimed, were affected by contact with these mystery religions. "Christianity," says B. W. Bacon, "shared with its rival religions of the Orient the great conceptions of personal redemption, union with God, and immortality." This is a true and easily understood statement, but many others construct from the same data the hypothesis, that Paul derived his ideas of immortality, of a resurrection, and especially his idea of union with God through burial in baptism, largely if not entirely from these Oriental sources rather than from Jesus or the Jerusalem Christian community. Much work must still be done upon this problem, but in so far as its solution will modify our valuation of the New Testament, such modification in my opinion, will apparently affect the teaching of the apostle Paul rather than that of Jesus.

To the question, how much historical dependence can be placed upon the New Testament, on the basis of the results of modern scholarship, one can only say that it possesses exactly that kind of historic accuracy to be expected in a body of literature of such an origin. The epistles of Paul are a strictly contemporary witness to the religious beliefs and usages of his time in the Græco-Roman world where he lived principally. If one wishes to know what "speaking with tongues" was understood to be, around the year 100, he should read the book of Acts, which was evidently written at a time when the custom had passed away and he will *Christianity, Old and New, p. 120,

find that it was the miraculous power of speaking foreign languages without previous study or the use of a lexicon. If one wishes to know what "speaking with tongues" was originally understood to mean, he should read the fourteenth chapter of I Corinthians, where it is represented as something else altogether. These epistles of Paul, and of the post-Pauline writers as well, are a perfect mine of reliable historical information of this order. They contain accurate history of the really valuable kind, not of kings or dynasties or famous persons, but the history of ideas. They are unimpeachable in these matters. The "we-sections" of the book of Acts come from a contemporary witness. This does not mean that that witness practiced all our modern methods of discrimination, nor that he described all he saw in precisely the way it would be described by a professor of history today. But he is a trustworthy witness, if anyone will familiarize himself with the methods he did use and read him with discrimination. Then, he will know better than to read the speeches ascribed to Peter in the book of Acts, with the idea that he has before him a shorthand report of what Peter said. He will read them as he reads all the other speeches put into the mouths of famous men by all the other historians of olden times, who all compose speeches for their heroes which contain what they felt to be appropriate for them to say on important occasions. The aim of the book of Acts for that matter, is not to be prima facie historical; its primary purpose is to be didactic and practical. Its author wishes to show, for instance, that Christianity has never been hostile to the state, and that on the various occasions its advocates and missionaries have been accused of such hostility and tried, they have always been vindi

cated. His treatise is history only in form by our standards of history writing, for he lacks all interest in strictly historical matters of importance. As Von Soden says: "The completion of the number of the twelve and the choice of the Seven are related in detail, yet we hear nothing of the performances of these two bodies. St. John, the son of Zebedee, appears on a few occasions in the first sections as a silent companion of St. Peter, and then completely vanishes. It is the same with Barnabas, Silas, Appolos, Mark; even St. Peter, who at the beginning stands at the central point of the narrative, is afterwards completely forgotten. St. James appears upon the scene without introduction; takes St. Peter's place at Jerusalem; and acts as the leader of the community; and yet we hear nothing else of him, nothing of his conversion, nor of how he came to his position in the chruch, nor concerning his end. The book is not an historical work but a defense of Christianity set forth in historical pictures." The dictum that history must be written with absolute objectiveness and impartiality is a strictly modern idea. Even yet it is only an ideal and has never been wholly attained.

But the question of historical accuracy, in the case of the gospels, where it is most important, can be answered in a way that will be reassuring to all minds except such as demand the impossible. The gospel of John, we repeat, is historically valuable not for any picture that it lets Jesus draw of Himself, but for its own picture of the Jesus exalted and supreme in the thought and ideals of Græco-Roman Christian communities at or around the end of the first century. But the synoptic gospels, there is little or no reason or "Von Loden, History of Early Christian Literature, pp. 218, 234.

room to doubt, do give a substantially correct account of the life and teachings of Jesus-not that everything in them stands on exactly the same footing. Legendary elements are discerned by many in the infancy sections of Matthew and Luke. With some satisfaction we note that these sections are not found in Mark. If Peter stands back of that gospel it is good to know that he did not pretend to a knowledge of any secrets about how Jesus was born; almost certainly Mark had no such information. When Matthew relates that after the crucifixion many graves opened and the ghosts of those buried in them came out and walked about the city, it does not take a trained historian to decide that statement is not on a par with the statement that Jesus went into the temple and drove out the men who bought and sold in its vestibule. There may be accretions here and there. Indeed, a comparison of the stories told by Mark and the same stories told by Matthew and Luke, shows how this process went unconsciously and inevitably on. But where this is true, the gospels themselves contain the means of their own correction. There will continue to be differences of opinion as to how certain of their statements are to be interpreted, but the foolish fear that anything but a slavish acceptance of their every statement is morally wrong, is gone. The discriminating reader will not shirk nor regret the responsibility of drawing his own line between what seems original history and later accretion. When he is through, he will find that the modern study of the gospels makes the character of Jesus stand out with a totally new distinctness and certainty.

To sum up this discussion. Jesus Christ is the permanent possession of the Christian world. Interpreta

tions of Him come and go, but He remains. His story was told orally and in earlier documents or gospels; and yet again in our other and later four gospels; in epistles and yet again in the apocalypse. Decidedly there is more than one interpretation of Him within the covers of the New Testament itself. Another interpretation of Him is enshrined in the creeds and the sacred customs of the Church. The Jesus of the modern student is far from identical with the Christ of the Italian peasant of the Middle Ages. The Jesus Christ of the Apostles' Creed is not the same as the Jesus of the gospel of Mark. All Christian thought is an attempt to understand Jesus, to re-interpret and fit Him into the thought and life of the thinker's own time. All these interpretations have their day and cease to be. But Jesus outlasts them all; and the more careful and trained the student who looks through and through the pages of the New Testament, the more towering does His commanding presence stand out. And so He will continue to stand until He draws in the fullness of the time all men unto Himself.