That we may estimate the significance of the testimony to the Divine Christ which we have seen to be borne by the Synoptists, we must bear in mind that it cannot be taken as merely con the individual opinion of three writers. It must be recognized as reflecting the consentient conviction of the community which these three writers represent and for which they wrote. And this is equivalent to saying that we have here the conception of Jesus which prevailed in the primitive age of the Christian propaganda.1
This might not be so obvious if we could follow certain extremists who, largely in order to escape this very conclusion, have wished—formerly in much greater numbers than more recently—to assign the composition of the Synoptic Gospels to a period somewhat late in the second century. It will be allowed by most reasonable men to-day that these Gospels were all written before A.D. 80, and belong at latest to the seventh and eighth decades of the first century. Our own conviction is very clear that they were all written before A.D. 70, and therefore belong to the seventh decade at the latest. In the seventh decade of the first century, therefore, it was of faith in the Christian community that Jesus Christ was a divine person. And this evidence is retrospective. What was with such firmness universally believed of the nature of the founder of the Christian religion in the seventh decade of the first century, had not first in that decade become the faith of the Church. But only a short generation, as we conventionally count generations—something like five and thirty years—intervened between the death of Jesus and the composition of the Synoptic Gospels. It is impossible to suppose that the conception of Jesus had radically altered in this brief interval; that a primitive humanitarianism for example had in the course of thirty or forty years been transformed into a universal conviction of the deity of Jesus, such as is expressed with simplicity and unstudied emphasis in our Gospels. The witness of the Synoptic Gospels is accordingly a witness to the aboriginal faith of Christians.
Nor is the force of this conclusion weakened by attempting to get behind our Gospels and appealing to the yet earlier documents out of which they may be thought to have been framed. Grant that our Gospels belong to the second generation of documents; and that behind them lie still earlier documents upon which they depend. These earlier documents cannot be presumed to have presented a portrait of Jesus radically different from that which all three of their representatives have derived from them. We have simply pushed back ten, fifteen, or twenty years our literary testimony to the deity of Jesus: and how can we suppose that the determinative expression of the Church’s faith in A.D.
50 or A.D. 40 differed radically from the Church’s faith in A.D. 30—the year in which Jesus died? The assurance that our Gospels rest on earlier documentary sources becomes thus an additional assurance that the conception of the person of Jesus which they present in concert is the conception which held the mind and heart of the Church from the very beginning.
How fully justified this conclusion is may be illustrated by examining the conception of Jesus imbedded In the hypothetical sources which the several schools of criticism reconstruct ¹for our Synoptics. In each and all of them is found the same portrait of the supernatural Christ. Probably the theory of the origin of the Syn-optics most in vogue just now is still the so-called twosource”’ theory, in some one or other of its forms. According to this theory, our three Synoptics in their main substance are compounded out of two important primitive documents, which may be conveniently called the original Mark and the Matthean sayings.’ The former of these is supposed to be substantially and, in the view of many critics, very closely indeed, represented by our present Mark; while from the latter a good portion of the material in Matthew and Luke not also contained in Mark is thought to be derived, —certainly what is common to these two Gospels apart from Mark, and doubtless also something not reproduced in both of them. According to the present most fashionable form of this theory, then, we are reading ‘ substantially a primitive evangelical document when we read our present Mark. Some suppose the primitive Mark to have been a longer document than our present Mark, some suppose it to have been a shorter document, some suppose it to have differed from it not more than one textual recension may differ from another,—say a ‘ Western” MS. of Luke from a “Neutral” one. But few would care to contend that the general portrait of Jesus drawn in it differed markedly from that which lies on the pages of our present Mark. The Jesus brought before us in our present Mark, however, is, as we have seen, distinctly and distinctively a supernatural person: and it must have been this same distinctly and distinctively supernatural Jesus, therefore, which was set forth in the primitive Mark.