n
personalities were not directly implicated. But Jesus, as we shall see,
before the close of his life, proclaimed himself to be something more
than a preacher of righteousness. He announced himself--and justly, from
his own point of view--as the long-expected Messiah sent by Jehovah to
liberate the Jewish race. Thus the success of his religious teachings
became at once implicated with the question of his personal nature and
character. After the sudden and violent termination of his career, it
immediately became all-important with his followers to prove that he
was really the Messiah, and to insist upon the certainty of his speedy
return to the earth. Thus the first generation of disciples dogmatized
about him, instead of narrating his life,--a task which to them would
have seemed of little profit. For them the all-absorbing object of
contemplation was the immediate future rather than the immediate past.
As all the earlier Christian literature informs us, for nearly a century
after the death of Jesus, his followers lived in daily anticipation of
his triumphant return to the earth. The end of all things being so near
at hand, no attempt was made to insure accurate and complete memoirs
for the use of a posterity which was destined, in Christian imagination,
never to arrive. The first Christians wrote but little; even Papias,
at the end of a century, preferring second-hand or third-hand oral
tradition to the written gospels which were then beginning to come into
circulation. [17] Memoirs of the life and teachings of Jesus were called
forth by the necessity of having a written standard of doctrine to which
to appeal amid the growing differences of opinion which disturbed the
Church. Thus the earlier gospels exhibit, though in different degrees,
the indications of a modifying, sometimes of an overruling dogmatic
purpose. There is, indeed, no conscious violation of historic truth, but
from the varied mass of material supplied by tradition, such incidents
are selected as are fit to support the views of the writers concerning
the personality of Jesus. Accordingly, while the early gospels throw a
strong light upon the state of Christian opinion at the dates when they
were successively composed, the information which they give concerning
Jesus himself is, for that very reason, often vague, uncritical, and
contradictory. Still more is this true of the fourth gospel, written
late in the second century, in which historic tradition is