ed it to correct
misunderstandings conveyed by their predecessors; the length of our
Lord's ministry, the procedure followed at the trial, the date of the
crucifixion, are by many supposed to be more exactly given in _John_
than in the Synoptists. In general there is no reason for questioning
the data in the later sources, save as they seem to come from an
interest of the Church of their day, unrelated with the Jesus of the
earlier records.

In such documents we must expect some events to be supported by more
historic proof than others. The evidence for Jesus' resurrection (to
take a typical case), is far weightier than that for His birth of a
virgin-mother. There is probably no scrap of primitive Christian
literature which does not assume the risen Christ; and the origin of the
Christian Church, and the character of its message and life, cannot be
explained apart from the Easter faith in the Lord's victory over death
and presence with His people in power. The virgin-birth rests on but two
records (possibly on only one), neither of which belongs to the earlier
strata of the tradition, and which are with difficulty reconciled with
the more frequently mentioned fact that Jesus is the Son of David (an
ancestry traced through Joseph). But in discussing the historicity of
the narratives, it is just to the evangelists to recall that their main
purpose was not the writing of history as such, but the presentation of
material (which undoubtedly they considered trustworthy historically)
designed to convey to their readers a correct religious estimate of
Jesus Christ. "These are written that ye may believe that Jesus is the
Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye may have life in His
name." They do not often take the trouble to tell us on what evidence
they report an event or a saying; they either did not know, or they did
not care to preserve, the sequence of events, so that it is impossible
to make a harmony of the gospels in which the material is
chronologically arranged. But they spare themselves no pains to give
_the truth of the religious impression of Jesus_ which they had
received.

And when one compares all our documents, it is significant that they do
not give us discordant estimates of the religious worth of Jesus. The
meaning for faith of the Christ of _John_ is not at variance with the
meaning for faith of the Christ of _Mark_ or of the Christ of the
supposed _Collection of Sayings_. The Church put the four go