iration in knowing the very sounds his lips
framed? The first word that his mother taught him survives in Abba
(Father)--something of his own speech to let us begin at the
beginning; something, again, that takes us to the very heart of him
at the end, in his cry: Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani (Mark 15:34).
Is it not true that we come nearer to him in that cry in the
language strange to us, but his own? Would not the story, again, be
poorer without the little tender phrase that he used to the daughter
of Jairus (Mark 5:41).

From time to time we find in the Gospels matters for which the
writers and those behind them have felt that some apology or at
least some explanation was needed. His friendship for sinners was a
taunt against him in his lifetime; so was his inattention to the
Sabbath (Mark 2:24, 3:2), and the details of ceremonial washing
(Mark 7:1-5). The faithful record of these is a sound indication
both of the date[5] and of the truth of the Gospels. But these were
not all. Celsus, in 178 A.D., in his True Word, mocked at Jesus
because of the cry upon the cross; he reminded Christians that many
and many a worthless knave had endured in brave silence, and their
Great Man cried out. It was from the Gospels that his knowledge came
(Mark 15:37). Even during his lifetime the Gospels reveal much about
Jesus that in contemporary opinion would degrade him--sighs and
tears and fatigue, liability to emotion and to pain, friendship with
women.

With these revelations of character we may group passages where
the Gospels tell of Jesus surprising or shocking his
disciples--startling them by some act or some opinion, for which
they were not prepared, or which was contrary to common belief or
practice--passages, too, where he blames or criticizes them for
conventionality or unintelligence.

It has been remarked that the frequency and fidelity of Jesus' own
allusions to country life, his illustrations from bird and beast and
flower, and the work of the farm, are evidence for the genuineness
of the tradition. Early Christianity, as we see already in the Acts
of the Apostles, was prevailingly urban. Paul aimed at the great
centres of population, where men gathered and from which ideas
spread. The language of Paul in his epistles, the sermons inserted
by Luke in the Acts, writings that survive of early Christians, are
all in marked contrast to the speech of Jesus in this matter of
country life. When we recall the practice of anc