John suggests that he
could not have mentioned Jesus more fully without some approval of his
life and teaching. This would be a condemnation of his own people, whom he
desired to commend to Gentile regard; and he seems to have taken the
cowardly course of silence concerning a matter more noteworthy, even for
that generation, than much else of which he writes very fully.

22. The reason for the lack of written Christian records of Jesus' life
from the earliest time seems to be, not that the apostles had a small
sense of the importance of his earthly ministry, but that the early
generation preferred what at a later time was called the "living voice"
(Papias in Euseb. Ch. Hist. iii. 39). The impression made by Jesus was
supremely personal; he wrote nothing, did not command his disciples to
write anything, preferring to influence men's minds by personal power,
appointing them, in turn, to represent him to men as he had represented
the Father to them (John xx. 21). But the time came when the first
witnesses were passing away, and they were not many who could say, "I saw
him." Our gospels are the result of the natural desire to preserve the
apostolic testimony for a generation that could no longer hear the
apostolic voice; and they are precisely what such a sense of need would
produce,--vivid pictures of Jesus, agreeing in general features, differing
more or less in details, reflecting individual feeling for the Master, and
written not simply to inform men but to convince them of that Master's
claims. One evidence of the reality of the gospel pictures is the fact
that we so seldom feel the individual characteristics of each gospel. This
is especially true of the first three, which, to the vividness of their
picture, add a remarkable similarity of detail. Tatian, in the second
century, felt it necessary to make a continuous narrative for the use of
the church by interweaving the four gospels into one, and he has had many
successors down to our day; but the fact that unity of impression has
practically resulted from the four pictures without recourse to such an
interweaving, invites consideration of the characteristics of these
remarkable documents.

23. The first gospel impresses the careful reader with three things: (1) A
clear sense of the development of Jesus' ministry. The author introduces
his narrative by an account of the birth of Jesus, of the ministry of John
the Baptist, and of Jesus' baptism and temptation and withd