Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE GOSPELS 35 sayings and of Mark, Matthew and Luke’s Gospels came into being, probably between 80 and 95; the former probably having Palestine as its place of writing, and the latter coming, there is some reason to believe, from Antioch. The Johannine Gospel is distinctly individual, and may not unfairly be ascribed to Ephesus, and to the period 95-110. Other gospels were in circulation, of which fragments survive, but none which compare in value with the four which the church came to regard as canonical. There seems to have been little of recollections of Jesus extant at the close of the first century which was not gathered into the familiar Gospels. That this was the case may be ascribed to the great Jewish war and the decline of the Palestinian Hebrew congregations. To the Gospels the church owes the priceless heritage of its knowledge of the life of its Master, and a perpetual corrective to the one-sidedness of an interpretation, which, like even the great message of Paul, pays little attention to His earthly ministry. SECTION VII. THE INTERPRETATION OF JESTJS An inevitable question of the highest importance which arose with the proclamation of Christianity, and must always demand consideration in every age of the church, is: What is to be thought of the Founder? The earliest Christology, as has been pointed out, was Messianic. Jesus was the Messiah of Jewish hope, only in a vastly more spiritual sense than that hope commonly implied. He had gone, but only for a brief time.1 He was now in exaltation, yet what must be thought of His earthly life, that had so little of glory in it, as men use that term? That life of humiliation, ending in a slave’s death, was but the fulfilment of prophecy. God had foreshadowed the things that His Christ should suffer.2 Early Jewis…
