610 NEW TESTAMENT 



of the observer and his interpretation of that experience, as to forbid 

 the historian to give to them unqualified acceptance, must be admitted. 

 No other problem of the New Testament historian more imperatively 

 demands sober judgment and careful weighing of evidence than this 

 determination of the class to which each of the apparently miraculous 

 events recorded in the gospels really belongs. 



A second great problem of the life of Jesus pertains to the recovery 

 of his teachings. As already indicated, the problem of historicity 

 confronts us here also. If there is little room for doubt concerning his 

 fundamental ethical teachings, or concerning his conception of relig- 

 ion so far as it concerns the relation of men to the heavenly Father, 

 or concerning his claim of authority as a moral teacher and as a 

 moral leader, yet the problem ceases to be simple when it is asked 

 what was his attitude toward the messianic idea, what he said con- 

 cerning his own nature, and what was his expectation concerning the 

 future of himself, his disciples, and the nations of the world. Criti- 

 cism and interpretation become intimately interlaced, and questions 

 of detail not simply contribute to, but wait upon, the solution of 

 larger problems, such, for example, as the intellectual characteristics 

 and horizon of Jesus. 



The question of the eschatology of Jesus is to-day in the forefront 

 of discussion. Do the gospels, when their testimony has run the 

 gauntlet of a just and discriminating criticism, and when that testi- 

 mony has been set in the light of full knowledge of the apocalyptic 

 ideas of the time, give us the evidence that Jesus shared the apoca- 

 lyptic conceptions and expectations of his day, fitted his own esti- 

 mate of himself and of his mission into the framework of those 

 expectations, and looked for his own speedy return after death to 

 inaugurate in Palestine a reign of the righteous both living and risen 

 from the dead; and was this what he meant when he spoke of the 

 kingdom of God as nigh at hand? Or when we view the testimony 

 of the gospels in the light of the process by which those gospels arose, 

 and of the unquestioned tendency to interpret Jesus' words by the 

 conception of the future held by Jew and Christian alike (though 

 not indeed in identical form) , and in the light of the sanity and thor- 

 ough independence of the thought of his contemporaries that are 

 so preeminently characteristic of Jesus, does it become more probable 

 that the church has in its report of Jesus' teaching unintentionally 

 confused the thought of Jesus concerning the coming of the kingdom 

 of God with his thought concerning the coming of the Messiah, and 

 unwittingly assimilated the memory of his teachings to its own 

 expectations and hopes, than that Jesus, in other things so independ- 

 ent in his thought, and so endowed with spiritual insight and dis- 

 cernment, was in this matter caught in the stream of apocalypticism 

 and assimilated his thought to that of his age? The question is 



