SECTION II

the new testament

The history of the life of Jesus is accredited, in its leading features, not only by the four Gospels, but by the whole New Testament. The book of the Acts of the Apostles continues the history of Christianity in the same tone, and in the same spirit, in which the Gospels relate the history of Christ. The three chief incidents of His life, the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension, it distinctly brings forward. The disciples of the Gospels here figure as apostles; but even in their new condition, their individual characters are quite in accordance with the characteristics attributed to them in the Gospels, and the most significant are conspicuous. The miracles of Jesus are repeated in the miracles of His disciples, even to the greatest, the raising of the dead. But even from the apostolic Epistles and the Apocalypse, we obtain a distinct impression of the life of Jesus,—an impression, moreover, which is enriched with many special features. According to the teaching of these apostolic writings, Christ was the Son of David according to the flesh (Rom 1:3-4), the second man, the Lord from heaven, a quickening spirit (1Co 15:45-47), born of a woman (Gal 4:4). His teaching is unfolded in the teaching of the apostles (1 Cor. 2), His miracles, in the miraculous gifts of the primitive Church (1 Cor. 12), His great conflict with the carnal mind of His people, in the experience of His witnesses (2Co 2:15, &c.), the institution of the Lord’s Supper in St Paul’s description of the same (1 Cor. 11); while His crucifixion and resurrection form the all-pervading elements of the apostolic Epistles, as being the most essential incidents of His life, of Gospel preaching, and of Christian experience. The form of Christ is thus apparent in the apostolic writings; and they who would oppose the essential features of the Gospel narrative, have to deal not with the four Gospels only, but with the whole New Testament. Even the Epistles of the New Testament are Gospels.

───♦───

Notes

In his essay, Die Glaubwürdigkeit der evangelischen Geschichte, p. 372, &c., Tholuck, with reference to Strauss’s criticism of the life of Jesus, expresses himself, concerning the relation of the representation of the life of Jesus in the four Gospels to its representation in the New Testament in general, in the following words: ‘In passing from the Gospels to the Acts we might have expected to find no more mention of miracles. We do not, however, meet with so abrupt a cessation, but find, on the contrary, that the Acts and apostolic Epistles, together with the Gospel narratives, form one continuous series, and that a continuous series of the miraculous. Christ is not depicted like the sun in tropical countries, which rises without a dawn and sets without a twilight; but as a thousand years of prophecy preceded Him, so do miracles follow Him, and the forces which He first evoked continue to work for a time, with greater or less activity. Hence, if criticism would banish the sun from the world, it has still to deal with the dawn and the twilight.’ The forces which Christ evoked do not, indeed, continue their activity only ‘for a time,’ but till the end of the world, and beyond it. It was, however, for a time that they maintained the first form of their activity, a form breaking violently through the old life, and therefore miraculous.¹

1) [The argument to be drawn from the identity of the representations of Christ in the Gospels and in the remaining books of the New Testament, has been elaborated with his usual delicacy and richness of treatment, and urged with remarkable skill against negative criticism, by Isaac Taylor in his Restoration of Belief, Cambridge, 1855. And for the cessation of miraculous powers see (not Bushnell, nor even Pascal, but) the very judicious remarks in Burton’s Lectures on the Eccles. Hist. of the First Three Centuries, vol. ii. pp. 5 and 230.—ED.]