We
conclude this brief analysis of the higher criticism of the Bible with a quotation
from Orr, showing its culminating effect upon the Jesus of the Bible and upon
the message of modern Christendom:
The Jesus of the new “modern” school is represented thus.
The ground fact is that a young Galilean peasant, son of Joseph and Mary of Nazareth,
starting as a disciple of John the Baptist, became, about his thirtieth year,
the originator of a remarkable religious movement in Galilee. This
brought Him into collision with the Pharisees and ecclesiastical heads of the
nation, and led, after perhaps a year’s activity, to His being arrested at
Jerusalem at the Passover, and, after trial by the Sanhedrin, and before Pontius
Pilate, put to death by crucifixion as a blasphemer. Whether, as the Gospels
say, He claimed for Himself the title Messiah is a moot question; whether He
spoke the Apocalyptic discourses attributed to Him is held to be even more
doubtful. Probably, as most allow, He did both, and to that extent, as in many
other particulars of His thinking, was a victim of delusion, or shared the
erroneous beliefs of His age. But His soul was one of singular purity--not “sinless,”
for the modern mind dare not use so absolute a word; His religious and ethical
ideals were the most spiritual yet given to mankind; while the filial
confidence He exercised in the Father, His perfect love and sympathy with men,
and the continual polemic which cost Him His life against the merely outward,
ceremonial, and legal in religion, in favor of a spiritual worship, and an
inward morality of the heart, made Him, in another sense than the theological,
the true founder of the Kingdom of God on earth. He gave up His life on the
Cross in fidelity to His convictions, but, it need not be said, according to
this new reading, did not rise again. It is allowed that His disciples believed
He did, and even that they had seen Him, and that it was by the energetic preaching
of a risen Lord that the Christian Church was founded. These dreams, however,
we are told, are gone, and the Church of the future will have to content itself
with a Jesus on whose grave, as Matthew Arnold said, the Syrian stars still
look down.
Such is the picture. What is to be said of it? What can be said of it,
except that, professing to be “religious historical,” it is not historical
in real sense of the word? It is a picture to be rejected, not on any a
priori dogmatic grounds, but simply because it does not fit the facts. It
does not explain the Jesus of the Gospels. It does not explain the faith and
hope of the early Christian Church, based on the facts which the Gospels
record. It does not explain the vast effects which have come from the
appearance and work of this Jesus. It does not explain how even such an image
of Jesus came to be there - who created it, or could create it, or whence the materials
came from which it was composed. It does not explain the edifice of the
Christian life, work, hope, and aspiration which has been built on Jesus, and
despite of all assaults on it, has endured through the ages. It does not
explain Christian experience, Christian character, Christian enthusiasm and
enterprise, the consciousness of redemption through Christ which lies at the
foundation of all.4
4 James
Orr, Revelation and Inspiration (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1910), pp. 132-134.
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