of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the virgin-birth, and even the leading position of Peter in some circles of the early church, are vouched for, independently of these additions and expansions. From the theological point of view, they mark not the incorporation of fresh elements so much as the evolution of elements which were already present in the primitive theology of the gospels themselves.

(d) Finally, there is the minor question of language. The passage of the tradition in its pre-canonical stages from the vernacular Aramaic to the written Greek in which our gospels and most of their sources were composed, cannot have been without some effect upon the contents of the tradition at several points. Whereas Jesus spoke in Aramaic, the most concrete and unmetaphysical of languages, he is reported in Greek, the most metaphysical.' 1 But it is almost entirely in the Fourth gospel that this semi-metaphysical tinge appears; when we attempt to translate the synoptic sayings back from Greek to Aramaic the results are rarely of importance, so far as regards theology. There is nothing about Himself or God in the canonical gospels which Jesus could not have said intelligibly in Aramaic. He could even have called Himself Son of man in that language without the risk of being misunderstood (see below, Chapter IV.). The appearance of the written gospels in Greek, after the earlier Aramaic tradition, which was for the most part oral, had nothing like the significance for their theology which the later adoption of terms like ovoía and

1 Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma (popular ed., 1883), p. 144.

persona had for the development of christology in the Church. Christianity as we know it has come to us through the Greek gospels, and for the purpose of their theology it is seldom necessary to take special account of the Aramaic background behind any term or saying.

As a matter of fact, it is better here and elsewhere in the criticism of the gospels to stand back from the trees in order to see the forest. Detailed exegesis of the gospels has its own function; elaborate research into the Aramaic substratum, the minutia of the literary variants between the gospels, and the special features which differentiate one from the other, is an indispensable discipline. But the common faith is larger and deeper than such characteristics and idiosyncrasies. They are usually eddies or currents in the river. They are differences of the second and third degree, seldom if ever of the first. The significant thing, for the theology of the gospels, is the attitude to Christ which they presuppose and illustrate in different ways, the fundamental conviction that with Jesus a new relationship to God has been effected and inaugurated. It is uncritical to reach this common postulate by the path of harmonising; the gospels show how it developed gradually and how various aspects of it appealed to different circles in the early church. But it is equally irrelevant to allow the mind to become absorbed in the pursuit of exegetical details till it loses the perspective of the whole. The open secret of our religion, says a later writer 1 (quoting from some early Christian hymn), is admittedly great

1 1 Tim. iii. 16.

1

-He who was

Manifested in the flesh,

Vindicated by the Spirit,
Seen by angels,

Preached among the nations of men,
Believed on throughout the world,
Taken up to heavenly glory.

The theology of the gospels, unlike Paulinism, has no place for the doctrine of Christ's revelation to angelic beings after the resurrection,1 but it corresponds to the remaining features of this primitive confession; the modern distinction between the historical and the supernatural in the vocation of Christ is ignored, and the essential fact of Christianity is found in the person of Jesus Christ. By common confession that was the distinctive note of the new religion, which was struck by all, whether they were writing a hymn or a gospel. The mystery or open secret was the personality of Christ. This was what distinguished the gospels from Judaism and Hellenism alike, and it is a difference which is immensely greater than any differences between one gospel and another. As early as the second century it had become common in some circles to suppose that when Paul mentioned my gospel and spoke of the brother whose praise in the gospel 2 was widespread throughout the churches, he was referring to a written gospel, and specifically to the gospel of Luke. The significance of this error lies in its witness to a particular contemporary application of the term 'gospel.' From denoting 1 Cf. the Ascension of Isaiah, x. 1 2 Cor. viii. 18.

6

the message of Jesus as the Christ, i.e. the Christian religion, it had begun to centre upon the acts and words of Jesus, and then, by a natural evolution, upon the written records of the Lord's life. The epistles preached Christ, but they were not gospels. The term was restricted to the books which described what Jesus began both to do and to teach until the day on which he was received up.1 It is right to emphasise the importance of this singular limitation for the history of the Church, if for no other reason than that it indicates to what an extent the communication of the words and deeds of the Lord must have formed from the very first the main content of the glad tidings, when the two were denoted by the same name and no other."2 The epistles and the gospels alike sprang out of the Gospel, but it was only the latter form of early Christian composition which drew to itself the sacred name, and this is all the more striking as there was nothing in the original meaning of the Greek term or in the literary structure of the four books to set the process in motion.

Such an estimate of the gospels helps to determine the sense of what theology' means in connection with them. By 'theology' the pre-Christian Greeks meant some account of the divine beings or being, and this general sense of the term, as the conception or definition of the God worshipped in any given religion, reappears, for example, in Hooker.3 The whole drift of the Scripture of God, what is it but only to teach Theology? Theology, what is it but the science of things divine?'

1 Acts i. 1.

2 Harnack, The Constitution and Law of the Church, p. 308.
3 Eccles. Polity, Book III. viii. 11.

'

Among some of the Greek theologians, however, the term came to have a more restricted range; it was confined to the ascription of a divine nature to Christ, and consequently tended to become a technical expression for that aspect of christology which the Logos idea of the Fourth gospel popularised. It would be unbalanced to hold that the gospels are theological in the latter rather than in the former sense of the term. Theologia deum docet, a deo docetur, ad deum ducit '—that is true of the gospels; even in the Fourth gospel it is the conception of God which is still dominant, though the person of the Son has assumed a larger prominence, relatively to the Father, than in the synoptic tradition. At the same time, the fundamental interest of the gospels, from the theological point of view, is the divine significance of Jesus, just as there is also a concentration upon His personality which equally prevents us from describing or from treating the theology of the gospels as a general account of things divine upon the basis of Christianity. The Fourth gospel does extend its survey more definitely to the relations of God through Christ to the universe as well as to men, but even this cosmic extension has its limitations, and it is far from making the person of Christ subsidiary or supplementary.1 We shall proceed therefore to discuss first the God of Jesus; this opens up into the question of the person of Jesus, since the revelation of God is mediated

1 'The centre of gravity in theology can never be shifted from the person of Christ. The Jesus whom we call Master is at once the historical Jesus of Nazareth and that ideal form which becomes more and more glorious as man's moral capacity increases' (Cheyne in Expositor, sixth series, vol. iii. pp. 270-1).