NAZARETH REVISITEDorThe Life and Work of Jesus Christ (1850 years ago) EXHIBITED ANEW, in harmony with The Scriptures of Moses and the Prophets, to which jesus appealed as THE WORD OF GOD."
It is no new thing to try to exhibit Christ's wonderful life in biographic form. Varied in times past and recent have been the efforts in this direction. That the author should add to the number of such efforts may seem either superfluous or presumptuous: -- superfluous, if previous efforts have been successful; presumptuous, if it argue an opinion that they have been failures. Perhaps it is neither one nor the other. Other efforts may have been successful in a measure that still leaves the way open to something more complete.
But the author, with a sense of pain at the seeming arrogance, is impelled to go further and say that, in order to give a truthful conception of the personage whose memory is enshrined in the four gospels, something totally different is needed from any Life of Christ that has yet appeared. That this book is that something in an exhaustive form, he dares not, with a full sense of human insufficiencies, profess. But he thinks it is at least a step towards it. It has in some respects a new picture to exhibit -- a new story to tell -- new and not new -- new as to current models, not new as to the original which it seeks to reproduce.
If most attempts at the Life of Christ have failed to exhibit this original, the author believes it is attributable to two palpably distinct causes: either they have tried to bring Christ into a merely human conception; or have tried to force him into the groove of a conventional theology to which he does not belong. If the author may have succeeded in a third line of treatment, it is because of another work that has been done in our age, of which the world has heard little, and which it esteems less -- the rediscovery of the truth originally promulgated by the apostles in harmony with Moses, the prophets, and the apostles; and its extrication from obscuring association with mere ecclesiastical tradition of both Romish and Protestant complexion.
A re-investigation of the theological problems of the age, in the full light of what the Bible is in itself, compels the conviction that false views of God and man have for centuries prevailed in Europe through the influence naturally attaching to a State-supported ecclesiasticism. It is these false views that have chiefly interfered with a right apprehension of the subject in hand. Christ is built into the whole structure of the Bible; and it is essential to a right interpretation of him that the purpose of God as revealed and embodied in that structure be understood. If (as will be found to be the case) this purpose has been obscured by the theologies of all denominations of Christendom, it is the natural result that a consistent and truly rational biography of Christ should be impossible in professional theological hands, notwithstanding the great abilities brought to bear, and the abundance of the materials supplied in the writings of the apostles. If impossible in theological hands, how much more in the hands of the so-called rationalistic school.
It is the conviction thus foreshadowed that must be the author's excuse for entering upon a work apparently overdone already, and by men, too, whose names the world accepts as unimpeachable guarantees of capacity and scientific accuracy. Eddersheim has produced a stupendous monument of what is understood by "learning," namely: acquaintance with ancient (and mostly valueless) writers on various phases of the subject. But his subject is lost in the attenuated spinning out of such material. The simple picture of the apostolic narratives disappears in the weak and steaming vapour arising from such elaborate cookery. Farrar gives us a beautiful view of a certain sort, but it is the beauty of a highly-coloured picture in Berlin wool. It has no naturalness of outline or colour. It is gaudy and gari
