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The first Christians were too absorbed in the expectation of Jesus’ speedy return to the earth to give much thought to practical detail. They cared nothing about developing a literature, a theology, or an organization. The Lord was at hand. The time was short. Why should people marry or slaves seek to be freed? At any moment the present order might come to an end.

But time wore on and nothing happened. The first leaders passed away, but the churches continued their work. It began to be clear that the end was not to come as speedily as men had thought, and that the churches might have to go on under the existing order for a long time. Christian leaders began to see that the practical side of church life could no longer be neglected. Spiritual enthusiasm and well-meaning devotion were no longer enough. Efficiency must be insured. Church life must be regulated. Church officers must be properly qualified, The several classes of people in the churches must be shown their several spheres and functions and kept to them. Efficiency must come through organization.

Such a state of things, it is true, seems a serious decline from the high, confident, spiritual enthusiasm of the apostolic age. But after the prophet must come the priest, to conserve and codify the other’s work. And this was what the letters to Timothy and to Titus sought to do.

Many churches needed to be shown what officers they ought to have to carry on their work and what kind of men these ought to be. Marriage, it was now evident, ought to be encouraged and sanctioned. The charitable work of the churches must be wisely directed and protected from abuse. The morals of the Christian communities needed definite correction. Christian leaders needed to be reminded that they must set a worthy example of conduct and character. The homely practical lessons which need to be taught so often had to be put before the widest possible circle of churches in compact and telling form.

In these letters Christians are taught to pray for kings and rulers and for all men. Perhaps the empire no longer maintained its hostile attitude to the church. Yet First Peter, written in the midst of persecution, bids Christians honor the emperor. Certainly the Book of Revelation takes a very different attitude toward kings. Prayer is to be offered by men. Women are not to teach, but to occupy a subordinate place in the church life. Each church may have as officers a presiding officer, the bishop or elder, and his assistants, the deacons. These should be men of good repute and blameless character, who have married but once. A recent convert should not be made a bishop, and only men who have proved their faithfulness in the church life should be appointed deacons.

That practical helpfulness which had characterized the churches from the first finds natural expression in providing for the support of destitute widows in the Christian community. This matter needs to be safeguarded against abuse. It is right that children or grandchildren who are able to do so should provide for their widowed mothers or grandmothers. Only widows past middle life and without any kindred able to provide for them are to become the permanent pensioners of the church.

Novel religious speculations remote from practical life are to be discouraged and avoided. Some teachers have declared that the resurrection has already taken place; an idea perhaps due to a misunderstanding of Paul’s teaching that conversion and baptism usher the believer, risen with Christ, into a new and blessed life. Such innovations are to be sternly condemned.

It was the coming in of these new currents of teaching that most perplexed Christian leaders about the end of the first century. How were they to be met and controlled? They sometimes seemed to threaten the life of the churches. To whom, when the first great leaders of Paul’s generation were gone, could their less gifted successors appeal in matters of conscience and faith? This is one of the questions these epistles to Christian ministers undertake to answer. It is not easy to realize how far early Christian thought, on a great many matters, was from being definite and specific. The words of Jesus all recognized as authoritative, and also the voice of his Spirit in their own hearts. But one Christian might put forth views widely different from another’s and claim for them the authority of the Spirit. Which was right? Who was to decide?

In the midst of this rising confusion of belief and teaching the churches fell back upon the letters of Paul. New teachings that conflicted with his must be false. In addition to Paul’s letters and the memory of his teaching there was also what we call the Old Testament. Jesus had disowned various parts of it, and Paul had denied the religious efficacy of the Law, but Christian leaders felt safer in following them in their endorsement of the Jewish scriptures than in their partial rejection of them, and very definitely added the Old Testament to their new authorities. We have evidence of this tendency in the Gospels of Matthew and John, but it is Second Timothy that first puts it decisively and unequivocally. Every scripture inspired of God, it was now felt, was profitable for teaching, reproof, and instruction. The church had adopted the Old Testament.

With the words of Jesus, a few letters of Paul, and the Jewish scriptures at their backs, the Christians could now feel in a measure prepared to test new religious teachings which original spirits in their own community or Christian visitors from distant churches might set forth in the local meetings. The new teaching had to square with the old apostolic teaching. If it conflicted with that, it could not stand. It must be possible also to harmonize it with the Old Testament. That Paul and Jesus did not always conform to the Old Testament did not at once appear nor greatly matter. What was needed was authorities, and with Jesus, Paul, and the literature of the Old Testament the need was satisfied.

That the letters to Timothy and Titus claim Paul as their author may possibly be due to the fact that short genuine letters of his were made the basis of them by some later follower of Paul who composed them. At any rate, the writer felt justified in claiming Paul’s authority for what he thought a necessary and timely supplement to the letters Paul had left behind, and doubtless thought he was doing just what Paul would have done had he lived to see the conditions the writer saw. But the value of these letters lay in the practical direction they gave the churches of their time, showing them how to readjust their high hopes of Jesus’ return and to set themselves to the task of establishing and perpetuating their work. In these little letters we see the church after the lofty enthusiasm of its first great experience settling down to the common life of the common day and grappling with its age-long task.

Christianity and Judaism had parted company. The Christian movement, at first wholly Jewish, had after a little tolerated a few Greeks, then admitted them in numbers, and at length found itself almost wholly Greek. The Jewish wing of the church withered and disappeared. The Jews closed up their ranks and disowned the church. Church and synagogue were at war.

It was plain that the future of the Christian movement lay among the Greeks, the Gentiles. To them it must more than ever address itself. Its message must be made intelligible to them. But the forms in which it had always been put were Jewish. Jesus was the Messiah, the national deliverer whose coming was foretold by Jewish prophets, and who was destined to come again on the clouds of heaven in fulfillment of the messianic drama of Jewish apocalyptic. The church was addressing a Greek world in a Jewish vocabulary. Was there no universal language it could speak? Was no one able to translate the gospel into universal terms? The Gospel of John is the answer to this demand.

Early in the second century a Christian leader of Ephesus, well acquainted with the early Gospels and deeply influenced by the letters of Paul, put forth a new interpretation of the spiritual significance of Jesus in terms of Greek thought. Paul had laid great emphasis upon faith in Jesus the risen Christ, glorified at God’s right hand, and had attached little importance to knowing the historical Jesus in Palestine. His Ephesian follower finds in Paul’s glorified Christ the divine "Word" of Stoic philosophy, and reads this lofty theological conception back into the earthly life of Jesus. The faith Paul demanded becomes with him primarily an intellectual assent to the messiahship of Jesus thus understood, that is, to the revelation in the historical Jesus of that absolute divine will and wisdom toward which Greek philosophy had always been striving.

The form in which this Christian theologian put his teaching was a gospel narrative. He did not intend it to supersede the familiar narratives of Matthew and Luke, but to correct, interpret, and sup- plement them The new narrative differs from the older ones in many details. In it Jesus’ ministry falls almost wholly in Judaea instead of Galilee, and seems to cover three years instead of one. The cleansing of the temple is placed at the beginning instead of at the end of his work. Nothing is said of Jesus’ baptism, temptation, or agony in the garden. His human qualities disappear, and he moves through the successive scenes of the Gospel perfect master of every situation, until at the end he goes of his own accord to his crucifixion and death. He does not teach in parables, and his teaching deals not, as in the earlier Gospels, with the Kingdom of God, but with his own nature and with his inward relation to God. In his debates with the Jews he defends his union with the Father, his pre-existence, and his sinlessness. He welcomes the interest shown by Greeks in his message, prays for the unity of the future church, and interprets the Lord’s Supper even before he has established it. His cures and wonders, which in the earlier Gospels seem primarily the expression of his overflowing spirit of sympathy and helpfulness, now become signs or proofs to support his high claims.

The long delay of the return of Jesus to the world had caused that hope which had been so strong at first to decline in confidence and power. The new evangelist at once acknowledges and explains this by showing that the return of Jesus has already taken place in the coming of his spirit into the hearts of Christian believers. He thus transforms the Jewish apocalyptic expectation into a spiritual experience. He foresees that under the guidance of this spirit the Christian consciousness will constantly grow into greater knowledge and power.

Toward the close of his Gospel the writer states his purpose in writing it to be to give his readers faith in Jesus as the Christ, and thus to enable them to have life through his name. This idea of the life to be derived from Jesus is prominent in the whole Gospel. Christ is the source of life of a real and lasting kind, and it can only be obtained through mystic contact with him. This is because Jesus is the full revelation of God in human life. This doctrine, which we call the Incarnation, is fundamental in the Gospel of John: "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. . . . And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory. . . . . I am come that they may have life and that they may have it abundantly."

While the Gospel of John contains no parables, in a sense it is a parable. It presents an interpretation of Jesus in the form of a narrative of his ministry. The writer feels that the Jewish title of Messiah does not express the full religious significance of Jesus, but by finding for it an expression in Greek philosophical terms he transplants Christian thought and the Christian movement into Greek soil. It was easy for persons of Greek education to understand the claim that Jesus was the divine Logos, or Word, of the Stoic philosophers, and a gospel which began with such a claim would be likely to arrest their attention. The writer still thinks of Jesus as Messiah, and retains his respect for the Jewish scriptures. Indeed, the idea of the revealing Word of Jehovah appears now and again in Jewish literature, and the Jewish philosopher Philo had already identified it with the Logos of Greek thought. This made it all the easier for the writer of the new Gospel to apply it to Jesus, but in this interpretation of Jesus as the divine Word he goes beyond previous Christian thinkers and takes a long and bold step in the development of Christian theology.

The Gospel is the story of Jesus’ gradual revelation of himself to his disciples and followers. The opening sentences present its main ideas in words intelligible and attractive to Greek minds. Over against the followers of John the Baptist, who still constituted a sect in the writer’s day as they had in Paul’s, the evangelist relates John’s ready testimony to Jesus as the Son of God and Lamb of God. With a few followers, some of them directed to him by John, Jesus visits Cana and in the first of his "signs" indicates his power to transform human nature. After a brief stay in Capernaum he goes to Jerusalem to the Passover, and there clears the temple of the dealers in sacrificial birds and animals who with their traffic victimized the people and dis- turbed places meant for prayer. The Jews demand a sign in proof of his right to do this, and he answers with a prophecy of his resurrection. In a conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus explains that a new birth of water and the Spirit, that is, baptism and spiritual illumination, must precede the new life of the Kingdom. Jesus comes near the place where John is baptizing and John gives fresh testimony to his superiority. To avoid overshadowing John, Jesus goes into Galilee and on the way explains the water of life to a Samaritan Woman and reveals himself as the Messiah and the source of eternal life. In Galilee Jesus is favorably received and performs the second of the seven signs that punctuate his earthly ministry. Soon another feast brings him to Jerusalem. There he heals an impotent man on the Sabbath and, in the discussions which ensue with the Jews, expounds his relation to God. Returning to Galilee, he feeds a great multitude by the Sea of Galilee and declares himself the bread of life, for everyone who beholds him and believes in him shall have eternal life. At the Feast of Tabernacles he is again in Jerusalem, teaching in the temple, although danger from the Jewish authorities threatens him. He declares that he is sent by God and offers his hearers the water of life, which the evangelist interprets to mean his Spirit, which was to be given to his followers after his resurrection. He proclaims himself the light of the world and when the Jews object claims the witness of God for his message. He promises truth and freedom to those who abide in his words, and declares his sinlessness and pre-existence. He restores a blind man’s sight on the Sabbath, and in the discussions that follow declares himself the Son of God and the Good Shepherd. Soon after at Bethany Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead and proclaims himself the Resurrection and the Life. The hostility of the Jewish rulers becomes so bitter that he conceals himself for a little while in Ephraim but as the Passover approaches he goes up to Bethany. Enthusiastic crowds go out from Jerusalem to meet him and escort him in messianic state into the city. Greeks ask to be presented to him, and Jesus answers that he is now to be glorified but that it must be through his death. In his last hours with his disciples he comforts them in preparation for his departure, and promises to send them his spirit to comfort and instruct them. Under the figure of the vine and the branches he teaches them the necessity of abiding in him, the source of life. As he has come from the Father so now he must return to him. Finally, in an intercessory prayer, he asks God’s protection for his disciples and the church they are to found, praying above all for its unity.

Leaving the city, he goes with his disciples to a garden on the Mount of Olives. There Judas brings a band to arrest him, but they are at first overawed by his dignity, and only after securing the freedom of his disciples does Jesus go with them. He is examined before the high priests and before Pilate, and on the charge that he claims to be the king of the Jews he is sentenced to be crucified. The evangelist is careful to show that Jesus retains his sense of divine commission to the last and dies with the words, "It is finished," on his lips, and he bears solemn testimony to the piercing of his side and the undoubted reality of his death. These details were important for the correction of the Docetic idea that the divine spirit abandoned Jesus on the cross. The writer also indicates that Jesus was crucified on the day before the Passover, so that his sacrificial death fell on the day on which the Passover lamb was sacrificed. On this point he corrects the earlier gospel narratives.

Early on the first day of the following week Jesus appears to Mary. The same evening he appears to the disciples, imparts his spirit to them, and commissions them to forgive sins. Eight days later he again appears to them when Thomas is with them and convinces Thomas of the reality of his resurrection. The Gospel closes with the evangelist’s statement of his purpose in writing it: that his readers may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that, believing, they may have life in his name.

To the Gospel of John an appendix or epilogue was afterward added, probably when John was combined with Matthew, Mark and Luke. It reports an appearance of the risen Jesus by the Sea of Tiberias, or Galilee, and his conversation on that occasion with Peter, in which he predicts Peter’s death, but seems to intimate that the beloved disciple may live until his own return. The Gospel never names this disciple, but by describing him several times in this way it makes him more conspicuous than any name could make him. The beloved disciple has perhaps died, for the epilogue explains that Jesus did not exactly say that the beloved disciple would survive until his coming. This epilogue may have been added to the Gospel to correct the popular misunderstanding about Jesus’ words to Peter, and to claim the beloved disciple’s authority and even authorship for the Gospel. There are indeed some points in the Gospel which seem to involve better information on the part of its writer than the earlier evangelists had. But the whole character of the narrative and its evident preference for the symbolic and theological, as compared with the merely historical, are against the assigning of its composition to a personal follower of Jesus. It is very probable that it was written by that Elder of Ephesus who perhaps after the publication of this Gospel wrote the three letters that bear the name of John.

The Gospel of John was wholly successful in what it undertook. It was not at first generally welcomed by the churches, but in the course of a generation it came to be accepted side by side with the earlier Gospels, and in its influence upon Christian thought it finally altogether surpassed them. Its great ideas of revelation, life, love, truth, and freedom, its doctrine of the spirit as ever guiding the Christian consciousness into larger vision and achievement, and its insistence upon Jesus as the supreme revelation of God and the source of spiritual life, have given it unique and permanent religious worth.

About the beginning of the second century a disagreement arose among the Christians of Asia. It was about the reality of the life and death of Jesus. How could the Messiah, the Son of God, possessed of a divine nature so utterly removed from matter, have lived a life of human limitation and suffered a shameful and agonizing death?

It was a favorite idea in ancient thought that the material universe was intrinsically evil, or at least opposed to goodness, and that God, being wholly good, could not come into any direct contact with it, for such contact, it was thought, would infect God with the evil inherent in all matter. This idea was held by some Christians who at the same time accepted Jesus as the divine Messiah. From this contradiction they escaped in part by claiming that Jesus’ divine nature or messiahship descended on him at his baptism and left him just before his death on the cross. They inferred that his sufferings were only seeming and not real, and from this idea they were known as Docetists, that is, "seemists."

The Docetists were probably better educated to begin with than most Christians, and their profession of these semi-philosophical views of Christ’s life and death still further separated them from ordinary people. This separation was increased by the claim they made of higher enlightenment, closer mystic fellowship with God, dearer knowledge of truth, and freedom from sin. Expressions like "I have fellowship with God," "I know him," "I have no sin," "I am in the light," were often on their lips. Both their spiritual pretensions and their fantastic view of Christ made them an unwholesome influence in the Asian churches and roused more than one Christian writer to dispute their claims.

There lived at that time in Asia a Christian leader of such influence and reputation that he could in his correspondence style himself simply "the Elder." Wide as his influence must have been, there were some who withstood his authority and refused to further his enterprises. With his approval missionaries had gone out through Asia to extend the gospel among the Greek population. Some Christians had welcomed them hospitably and helped them on their way, but others who were hostile to the Elder had refused to receive them and had threatened any who did so with exclusion from the church.

In this situation the Elder writes two letters. One, known to us as Third John, is to a certain Gaius, to acknowledge his support and encourage him to continue it, and to warn him against the party of Diotrephes. Gaius is probably the most influential of the Elder’s friends and supporters in his own community, while Diotrephes is the leader of the party hostile to the Elder. The letter is probably delivered by Demetrius, one of the missionaries in question. At the same time the Elder writes another short letter, our Second John, to the church to which Gaius belongs, urging its members to love one another and to live harmoniously together, and warning them against the deceivers who teach that Christ has not come in the flesh. The advocates of this teaching they are to let severely alone, refusing them even the ordinary salutations and the hospitality usual among Christians. The two letters are brief, for the Elder is coming to them very soon in person; but short as they are they bring us into the very heart of a controversy that was already dividing individual churches and threatening the peace of a whole district.

As missionaries like Demetrius went about the province of Asia, under the Elder’s direction, they took with them a longer letter from his pen in which the same pressing matters were more fully presented. We have seen that the short letters are without his name, and the long letter bears not even his title. It hardly required it if it was to be carried by his messengers and read by them as from him in the assembled churches they visited. This longer letter, known to us as First John, deals with the same question as Second John, takes the same view of the matter, and puts it with the same confident authority. But the situation has developed somewhat, for the Docetists, or some of them, have now left the church.

The Elder begins with the most confident emphasis. His own experience guarantees the truth of his message, which he is sending in order that his readers may share the fellowship with God and Christ which he enjoys. The heart of that message is that God was historically manifested in the life of Christ, and that the Christian experience is fully sufficient for anyone’s spiritual needs. To claim fellowship with God and live an evil life will not do; the claim is false. The Docetic pretension to sinlessness is mere deceit. The Christian way is to own one’s sins and seek forgiveness.

The claim of knowing Christ is meaningless apart from obedience to his commands. Living as he lived is the only evidence of union with him. Those who claim peculiar illumination and yet treat their brethren with exclusiveness and contempt show that they have never risen to a really Christian attitude. The Elder’s reason for writing to his friends is that they have laid the foundation of a real Christian experience, and he would warn them against sinking again into a life of worldliness and sin.

The breach with the Docetic thinkers, with their claims of freedom from sin, is complete. It is well that they have left the church, for they have no right to be in it. Those who deny that Jesus is the Christ are not Christians but antichrists. In opposition to their teachings, true Christians should continue to cultivate that spiritual experience upon which they have entered. They must abide in Christ and following the guidance of the Spirit seek, as children of a righteous heavenly father, to be righteous like him. Righteousness and love are the marks of the Christian life. Jesus in laying down his life for us has shown what love may be.

Some who urge the Docetic teaching claim that the Holy Spirit in their hearts has endorsed it. But the Spirit of God authorizes no such teaching. Only spirits that confess that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh are of God. Spirits that deny this are of the world. The Elder declares that he is of God and that all who really know God will obey his solemn warning against these spirits of antichrist.

Love is the perfect bond in all this great spiritual fellowship. Love is of God and God is love. He has shown it by sending his Son into the world to give us life. We love because he first loved us. If he so loved us, we also ought to love one another. Belief in Jesus as the Christ is the sign of sonship to God and the way to the life of love, since it is the manifestation in Jesus of God’s love that kindles love in us. The messiahship of Jesus is evidenced not only by the voice of the Spirit, but by his human life and death. There are three who bear witness, the Spirit, the water, and the blood. The witness is this, that God has given us eternal life and this life is in his Son. To have the life we must see in Jesus the Christ, the indispensable revelation of God.

The Elder writes to confirm his readers in their assurance of eternal life. Sonship to God means the renunciation of sin. The Christian has an inward assurance that he belongs to God, whom Jesus has revealed Here is the true God and eternal life.

Except for a few touches which mark it very definitely as a letter (2: 12-14), this little work might pass for a sermon or homily. It is clearly a circular letter written to save the churches of Asia from the Docetic views which threatened them. The great words of the letter, life, light, love, figure importantly in the Fourth Gospel also, and in its meditative and yet epigrammatic style the letter resembles the Gospel. It has been said that while the Gospel argues that Jesus is the Christ, the letter contends that the Christ is Jesus, that is, the Messiah is identical with the historical Jesus.

Who was this Asian Elder who could so confidently instruct and command the churches of his countryside? Early Christian writers mention an Elder John of Ephesus, who was a follower of Jesus but was not the apostle of that name, and they sometimes refer to him simply as "the Elder", just as the writer of these letters calls himself. There is no need to identify him with the prophet John of the Revelation. But to John the letters have always been ascribed, and we may think of the Elder John as sending them out from Ephesus, one to Gaius, one to the church to which he belonged, and one to that and other churches, in full assurance that the Christian experience and belief in Jesus as the Christ would save them from the mistakes of Docetism.

The ancient world was full of preachers. Dressed in a rough cloak, one would take his stand at some street corner and amuse and instruct, with his easy, animated talk, the chance crowd that gathered about him. He would mingle question and answer, apostrophe, dialogue, invective, and anecdote, urging his little congregation to fortitude and self-control, the great ideals of the Stoic teachers. For these street preachers of ancient times were Stoics, and their sermons were called diatribes.

Christian preachers had to compete with these men for the attention of the people they were trying to convert to Christianity, and they naturally adopted some of their methods. In the marketplace at Athens Paul did this informal open-air preaching every day, and in doing so came into conflict with some of these Stoic preachers. A later Stoic, Justin, became a Christian, and tells us in his Dialogue with Trypho how he continued to practice this way of preaching on the promenade at Ephesus.

We cannot help wishing that one of these street sermons had been preserved to us just as its author gave it, and of course we have in the Book of Acts reports of several sermons of Stephen, Peter, and Paul. It is true that Luke was not present when most of these were uttered, and probably had to fill out somewhat any outline or report which had come to him; but this only means that the sermon, if not exactly what Paul or Peter said, is what another early Christian preacher, Luke, would have said, and supposes Paul would have said, in those circumstances. But we have in the New Testament at least one ancient sermon preserved for its own sake and not as an incidental part of a historical narrative. It is the book we know as the Epistle of James.

In James the Christian preacher tells his hearers that life’s trials, vicissitudes, and temptations will perfect character, if they are met in dependence upon God. But his hearers must not merely profess religion, but really practice purity and humanity. They must be doers that work, not hearers that forget. They must learn to respect the poor, and to feed and clothe the needy. Their faith must show itself in works. They must not be too eager to teach and direct one another. The tongue is the hardest thing in the world to tame. If they wish to show their wisdom, let them do it by a life of good works. They must give up their greed, indulgence, and worldliness, their censoriousness and self-confidence. Their rich oppressors are doomed to punishment; only they must be patient, like Job and the prophets. Above all things, they must refrain from oaths. In trouble and sickness they must pray for one another. The prayer of a righteous man avails much. And they must seek to convert sinners, for God especially blesses such work.

These are the teachings of this ancient sermon. What is the connection between them? Do they constitute a chain of thought? Are they beads on a string, or simply a handful of pearls? As an example of Christian preaching this sermon is not at all doctrinal or intellectual. Little is said even of Christ. The whole emphasis is practical. The preacher’s interest is in conduct, in the words and acts of his hearers. He does not care especially about their theological views. For him the only real faith is that which shows itself in good deeds. Honest, upright, and helpful living is what the preacher demands, and he does so with a directness and a frankness never since surpassed. It is this that has given this fifteen-minute sermon its abiding place in Christian Literature.

Where this sermon was first preached it is impossible to say. It would have been appropriate almost anywhere. That is the beauty of it. But we may be sure that it was as a sermon and not as a letter that it first appeared. It contains none of those unmistakable epistolary touches that we find for example in Galatians and Second and Third John. It does not end with a farewell or benediction as so many New Testament letters do. Only the salutation contained in the first verse suggests a letter: "James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes which are of the Dispersion, greeting."

But a moment’s reflection will show that this does not prove the Epistle of James to be a letter. How would one go about delivering it "to the twelve tribes which are of the Dispersion," that is, to the Jews scattered about through the Greco-Roman world from Babylon to Spain? Or, if the Dispersion is meant in a figurative sense, to all the Christians outside of Palestine? It is clear at once that these words are not the salutation of a letter but a kind of dedication for a published work. That the Epistle of James was written to be thus published, however, that is, that it is an "epistle" in the literary sense of the word, is very improbable in view of its contents, which relate to no single subject or situation.

It can surely be no cause for surprise or incredulity that we possess among the twenty-seven books of the New Testament one representative of the commonest type of Christian literature, the sermon. It would be a wonder if this were not the case. Like thousands of other sermons, it was not only preached but published, with a dedication, boldly figurative, to Christians everywhere. The unidentified James whose name is prefixed to it may have been its author or its publisher, or simply one in whose name it was put forth. The early church sought to recognize in him Jesus’ brother, who, though not an apostle, became the head of the church at Jerusalem. But if he was the preacher, the sermon’s reticence about Jesus would be doubly hard to understand.

There is something very modern about this so-called Epistle of James. Its interest in democracy, philanthropy, and social justice strikes a responsive chord in our time. The preacher’s simplicity and directness, his impatience with cant and sham and his satirical skill in exposing them, his noble advocacy of the rights of labor and his clear perception of the sterling Christian virtues that were to win the world, justify the place of honor his sermon has in the New Testament.

The Empire’s condemnation put a peculiar strain upon the churches all over the Roman world. The ignorant masses already regarded the Christians as depraved and vicious and credited them with eating human flesh and with other monstrous practices. But quite aside from this the Empire had adjudged being a Christian a crime punishable by death. The Christian had neither the protection of the state nor the sympathy of his fellows.

In this situation a Christian elder of Rome wrote to his brethren throughout Asia Minor a letter of advice and encouragement. Perhaps the Epistle to the Hebrews had already reached Rome and its ringing challenge to the Romans to be teachers stirred him to write. He styles himself a witness of Christ’s sufferings, which may mean that he was himself a Christian confessor, that is, one who had risked his life by acknowledging his faith before the authorities. He sends to the Christians of the chief provinces of Asia Minor a message of hope. They already enjoy a salvation of unutterable worth, and have awaiting them in heaven an imperishable inheritance. All their present trials are to prove and refine their faith. As Christians they are to live lives of holiness and love. By their pure and unobjectionable conduct they must disarm the public suspicion of their practices. They must obey the emperor and his appointed governors. Government is for the restraint of evildoers and for the encouragement of the good. The example of Christ’s sufferings should encourage servants when they are mistreated to imitate his patience and self-command. All must cultivate sympathy, humility, and love.

No one can reasonably molest them if they live uprightly, but if they should suffer for their very righteousness they would be only the more blessed. It is better to suffer for welldoing than for evildoing. They must not be afraid, but be ready to give respectful and honest answers to magistrates who examine them, and by their uprightness of life must silence and condemn the popular calumnies. Christ too suffered to bring them to God, and they must live the new Christian life which he opened to them, not their old gross heathen life of sin.

The fiery trial to which they are now exposed must not be thought strange. Through it they may share in Christ’s sufferings, and so in his coming glory too. It is a privilege to endure reproach for the name of Christ. To be punished for committing crime carries disgrace along with it, but to endure punishment for being a Christian does honor to God. They can only commit their lives to God, and keep on doing what is right.

Their elders must do their work in a noble and high-minded way, as true shepherds of the flock of God under the chief shepherd Christ. They must all humble themselves under God’s mighty hand, and he will in his good time lift them up again. Everywhere their Christian brethren are being compelled to endure this same bitter experience. God is the source of all their help, and after they have suffered a little while he will give them deliverance

Among the messages which conclude the letter, is one from the church at Rome -- here as in the Revelation called Babylon -- in which the writer is an elder. Who he was it is not possible to say; but in later times the church at Rome came to regard itself as the heir and spokesman of Peter, and if one of the purposes of this letter is to correct the seditious attitude toward the Empire that marked the Revelation, and if the publication of Paul’s letters in collected form had recently drawn universal attention to him as an apostolic writer, we can understand how the Roman church might have felt justified in claiming the great name of Peter, its martyr apostle, as the one whose authority really speaks in this letter to the Christian groups which Revelation was most likely to affect. But, whoever wrote it, it gave the imperiled Christians all through Asia Minor a message of hope and courage during the persecution of Domitian, pointed out the difference between suffering for being a criminal and suffering for being a Christian, and inspired them to overcome by lives of purity and goodness the hatred and slanders of the heathen world.

Of all the early centers of Christianity the church at Rome went through the most significant and dramatic experiences. Founded by unknown persons about the middle of the first century, it entertained Paul and Peter, Luke and Mark, witnessed the martyrdom of the chief apostles and piously tended their graves, in a single generation withstood the fires of two persecutions, and served in short as the focus of Christian life in the capital of the world.

All this was not effected without sacrifice and devotion. It is the Christians of Rome who first appear in the pages of the history of the Empire, and it was the extraordinary sufferings they endured that led the historian to mention them. Hardly a dozen years after the Roman church had been established there burst upon it the storm of Nero’s persecution, of brief duration but of frightful severity. Many of the Christians of Rome suffered agonizing martyrdom, and all of them faced it with a heroism that wrung sympathy even from the callous populace of that brutal city. In that dreadful August of 64 A.D. the Roman Christians learned what it was to have their dearest friends and leaders torn from them, to attend these friends to prison and to cruel and mocking deaths, to lose their little savings by capricious confiscation, and so to be brought by the events of a single month to the very verge of ruin and despair.

From such a baptism of fire the Roman Christians emerged reduced in property and numbers, but more than ever convinced that they were pilgrims upon the earth and that their citizenship was in heaven. They were sustained in this by the hope in which Paul and Peter had confirmed them, that Jesus would soon return to set up his messianic kingdom, and that then their troubles would be over. Their immediate troubles did soon pass and gave way to a reasonable degree of security and peace, but the hope of Jesus’ coming remained unfulfilled.

Years went by. The churches settled down from their first exuberant spiritual enthusiasm into a partial accommodation to a work-a-day world. They had their officers, their meetings, their institutions. They still expected the return of Jesus, but only as people might who had been expecting it all their lives. The expectation could hardly play the part in their religious lives that it had in their fathers’. But evidences were beginning to appear that they were in turn to be put to the test to which Nero had put their predecessors. Domitian was emperor. Conspiracies and losses had embittered and frightened him. He had begun in Rome that reign of terror which so horrified high-minded Romans like Tacitus who had to witness it.

What first led Domitian to threaten the Roman church is not clear. It may have been his insistence upon divine honors for himself, as it was in Asia. It may have been the collection for the benefit of Jupiter Capitolinus, of the temple tax from the Jews, and the incidental confusing of Christians with the latter. Or perhaps the inability of a Christian magistrate to perform the religious duties his office imposed upon him first brought the Christians again under attack. At any rate, toward the very end of Domitian’s life, he made a series of attacks upon the Christians of Rome which left a deep impression upon them.

The Roman church had more than made up the losses Nero had inflicted upon it. It had continued to practice that duty of Christian hospitality which its location imposed upon it, and to attend to the needs of Christian prisoners who were brought to Rome as Paul had been. It had not, however, developed any outstanding Christian teachers, nor as yet taken the place of leadership among the churches for which its position at Rome naturally marked it out. It was a practical church, but a church without imagination. The fact that Jesus had been executed like a slave or a criminal was hard for it to understand and to harmonize with the messiahship he claimed. And with the passing of time the expectation of Jesus’ return to the earth had declined in eagerness and confidence, leaving the Roman Christians far less ready to withstand the shock of persecution than their fathers had been thirty years before.

But persecution and apostasy were not the only dangers that threatened the Roman church. The very age of the church now exposed it to a peril of apathy and indifference which could never have menaced it in its youth, when enthusiasm was new and hope high. While some might continue to hold in a mild way their expectation of Jesus’ coming, others, now that the generation that had known Jesus in Galilee had passed away and Jesus had not returned, felt that the expectation so long disappointed had been vain, and that the Christian movement was played out.

It was to this situation that some Christian teacher, unknown to us but well known at Rome, addressed the letter which from its strongly Jewish tone has come to be called the Epistle to the Hebrews. The writer was not in Italy, though other Christians from Italy were with him when he wrote, and perhaps from what they had told him, or from what he had himself observed in Rome, the perilous situation of the Roman community was clear to him. But the Roman church must not go down. Its noble traditions of devotion and service must not sink into oblivion. Above all the great task for which it was in the writer’s mind so clearly marked out must be performed. The church must not only survive but rise to higher forms of service, that should eclipse all that it had yet done. This is the kindling ideal that this great unknown of the first century puts before the wavering line of Roman Christians. Seeing them unequal to their present task, he nerves them for a greater.

The Christian scholar who undertook to meet this situation took as his theme the complete and final character of the revelation made in Christ. As compared with the beings, men or angels, through whom the old Jewish revelation was made, Christ is immeasurably superior. They were at best God’s servants; he is God’s son. How shall anyone escape who neglects a salvation so supremely authoritative? The Romans must learn the awful lesson of the Israelites in the wilderness. Like them they have had good news and set forth for a better country; let them not like the Israelites, through unbelief and disobedience, fall short of the heavenly rest.

Christ is not only far above the old mediums of revelation; he is far superior to the old priests. This is a difficult matter to explain to the Romans, who for all their long experience as Christians, in view of which they ought to be teaching and leading the churches, are still no better than infants as far as intellectual or spiritual development is concerned. Only let them remember that persons who have once had the Christian experience and who then give it up can never recover it. It is impossible to renew them again unto repentance. Surely none of the Christians at Rome will make this irreparable mistake. Their faithful service of helpfulness to their needy brethren has long commended them to God; they must not give up now, but hold fast to the end.

To show his readers the extraordinary value of what they are in danger of throwing away, the writer proceeds to explain to them the messianic priesthood of Christ and its superiority to the old Jewish priesthood. In doing this he uses the Old Testament in the fanciful Alexandrian manner, treating it allegorically and typically. This enables him to find in the Old Testament evidence that Jesus is the final and eternal high priest, of an order older than Aaron and even than Abraham. His ministry is correspondingly superior to that of the Jewish priests. They had to offer over and over again, in a tent that was at best only a copy of the heavenly sanctuary, the same material and ineffectual sacrifices. But Christ as messianic high priest has offered once for all in the heavenly sanctuary the supreme sacrifice of himself and taken his seat at the right hand of God.

With this novel and ingenious interpretation of Jesus’ religious significance the writer couples the practical lesson of drawing near to God through the new and living way which Jesus has opened. He again exhorts the Romans to keep fast hold of their Christian hope. He who has promised is faithful; already they can see the Day drawing near. To return to a life of sin after having once experienced the Christian salvation is to forfeit that salvation forever and to incur penalties too dreadful to utter. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. They must remember the heroic devotion they showed in former days, when in its infancy their church endured a cruel persecution at Nero’s hands. That same boldness and endurance they must still show.

Through all the history of God’s dealings with men, that faculty of faith by which men have laid firm hold on the unseen realities has kept patriarchs, prophets, and martyrs steadfast to the end. These veterans of faith are now looking down upon their successors at Rome to see them run with endurance the race upon which they have started. Christ himself has set the supreme example of faith. In all the trials and hardships that they are enduring the Romans must learn to see God’s paternal discipline, by which the lives and characters of his sons are to be perfected.

In a final impassioned utterance the writer returns to the thought with which he began. The new covenant and mediator are far above their old Jewish prototypes, and disloyalty to them is attended with proportionately greater peril. Our God is a consuming fire.

Exhortations and warnings conclude the letter. The Romans must not forget the noble example of their first martyr-teachers. Considering the issue of their lives, they must imitate their faith. They must avoid false teachings and practices, and be thankful and beneficent. The writer closes his hortatory discourse, as he calls it, with the news of Timothy’s release from prison, promises to visit them soon, and sends salutations from himself and the Italian brethren who are with him.

The language of Hebrews shows more elegance and finish than that of any other book of the New Testament. Its author was a trained student and thinker. What he wrote is so eloquent as to be more like an oration than a letter, and the absence of any superscription such as letters usually have makes it seem all the more oratorical. It is worth noting that the Judaism which the writer has in mind is always that of the tabernacle in the wilderness, never that of the temple in Jerusalem. In showing the superiority of Christ’s covenant and revelation, he first among Christian writers makes free use of that allegorical interpretation of the Old Testament which has had such grave consequences in Christian history. Hebrews may be regarded as the supreme effort of early Christianity to state the religious significance of Jesus in Jewish terms -- "mediator," "high priest," "Messiah." It is interesting to observe that the Roman church bravely withstood the attack of Domitian and in the century that followed made an earnest effort to teach and lead its sister churches in a way worthy of its opportunities and its history.

It was a dangerous thing in the first century to be a Christian. Jesus himself had laid down his life for his cause, and the apostles Paul, Peter, James, and John met their deaths as martyrs, that is witnesses, to the new faith. Although Christianity was not yet a "licensed" or "permitted religion," yet to be a Christian was not against the Roman law, and through the first century we can trace the Christians’ hope that when at length the Roman government should decide what its attitude toward Christians was to be, the decision would be favorable. Luke points out that Pilate himself was disposed to release Jesus, and expressly says that neither Herod nor Pilate found any fault in him. Luke also brings out the fact that the proconsul Gallio at Corinth would not even entertain a charge against Paul, and that at Caesarea both Agrippa and the procurator Festus declared that Paul might have been released if he had not appealed to the emperor. Paul had encouraged his converts to honor the emperor, and obey the law, and in Second Thessalonians had referred to the emperor as a great restraining power holding the forces of lawlessness in check.

Nero’s savage outbreak against the Roman church must have startled and appalled Christians all over the world, but that attack, though severe, was short, and left the status of Christians before the law undecided as before. Nero’s victims suffered under the charge of burning the city, not that of being Christians, and Paul himself, as Luke indicates, was tried and probably executed as an agitator, not as a Christian. It is clear that representative Christians like Luke kept hoping that when a test case arose the Empire would not condemn the Christian movement and put Christians under its ban.

But these hopes were doomed to disappointment. Late in the reign of Domitian, the emperor-worship which had prevailed in some parts of the Empire since the time of Augustus began to threaten the peace of the churches. Earlier emperors had for the most part let it take its course, but Domitian found divine honors so congenial that he came to insist upon them. There was indeed an obvious political value in binding together the heterogeneous populations of the Empire, differing in speech, race, civilization, and religion, by one common religious loyalty to the august imperator, considered as in a certain sense divine. Most oriental peoples found this easy. Worshipping numerous gods, they did not much object to accepting one more.

With the Christians it was very different. Their faith forbade such an acknowledgment, and the scattered churches of Asia, where the matter first became acute, now witnessed the disappointment of their cherished hope of freedom to worship God undisturbed, in their own way. It is hard to realize all that this meant to them. Their early teachers had been mistaken. The Empire was not their friend and safeguard, to be loyally obeyed. It now suddenly appeared in its true colors as their bitter and unrelenting foe. For it inexorably demanded from them a worship of the emperor which Christians must refuse to accord. The church and the Empire were finally and hopelessly at war.

The Christian leaders of Asia must have realized this with stricken hearts, and they must have reviewed the history of the Christian movement from a new point of view. After all, what else could they have expected? Jesus, Paul, and Peter had suffered death for the Kingdom of God, and at the hands of Rome. In Nero’s day hundreds of others had perished in Rome at the emperor’s bidding. The Empire, as they now saw, had long since recorded its verdict, and it had been against them.

The matter of worshipping the emperor came home to the Christians of Asia in various forms. His name and likeness appeared on many of the coins they used. He had among them his provincial priesthood, charged with the maintenance of his worship throughout Asia. Christians might be called upon, as Pliny tells us they were twenty years later to worship the image of the emperor. It was customary to attest legal documents --contracts, wills, leases and the like -- with an oath by the fortune of the emperor. Refusal to make this sworn endorsement would at once involve one in suspicion and lead to official inquiries as to the apparent disloyalty of the person concerned to the imperial government. Why not then make the oath? It was after all a purely formal matter with all who used it. Why not simply add to one’s business documents, as everyone did, the harmless words, "And I make oath by the Emperor Domitianus Caesar Augustus Germanicus that I have made no false statement"? So slight an accommodation might seem a very excusable way to gain security and peace.

But in even slight concessions to pagan practice the Christian leaders of Asia saw a serious peril. There must be no compromise. The church might perish in the conflict, but the conflict could not be avoided. The church must brace itself for the struggle, and compromising was not the way to begin. On the contrary, the church must absolutely disavow everything pertaining to the wicked system through which the devil himself was now assailing it. For in the Empire the Asian Christians now recognized not a beneficent and protecting power but an instrument of Satan.

Among the first victims of the kindling persecution was a Christian prophet of Ephesus, named John. He seems to have been arrested on the charge of being a Christian and banished to the neighboring island of Patmos, perhaps condemned to hard labor. He could no longer perform for his Asian fellow-Christians the prophet’s work of edification, comfort and consolation described by Paul in First Corinthians, though they needed it now as never before. But he might hope to reach them by letters, and, as he wrote these to the seven leading churches of Asia, his message expanded into a book. He uses the cryptic symbolic forms of the old Jewish apocalypses, of Daniel or Enoch, in which empires and movements figure in the guise of beasts and monsters, and the slow development of historical forces is pictured as vivid personal conflict between embodiments of rival powers. Indeed, his message is one that may not be put in plain words, for it contains a bitter attack upon the government under which the prophet and his readers live.

The canon of the writings of the prophets had long been regarded by the Jews as closed, and anyone who wished to put forth a religious message as a work of prophecy had therefore to assume the name of some ancient patriarch or prophet. But the Christians believed the prophetic spirit to have been given anew to them, and a Christian prophet had no need to disguise his identity. John in Patmos writes to the neighboring churches as their brother, who shares with them the agony of the rising persecution.

The task of the exiled prophet was to stiffen his brothers in Asia against the temptations of apostasy and compromise which the persecution would inevitably bring. He would arouse their faith. In the apparent hopelessness of their position, a few scattered bands of humble people arrayed against the giant world-wide strength of the Roman Empire, they needed to have shown to them the great eternal forces that were on their side and insured their final victory. For in this conflict Rome was not to triumph, but to perish.

The prophet’s letters to the seven churches convey to them the particular lessons that he knows they need. But one note is common to all the letters "To him that overcometh," to the victor in the impending trial, the prophet promises a divine reward. But this is only the beginning of his message. Caught up in his meditation into the very presence of God, the prophet in the spirit sees him, as Isaiah saw him, enthroned in ineffable splendor. In his hand is a roll crowded with writing and sealed seven times to shut its contents from sight. Only the Lamb of God proves able to unfasten these seals and unlock the mysterious book of destiny, which seems to contain the will of God for the future of the world and to need to be opened in order to be realized. Dreadful plagues of invasion, war, famine, pestilence, and convulsion attend the breaking of the successive seals, doubtless reflecting familiar contemporary events in which the prophet sees the beginning of the end. On the opening of the seventh seal seven angels with trumpets stand forth and blow, each blast heralding some new disaster for mankind. Despite these warnings men continue in idolatry and wickedness. The seventh trumpet at length sounds and proclaims the triumph of the Kingdom of God, to which the prophet believes all the miseries and catastrophes of his time are leading.

The victory is thus assured, but it has yet to be won. The prophet now sees the dragon Satan engaged by the archangel Michael and the heavenly armies. Defeated in heaven, the dragon next assails the saints upon the earth. In this campaign Satan has two allies, one from the sea -- the Roman Empire -- the other from the land -- the emperor cult of Asia. Again the prophet’s vision changes. Seven bowls symbolizing the wrath of God, now at last irrepressible, are poured out upon the earth. An angel shows him the supreme abomination, Rome, sitting on seven hills and drunk with the blood of the saints. Another angel declares to him her doom, over which kings and merchants lament, while a thunderous chorus of praise to the Lord God Omnipotent arises from the redeemed. The prophet’s thought hastens on from the fate of persecuting Rome and the imprisonment of Satan to the glorification of those who have suffered martyrdom rather than worship the emperor. As priests of God they reign with Christ a thousand years, until the great white throne appears, and the dead, small and great, stand before it for the final judgment.

These lurid scenes of plague and convulsion now give way to the serene beauty of the new heavens and the new earth, with the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God who makes all things new. Amid its glories God’s servants, triumphant after their trial and anguish, serve him and look upon his face.

The prophet begins with a blessing upon anyone who shall read his prophecy and upon those who shall hear it read. He closes with a warning against any tampering with its contents. The book is clearly intended to be read at Christian meetings. More than this, by its repeated claim of prophetic character, it stands apart as the one book in the New Testament that in its zeal to make its message heard, claims the inspiration of Scripture. It is thus in a real sense the nucleus of the New Testament collection.

The Revelation is not a loyal book. Its writer hates the Roman government and denounces its wickedness in persecuting the church in unmeasured terms which every Christian of the day must have understood. It does not indeed advise rebellion, but it is, from an official Roman point of view, a seditious and incendiary pamphlet. But so symbolic and enigmatical is its language that few outside of Jewish or Christian circles can have understood its meaning, or guessed that by Babylon the prophet meant the Roman Empire. Its value to the frightened and wavering Christians of Asia must have been great, for it promised them an early and complete deliverance, and cheered them to steadfastness and devotion. Their trial indeed proved less severe than they had feared, for twenty years later Ignatius found these same churches strong and earnest, and forty years after the writing of Revelation a Christian convert named Justin found this book still prized by the Ephesian church. Ignatius and Justin both suffered martyrdom in Rome, and joined the army of those who had come out of great tribulation, and had made their robes white in the blood of the Lamb. But in these successive conflicts, and through many more down to the present day, Christians have cheered themselves in persecution with the glowing promises and high-souled courage of the banished prophet of Ephesus, who in the face of hopeless defeat and destruction showed a faith that looked through death, and in stirring and immortal pictures assured his troubled brethren of the certain and glorious triumph of the Kingdom of God.

Within fifty years after the death of Jesus his gospel had spread over Palestine and Asia Minor and had been carried by travelers and missionaries across the Aegean Sea to Greece and over the Mediterranean to Rome. Companies of Christian believers had been formed in the principal cities, and the new faith was spreading rapidly. But few of these new Christians had any clear idea of how the gospel had reached their communities, and by what providential means and through what perils and difficulties the missionary travelers had found their way to Corinth, Ephesus, and Rome. Few had any idea of how the Christian movement had first separated itself from the Jewish faith; how it had ever come to be offered to Greeks, when it had originally belonged exclusively to Jews; where this change in the propagation of the gospel had begun, and who had first undertaken to carry the gospel out of Syria and Palestine into the more western provinces of the Roman Empire.

Some men still lived who had seen this wonderful Greek mission develop and who had learned from others how it had begun. They knew what courage and perseverance and faith it had taken to bring about its spread through the Roman world, and they felt that it would strengthen the faith and stimulate the zeal of the Christian believers around them to hear the story from the beginning. In such a spirit the physician Luke, perhaps in some city on the Aegean Sea like Ephesus, began to write the story of the Greek mission.

He was himself a Greek, and knew little about the beginnings of the movement except what others had told him. For his first volume, as we have seen, he made use of a variety of written sources, which probably did not extend beyond the gospel story. But he was a close friend of Paul, who had done more than any other to carry the gospel among the Greeks of the Roman provinces. He had been with Paul on some of his most dangerous and adventurous journeys and in some of his most extraordinary experiences. With him he had visited Antioch, Caesarea, and Jerusalem, and in these cities he had met people who could tell him much about the strange series of events that had led the earliest Christians to push out first from Jerusalem to Caesarea and Antioch, and then from Antioch to Cyprus and Galatia. Luke had himself witnessed the extension of the movement from Asia Minor to Macedonia and Achaea, and had finally followed its progress to Rome itself. Supplementing his experiences by his inquiries, Luke fitted himself to relate the fascinating story, with its bewildering variety of riots, arrests, trials, councils, voyages, shipwrecks, imprisonments, and escapes. These are set in the most varied scenes: Temples, marketplaces, deserts, islands, synagogues, the courts of kings and governors, the streets of those splendid flourishing cities of the Greco-Roman world, Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Athens, Rome. And over it all is the writer’s conviction of the providential hand of God shaping the decisions and movements of his people to his own great purposes.

The books known to us as the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles are really the two volumes of Luke’s story of the beginning of Christianity and its development in the Greek world., In both of them his purpose is at once religious and historical. He wishes to strengthen the faith of his readers and commend Christianity to them. At the same time he wishes to make their knowledge of Christian history more exact and complete. We should have liked more definiteness in the dating of some events, and here and there we long for a line more about the fate of Paul or of Peter, the work of missionaries in the East and South, or the beginning of Christianity in Alexandria or Rome. But we must admit that Luke has told his story to its climax, for with the churches once established in Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, and Rome, the extension of the gospel to the rest of the Roman world about the Mediterranean was inevitable.

We are now accustomed to view history as a study of popular forces working their way to expression and influence, rather than of battles, reigns, and dynasties. With such a sense of historical values Luke wrote his sketch of the mission to the Gentiles. Kings and wars play little part in it. It is a record of a popular movement, at first obscure, then gradually making itself felt in widening circles and with increasing power. Even when he wrote, it was still little thought of and, indeed, hardly noticed by Greek or Roman historians and literary men. It was left for this Greek physician, the friend and fellow-traveler of Paul, to begin the writing of what we now call church history.

The acts and sayings of Jesus seem from the earliest times to have been taught by Christian missionaries to their converts, and by these in turn to those who afterward became Christians. Paul reminds the Corinthians how he had delivered unto them what he had himself received as to the Last Supper, and the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. Paul had been taught these things after his conversion, and he was accustomed to tell them to his converts. In this way the principal facts of what we call the gospel story became known to all Christian believers.

But the story was not always the same. Scores of missionaries were at work about the eastern Mediterranean, but not all of them had been taught the gospel story by Paul or by the men who had taught him. The Christians who fled from Judaea when the persecution in connection with Stephen’s work arose, and who carried the gospel into various parts of the eastern world, probably did not tell their converts precisely the same series of acts and sayings of Jesus. After these early missionaries had left Judaea, new stories and sayings about Jesus’work must have come out as the value of such memories became more evident. Here and there people took the trouble to write down these stories for their own instruction and enjoyment or for use in their missionary work. Fifty years after Jesus’ death there had in these ways arisen a variety of partial accounts of his birth, his ministry, and his death and resurrection, which to a thoughtful mind must have been very perplexing.

It was this perplexity that led Paul’s friend Luke, a Greek physician living somewhere on the shores of the Aegean Sea, to write his Gospel. With this confusion of partial narratives and oral tradition intelligent Greek Christians hardly knew what to believe about the life and teaching of Jesus. One such at least, a certain Theophilus, a man of position and intelligence, was a friend of Luke’s, and perhaps suggested to him his perplexity and what ought to be done to relieve it. For him and for the growing class of intelligent Christian people Luke undertook to bring together into one comprehensive and orderly record what was most valuable in the tradition and narratives which had sprung up in various parts of the world.

Luke traces the ancestry of Jesus not simply to David and Abraham, but back to Adam the son of God, thus emphasizing his human nature more than his Jewish blood, and preparing the way for his later emphasis on the universal elements in Jesus’ ministry. At the same time he declares Jesus to be in a special and immediate sense the child of the Holy Spirit. The consciousness that he is God’s son attends Jesus even in his youth, when after a visit to Jerusalem he lingers in the temple, calling it his Father’s house. At the very outset of his ministry Jesus appears in the synagogue at Nazareth and declares that Isaiah’s prophecy of a Messiah with good tidings for the poor and wretched is fulfilled in him. In the spirit of this prophecy Jesus, though rejected by his townspeople, goes to Capernaum and by his cures and teaching achieves an immediate success. Four fishermen of the neighborhood become his followers. He goes about Galilee teaching the people and healing the sick and demon-possessed. His disregard of scribal precepts and his claim that he has power to forgive sins offend the Pharisees, and they begin to plot against him. He calls twelve men to him to be his apostles, and in a great sermon explains to his disciples the moral spirit which should govern their lives. Accompanied by the Twelve he continues to travel about Galilee, teaching and healing, and even restoring dead persons to life. The Twelve, who have now seen something of his work and spirit, are sent forth through the country to heal the sick and cast out demons and to proclaim the coming of the Kingdom of God

On their return Jesus feeds a multitude with a few loaves, and afterward asks the disciples who the people think him to be. They give various answers, but Peter pronounces him the Messiah. Jesus charges them to keep this to themselves, and tells them that rejection and death lie before him, but that the Kingdom of God will soon come. The transfiguration gives his closest intimates a better idea of the kind of Messiah he is to be, and he again foretells his death and resurrection.

At length Jesus sets forth on the momentous journey to Jerusalem, sending messengers before him to make ready for his coming in the villages through which he is to pass. Teaching and healing as he goes, he is more than once entertained by Pharisees, and on one occasion is warned by them of the danger threatening him from Herod, but he only grows more earnest in his warnings against them. In the parables of the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin, and the Lost Son, he defends his course in associating with sinners, that is, persons who did not fully observe the Jewish law. As he approaches Jerusalem, he reminds the Twelve that death and resurrection await him there. Reaching the city he enters it in messianic state amid the acclamations of the people. He goes into the temple and clears it of the traders who use its courts for their traffic. The Jewish leaders protest and demand his authority for this act. His answer does not satisfy them and they prepare to kill him. But he teaches daily in the temple, already crowded with those who had come up for the feast of the Passover, and in the parable of the Vineyard he sets forth the peril of the nation in rejecting and destroying him. After a series of clashes with Pharisees and Sadducees, he foretells the destruction of Jerusalem, the coming of the Kingdom of God, and the return of the Messiah on the clouds of heaven. He eats the Passover supper with his disciples, and immediately after is arrested in a garden on the Mount of Olives. After a series of examinations before the high priest, the Jewish council, the Roman procurator, and Herod, the tetrarch of Galilee, who is in the city, and although neither Pilate nor Herod find him guilty, he is condemned and crucified. Immediately after the Sabbath, however, he appears, first to two of his disciples, then to the eleven apostles and their company in Jerusalem. He reminds them that all this has been in accord with the Scriptures, declares that repentance and forgiveness are to be preached in his name to all nations, and is taken from them into heaven.

More than any other evangelist Luke claims to have a historical purpose. His aim is to acquaint himself with all the sources, oral and written, for his work, and to set forth in order the results he ascertains. It is this historical aim that leads him to fix the date of Jesus’ birth by the Augustan enrollment under Quirinius, to date the appearance of John the Baptist in the fifteenth year of Tiberius, and to tell us how old Jesus was when he began to preach. He is the only writer in the New Testament who sees the need of such particulars and tries to supply them. Indeed we are not to think of the Gospel of Luke as a mere gospel; it is really the first volume of the history of the rise of Greek Christianity, of which Acts is Volume II.

Luke is evidently a Greek writing for Greeks. The fate of the Jewish nation interests him less than the universal elements in Jesus’ work. The stories of Jesus seeking hospitality in a Samaritan village, of the good Samaritan, and of the grateful Samaritan leper, suggest Jesus’ interest in people outside his own nation and foreshadow the universal mission. Luke’s Gospel shows a peculiar social and humanitarian interest; the poor and unfortunate appear in it as the especial objects of Jesus’ sympathy and help. A few echoes of medical language in the Gospel to remind us that Luke was, as Paul calls him in Colossians, "the beloved physician."

The Christian movement had failed in its first campaign. ‘The nation in which it had arisen and to which its founder belonged had disowned it. It was as though the Israelites had refused Moses. This was the more staggering because the gospel had been represented by Jesus’ early followers as the crown and completion of Judaism. Jesus was to be the Jewish Messiah, through whom the nation’s high hopes of spiritual triumph were to be realized. But the Jews had refused to recognize in him the long-expected deliverer, and had disclaimed his gospel. Who was right? The prophets had anticipated a redeemed and glorified nation, but the nation had refused to be redeemed and glorified by such a Messiah. The divine program had broken down.

Yet the gospel was not failing. Among the Greeks of the Roman Empire it was having large and increasing success. Strangers were taking the places which the prophets had expected would be occupied by their own Jewish countrymen. The church was rapidly becoming a Greek affair. The Gentiles had readily accepted the Messiah and made him their own. To a Christian thinker of Jewish training this only increased the difficulty of the problem. For how could the messiahship of Jesus be harmonized with the nation’s rejection of him? The prophets had associated the messianic deliverer with the redeemed nation, but the event of history had disappointed this hope. What did it mean? Were the prophets wrong, or was Jesus not the Messiah? Paul had seen the difficulty, and in writing to the Romans had proposed a solution. It was in effect that the Jews would ultimately turn to the gospel, and so all Israel would be saved. Yet since the writing of Romans the breach between Jews and Christians had widened, and Paul’s solution seemed more improbable than ever.

But an event had now happened which put a new aspect on the matter. Jerusalem had fallen. The downfall of the Jewish nation put into the hand of the evangelist the key to the mystery. Jesus was the Messiah of the prophets. He had offered the Kingdom of Heaven to the Jews, finally presenting himself as Messiah before the assembled nation in its capital at its great annual feast. Misled by its religious leaders, the nation had rejected him and driven him to his death. But in this rejection it had condemned itself. God had rejected Israel and the kingdom it had disowned had been given to the nations. In the fall of Jerusalem the evangelist saw the punishment of the Jewish nation for its rejection of the Messiah, and in this fact the proof that the gospel was intended for all nations.

The vehicle for this trenchant and timely philosophy of early Christian history was to be a book. It may be called the first book of Christian literature, for Paul’s writings, great as they are, are letters, not books, and Mark for all its value is hardly to be dignified as a book, in the sense of a conscious literary creation. This book was to be a life of the Messiah, which should articulate the gospel with the Jewish scriptures and legitimize the Christian movement. For this purpose a variety of materials lay ready to the evangelist’s hand. The narrative we know as Mark was familiar to him. He had also a collection of Jesus’ sayings which may have borne the name of the apostle Matthew, and one or two other primitive documents of mingled discourse and incident. The mere possession of these partial and unrelated writings was in itself a challenge to harmonize and even combine them, just as our Four Gospels have ever since their origin invited the harmonist and the biographer.

With a freedom and a skill that are alike surprising, the evangelist has wrought these materials into the first life of Christ. Perhaps it might better be called the first historic apology for universal Christianity. For it is a biography with a purpose. Jesus, though legally descended from Abraham through the royal line of David, is really begotten of the Holy Spirit, a symbol at once of his sinlessness and his sonship. Divinely acknowledged as Messiah at his baptism, and victorious over Satan in the temptation conflict, he declares his message in a series of great sermons, setting forth in each some notable aspect of the Kingdom of Heaven. In the first of these, the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus demands of those who would enter the new Kingdom a righteousness higher than that based by the scribes upon the Jewish law, and he follows this bold demand with a series of prophetic and messianic acts which show his right to make it. The Jewish leaders are unconvinced and quickly become hostile. His nearest disciples at length recognize in him the Messiah, and he welcomes this expression of their faith. Soon afterward they gain a new idea of the spiritual and prophetic character of his messiahship through the transfiguration experience, in which they see him associated with Moses and Elijah, the great prophetic molders of the Jewish religion.

Already foreseeing the fatal end of his work, Jesus yet continues to preach in Galilee, and at length sets out for Jerusalem to put the nation to the supreme test of accepting or refusing his message. They refuse it, and he predicts the nation’s doom in consequence. The Kingdom of God shall be taken away from them and given to a nation that brings forth the fruits thereof.. The last discourses denounce the wickedness and hypocrisy of the nation’s religious leaders, and pronounce the doom of the city and nation, to be followed shortly by the triumphant return of the Messiah in judgment. The Jewish leaders, offended at his claims of authority, cause his arrest and execution. Yet on the third day he reappears to some women of the disciples’ company, and afterward to the disciples on a mountain in Galilee, when he charges them to carry his gospel to all the nations.

Jesus had expressly confined his own work and that of his disciples, during his life, to the Jews, but since they had refused the gospel, his last command to his followers was to offer it henceforth to all mankind, and the curtain falls on the gospel of Matthew leaving Jesus an abiding presence with his disciples.

The Jewish war of 66-70 A.D., culminating in the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the last vestige of Jewish national life, must have brought what Jesus had said of these things powerfully before his followers’ minds, and shown them a welcome solution for the problem that perplexed them. Jesus had not come to destroy Law or prophets; his work and its fortunes stood in close relation with them. But as between the Jewish Messiah and the Jewish nation, the verdict of history had gone for the Messiah and against the nation, for the nation had already perished while he was coming to be worshipped all over the Greek world.

The obviousness of this solution to our minds is simply an evidence of the evangelist’s success in grappling with the problem, for we owe to him the solution that seems so simple and complete. Few any longer stop to think that a triumphant Messiah apart from a triumphant nation is hardly hinted at in the Old Testament. In this as in other respects the success of the book was early and lasting. As a life of the Messiah it swept aside all the partial documents its author had used as his sources. Most of them soon perished -- among them the Sayings attributed to Matthew the apostle -- probably because the evangelist had wrought into his book everything of evident worth that they contained. Even what we call the Gospel of Mark seems by the narrowest margin to have escaped destruction through neglect, and its escape is the more to be wondered at since practically all that it offered to the religious life of the early church had been taken up into this new life of Christ.

For the probably Jewish-Christian circle for which it was written the new book performed a threefold task. It solved, by its philosophy of Christian history, their most serious intellectual problem. It harmonized and unified their diverse materials relating to Jesus’ life and teaching. And it did these things with an intuitive sense for religious values that has given it its unique position ever since. Forty years after it was written it was quoted at Antioch as "the Gospel," being probably the first book to bear that name. Twenty years later, when the Ephesian leaders for some reason put together the Four Gospels, the first place among them was given to it, and its name was extended to the whole group. A new designation had therefore to be found for it, and it was distinguished as "according to Matthew," probably in recognition of that apostolic record on which it was believed to be based. Of its actual author, however, we know only that he was a Jewish Christian of insight and devotion, who preferred to remain unknown, and cared only to exalt the figure of Jesus, the Son of Man and the Son of God.