spels side
by side in its Canon, and has continued to use them together for
centuries, because it has found in them a religiously harmonious
portrait of its Lord. This is also true of the portraits of Jesus to be
found in the _Acts_ and the epistles. The Christ of the entire New
Testament makes upon us _a consistent religious impression_; and the
unity of His significance for faith is all the more noteworthy because
of the different forms of thought in which the various writers picture
Him. Behind the primitive Church stands an historic Figure who so
stamped the impress of His personality upon believing spirits, that,
amid puzzling discrepancies of historical detail and much variety of
theological interpretation, a single religious image of Him remains. We,
whose aim is not primarily to reconstruct the figure of Jesus for
purposes of scientific history, but to arrive at an intelligent
conviction of His spiritual worth, are entirely satisfied with a
portrait which correctly represents the religious impression of the
historic Jesus.

Two diametrically opposed classes of scholars have denied that in the
Christ of the gospels we possess such a trustworthy report. A very few
have held that the evangelists do not record an historic life at all,
but describe a Saviour-God who existed in the faith of the Church of the
First Century. The allusions, however, in the letters of Paul alone to
definite historical associations connected with Jesus are sufficient to
confute this view. There undoubtedly was a Jesus of Nazareth. Moreover,
the divine redeemers of mythology, of whom this theory makes so much,
are most unlike the Jesus of the gospels in moral character and
religious power; and the old argument is still pertinent that it would
have required a Jesus to have imagined the Jesus of the evangelists'
story.

A much larger number of scholars, determined beforehand by their
philosophic views to reject all elements in the records which transcend
usual human experience, have for several generations sought to
reconstruct the figure of Jesus on an entirely naturalistic basis.
Instead of the Jesus of the gospels, they give us, as the actual Man,
Jesus the Sage, or the Visionary, or the Prophet, or the Philanthropist,
who, they think, was subsequently deified by His followers. Such
reconstructions handle the sources arbitrarily, eliminating from even
the earliest of them that which clashes with their preconceptions. They
fail to do jus