letters. But it is reasonable to suppose that John Mark, whose intimacy with the apostles we have seen, was the compiler and writer; not a mere amanuensis, but himself to some extent, especially during the last days in Jerusalem, an eyewitness.

NOTE. Peter's discourse, Acts.x, 34-43, was given to the centurion Cornelius and his household, being the first address Peter gave to a Gentile audience. This epitome of his gospel message is here given from "The Corrected English New Testament":

Ce The message which he (God) sent to the children of Israel, preaching good tidings of peace through Jesus Christ- he is Lord of all- - even that word, as ye yourselves know, was published throughout all Judea, beginning with Galilee after the baptism which John preached — concerning Jesus of Nazareth: how God anointed him with the Holy Spirit and with power, and how he went about doing good, and healing all who were oppressed by the devil; for God was with him. And we are witnesses of all things which, both in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem, he did; whom also they slew, hanging him on a tree. Him God raised on the third day; and showed him openly, not to all the people, but to witnesses chosen before by God, even to us, who ate and drank with him after he had risen from the dead. And he commanded us to preach to the people, and to testify that this is he who was appointed by God to be the judge of living and dead. To him all the prophets give witness that, through his name, whosoever believeth on him shall receive forgiveness of sins.”

The purpose of the book is simple and direct. Beginning not at the birth of Jesus, as a biography would, but at the preaching of John the Baptist when Jesus entered upon his ministry, its aim is to set forth "the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God" (Mark i, 1). Designed for Roman readers, to whom the idea of the Son of God with its connotation of dignity and power would be natural and congenial,1 the gospel concerns itself with a plain narration of the things Jesus did during his ministry—works which, without asserting divinity, yet evince the tremendous power inherent in One who acts in divine character. Of his teaching the gospel has 1 Cf. the words of Roman centurions, Luke vii, 6-8; Mark xv, 39.

not so full and systematic reports as have the others, nor is it concerned to compare his life minutely with prophetic prediction. It simply recounts, in a matter-of-fact way, what he did and the words immediately connected therewith, as “he went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil."

The story is told with simple directness and vigor, and with many such touches as only an eyewitness would give. Of all the synoptic gospels this gives most the impression of first-hand contact with the uncolored facts of Jesus' life. As a source-gospel it furnished, as has already been noted, the framework of order and sequence on which all the accounts of the ministry are based.

As the Gospel of Mark views Jesus as the Son of God, the Gospel of Matthew presents him no less distinctly as the 2. The Gospel Messiah, the Coming One foretold by the prophets of Matthew and expected as the King of Israel. The portrayal of him in that light would of course be designed primarily for Christians of Jewish antecedents. The theme that seems to have been in the writer's mind may be expressed as: The Messianic King and the Beginnings of his Reign.

The gospel accordingly begins with a genealogy (Matt. i, 1-17) giving Jesus' descent from David and Abraham; and the stories of his infancy narrate the royal homage paid him by Eastern Magi, and the rivalry of which King Herod was suspicious and jealous and which he sought to suppress by the child's death (Matt. ii). After Jesus' baptism, where John the Baptist was conscious of his majesty (Matt. iii, 14), his ordeal of temptation determined the manner of his kingdom as contrasted with the kingdoms of the earth (iv, 1–11). So throughout the gospel the subject matter is keyed to the note of royalty. Jesus is the Messiah, King of men, and his words are concerned with the principles of his kingdom, the kingdom of heaven.

This gospel, more didactic than Mark, concerns itself more with the teachings of Jesus than with the historic sequence of his ministry; which teachings it gathers into groups forming several somewhat extended discourses, with enough narrative material between to give them a natural setting and coördination. The most important of these discourses is the so-called Sermon on the Mount (chaps. v-vii), which, though its sections may have been given at different times, is so related as to embody a kind of charter or manifesto of the kingdom of heaven and to reveal the relation of this new charter to the old law.

NOTE. On the theory that the discourses of Jesus form the main scheme of Matthew's gospel, while the incidents are connective and ancillary, the gospel may be regarded as having for substance five didactic groups or discourses:

1. The charter or principle of the kingdom, chaps. v-vii.

2. The charge to the apostles who have the kingdom to maintain, chap. x.

3. The definition of the kingdom in parabolic teaching, chap. xiii. 4. The internal relations of the kingdom and its spirit, chap. xviii. 5. The culmination of the kingdom and the eternal test of citizenship therein, chaps. xxiv, xxv.

Another striking characteristic of this gospel is its frequent citation of Old Testament prophecies. These citations differ much in didactic value. Some of them betoken a large and liberal sense of prophetic meaning and scope (for example, ii, 6; iv, 15; xii, 18-21); others are more far-fetched, as if the fulfillment of prophecy meant verifying coincidences of prediction and event (for example, ii, 18, 23). A kind of middle sense of values may be seen in i, 23; xxi, 5. This variety, whether so intended or not, has the effect of finding and satisfying different grades of mind, the unlearned and literal as well as the scholarly and poetic. To all classes the writer would certainly show that Jesus was indeed the Messianic king who, though so different from anticipation, yet fulfilled all reasonable expectations and gave them reality.

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3. The Gospel of Luke

Luke, who was the author both of this gospel and of the Acts of the Apostles, seems to have designed the two as continuous with each other. In the preface to the Acts (Acts i, 1-5) he speaks of the gospel as a "treatise. . . concerning all that Jesus began both to do and to teach, until the day in which he was received up." The two histories, then, he regarded as two stages in an essentially continuous ministry; namely, first, as conducted personally in the body and, secondly, as conducted through the apostles by his directing and supporting spirit.

If the first two gospels are concerned with the divine aspects of Jesus' personality, as Son of God (Mark) and as Messiah (Matthew), Luke may be called more distinctively the Gospel of the Son of Man. It is especially in Jesus' sweet and strong humanity, his helpful fellowship with all, that Luke regards him. The Lukan accounts of the infancy and childhood portray him as a very human child, yet filled with wisdom and piety; and his descent is traced back not to David or Abraham but to Adam, the father of humanity. It is Luke, as we have noted, who narrates how Jesus took upon himself the ministry of healing and emancipation prophesied in the Second Isaiah (Luke iv, 16–22). His gospel preserves for us also many instances of Jesus' kindness and good will not to the Jewish nation alone or to disciples but to man as man. He is indeed the friend of publicans and sinners and risks odium thereby (cf. xv, I, 2; xix, 7); yet while in his parable he satirizes the self-righteousness of the Pharisee (xviii, 9-13), he does not hesitate to eat with Pharisees, even while in their presence he accepts the homage of an outcast woman. The parables of the Lost Son (xv, 11-32) and of the Good Samaritan (x, 30-35), both peculiar to Luke, give a fair keynote of the broad humanity of the gospel; such a spirit as would become one who, himself a Gentile Christian, was an intimate companion of Paul, the great apostle to the Gentiles.

Luke writes more like a historian than do the other Evangelists giving the narrative not in mere annalistic sequence like Mark, nor in didactic order like Matthew, but with the causes and motives that give the events a historic relation and coherence. He is also the master of a more finished literary style. As he himself was not an eyewitness of any of Jesus' life, nor a native of Palestine, he shows a certain detachment from the inherited ideas and prejudices of the Jews, which qualifies him all the better to weigh and verify his historical material and put it in a form that readers of all nations can appropriate.

NOTE. The fourth gospel, the profoundest account of Jesus' personality and work, comes up more fitly, perhaps, in the next chapter, The Literature of Values (see p. 645). This, not because it is untrue to fact, or to eyewitness testimony, but because it was written at a time so much later that the facts of Jesus' personality had come to be understood in their larger and divine values. It is written, in other words, not with a merely historical but with a predominantly interpretative purpose (see John xx, 31).

It was late in the first century before the narrative gospels, as completed, became the literary basis for the educaDuring the tion of the growing church. We are to note, Transition however, that it was not because the facts of Jesus' life were remote or had not come to light that the systematic record of them was so long delayed. The exact opposite is closer to the truth. It was because they were so near, because they were a present luminous reality instead of a past and fading history, that the century waited so long for a written gospel. Meanwhile, through the companionship and instruction of apostles who had seen and heard, through apostolic letters sent to the churches and circulated from community to community, and through the felt impulsion and power of the spirit of Christ, the faith of the early Christians was kept living and operative, forming an ecclesia, a body of believers with common motives and ideals separate