and led away a party of deluded followers. This is the picture which his enemies among the Jews have left.

Come now to the two Jews that we should suppose would have something to say about Jesus. Philo was born about twenty years before him. He was the most celebrated of all the Jewish philosophers, and spent his life at the centre of learning at that time, in Alexandria. He devoted his years to the development of the philosophical ideas of his age, trying to reconcile between the Old Testament and the Platonism of his time. We should have supposed that Jesus and a life like his would have attracted the notice of Philo. And yet, though his life covered the whole period of the existence of both John the Baptist and Jesus, there is no single word from beginning to end in all his writings that would lead us to suppose that he ever heard of the existence of either. Josephus, the great Jewish historian, was born about two years after the crucifixion. He lived until after the destruction of Jerusalem, and wrote a history of the Jews elaborately from first to last. In his works, as they have come down to us, there are only two passages that even pretend to refer to Jesus. One of these is certainly an interpolation, and the other one has almost as certainly been tampered with and changed; so that, practically, Josephus does nothing more than merely recognize the existence of a man named Jesus.

Let us come now still closer, toward the inner circle, to the age of the post-Apostolic traditions, and what do we find here? We discover a volume called the Apocryphal New Testament,- a collection of writings that sprung up like a rank growth of weeds in the later ages of the Apostolic tradition. These books are worthy of our attention only as illustrating what sort of stories common people at that time were capable of accepting as true,― weird, wild, fanciful,

grotesque, extravagant. For example, they tell us a story of Jesus: of how, when a young man, he worked as a carpenter with his father. Joseph had manufactured a throne for the king; and, the throne being too small to fit into the place designed for it, Jesus grasps it with his hands, and stretches it to the proper dimensions. They tell us another story of how Jesus as a little boy becomes angry with one of his playmates, and strikes him dead. Another story still. Playing one day with the other boys in the streets of Nazareth, they were making little sparrows and birds out of clay; and while they were discussing what they would do with them, Jesus suddenly claps his hands, and the birds he had made fly away in the air. I refer to these things as simply illustrating the kind of stories that would spring up in an age like this, credulous, superstitious, ready for any wonder, questioning nothing, but believing things perhaps all the more because they were strange and unheard of.

Take one step further up the ages and nearer to Jesus. We come to the broken fragments of traditions and gospels that now no longer exist. We find, for example, such stories as this: that, during the time when Jesus was baptized, the Jordan itself was on fire; this story evidently springing out of the saying that Jesus was to baptize "with the Holy Ghost and with fire." We find also Jesus himself represented as saying that the Holy Ghost personified was his mother,not Mary, but the Holy Ghost his mother, and this mother taking him by a single hair of his head, and carrying him miraculously through the air, and setting him on the summit of Mount Tabor. I speak of this again, simply to show the stories then in circulation, and how readily all sorts of wondrous things could gain currency and get written down in the books of the time.

Leaving these, let us step into the New Testament days,

and see what we find there. I have now given you, so far as I know, specimens of every kind of reference to Jesus outside of the New Testament that we have in the ancient world. In the New Testament itself, then, what do we find? I will speak first of Paul; and yet by doing so I reverse the natural order of time that I have been following, for Paul is the very earliest witness we have for Jesus in the New Testament. His Epistles were written years and years before the Gospels; so that, if you want to find that part of the New Testament which comes nearest to Jesus, you must not go to the Gospels, but read the Epistles of Paul,-the first to the Thessalonians, the two to the Corinthians, that to the Galatians and the one to the Romans. What do we find here? Strange as it may seem to us, it is yet true that we really find nothing peculiar as bearing on the personal history of Jesus. That is, Jesus, in the mind of Paul, seems to have been little else than an ideal. Paul appears to care almost nothing for the human life and the human history of Jesus. He tells us nothing about him except that he describes the supper. We only find that he saw Jesus in a vision years after the crucifixion. How much does this mean? Some one has said that, when a man says he has seen God in a dream, all that it can rationally mean is that he has dreamed that he saw God. When Paul tells us that he saw Jesus in a vision, and this after Jesus was dead and had been dead for years, of course we cannot take it as testimony in the same sense in which we would if Paul had been acquainted with Jesus in his earthly ordinary life, and had told us where he lived, how he lived, what he said, where he went, and what he did.

Leaving then the testimony of Paul, we come to the Gos pels. And this of course is the most important part of it all. And I wish to be just as clear and simple as I can in telling you how the Gospels have come into our hands, how

they grew up, and what is the nature of their authority. You must bear in mind first, then, that Jesus himself has left in the world not one word of his own composition. Neither is there any record of his ever having commissioned or asked any one else to write anything about him. Jesus lived and died, and there was nothing written to be a record of his wonderful life. And years passed away before there was anything; for at the first, as we see on the surface of the New Testament and all through, the disciples expected Jesus to return in the clouds almost any day, any week, any year. Why, then, should they sit down and write records of him? But the years passed away, and there was no “sign of the Son of Man" in the heavens; and then the disciples began to think of keeping a record of that wondrous life that they had known and had learned so to love and revere. And the first thing that came into existence were brief notes, memorabilia, written by this one and that; one writing down something about this part of his life, another about that part. One perhaps remembered and wrote down a fragment of the Sermon on the Mount; another, the words of his prayer; another, something else that he said; this one remembering a parable, and another some striking sententious utterance,— the rebuke of the Pharisees perhaps. And by and by these drifted naturally together, and gave us the nucleus of our present records of Jesus. The first Gospel that came into its present shape was that of Mark. And you will notice one strange thing about that. There is no account in it at all of any miraculous birth. The last part of the last chapter is the addition of a later hand; so that in the genuine Mark, the oldest Gospel we have, there is also no account of any bodily resurrection or ascension. All these wonders preceding and following the life are absent in the oldest traditions. The next Gospel of our present four to make its appearance

is that of Matthew. Here we find the wonders occurring upon the birth of Jesus, and an account of his resurrection. After that comes Luke. And the marvels attending both the advent and the departure have wonderfully increased and grown, until in Luke we have the full-grown story of the annunciation, the appearance of the angels, the song in heaven, the wise men, the star,— all the miraculous things said to have preceded his coming; and then an elaborate record of his walks and talks with his disciples after the resurrection, and of the ascent into heaven. These Gospels were brought together in their present shape by unknown authors as late as eighty or one hundred years after the birth of Jesus. Thirty or fifty years later still came the Gospel of John,-not so much a story of the life of Jesus as a theological treatise; a wonderful poem, setting forth a spiritualized, ideal conception of him who had grown to be no longer Jesus of Nazareth, but the eternal Word of the eternal God.

These four Gospels are by no means the only ones that had been written. There are many traces of others, and Luke himself refers to "many" who had been engaged in the work of gospel-making. But about 200 A.D. we find only our four received as authority. And so fixed had the idea of this number become, that Irenæus thinks it impossible that they should be either more or less. The reasons he gives for this opinion are indeed curious enough, and throw strong light on the credulous and fanciful character of the age. He thinks that, as there are four winds and four quarters of the heavens, and as the cherubim were quadriform, so of necessity the number of Gospels must be four.

The Gospels, then, as we have them, you must think of not as composed by the men whose names are attached to them, but as gradual growths, taking their shape as the result of the