Chapter III: The Christianity of Christ

It is hardly necessary to say that simply from the statements of the gospels we cannot construct an historical life of Christ. Strauss and Baur have finally determined the question of their historical value. In the first three, it is true, after making allowance for the vast growth of legend overspreading them, useful materials can still be found; but even these can be depended on only so far as probability is distinctly in their favour. The last is simply a philosophical romance, with the theology of the second century as its basis. We see the figure of Christ through a mist of legend, and its real outlines are hopelessly lost. Characters like the hero of M. Renan’s historical novel are merely the projections of imagination, coloured undisguisedly by the medium through which they are viewed. Only by study of the religion he founded can trustworthy knowledge of Christ be obtained.

But in this way, as far as general results are concerned, we can arrive at almost certain knowledge. We can be sure, for instance, that the exceptional goodness of Christ was no figment of the gospels. The new morality which Christianity introduced into the world of practice, the morality which makes inward purity a test of virtue rather than outward actions, must have been derived from him. Its origin must have been in personal influence, and Christ’s alone could have permanently stamped it on Christianity. And this, of course, renders it likely that sayings of striking moral beauty attributed to him in the gospels, such as “Love your enemies,” “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” and the perfect one not in the gospels, “It is more blessed to give than to receive,” were in substance actually uttered by him, for they are in harmony with the character of exceptional goodness which he must have possessed. So far, at least, we can have a sure knowledge of Christ which entitles him to our willing reverence.

Not only is it necessary to distrust the positive evidence of the gospels, but even negatively their evidence cannot wholly be allowed. They may suppress what is true as well as assert what is false. For instance, they represent Christ as obtaining great success immediately after his entrance on his ministry. Now nothing could be more unlikely than this. He could not have been accepted as the Messiah by even a small number of disciples without a long probation previously, a period of struggle and unsuccess. In the gospels themselves the explanation of this omission is suggested, when Christ is said to have been thirty years old at the time he began to preach. At about this age, after a youth of conflict and uncertainty, he probably was first recognized as the Messiah. But naturally those who knew him only as the Messiah could not dream of a period when none regarded him as such. Hence the account in the gospels, the years of development and failure having passed out of remembrance.

The true historical evidence on which to found a life of Christ consists of the statements of the synoptical gospels, tested and interpreted by probability. It is obvious that in this way only knowledge of the broadest and most general nature can be obtained. If special circumstances of Christ’s life, as reported in the gospels, are accepted according as they appear to be probable, the result naturally varies with the character of the student. In these cases probability, in the scientific sense, does not exist. And thus far the greater part of the statements of the gospels are properly outside the region of historical investigation. Some are so distinctly improbable that we can pronounce them inaccurate; some are so distinctly probable that we can pronounce them accurate; but the vast majority of them, the test of probability being absent, cannot be pronounced either accurate or inaccurate; we simply cannot tell.

In endeavouring to determine the nature of the personal character and religious ideas of Christ, it is on this general kind of probability that I chiefly rely, appealing to the gospels to corroborate it more than to it to corroborate the gospels. Such probability in certain cases is the surest kind of historical evidence, and may safely be depended on, even in the absence of written confirmation.

That Christ stood exceptionally high in moral development, was exceptionally good, can be declared, as we have seen, with practical certainty. The evidence of the gospels and the evidence of probability are here in thorough harmony, and the fact has never been disputed. The evidence of the gospels and the evidence of probability equally agree in declaring that Christ was not exempt from the theological illusions of his age, but their declaration is called in question by some. As this point is of vital importance to our subject, we must now carefully consider it.

Mr. Matthew Arnold has given the clearest expression to the belief that the religion of Christ was wholly undogmatic in character. The dogmatic assertions attributed to Christ in the gospels, were, according to him, used only in a mystical sense which the grosser-minded disciples misunderstood. When Christ, for instance, spoke of his resurrection, he meant that his moral system would triumph after his death; but his disciples understood his words in a personal sense. Christ, Mr. Arnold says, spoke “over the heads of his followers,” and, in consequence, they failed to understand him, and ascribed their own ideas to him. The evidence on which Mr. Arnold founds his theory is extremely slight; in fact, he practically rests it on the few stories in the gospels where Christ uses figurative language, which his disciples misunderstand, as in the case of his injunctions respecting the “leaven of the Pharisees.” Now figurative language of this sort is quite distinct from the mystical language Mr. Arnold attributes to him, Hebrew literature being full of the former and absolutely empty of the latter, and the only resemblance between them is that they can both be misunderstood. Mr. Arnold, indeed, by an elaborate criticism of the last gospel, makes it to support his theory, its mysticism readily allowing this to be done; but the fourth gospel has no historical value. The real basis of the theory is the reverence which all men feel for Christ, which renders it difficult for them to believe that he held opinions differing from their own, and which also disposes them to imagine that a vast distinction separated him from those whom he addressed.

The strongest argument in favour of the theory is drawn from the unquestionable fact of the greatness of Christ. His moral superiority cannot be disputed, and the success of his system shows that he must have possessed unique personal power. But does his moral superiority, or his possession of wonderful personal power, really prove that he was free from theological illusion? It is obvious to every one that the most exalted goodness may be united with the most implicit belief in the dogmas of supernatural religion. It is nearly as obvious that extreme fascination of character, far from indicating that one who possesses it is superior to ordinary illusions, is a clear presumption that he is peculiarly under their control. The popular power which Christ must have exercised is strong evidence that he shared the popular beliefs. The essence of popularity is sympathy; the popular man must be in sympathy with the people he meets, and must be ruled by the same ideas, whether they happen to be right or wrong. Christ’s popularity, his influence over his simple Jewish followers, is a fair proof that he was subject to their religious illusions, that no difference of deep insight separated him from them. People always are irritated by hearing what they do not understand. Had Christ been in the habit of speaking over the heads of his disciples, not many would have remained with him; he might thus have acquired a reputation as a philosopher, but he certainly would not have founded a Church.

In considering this question, we must keep the facts of experience steadily before us. All who have ever been widely loved and greatly popular among average men have had characters remarkable for moral beauty, and have also been peculiarly steeped in religious illusions. St. Francis of Assisi and St. Teresa resembled Christ in spiritual goodness and in the power of fascinating others, and they held the crudest religious ideas of their times. In our own days, men who are justly called heroes, men like Stonewall Jackson and General Gordon, who win the love and reverence of all who come near them, are sure to believe in the most absurd dogmas. Stonewall Jackson feared that he would lose a battle if he fought it with powder obtained by labouring on Sunday, and General Gordon believed an island in the Pacific to be the private residence of the devil. Christ’s fascination of character is additional evidence of his supreme goodness, but it is far from proving that he rose above the religious ideas of the crowd.

The reverence we feel for Christ need not in the least be impaired by recognizing that he was subject to the illusions of dogmatic religion. Of his moral superiority we have certain evidence; and this, and not wisdom, is the true object of reverence. Had he been profoundly wise, seeing with perfect clearness through the deluding phantasms of life, he could not have been so good. To be supremely good, to rise far above the standard of negative morality, and to be inspired by a passionate devotion to others which leaves no room for a thought of self, is not compatible with the colder temperament which examines the foundations of belief. Wise men may die for a just cause, but they are never willing martyrs; they lack not merely the fanaticism, but the power of forming the exaggerated estimate of the value of the sacrifice, which martyrdom requires. But we never hesitate in choosing between calm wisdom and pure enthusiasm as objects of our praise. And in the same way, Christ’s belief in much that we think unfounded should be no hindrance to our reverent admiration of him; we ought rather to recognize that it is the inevitable accompaniment of such greatness as his. Only a noble fanaticism, which leaves no guard against error, could have inspired his life and secured his success.

We may conclude, then, that Christ accepted the common religious ideas of his time, that he believed in the personal God to whom the prophets addressed their prayers and complaints, and in the resurrection of the dead. And now, after this unavoidable digression, we will take up our subject at the point where we left it at the close of the last chapter. In referring to the gospels, I shall always mean the synoptical exclusively, the last being put aside as hopelessly unhistorical.

At the time of Christ’s birth the expectation of the Messiah was rooted more strongly than ever in the minds of the Jewish people. Nothing but the Messiah seemed able to save them from the final loss of the remains of their national independence at the hands of the irresistible power of Rome. For in Rome they saw, not a mere conqueror exacting tribute from subject peoples, but an empire that steadily absorbed into its own vast mass all the nationalities of the civilized world. To the Jews, who valued their nationality above all things, this fact must have appeared a ground for absolute despair. The lower orders might be roused to attempts at passionate resistance, but the higher classes must have seen the hopelessness of a struggle against the Roman power, and must have been impelled to gloomier forebodings by the fear that at any moment the end might be precipitated by the unreasoning fanaticism of their ignorant countrymen.[52] The religion of the Jews, as Professor Kuenen has pointed out,[53] tended to encourage these feelings. Pride in their religion stimulated their patriotism, and made it harder for them to submit to the conditions of Roman rule. Thus the circumstances of the time would heighten the ordinary Messianic hopes, and make the people look more for the national saviour. The general unrest, too, would deepen the sense of sin. Wandering preachers of the class of John the Baptist, denouncing the sins of the people, and asserting that their wickedness was bringing on them the threatened calamity, and calling for repentance, in order that the Messiah might be sent to deliver them, such a time would be sure to produce.

In the midst of these Messianic expectations Christ grew up. The agitation and unrest of the period must have powerfully stimulated a nature so impressible in its spiritual beauty. Exceptionally good men are always keenly responsive to the religious influences around them, so Christ must have passed his youth in a world of Messianic dreams. The sacred literature of his race was familiar to every Jew; and the spiritual predictions of the prophets, the vision of an Israel reconciled to God, must early have enthralled his fancy. National fanaticism could not have found a place in his character. In both Messianic ideals, as we saw in the last chapter, the distinction between Jew and Gentile was made to contribute either to the spiritual or to the material glory of Israel. For the glory of Israel Christ could not have cared; putting aside national distinctions, he must have lived only for the welfare of man and for the glory of God.

From the beginning, his Messianic desires must have been for the reconciliation of God and man by the conquest of human sinfulness. As he watched the ceremonialism which was then the most distinctive feature of the Jewish religion, he must have echoed the burning words in which the prophets proclaimed righteousness to be alone acceptable to God, and must have denounced all forms that tended to obscure this truth. His sympathy would be sure to be with those whom the Pharisaic rigidity of that ceremonialism shut out and degraded by exclusion, “the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” The “inwardness” of Christ, the stress he laid on the purity of the heart, in the first instance was probably the result of a reaction against the formalism of his age, with its minutely defined outward morality of law. To restore primitive truths, and to make goodness the essence of religion, must have always been his aim.

Judging simply from probability, we should say that there were likely to be three clearly marked periods in the life of Christ. In early manhood his longing for the Messianic times would naturally express itself in the same form in which the longing of so many of his countrymen was expressed—in the call to repentance. The wickedness of the people being regarded as the cause of God’s anger, the best way to remove his anger and, consequently, to obtain the Messiah, was to turn the people from their sins, Christ’s own personal hatred of sin also, of course, urging him in this direction. Thus at first probably he was simply a preacher like John the Baptist, not claiming to be the Messiah, but a forerunner of the Messiah, exhorting the people to repent, and promising them that the Messiah would come as soon as they had reconciled themselves to God. Gradually, while engaged in this work, as he reached maturity and his powers grew to their full development, and as with them came the consciousness of his own greatness, the conviction would force itself on him that he was himself the promised Messiah, to be revealed as such by succeeding in his labour, by converting the people and banishing sin from Israel. This second period would grow naturally out of the first. Compared with the other preachers of repentance, he must have seemed able to obtain success; his preaching, of course, would be far more effective than theirs. Such being the case, hope—and natures like his are always intensely hopeful—would lead him to imagine himself completely successful, to believe that at his call all Jews would turn with pure hearts to God. This result would be sufficient glory for the Messiah; in the dreams of the prophets it had been the chief feature of the Messianic times. During this period he would be uniformly gentle, without bitterness against any class, would speak of coming “to call not the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” Then as slowly but surely it became evident that his task was impossible, that the Jews in general cared nothing for his teaching and despised his pretensions, he would enter on a third period, with the end not far off, in which, still firmly holding himself to be the Messiah, he would appear as the leader of a new departure like Moses, and, applying to himself the spiritual ideal of the second Isaiah, would open his system to the Gentiles, the obstinate and unrepentant Jews being left to perish in their sins. During this period he would become a bitter assailant of those who refused to accept him; he would denounce the scribes and Pharisees, and, like the prophets, foretell destruction for Jerusalem, and thus finally gain for himself the death of the cross.

Of course no evidence for the first of these three periods can be derived from the gospels. For reasons already mentioned, when Christ was once recognized as the Messiah all the previous part of his life must have passed into oblivion. But in the gospels the second and third periods are clearly indicated; in fact, by referring to them we explain most of the contradictions in the sayings ascribed to Christ. As probability and tradition are so strongly in favour of them, we may assume the existence of at least these periods to be proved.

The greater part of Christ’s active life probably belonged to the second period. Declaring that the kingdom of heaven had come, and exhorting to righteousness as the condition of sharing in its blessedness, he wandered through the country districts of Galilee and Judæa. To the country he would naturally keep, as there, where the people were less fiercely national and fanatical, his purer conception of the Messiah would more readily find acceptance. In the towns, and especially in Jerusalem, only the national type of Messiah would be recognized; and so the gospels are probably correct in stating that he came first to Jerusalem in the closing days of his life. The term “Son of man,” which in the gospels is his favourite name for himself, was, it is likely, the Messianic title he claimed, as it marks the recognition of humanity alone by the minister of God. “Son of David” was the accepted title of the national Messiah, and though his followers, we may be sure, often applied it to him, he would rather shrink from it himself. He must have gained many adherents during this period; in the unrest of the age men would easily yield to the fascination of his character, its gentleness and hopefulness being still unspoiled by failure.

As he extended the area of his labours and began to come in contact with the people of the towns, he would find himself in face of serious opposition. Here he would meet, not simple rustics who cared little about ritual and politics, but legalists and nationalists prompt to condemn him as irreligious and unpatriotic. The credulity of his country disciples would be challenged and his Messianic claims subjected to a hostile scrutiny. The tendency to dwell on the supernatural inseparable from such a character as his would be in sharp contrast to the spirit of worldliness he would encounter. Some Sadducees even would be likely to confront him, requiring proof of the postulates of his teaching, and infecting others with their scepticism.

Then would begin a time of struggle and irritation. All who looked for the national Messiah would be enemies of Christ. They would be eager upholders of the formal and exclusive elements of Judaism, and his disregard of these would excite their bitter opposition. If he neglected traditional ceremonies or associated with the outcasts of formalism, he would be denounced as a breaker of the law, and the friend of publicans and sinners. Gradually this opposition would produce its effect. As the minor customs of the law were more and more put before him as matters of sole importance, he would be forced into hostility against them; as the outcries of the legalists grew stronger, the whole system of legalism would become more discredited with him. But, above all, he would lose his expectation of converting Israel. When he realized by experience the strength of the obstacles to his ideal, he would be compelled to reconsider his whole position as Messiah.

The effect of this would be to drive him strongly towards supernaturalism. From the beginning he must have been disposed to put aside the ordinary conditions of life. The exaggerated and unworkable morality of the gospels is probably an accurate representation of his teaching. With his attention fixed on the spiritual glories of the Messianic age, the worldly arrangements around him must have seemed too transient to be worthy of attention. This feature of his character would now enable him to meet the difficulty of his position. He would turn from earth to heaven. Believing in the resurrection of the dead, he would use it to justify his claim to be the Messiah. Rejected by the greater part of his countrymen, no demonstration of his power on earth could be pointed to, but he still could proclaim for himself the future glory of a second coming in the clouds of heaven.

Opposition, of course, would only strengthen his belief in himself. But this belief required that he should realize the glorious ideal of the prophets. If he could not realize it during his earthly life, he would have to realize it after his death. The prophecy in the book of Daniel of one like a son of man coming with the clouds of heaven, and having everlasting dominion over all the world,[54] would now appear to him to be a manifest reference to himself. Connecting it with the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, the chapter easily admitting of an erroneous interpretation in a personal sense, he would readily form a new conception of his mission. The failure to convert Israel would seem part of his true glory as the suffering Messiah. Despised and rejected of men, he would only be like all God’s envoys to the Jews; his rejection would fill up the measure of Israel’s guilt; and after it the wicked would finally be swept away, and he himself, as Messiah, proved by his constancy under persecution and suffering, would judge those who had rejected him, and establish his everlasting kingdom.[55]

The necessity of his own martyrdom would soon become part of his belief. In the state in which Judæa was then, the forces tending in this direction were sufficiently obvious. Only an increase of the opposition he had already encountered, such as would be produced by his coming into collision with the fanatical orthodoxy of Jerusalem, was needed to secure his death as a criminal. There must have been many reasons to make him welcome a speedy death. M. Renan is probably right in conjecturing that Christ began to lose ground during the later days of his life, the irritability produced by constant controversy weakening the personal charm of his character. Death would seem the only remedy for this. The fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, which Mr. Arnold supposes to have been always present to Christ’s mind as the embodiment of his Messianic ideal, is likely to have been thus before him in this closing period. There death is represented as crowning the afflictions of the righteous servant of Jahveh, and a glorious triumph is promised as its result. Christ would of course apply the passage to himself, and would look forward to his death as the condition necessarily preceding his Messianic glory. Personal shrinking from pain would count for nothing with him. If he believed himself to be the divinely appointed Messiah, the central figure of all the world’s history, he could not have had one feeling that was not subservient to his mission.

As soon as this conception of his Messiahship was developed in his thoughts, he would at once adopt in its fulness the spiritual Messianic ideal. Rejected by the vast majority of the Jews—rejected, moreover, because he was not the national Messiah, he would be irresistibly impelled to proclaim himself the spiritual Messiah, in whose eyes no distinctions of race separated men from God. Failing with the Jews, there was the more need that he should turn to the Gentiles; defeated by Jewish nationalism, Jewish nationalism must have become hateful to him. He would look now for the establishment of a spiritual Israel, formed of all mankind reconciled to God and delivered from sin. From this time, though he probably did not preach to them himself, he must have included the Gentiles in his system.[56]

He would, of course, impress this new ideal on his disciples as strongly as he could. It was now necessary that his system should be preached by them after his death, so that when he came again in the clouds of heaven he might find faithful adherents to share in the glories of his reign. He would strive to prepare his disciples for his death, to prevent them from being disheartened by it, and in doing so he would promise them his return in power. Thus he would himself originate the dogma of his second advent, which was the main support of the early Christian Church. It would not be very difficult to induce his disciples to accept the doctrine. They believed in the resurrection of the dead, and he would merely have to fix in their minds a conviction that his resurrection would be immediate; that he, as Messiah, would rise at once to heaven after his death, thence to return with unlimited powers to punish and reward. To get the first part of the doctrine into their heads may not have been easy; they would not readily understand that their lord was to die still publicly unrecognized, with no proclamation of his greatness; but once they did understand this, his promised return in glory would seem best to explain it, and would suit it to their ambitious dreams. Probably they never fully understood this portion of his teaching until after his death, when, of course, there would be every inducement to accept it.

It is unnecessary to state how strongly the evidence of the gospels supports this conclusion. Again and again in them Christ appears preparing his disciples for his death, and promising his return afterwards in heavenly glory. But the evidence of probability would be sufficient to establish it. It solves the great problem in the history of Christianity; it explains the passage of Christianity through the perilous period immediately after its founder’s death.

Being thus forced to justify himself by appealing to the supernatural elements of Judaism, supernatural conditions would necessarily assume more importance in his eyes. The post-prophetic additions to Judaism mentioned in the last chapter had by this time developed a complete system of salvation and damnation. Heaven and hell were now fully established in the creed of the Jew, heaven being appointed for himself and hell for the Gentile. Christ would naturally accentuate this part of his religion, and adopt the same spirit of exclusiveness. Heaven would be for those who accepted, hell for those who rejected the Messiah. Probably he now began to lay special stress on the salvation of the soul in his preaching. And thus we can understand how Christianity came to possess in a heightened form the more Pagan features of Judaism.

The same circumstances which were leading Christ to exaggerate the portions of Judaism most favourable to general proselytism, would also cause him to lay aside the portions of Judaism most unfavourable to it. His opposition to the legal and ceremonial elements of Judaism would now be greatly increased. His worst enemies, of course, were those who attached most importance to these, and in their attacks on him formalism must have supplied them with their most effective weapons. This would lead him in time to reject formalism completely. In doing so, he was, as we saw in the last chapter, strictly fulfilling the spiritual Messianic ideal. To what extent he made the renunciation of the law an actual part of his system we cannot tell, but we may be sure it was to a larger extent than his disciples were ready to accept. The forms of Judaism, at least, could not have been regarded by him as necessary elements of his religion. He was forced to make his system a movement out of orthodox Judaism, and he could not have cared to encumber his new religion with the worn-out forms of the old.

The account in the gospels of the closing incidents of Christ’s life is probably in the main strictly correct. Sooner or later he was sure to go to Jerusalem. The need to justify his system by preaching it in the capital, and the wish to found it securely by his death under persecution, would alike impel him in this direction. And he would naturally choose one of the great feasts as the occasion for his visit to the city. Though the forms of Judaism had now probably ceased to be an essential portion of his religion, there is no reason to suppose that he personally objected to observing the more important of them. Coming to Jerusalem to keep the passover, he would find it crowded with strangers; practically the whole Jewish world would be concentrated there; and thus he would obtain the widest possible publicity, both for his preaching and his martyrdom. That the latter would necessarily follow the former he must have clearly seen. In the capital of Judaism, at a time when a great religious festival excited the fanaticism of the people to the highest pitch, to preach a religion that involved the overthrow of legalism and the equality of Jew and Gentile in the sight of God, and to do this while claiming to fulfil the popular expectations, obviously meant a speedy extinction. So we may conclude that Christ came to Jerusalem at the time of the passover, probably accompanied by many of his country adherents who were also going to the feast, and that there by his preaching he provoked against himself the fanaticism of the priests and the populace, and was put to death as an offender against the law. Among the incidents related as occurring now, is one that established a great dogma.

In the description which the gospels give of the institution of the Lord’s supper, we have statements which are corroborated by an important external authority. The first epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians is unquestionably genuine, and accordingly it ranks as one of the earliest documents of the New Testament. In it Christ, on the occasion of his passover feast in Jerusalem, is said to have broken bread and distributed it among his disciples, and to have poured out wine and given it to them, asserting that the bread was his body and the wine his blood, and ordering them to continue the practice as a memorial of him. Taking this passage in conjunction with the corresponding passages of the gospels, we have in all four statements so much distinctly expressed; while equally in all four it is either expressed or clearly implied that this distribution of his body and blood meant that his body was broken and his blood shed for the remission of sins; the only variation in the passages being the omission by the first two gospels of the injunction to repeat the ceremony. Putting this point aside for the moment, we have in the rest of the description an account in which the three gospels agree, and in which they are corroborated by a trustworthy external authority. Unless probability is decidedly against it, this concurrence of evidence is sufficient to establish its truth.[57]

The account, however, has probability distinctly in its favour. If Christ was alive on the day of the passover—and there is every reason to suppose that the gospels are correct when they assert that he was—he would naturally keep the passover supper with his disciples, as otherwise his presence in Jerusalem would be inexplicable. But keeping the passover, with the expectation of his immediate death vividly before him, the celebration must have seemed to him to possess a strange significance. He believed that the first passover feast had been celebrated in the time of Moses, that the blood of the victim sprinkled on their doorways had preserved the Israelites from harm on the eve of their departure from Egypt, and that this had been the earliest rite of the Jewish law. Now he, of course, must have regarded his system, which was to be fully established by his death, as the fulfilment of Judaism. The ceremonies of Judaism, of which the passover, as first, was chief, belonged only to the old unfulfilled religion, and not to the mature Judaism founded by him. So this passover he was keeping would seem to him, not merely a commemoration of the first, but, in a proper sense, actually the last ceremony of the Jewish ritual. And as it was the last rite of the old, so it was the first of the new Judaism. His disciples now, like the early Israelites, were leaving old ways and beginning a new life as wanderers on strange paths. As the first ceremony of Judaism had sanctified its commencement, so this first ceremony of Christianity might well appear to him to sanctify its commencement, and to mark the transition from the old religion to the new.

But where was the victim of this Christian passover? The Jewish passover was essentially a sacrifice, and the idea of vicarious atonement was clearly stamped on it. The Jews believed that, when the first-born sons of the Egyptians had been destroyed, the first-born sons of their ancestors had escaped, through the sprinkling on their doorways of the blood of a _first-born_ lamb or kid of their flocks.[58] Sacrificial substitution is unmistakable here. Now, as mentioned above, Christ at this time had probably taken as his ideal the suffering Messiah thought to be referred to in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. There the supposed Messiah is spoken of as becoming “an offering for sin,” and as bearing “the sin of many.”[59] To Christ’s mind, we must remember, the idea of atonement for sin by sacrifice was thoroughly familiar, rooted as it was in the Jewish law. If, then, he believed that for him as Messiah a death at the hands of others was ordained, he would at this moment naturally see in his death an atonement offered for sin. Though he must have regarded the sacrificial system of the law as only decreed for a time, he would still feel that underlying it there was a divine principle. Recognizing this principle, with the passage of Isaiah pressing on him a sense of a connection between it and his death, he would be sure to find in himself the victim of the Christian passover.

The idea that his death was an atonement for sin may have occurred to him before. But whether it did or not, it must have been fully developed in his mind by the circumstances under which he kept this passover. It fitted like a key into the peculiarities of his religion. As already explained, his object as Messiah was to found a system which should secure the happiness of those who accepted him; on his second coming, they were to enjoy the felicity of the Messianic period on earth, as well as the everlasting joys of heaven. If they were to enjoy felicity, to escape punishment, through his death, which necessarily preceded his second coming, how readily would that death appear to him, as a Jew, an atoning sacrifice for their sins! Just as the lamb of the passover had borne, as a substitute for the Israelites, the penalty that had fallen on the Egyptians, so he, as their substitute, would bear for his followers the penalty that would fall on the rest of the world, the time at which his death was to take place heightening the parallel and making it seem to be providentially designed.

As the victim of the passover, part of it having been used sacrificially as an expiation, had then been eaten as food by those whom its sacrifice was meant to benefit, so here Christ would wish his body thus to be partaken of sacramentally after it became an atonement for sin. Sacrifice is usually followed by sacrament; the victim, being accepted by the deity, becomes divine, and those who partake of it are purified by receiving divine elements into their natures. The sacramental side of the passover sacrifice was particularly marked. To complete the parallel, Christ, as the new passover victim, needed to make his body a sacrament. But in his case such a sacrament had necessarily to precede, and not to follow the sacrificial death. It could only be symbolical. He had, as the parables of the gospels show, a natural tendency to use symbolism to express his thoughts. Symbolically, the sacrament, to prevent coarse misconception, would best be celebrated by himself. And so at this passover supper, after the victim appointed by the law had been partaken of, Christ probably distributed bread and wine as his body and blood, the symbolical sacrament of his approaching sacrificial death, the new passover feast of the new Christian Church. And as the first passover feast had been commemorated in Judaism, so he probably commanded his disciples to commemorate this second one, which fulfilled and abrogated the first, even as his system fulfilled and abrogated the system to which the first belonged, making it thus the only rite of Christianity, which should symbolise in purity the coarse sacrificial ritual of Judaism.

Though, of course, there is no certainty in this conclusion, probability is so much in its favour that we may assume it to be proved. The positive evidence alone is sufficient to establish the fact, and still stronger is the evidence for it arising from its being an indispensable link in a great chain of development.

And so we may conclude that the first distinctive dogma of Christianity was actually originated by Christ himself. The Church started with belief in the Atonement, in the sacrificial death of Christ, the “Lamb of God,” for the sins of men. The further explanation of this doctrine belongs to our next chapter.