I. The word Jesus is the form assumed in Latin by the Greek Iesous, which is the transliterated form of the Hebrew Jehoshua, Jeshua, or Joshua, meaning “Jehovah is salvation.” In one or other of its forms the name is found in many passages of the Old Testament. It was not, however, borne by any person who rose to historic eminence between the days of Joshua the son of Nun and the high priest Joshua who was the colleague of Zerubbabel at the return from the exile. The prominent position held by Joshua in the later prophetic books seems to have made the name popular. We find frequent traces of it after the exile. During the Hellenizing period, which excited so deep an indignation among patriotic Jews, many of the bearers of the name preferred to adopt the purely Greek analogon Jason, and the name occurs in this form in the New Testament also. Later on it became one of the commonest Jewish names which we find in the New Testament, and again and again in Josephus. There is some reason for believing that the name of Bar Abbas was also “Jesus,” although it may have disappeared from the chief manuscripts, partly from feelings of reverence, partly from the mistaken fancy of Origen that we find no sinner among all those who had borne the name. But the name, though common, was meant to be deeply significant of the work for which Jesus was born into the world—namely, to save His people from their sins; and for this reason, in the account of the Annunciation, as given by St Luke (i. 31), His mother is expressly bidden to call her babe by this name.

On the other hand, the word Christ was not originally a name but a title. In the Gospels we scarcely ever read of Christ, but always of “the Christ.” It was only after the resurrection that the title gradually passed into a name, and “Jesus Christ,” or later still “Christ Jesus,” becomes one designation. The Greek word means “anointed,” and is a translation of the Hebrew “Messiah.” The coming Deliverer for whom the Jews had yearned for so many centuries was spoken of as the “anointed one,” with special reference to the prophecies of Isaiah (lxi. 1) and Daniel (ix. 24-26), which again referred backward to the language of the Psalms (ii. 2, xx. 6, xlv. 7). The anointing of Jesus was the special outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon Him, not only throughout His life (Acts x. 38), but specially at His baptism (John i. 32). Unction was the recognized mode of consecrating any one to the offices of priest (Ex. xxix. 29; Lev. iv. 3) and king (1 Sam. x. 1, ∑xiv. 6); and prophets were supposed to be anointed by God’s grace for the fulfilment of their task (Isa. lxi. 1). The Messiah combined in His office the threefold dignity. He was a prophet to reveal (John vi. 14; Matt, xiii. 57; Luke xiii. 33, xxiv. 19), a king to reign and to judge (Luke xxiii. 2; Acts xvii. 7; 1 Cor. XV. 24; Rev. xv. 3), and a high priest to offer up the sacrifice of Himself (Heb. ii. 17 and passim).

Since these, however, were distinctively J ewish conceptions, it was natural that they should be but little understood by the Greeks and Romans. The word “anointed” conveyed to them no sacred conceptions, and it was restamped (surfrappe) by them into accordance with their own notions. They fancied that the real name of the founder of the new religion must be Chrestzιs or “excellent,” and they constantly spoke of the Christians as “Chrestians.” Suetonius says that the Jews were expelled from Rome by Claudius because they were raising seditions at the constant instigation of “Chrestus”; and he cared so little to inform himself on the subject that he made no distinction between Jews and Christians, and seems to have imagined that “Chrestus” was some leader of sedition then living at Rome. On the other hand the Christians in no wise objected to the mistaken designation. “If you call us Christians,” said Tertullian, “you bear witness to the name of our master; if you call us ‘ Chrestians,’ you testify to the blamelessness of our lives.”

II. The designation of “the Christ” given to Jesus shows that His followers saw in Him the long-promised Messiah of Judaism; and the rapidity with which the title developed into a name proves the strength and permanence of this conviction. And this much at least is conceded by all, that Jesus more than fulfilled the conditions for which the Jews had hoped in the Deliverer of whom so many prophets had spoken, and that He fulfilled them in a manner transcendently wider, deeper, and more permanent than even the prophets had fully foreseen. Even the most advanced sceptic cannot deny that by His life and teaching He has altered the entire current of human history, and raised the standard of human morality. He was, says Renan, “the individual who had made the species take the greatest step towards the divine.” But as His life was passed and His work accomplished, not in a corner, but on the open stage and under the full light of a civilized epoch, it becomes a matter of great importance to estimate the value of the sources from which our knowledge of His life is derived. Those sources are (1) heathen, (2) Jewish, and (3) Christian.

1. The knowledge derivable from heathen sources, if much smaller than we could have desired, or a priori expected, is not smaller than is fully accounted for in the •simple and unsophisticated narratives preserved for us by the evangelists and apostles. They show us that Christianity began from the most humble origin, and was regarded by the whole non-Christian world—alike Jewish and pagan— with unconcealed hatred, largely mingled with a contempt which ultimately passed into terror and exasperation. They faithfully record for us the obscure position, the extreme poverty, the persecuted lives, the unlearned training of the apostles, and the disdain to which they were on all sides subjected. The silence of contemporary Gentile and Jewish writers, which would be otherwise inexplicable, finds its undesigned explanation in the New Testament itself, which never attempts to conceal the contemptuous indignation of the Jewish aristocracy, and the lordly indifference of the higher Gentile authorities.

Accordingly, from heathen writers we do not learn a single new fact respecting Jesus Christ, while yet all that they do tell us, even when expressed in language of calumny and abhorrence, proves the historical reality of the facts which the Gospels record. If it be true that Napoleon once asked Herder whether Jesus ever lived at all, such a passing phase of incredulity is so perfectly unreasonable that it has long been abandoned even by the most destructive critics. Whether there ever existed any authentic census tables of Quirinius, or any official report of Pilate to the emperor Tiberius or not, Tacitus tells us with perfect accuracy that the founder of Christianity had been put to death in the reign of Tiberius by the procurator Pontius Pilate, and that his religion, which Tacitus calls a “deadly superstition,” “though crushed for a time, burst forth again, not only throughout Judaea, in which it sprung up, but even in Rome, the common reservoir for all the streams of wickedness and infamy.” He further tells us that Nero diverted from himself the odium of the burning of Rome by charging the crime upon the Christians; and, though he implies that their fate was not undeserved because of their universal misanthropy, he yet honestly admits that they were not guilty of this crime of incendiarism, on pretence of which they were subjected to the most awful forms of martyrdom. It is clear that Tacitus, in common with all his contemporaries, confounded the Christians with the Jews, only regarding them as being Jews whose belief was more than usually abject. How little information could be expected from this eminent historian appears from the credulity with which he accepted the most foolish legends and calumnies about the origin and early history even of the Jews. His contemporary Suetonius evidently held the same opinions. He seems to regard Nero as a public benefactor because he punished the Christians, “a class of men of a strange and pestilent superstition.” In his life of Claudius, as we have already seen, he ignorantly confuses Christ with some Chrestus whom he supposes to have been at that time living at Rome. From the younger Pliny, who wrote to the emperor Trajan for advice how to deal with Christians, we learn the valuable fact that they lived lives confessedly innocent, since he was unable to establish against them any crime beyond that of the belief which, like his contemporaries, he regarded as a perverse and extravagant superstition. We learn also from this celebrated letter that nothing could shake the allegiance of Christians to Christ, and that they were accustomed to meet early in the morning to celebrate Him as God with hymns of praise. Later in the 2d century the scoffer Lucian, in his Death of Pere grinus, and his Ρhilopseudes, Seo Philops., §§13, 16, which have been thought to imply ridicule of Christian miracles. b spoke with bitter sneers both of Christ and Christians. He alludes to the fact of the crucifixion of Christ, to His miracles, to the mutual love and help which prevailed among His followers, and their belief in Him as a divine person. Passing over the asserted allusions to Christ by Numenius, to His parables in Galerius, and to the earthquake at the crucifixion in Phlegon, we come to the “True Word” of Celsus the Platonist, towards the close of the second century. We only know this by the quotations and refutation of Origen, but it furnishes us with indisputable testimony that in his day the facts of the Gospels from first to last were current in the exact form in which we now possess them (see Celsus). Thus, from the scanty notices of heathens even, we can derive a confirmation of the main external facts in the life of Christ :—His miracles, His parables, His crucifixion, His claim to divine honour, the devotion, innocence, heroic constancy, and mutual affection of His followers, and the progressive victories won by His religion in despite of overwhelming opposition alike physical and intellectual.

2. From Jewish writers we can glean similar confirmation of the gospel story. Philo indeed is silent. The legends preserved by Eusebius —that Philo had met St Peter in Rome during his mission to the emperor Caius, and that in his book on the contemplative life he is describing not the life of the Essenes and Therapeutae, but those of the Christian church in Alexandria founded by St Mark —are valueless. It is extremely probable that Philo had scarcely heard either of Christ or of the Christians. He died-after 40 A.D., but at that period Christianity had hardly emerged into the recognition claimed by prominent historical phenomena. The writings of Philo are valuable, not for any light which they throw on the gospel histories, but for the evidence which they afford of prevalent modes of thought and phraseology, in which some even of the apostles shared. When, however, we turn to Josephus, we find in his writings, as now extant, no less than three allusions to events in the gospel history. Jt cannot be decided with certainty whether two of these passages are genuine as they now stand, but modern opinion tends to the view that in each of the actual allusions to Jesus there is a genuine basis with later Christian interpolations. The passage in which he speaks of the preaching and execution of John the Baptist is not disputed, and it is very important as showing that Josephus must have been perfectly well acquainted with the facts of Christ’s life, and that he has passed them over, in his usual unscrupulous way, with a reticence due only to dislike or perplexity. For in speaking of St John’s preaching he deliberately, and it must be feared dishonestly, excludes the Messianic element from which it derived its main power and significance. In another passage he mentions with strong disapproval the judicial murder by the younger Annas of James the Just, “the brother of Jesus, called the Christ.” The passage was early tampered with by Christian interpolators who wished to make it a more emphatic testimony in favour of Christ, but in its present form its genuineness is undisputed. Respecting the third passage, in which Josephus speaks directly of Jesus, the only question is whether it be partly or entirely spurious. Placing in brackets the words which are undoubtedly interpolated, it runs as follows :—

At this time appeared a certain Jesus, a wise man [if indeed He may be called a man, for He was a worker of miracles, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with joy], and He drew to himself many Jews [and many also of the Greeks. This was the Christ]. And when at the instigation of our chief men Pilate condemned Him to the cross, those who had first loved Him did not fall away. [For He appeared to them alive again on the third day, according as the holy prophets had declared this and countless other marvels of Him.] To this day the sect of Christians, called after Him, still exists.”

That Josephus wrote the whole passage as it now stands no sane critic can believe. Vespasian, not Jesus, was the Messiah of the “ambiguous oracle” of that apostate Jew. There are, however, two reasons which are alone sufficient to prove that the whole passage is spurious,—one that it was unknown to Origen and the earlier fathers, the other that its place in the text is uncertain. It is now found after the historian’s notices of Pilate, but the remarks of Eusebius show that in his time it was found before them. We must conclude then that Josephus preserved a politic silence respecting Christ and the Christians, confining himself to remote allusions; and this was quite possible, because he was writing mainly for Greeks and Romans who were profoundly ignorant of the whole subject. That Josephus knew a great deal more than he chose to say is evident. There is reason to suspect that his account of his own juvenile precocity before the leading teachers of his nation is borrowed from the Gospels, and that his account of his shipwreck on the journey to Rome is not un coloured by the facts of St Paul’s shipwreck about that very time. But the most striking indication of his hostile reticence is found in the chapter of his Antiquities which follows the supposed allusion to Jesus. He there breaks his narrative in the most arbitrary manner to drag in a disgusting story of a trick played by the priests of Isis on a Roman lady; and no one who is acquainted with the Jewish calumnies about the incarnation can doubt that in this story we have an oblique and malignant anticipation of the falsehood which ultimately took form in the Talmud and the anti-Christian writings of the later Jews.

From other Jewish sources not a single fact about Jesus can be gleaned. In the unexpurgated editions of the Talmud there are about twenty allusions to Christ and the Christians characterized by intense hatred. He is usually spoken of indirectly as “that man,” “the Nazarene,” “the fool,” “Absalom,” “the hung,” “the son of Stada,” “the son of Pandera.” Many allusions to Him are veiled in cryptographs of which the key is in the possession of but few. All the grossest fictions respecting him—that He was a seducer (mesιtli) who had learned magic in Egypt, and had been excommunicated by Rabbi Joshua ben Perachia in the reign of Alexander Jannaeus (nearly a century before His birth !), and that He was crucified at Lydda, because no one, during forty days, came forward to give any evidence in His favour—are collected in a miserable Jewish tract called the Toldoth Jeshu, which may be consigned to oblivion, because even the Jews now regard it with contempt and shame. It is, however, remarkable that from these intensely embittered Jewish sources we derive an absolute confirmation of Christ’s stay in Egypt, of His Davidic descent, of His miracles, of His disciples, of His excommunication by the Sanhedrin, of His crucifixion on the evening before the Passover, and even of His innocence, —for not a single crime but that of working miracles by magic, and claiming divine honour, is, even in these sources, laid to His charge. And thus even from pagan and Jewish enemies we derive all that we want and all that we could expect in the recognition of the historic personality of Christ, and of the chief facts in His outward life.

3. If we had nothing to help us but these allusions, the two great facts of Christianity and Christendom would be an inexplicable enigma. In the Christian sources of information all becomes intelligible. Of these we may dismiss for practical purposes all but the New Testament. From the fathers we derive surprisingly little. A few sayings—of which some are very dubious, and of which the most valuable are only variations of those in the Gospels— and one or two highly uncertain incidents, are all that we can glean from them. The Apocryphal Gospels help us still less. They are for the most part heavy fictions, the inventions of an indiscriminate curiosity, often grossly heretical, abounding in coarsely-conceived and even pernicious miracles, and dwelling chiefly on imaginary details of the nativity, the infancy, or the last scenes. Their chief value is to set forth by contrast the immeasurable superiority of the canonical Gospels, by showing us what these also might have been if they had been the products of human invention. But it is not the Gospels alone on which we have to depend. We have four works of which the authenticity has never even been assailed by any serious writer, namely, St Paul’s four epistles to the Galatians, Romans, and Corinthians. These may truly be regarded as a fifth Gospel, of which the testimony is all the more valuable because it is undesigned and incidental. It is also earlier than that of any Gospel, and is the testimony of one whose personality stands forth with absolute clearness in the light of history. Further than this, it is the testimony of a man of commanding intellect, and of the highest Jewish culture, who, after the death of Christ, was converted from the most bitter hostility to the most intense devotion, and who bears his witness within twenty-five years of the events respecting which he speaks. And yet, if we had the epistles of St Paul alone, we could find a contemporary testimony to almost every single fact of primary importance in the life of Christ,—His birth of the seed of David, His poverty, His Messiahship, His moral teaching, His proclamation of the kingdom of God, His calling of the apostles, His supernatural power, His divine claims, His betrayal, His founding of the Last Supper, His passion, crucifixion, burial, resurrection, and repeated appearances. If we add the testimony of the other epistles, we have further testimonies to almost every fact of importance in the Gospels, as we have also in the catholic epistles and in the Revelation of St John.

It is, however, from the Gospels that our fullest light is derived. They are not, and do not profess to be, full biographies written for the gratification of curiosity, but they preserve for us all that is necessary to explain the origin of Christianity in the life of its Founder. In the first three Gospels, called Synoptic, we have sketches of the life and teaching of Christ of which the latest was probably written within forty years of the crucifixion. No one has ever denied that the representation of Christ in these three Gospels is essentially the same. The view of Him presented in the Fourth Gospel, which was not published till towards the close of the 1st century, is more subjective. It is the spiritual Gospel, the Gospel for the church, and even...