Of Jesus we may well say what he said of himself: he is “The Son of man.” He belongs to all; he is a universal character, and the only one in history. He is brother to every human being; he loves one as well as another and each one perfectly. He means as much to us of to-day as to those friends in Bethany whom he loved, or as he meant to that “beloved disciple” who leaned upon his breast at the Last Supper.
The necessary conclusion is, such a character could not have been created by dramatic genius, least of all by the four writers of that period who have given us the gospels. The Jesus of the gospels must have lived, to have been conceived or described.
This conclusion agrees with the method these writers adopt in presenting this character to us. It is the method of perfect simplicity. They nowhere try to tell us what he was or what he was like. There are no comparisons, no analyses of qualities, no character-sketching; there is no effort, not the least, to draw a portrait of him. They simply write down what they saw him do and what they heard him say; and they make it plain that they understood neither his deeds nor his words, and that least of all they understood him.
The loftiest genius could not have invented the character of Jesus. Plain men, like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, could write of a life that was lived; they could write down the words they heard him speak; they could record the story of the good works they saw him do, and so make us to know Jesus, “who and what manner of man he was.”
Some learned men, in seeking a way to account for the Jesus of the New Testament without accepting the reality of his existence, have sought to set up a notion like this: It is true that the evangelists did not invent this character, yet Jesus never really lived; he is only the myth of Hebrew history.
We are to think of Jesus, they tell us, as we do of the Greek Theseus, of the Egyptian Isis and Osiris, of the Thor and Odin of the Scandinavian legends, of the Hindustanee Vishnu, or of Buddha, and of scores of other myths that belong to the poetry, traditions, superstitions, and religions of other nations. Much scholarship has been mustered into the service of this notion. All this may appear more absurd than serious to one whose education has made Jesus of Nazareth real to his thoughts. It may indeed be so; but we must be fair even to those who seem to us to advance absurd views. I cannot doubt that some able and sincere minds have accepted a theory of Jesus that makes him out only a Hebrew myth.