The old problem returns upon us: Who and what is this Jesus Christ? We are involved in the recurrent need to re-examine him and re-explore him.
There are several ways of doing so. Like every other historical character Jesus is to be known by what he does rather than by "a priori" speculation as to what he might be. In the study of history, the first thing is to know our original documents. There are the Gospels, and, like other historical records, they must be studied in earnest on scientific lines without preconception. And there are later records, which tell us as plainly and as truthfully of what he has done in the world's history. We can begin, then, with the serious study of the actual historical Jesus, whom people met in the road and with whom they ate their meals, whom the soldiers nailed to the cross, whom his disciples took to worshipping, and who has, historically, re-created the world.
The second line of approach is rather more difficult, but with care we can use Christological theories to recover the facts which those who framed the theories intended to explain. We must remember here once more the three historical canons laid down at the beginning. We must above all things give the man's term his meaning, and ask what was the experience behind his thought. When we come upon such descriptions of Jesus as "Christ our Passover" (1 Cor. 5:7), or find him called the Messiah, we must not let our own preconceptions as to the value of the theories implied by the use of such language, nor again our existing views of what is orthodox, determine our conclusions; but we must ask what those who so explained Jesus really meant to say, and what they had experienced which they thought worth expressing. These people, as we see, were face to face with a very great new experience, and they cast about for some means of describing and explaining it. A slight illustration may suggest the natural law in accordance with which they set about their task of explanation. A child, of between two and three years old, was watching his first snow-storm, gazing very intently at the flying snow-flake, and evidently trying to think out what they were. At last he hit it; they were "little birds." It is so that the mind, infant or adult, is apt to work--explaining the new and unknown by reference to the familiar. Snow-flakes are not little birds; they are something quite different; yet there is a common element--they both go flying through the air, and it was that fact which the child's brain noticed and used. To explain Jesus, his friends and contemporaries spoke of him as the Logos, the Sacrifice, "Christ our Passover," the Messiah, and so forth. Of those terms not one is intelligible to us to-day without a commentary. To ordinary people Jesus is at once intelligible--far more so than the explanations of him. Historically, it is he himself who has antiquated every one of those conceptions, and, so far as they have survived, it has been in virtue of association with him. They are the familiar language of another day. "No one," said Dr. Rendel Harris, "can sing, 'How sweet the name of Logos sounds.'" Synesius of Cyrene did try to sing it, but most human beings prefer St. Bernard or John Newton.