But these four men who wrote of Jesus, these men so different in their training and manner of life--Matthew, who had been a tax-collector under the Roman Government; Mark, a mere child when Jesus was among men, and brought up under a careful mother; Luke, a “physician beloved;” and John, a fisherman of Galilee--these have given us one Jesus, not four. The differences are such as four photographs of one man show in different postures taken by the same artist in the same day. No matter by whose pen recorded, the words and deeds of Jesus in the four gospels are the words and deeds of one man. But there is another view of the notion that the evangelists invented the character of Jesus. Granting that these men had the mental and spiritual capacity to have created such a character as that of Jesus; granting that, by some strange chance, although without precedent or succession, and in utter contradiction of all we know of the laws of the human mind, these writers, in themselves and their circumstances so different, invented not four, but one character, there is another thing to be considered, and it alone is conclusive: they were bound to have invented a different Jesus from the Jesus of the gospels. It is impossible but that these men were under the influences that not only characterized their times but made them what they were. The gospels themselves show that these men were not only thoroughly Hebrew in their thoughts and dispositions, but Hebrews of that period. No writer can any more escape the intellectual and moral atmosphere of his time than he can escape the heredity that is in his blood. These influences will show themselves in any work of the imagination as certainly as children will resemble their ancestors. Now Jesus, though a Jew, is not like his time or people. He is a Jew only in blood; he is not a Jew in thought or character. The Jew of that period, saying nothing of what was past or of what was to come to that most wonderful people, was narrow in his sympathies; Jesus was as broad as humanity. The Jew was exclusive; Jesus made welcome all who came to him. The Jew had small toleration for opinions that were not his own, and none for men of other races; no cosmopolitanism, or even Christian charity, has ever yet reached the divine tolerance of Jesus. The Jew felt only contempt for the mongrel tribes of Samaria; Jesus makes a Samaritan teach us universal brotherhood. The Jew felt that contact with other nations defiled him; there is not in Jesus the faintest flavor of any sort of race or caste prejudice.