When I come to the New Testament, I feel myself, in the Gospels,
confronted by the most wonderful personality which has ever drawn
breath upon the earth. I am not in a position to affirm or to deny the
exact truth of the miraculous occurrences there related; but the more
conscious I am of the fallibility, the lack of subtlety, the absence of
trained historical method that the writers display, the more convinced
I am of the essential truth of the Person and teaching of Christ,
because he seems to me a figure so infinitely beyond the intellectual
power of those who described him to have invented or created.
If the authors of the Gospels had been men of delicate literary skill,
of acute philosophical or poetical insight, like Plato or Shakespeare,
then I should be far less convinced of the integral truth of the
record. But the words and sayings of Christ, the ideas which he
disseminated, seem to me so infinitely above the highest achievements
of the human spirit, that I have no difficulty in confessing, humbly
and reverently, that I am in the presence of one who seems to me to be
above humanity, and not only of it. If all the miraculous events of
the Gospels could be proved never to have occurred, it would not
disturb my faith in Christ for an instant. But I am content, as it is,
to believe in the possibility of so abnormal a personality being
surrounded by abnormal events, though I am not in a position to
disentangle the actual truth from the possibilities of
misrepresentation and exaggeration.
Dealing with the rest of the New Testament, I see in the Acts of the
Apostles a deeply interesting record of the first ripples of the faith
in the world. In the Pauline and other epistles I see the words of
fervent primitive Christians, men of real and untutored genius, in
which one has amazing instances of the effect produced, on contemporary
or nearly contemporary persons, of the same overwhelming personality,
the personality of Christ. In the Apocalypse I see a vision of deep
poetical force and insight.
But in none of these compositions, though they reveal a glow and
fervour of conviction that places them high among the memorials of the
human spirit, do I recognise anything which is beyond human
possibilities. I observe, indeed, that St Paul's method of argument is
not always perfectly consistent, nor his conclusions absolutely cogent.
Such inspiration as they contain they draw from their nearness to and
their close apprehension of the dim and awe-inspiring presence of
Christ Himself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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