We affirm that the worship of the one God under the name, aspect, or person of the Jesus, the Saviour, was the primitive and indefectible essence of the primitive teaching and propaganda.
On the contrary, in the two basal documents, Mark and Q, no such worship is discernible. Jesus first comes on the scene as the humble son of Joseph and Mary to repent of his sins and purge them away in Baptism; he next takes up the preaching of the imprisoned John, which was merely that Jews should repent of their sins because the kingdom of God, involving a dissolution of the existing social and political order, was at hand. This was no divine rôle, and he is represented not as God, but only as the servant of God; for such in the Aramaic dialect of that age was the connotation of the title "Son of God." In Mark there is no sign of his deification, not even in the transfiguration scene; for in that he is merely the human Messiah attended by Elias and Moses. From a hundred early indicia we know that in the Semitic-speaking churches of the East he remained a human figure for centuries; and the Syrian Father Aphraat, as late as 336 in Persia, is careful to explain in his homilies that Jesus was only divine as Moses was, or as human kings are. It was not till the religion was diffused in a pagan medium in which gods had children by mortal women that the gross deification of Jesus emerged. The purport of these basal documents, moreover, is not to deify Jesus, but to establish as against the Jews that he was their promised Messiah and the central figure of the Messianic kingdom he preached. That figure, however, was never identified with Jehovah, but was only Jehovah's servant, anointed king and judge of Israel, restorer of Israel's damaged fortunes, fulfiller of her political ideals and hopes. Mr. Smith argues that Jesus was deified from the first because his name was so often invoked in exorcisms. He even makes the suggestion (p. 17) that the initial letter J of Jesus "must have powerfully suggested Jehovah to the Jewish consciousness." There is no evidence, and less likelihood, of any such thing. The name of Jesus was during his lifetime invoked against demons by exorcists who rejected his message; just as they used the names of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, so they were ready to exploit his powerful name; but neither Jews nor Christians ever confounded with Jehovah the names or personalities they thus invoked; any Jew in virtue of his birth and breeding would have regarded such a confusion of a man with his God as flat blasphemy.