If it could be demonstrably proved that there never existed such a person as Jesus, Christianity, as a living force, would cease from the earth. There would indeed be a history, a literature that would interest people according to their tastes; but there would be no heart-changing, world-up-lifting system of vital and vitalizing truths and corresponding duties, binding upon the conscience of every human being and inspiring hope in every breast.
In the discussions we are about to enter nothing will be assumed except what is too obvious to question. It will not be assumed that the little books called “gospels” were inspired at all. You will not be asked to consider any miracle, said to have been performed by Jesus, as making proof of his divinity. Nor will I quote proof-texts to show that he is divine.
The first question to ask is this: Did such a person as Jesus is described to have been ever really exist? Did Jesus really live in Nazareth and work in Joseph’s shop? Did he, for some three years and six months, go to and fro among men teaching them? Was there, in the days of Herod and Pilate, a Jesus as surely as there was a Cæsar?
This much is certain: we have in these four little books--compared with what is every day written about common men how small they are!--attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, a most distinct character, known to us and known to history as Jesus. Whether the men whose names the little books bear, or some other men whose names are lost to us wrote them, matters not in the least. What books contain is more important than the question of authorship. No matter who wrote them, the character we know as Jesus is in the books; there can be no dispute about this; here it is, before our eyes. And this character is as surely in history, in literature, in men’s thoughts, in all that we mean by Christian civilization, as it is in the writings of the four men we call evangelists.
Not only do we have the character, but we see clearly that it is a character absolutely unique. It is unique in many respects, but pre-eminently in this--it is the one perfect character that has appeared in the world that ever had a place in the history or the thought of men. It is said that the volatile Voltaire once compared Jesus to Fletcher of Madeley, thinking him as good a man as the Nazarene. But the light Frenchman understood neither the one nor the other. As one said of an unfit biographer of Fletcher’s great friend, John Wesley: “He had nothing to draw with, and the well was deep.”