Conflict has never arisen on the ethical sayings of Jesus, which, making allowance for the impracticableness of a few, place him high among the sages of antiquity. Comparing their teaching with his, it is easy to group together maxims which do not yield to the more famous examples in the Sermon on the Mount as guides to conduct, or as inspiration to high ideals. The "golden rule" is anticipated by Plato's "Thou shalt not take that which is mine, and may I do to others as I would that they should do to me" (Jowett's translation, v, p. 483). And it is paralleled by Isocrates, a contemporary of Plato, in those words spoken by the King Nicocles when addressing his governors, "You should be to others what you think I should be to you." But if there was nothing new in what Jesus taught, there was freshness in the method. Conflict is waged only over statements the nature and limits of which might be expected from the place and age when they were delivered. They who hold that Jesus was God the Son Eternal, and therefore incapable of error, may reconcile, as best they can with this, his belief in the mischievous delusions of his time. If they say that so much of this as may be reported in the records of his life are spurious, they throw the whole contents of the gospels into the melting-pot of criticism.
Taking the narratives as we have them, documents stamped with the hall-mark of the centuries, "declaring," as a body of clergymen proclaimed recently, "incontrovertibly the actual historical truth in all records, both of past events, and of the delivery of predictions to be thereafter fulfilled," we learn that Jesus accepted the accuracy of the sacred writings of his people; that he spoke of Moses as the author of the Pentateuch; that he referred to its legends as dealing with historical persons, and as reporting actual events. All these beliefs are refuted by the critical scholarship of to-day. We need not go to Germany for the verdict; it is indorsed by eminent Hebraists, officials of the Church of England. Canon Driver, Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, says that "like other people, the Jews formed theories to account for the beginnings of the earth and man"; that "they either did this for themselves, or borrowed from their neighbours," and that "of the theories current in Assyria and Phoenicia fragments have been preserved which exhibit parts of resemblance to the Bible narratives sufficient to warrant the inference that both are derived from the same cycle of traditions." If, therefore, the cosmogonic and other legends are inspired, so must also the common original of these and their corresponding stories be inspired. The matter might be pursued through the patriarchal age to the eve of the Exodus, showing that, here also, the mythical element is dominant; the existence of Abraham himself dissolving in the solution of the "higher criticism." As to the Pentateuch, the larger number of scholars place its composition, in the form in which we have it--older documents being blended therein--about the sixth and fifth centuries B. C.