and dwell in His followers.  On the other hand, in some particulars scholars think that the later writers had more accurate information, and used it to correct misunderstandings conveyed by their predecessors; the length of our Lord’s ministry, the procedure followed at the trial, the date of the crucifixion, are by many supposed to be more exactly given in John than in the Synoptists.  In general there is no reason for questioning the data in the later sources, save as they seem to come from an interest of the Church of their day, unrelated with the Jesus of the earlier records.

In such documents we must expect some events to be supported by more historic proof than others.  The evidence for Jesus’ resurrection (to take a typical case), is far weightier than that for His birth of a virgin-mother.  There is probably no scrap of primitive Christian literature which does not assume the risen Christ; and the origin of the Christian Church, and the character of its message and life, cannot be explained apart from the Easter faith in the Lord’s victory over death and presence with His people in power.  The virgin-birth rests on but two records (possibly on only one), neither of which belongs to the earlier strata of the tradition, and which are with difficulty reconciled with the more frequently mentioned fact that Jesus is the Son of David (an ancestry traced through Joseph).  But in discussing the historicity of the narratives, it is just to the evangelists to recall that their main purpose was not the writing of history as such, but the presentation of material (which undoubtedly they considered trustworthy historically) designed to convey to their readers a correct religious estimate of Jesus Christ.  “These are written that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye may have life in His name.”  They do not often take the trouble to tell us on what evidence they report an event or a saying; they either did not know, or they did not care to preserve, the sequence of events, so that it is impossible to make a harmony of the gospels in which the material is chronologically arranged.  But they spare themselves no pains to give the truth of the religious impression of Jesus which they had received.

And when one compares all our documents, it is significant that they do not give us discordant estimates of the religious worth of Jesus.  The meaning for faith of the Christ of John is not at variance with the meaning for faith of the Christ of Mark or of the Christ of the supposed Collection of Sayings.  The Church put the four gospels side by side in its Canon, and has continued to use them together for centuries, because it has found in them a religiously harmonious portrait of its Lord.  This is also true of the portraits of Jesus to be found in the Acts and the epistles.  The Christ of the entire New Testament makes upon us a consistent religious impression; and the unity