of His significance for faith is all the more noteworthy because of the different forms of thought in which the various writers picture Him.  Behind the primitive Church stands an historic Figure who so stamped the impress of His personality upon believing spirits, that, amid puzzling discrepancies of historical detail and much variety of theological interpretation, a single religious image of Him remains.  We, whose aim is not primarily to reconstruct the figure of Jesus for purposes of scientific history, but to arrive at an intelligent conviction of His spiritual worth, are entirely satisfied with a portrait which correctly represents the religious impression of the historic Jesus.

Two diametrically opposed classes of scholars have denied that in the Christ of the gospels we possess such a trustworthy report.  A very few have held that the evangelists do not record an historic life at all, but describe a Saviour-God who existed in the faith of the Church of the First Century.  The allusions, however, in the letters of Paul alone to definite historical associations connected with Jesus are sufficient to confute this view.  There undoubtedly was a Jesus of Nazareth.  Moreover, the divine redeemers of mythology, of whom this theory makes so much, are most unlike the Jesus of the gospels in moral character and religious power; and the old argument is still pertinent that it would have required a Jesus to have imagined the Jesus of the evangelists’ story.

A much larger number of scholars, determined beforehand by their philosophic views to reject all elements in the records which transcend usual human experience, have for several generations sought to reconstruct the figure of Jesus on an entirely naturalistic basis.  Instead of the Jesus of the gospels, they give us, as the actual Man, Jesus the Sage, or the Visionary, or the Prophet, or the Philanthropist, who, they think, was subsequently deified by His followers.  Such reconstructions handle the sources arbitrarily, eliminating from even the earliest of them that which clashes with their preconceptions.  They fail to do justice to Jesus’ consciousness of Himself, of His unique relation to God, of His all-important mission to men, as the critically investigated documents disclose it.  Historically, they do not give us a Figure sufficiently significant for faith to account for the Christian Church; scientifically, their portraits do not long prove satisfactory, and are soon discarded on further investigation of the facts; and religiously, they do not appeal to Christian believers as adequate to explain their own life in Christ.