It is not surprising that these attempts have failed.  The historic Jesus did not make the same impression upon everybody who met Him; men’s judgments of Him varied with their spiritual capacities, and their spiritual capacities affected what He could do for them.  There is enough historicity in the narratives to convince sober historians, whatever their faith or unfaith, that Jesus existed as a man among men, and that He was conscious of a relationship to God and a significance for men which transcend anything in ordinary human experience.  It requires something more than sound historic judgment to see in Jesus what He saw in Himself, or what Peter saw in Him when he called Him “the Christ of God.”  We can never prove to any man on the basis of historical research alone that the portrait of Jesus in the gospels correctly represents the religious impression of the historic Jesus.  When we deal with anything religious, a subjective element enters and determines the conclusion, exactly as the artistic spirit alone can appreciate that which has to do with art.  The gospels as appreciations appeal only to the similarly appreciative.  We can show that the earliest stratum of the gospel tradition, according to the most rigorous methods of critical analysis, gives us a Jesus who possessed a meaning for His followers akin to the meaning the Jesus of our four gospels possessed for the Church of the First Century, and possesses for the Church of our day.  Only as Jesus comes to have a supreme worth to any man can he believe that the estimate of their Master in the minds of the first disciples can be the accurate impression of a real man.

When, then, we speak of the Christ of history, we mean not the figure of Jesus as reproduced by scientific research apart from Christian faith, but the Christ of the four gospels, whose figure corresponds to the religious impression received from the historic Jesus by His earliest followers. Lives of Christ by historical students have their value when our main aim is historical information; but the best of them is poor indeed compared with our gospels when we wish to attain the life of Christ’s followers.  The humblest reader of the New Testament has the same chance with the most learned scholar of attaining a true knowledge of Jesus for religious purposes; and Jesus remains, as He would surely wish to remain, a democratic figure accessible to all in the simply told narratives of the evangelists.

Each age seems to have its own way of phrasing its religious needs; and various elements in the picture of Jesus have been prized by the succeeding ages as of special worth.  Our generation finds itself religiously most interested in three outstanding features in the record of His life: