■108 The Fundamentals pearance of Jesus Christ. They were nothing but the por- traitures of the conceptions which the various artists en- tertained as to the features of Christ. Each artist portrayed his own ideal of Jesus. Some of the portraits looked so strange that no one would have; thought it a picture of Jesus Christ if it had not been labeled as such. This is. precisely the case with all these modern attempts to write a life of Jésus Christ minus St. Paul, minus St. John, minus Matthew, Luke and Mark. I f you examine the character of this Jesus closely, you will find that He is really a portraiture of what the author considers his ideal of a pure and holy life, clothed in the garb of an Oriental peasant two thousands years ago. We cannot here reproduce the details of this twentieth- century ideal in its strange and ancient environments; it is a picture of a man from whom every supernatural, mirac- ulous, mysterious trait has been erased. “Jesus has nowhere overstepped the limits of the purely human,” says Bousset; and again: We do no longer start with the thought that Jesus was absolutely different from us; that He was from above, we from below. And consequently we do no longer speak of the divinity of Christ.” Doubts and fears, joys and griefs, moments of ecstasy and of utter dejection, all the changing moods of a poor human heart, may be found in His life. “He was a poor, disquieted man, at times shouting with joy, at times woefully despond- ent,” writes Gustave Frenssen, and adds : “Sometimes He was treading upon the very borderland of exalted insanity.” On the whole, Jesus was the personification of faith in God, brotherly love, and faith in immortality; at times He seems to have taken Himself as the Messiah of His people ; in everything He was subject to the limitations of mankind. There is only one difference between this modern view and the old rationalistic view. While the old rationalists, by all sorts of exegetical jugglery, vainly attempted to show that
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