New Light on Christian Origins Jesus Christ and His Revelation.
By Vacher Burch, D.D. (Chapman and Hall. 9s.)
STuDENTs of Christian origins have eagerly awaited the appearance of Dr. Burch's book. Now it is here ; and perhaps most readers will feel that it contains in one sense far more, in another somewhat less, than they expected. The newly discovered passages from Josephus of which we have heard so much, though of intense importance for a knowledge . of the historical Jesus, are only given a subsidiary place in it : • but, as against this, we have an original exploration of primi- tive Christian and Jewish material which is of profound interest, and leads to a new presentation of the person and . revelation of Christ.
Dr. Burch's difficult and sometimes even exasperating style makes the reading of his book somewhat of a discipline. But it is a discipline which will repay those who submit to it ; for apart from the unfamiliar documentary evidences which he brings forward and discusses, he has something fresh and _arresting to say. His object is to recover, if possible, by a re- examination of the very earliest records—including some which have never been given their full weight—what the person and work of Jesus really seemed like to Ifimself, and to His hostile and His sympathetic contemporaries. lie con- siders that as later Judaism " talinudized " the Old Testa- ment, reading into its chronicles and prophecies meanings they were never meant to bear ; so. Christianity has from the very first " talmudized," Christ, and continues so to do ; thus obscuring the real quality of His spiritual transcendence and the uniqueness, of His revelation of God. A main source of error has been the desire of the primitive Church to represent Him as fulfilling the Messianic prophecies of the Old Testa- ment ; whereas He stood over against official Judaism, and offered first and foremost to His disciples liberation from the fetters of the hisw and the ceremonial cult. His estimate of
Judaism appears in His attitude towards the Sabbath and denunciation of Pharisaic piety.
Jesus, say ° 1-1,. refl- AM_ , never claimed the title of Messiah.
He knew Himself to be something far greater : nor are Messiah and Christ equivalent terms. It is true that He used, for the giving of His "good news" of freedom and full life, chosen scraps from the Old Testament ; and adopted its terminology because this was the only religious idiom His Palestinian hearers would understand. " He takes a little piece from Moses or Isaiah or Solomon ; and the words are the same, but their content has been transfigured." For the doctrine thus simply given was new, and of universal not national significance ; and wherever accepted, it overthrew the cul- tural religions of antiquity. Thus Jesus Himself, and not Paul, is .the source of the universal quality of the Christian message. That one historic and inexhaustible figure trans- cends all the Christologies—mystical, eschatological, philo- sophic and' the rest—by which men have sought to explain Him, and remains His own best interpreter. Dr. Burch accuses Christians—scholars and believers alike—of forgetting this fact and reinterpreting the New Testament in the terms of the names which we have become accustomed to apply to Jesus. But He is other than those names—they merely repre- sent men's theories about Him. The only names which have true significance as guides to an understanding of His person are those He used Himself. The chief of these, which can still be found embedded in the primitive record, are Father, His name for God ; Son, the self-chosen title by which He claimed to be a direct revealer of God ; Spirit, God's self, speaking in and by the Son. This trilogy is not the product of Hellenistic theology. It represents the actual terms in which Jesus embodied His intuition of His own uniqueness, and witnesses
to His consciousness of a special relation with the Eternal God Whom He revealed—" I and the Father are One." The portrait given in the New Testament, if we look at it with innocence of eye, is not that of a teacher telling men that God works directly on their lives, but of a Person who does Himself so work on men's lives ; and who " forgives sins " with a full sense of possessing a delegated power to absolve human
beings." This is revelation raided to the powers of identity between the Revealed and the Revealer," and this, says Dr. Burch, is what the New Testament means by " God mani- fested in the flesh." Thus, if we accept this view, we must allow that the Prologue of the Fourth Gospel expresses without any " Hellenizing " or philosophizing the very earliest Christian view of Jesus : namely, this coincidence in Him of Revealer and Revealed--"--" We beheld His glory-- glory as of the only-born-from-God."
In a final chapter Dr. Burch brings forward, as independent witness of his views, the discovery with which his name has lately been associated : namely the famous " lost passage " from the " Jewish Wars " of Josephus, which- describes the person and career of Christ. This passage, excised from the Greek version as likely to give offence to the Roman authori- ties, seems to have passed from the original Aramaic or Hebrew text into an old Sclavonic translation, and has now been recovered from a Russian MS. The figure which it puts before us, doubtless from the reports of non-Christian eye- witnesses, is startlingly different froni the mitigated Christ of Modernist critics. The passage is too long for full quotation, but we specially notice in it the statement that here was one
" Who, by his nature and behaviour, showed himself as if more than human. His works were wonderful ; and he worked wonders strange and powerful.. . . And all he did, he did by word and command ; as if by some inner power."
The one test which every reader can apply to any new con- tribution to New Testament study is : " How does it make the Synoptic record look ? " Does it bring its details into sharper focus, give it more richness, depth and reality than before ? If we re-read the Gospels through the spectacles which Dr. Burch has profided, I think the result is much to enhance the majesty and power of the figure of Jesus—to emphasize that aspect of His personality at which the disciples were "'amazed." Thus this book helps- the gradual move- ment of scholarship towards a recovery of that sense of wonder and uniqueness certainly present in the New Testament, but which nineteenth-century criticism strangely ignored.
EVELYN UNDERHILL.
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