by Joseph Parker (1867)

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Christ was pre-eminently a talker. “Never man spake like this man,” was the testimony of his enemies. After reading the doctrines of Plato, Socrates, or Aristotle, we feel that the specific difference between their words and Christ’s is the difference between an inquiry and a revelation. We feel as if at any moment they might push a speculation too far, or suddenly turn off at a wrong angle—as if they were groping their way along dim and perilous paths, throwing gossamers over the dark rivers and tempting men to walk over the substantial bridge; again and again they run the risk of exalting a riddle into a problem, or settling a definition into law. With this the method of Jesus Christ most strikingly contrasts. There is, account for it as men please, an authority in every tone; his language is clear, and if short it is final; it never betrays the faintest sign of hesitancy on the part of the speaker; if it were an immediate revelation from heaven, there could not be a sharper outline or a firmer emphasis. Thus much may be said simply as a matter of criticism, without any pre-judgement of the doctrine. It has been suggested that he spoke with “the authoritative tone and earnestness of a Jew,” but this suggestion, if meant for an explanation, is pointless: Christ was not the only Jew who had spoken; and if “authoritativeness of tone” be characteristic of Jewish teaching, it should be borne in mind that Christ was openly and repeatedly contradicted by men who spoke with “the authoritative tone and earnestness of a Jew,”—by the doctors of the law, by the teachers and leaders of the people, by men who held the historic parchments of the land; so that in all fairness “tone” should be set against “tone,” and it should then be explained how the “tone” of the peasant overpowered the “tone” of great councils of or solemn sanhedrims. The case, too, is more strongly in favor of Christ, when it is remembered that he abrogated institutions which had existed for ages under the special sanction of God. Moses, it will be allowed, spoke with “the authoritative tone and earnestness of a Jew,” yet Christ abolished much that Moses had inaugurated. Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Daniel spoke with “the authoritative tone and earnestness of a Jew,” yet they spoke of another, not of themselves; but Christ was his own theme and his own expositor. His immediate disciples would not be wanting in “the authoritative tone and earnestness of a Jew,” yet every one of them did his wonderful works, not in his own name, but in the name of Christ. Looking, therefore, simply at the facts, it must be admitted, even in a fuller sense than that conveyed by his enemies, that “never man spake like this man”—not even Moses, not the great seers of Israel, not Elijah on Carmel, not John in the wilderness, nor the contemporary disciples—he was what he distinctly claimed to be, separate from all, because greater than all.

The manner in which Christ’s followers have reported him is truly marvelous, a point which calls for serious thought on the part of all who wish to go carefully through the incidental and tributary evidence. In our own day it is so common to have reports of speeches that we think little of them; though in many cases so wonderful, yet they have come to be regarded as matters of course. But the disciples were not shorthand writers; we do not find that one of them was elected clerk, and that in the evening of each day he made entries in a common journal which all could read and revise; yet they report his discourses often in the first person, and preserve all the sharpness and vivacity of dialogue, retort, extemporaneous definition, and appeal. We feel throughout that we are reading the works of a talker, not of an author; all the sharp edge of free speech is singularly preserved, so much so that with the least effort of imagination we can be present at the delivery of every discourse, or at every passage at arms, between Christ and his opponents. A strange yet pleasant feeling of nearness to the event steals over every reader of the evangelic story; no lengthening shadows of distance diminish the reader’s interest—everything is at hand! In reading The Laws we are always conscious of the presence of an artist. Plato has, indeed, arranged all the parts taken by the Guest, Clinias, and Megillus with great skill, determining the proportions and balancing the conversation with a very fine appreciation of the requirements of the dialogue: yet throughout the elaborate production we feel that it is all art, all the work of one master, who in the retirement of his home apportioned and decided everything so as to work out the particular object he intended to compass. On the other hand, in reading the Gospels we feel that everything is lifelike, spontaneous and unfinished, yet suggestive and provocative of thought beyond anything that has ever come from the tongue or pen of man. Yet those Gospels contain no prepared speeches, no formal compositions—nothing but “sayings,” often jagged, broken, unconnected, yet singularly full of life. The youngest author could make a better mechanical arrangement, but the oldest could utter no such electric words. Plato’s Definitions are practically forgotten, but the Nazarene’s words intermingle with universal civilization; and this is the more remarkable as they were not formally arranged. A great composer said that he was spending a long time over his work because he intended it to live long, but this Galilean peasant talks extemporaneously, as if simply answering the question of the hour; yet his words float over all generations, and are prized by men today as if they had been addressed exclusively to themselves. This is, perhaps, the most wonderful characteristic of the words of Jesus. Can this be accounted for by “the authoritative tone and earnestness of a Jew?” Is it not rather to be accounted for by “the authoritative tone and earnestness of the Son of Man?” These “sayings” are not local lamps, but suns set in the firmament commanding the range of all nations. The Nicomachean Ethics are certainly distinguished by a marvelous comprehension of the peculiarities of human nature; yet who will say that the words of Aristotle are quick with the same intensity of life that is characteristic of the “sayings” of Christ? They are, no doubt, wise, critical and often most practical; yet the minuteness of definition and the tedious redundancy of detail give them a scholastic air which is little adapted to the tumultuous life of all nations. The best philosophies of the ancient civilization descend so much into detail as to leave no scope for the play of life on the part of the reader. Everything is numbered, labeled, docketed—there it is, take it, or be a fool. Plato, as before pointed out, was so voluminous in his details, going from statesmanship, philosophy, science and rhetoric to early rising, hunting, dancing, money-lending and Sicilian cookery, as to give one the idea that he undertook to do the work of a domestic gas fitter rather than to bring men into the light of the sun. He is so minute as to place a lamp at the corner of every street, at the entrance of every house, and in every room of every habitation. He was a very skillful gas fitter, and very careful; he ran his trial-light over every tube and every tap, but it may be doubted whether, after all, he was more than a painstaking gas-fitter—a high character, too, considering the general darkness of his time. Now, Christ, instead of intermeddling with artificial or secondary light, at once, with something more than  “the authoritative tone and earnestness of a Jew,” announced himself as “the Light of the world”—not Holman Hunt’s “Light of the World,” who resembles a belated and forlorn traveler carrying a lantern, but a man who had the light in him, and through whom it gleamed like the sun through a summer cloud. Plato lighted his age with gas, Christ lighted the world with the sun; the one was local, the other universal; the one changeable; the other permanent. The heathen philosophers gave directions, Christ gave life. Aristotle expounded diametrical conjunction; Christ said, “As ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them.” Cicero wrote excellent advices on friendship; Christ said, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Plato wrote wise prescriptions for particular diseases; Christ infused his own life into men. The Pythagoreans wrote for favorite circles; Christ sent his gospel to “all nations.” Aristotle quotes from Plato, Plato refers to Homer, and the pages of Cicero about with quotations and allusions; but Christ quotes immediately from the Father, and by so much speaks the universal language.

Christ does not appeal to men as the heathen philosophers did. They ask opinions, court criticism, and even the wily and garrulous Socrates gives men an opportunity of differing from him; but Christ, with “the authoritative tone and earnestness” of the Son of God, says, “This is absolute; believe it and be saved, or reject it and be damned.” He says that he came from the Father, that he speaks the word of the Father, and that he is returning to the Father. So there is nothing between him and God; immediately behind him, though invisible, lies infinitude, and he sets himself up as the medium on which the voice of the infinite is broken into human sounds. When a man says, “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world; again I leave the world, and go to the Father,” he simply excludes controversy; there is no common ground between him and his interlocutors; and when his words are sustained by such mighty deeds as abound in the life of Christ, one of two conclusions is inevitable—either the man is speaking the most sublime truth, or he is uttering the most awful falsehoods. He cannot occupy any middle position. No man may make himself “equal with God,” and yet pass in society merely as a good man. The morality of language would be violated. All human relations would be disorganized. The term “God” might be used to palm off the most infamous charlatanism, and all exactness of language would be supplanted by the exaggerations of an inflamed and incoherent ideality.

At the risk of speaking paradoxically, it may be said that the sayings of Christ are divine because they are so human, and are human because they are so divine. “He knew what was in man,” and this knowledge of human nature was his great weapon alike of attack and defense. The intense humanness of Christ’s life is perhaps most seen and felt in his never-failing sympathy with all the conditions of human experience. When he tells men not to think about what they are to eat, it is because he himself is thinking about that subject for them., and is prepared to feed them with his own hand: when he calls man to courage, he means them to draw upon his own power: when he says, “Seek first the kingdom of God,” he is prepared to make up all that is wanting for the daily life. He repeatedly referred to his miracles in order to stimulate the faith of his followers—“How many baskets full of fragments took ye up?” He thus made recollection the ground of hope by teaching that divine power was not exhausted by the performance of a single miracle. There is a kind of power which exhausts itself in one great effort, but it is not living power; it is mechanical, not dynamical; and though it be seen in human history, it is a spasm of weakness, not the throb of a healthy heart. Christ told men that the power which had worked one miracle could work another, and that what was given was but a hint of the resources that were untouched. This could not but substantially aid the effect of his teaching respecting that all-exciting and ever-pressing subject—TO-MORROW. To most men, “to-morrow” had been a spectra, but Christ showed it might be an angel. When men looked forward to it with fear, Christ inquired, with the slightest tremor of reproach in his tone, “How many baskets full of fragments took ye up?” Christ never held history in contempt. He made yesterday the prophet of tomorrow. All this personality of appeal, combined with all the practical demonstration of carefulness of human comfort, showed that Christ never talked at men, but always to them. His humanness was his power. Apart from it he never could have been so great a talker. Men would have become weary, but in his company they were insensible of the flight of time. Men that heard him only on one set of subjects left him, but those who had heard him on the deepest question said, “To whom can we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.” The heart lived on such music.

There is one peculiarity about the “sayings” of Christ which is not claimed by the great philosophers, and which cannot be accounted for by “the authoritative tone and earnestness of a Jew;” that is to say, Christ’s “sayings” determined the destiny of all who heard them, and this peculiarity he specially pointed out as enduring for ever. To have heard these “sayings” is to have incurred the gravest responsibility. A man may read the Ethics of Aristotle, and treat the reasoning with contempt without endangering his fate; but no man can read Christ’s “sayings” without finding “saved” upon one side and “damned” upon the other. Is this dogmatism on the part of Christ? Undoubtedly. God must be dogmatic. If God could hesitate, he would not be God. Do we stumble at the solemn words, “He that believeth shall be saved; he that believeth  shall not be damned?” Why should we? An agriculturist says practically, “Go ye into all the world, and say to every creature that there is a particular season for sowing seed: he that believeth shall be saved—shall have a harvest; he that believeth not shall be lost—shall have no harvest.” There is thus a gospel of agriculture: why not a gospel of salvation? Men’s disbelief of God will damn them in farming; why not in religion? Does God speak decisively in the one case and hesitatingly in the other? There must be a climacteric point—a point of saving or damning—in all the declarations of God, because he has spoken the ultimate word on all the subjects which he has disclosed. The truth upon any matter, high or low, is the point of salvation or damnation. The man who merely points out the right road to a traveler is in a position (with proper modification of the terms) to say to that traveler, “He that believeth shall be saved; he that believeth not shall be damned:” in other words, “Go thus, and you will reach the object of your journey; but go so, and you will never reach it.” This is the position which Christ assumes, “He that believeth in me hath life; he that believeth not me hath not life.” Is such a projection of his personality consistent with his being simply one who spoke with “the authoritative tone and earnestness of a Jew?”

In the “sayings” of Christ, special prominence is given to a peculiar form of teaching known as Parables. The entire history of religious thought might be written under the twofold division of the dogma and parable. We are passing through what may be emphatically characterized as the parabolic era, taking its tone and order of procession fro the transitional and most excited state of the intellectual world. In periods of intellectual quiescence, it is found that the religious world is settled firmly upon theological dogma; but in periods of great intellectual agitation in scientific and philosophical inquiry, the religious idea passes into what may be called the parabolic phase; not that dogma is, or can be, destroyed, but that the mental nature is engaged upon problems rich, truly or deceitfully, in their promise of results. This is illustrated vividly in Christ’s own method of teaching. First he gave doctrine, then he gave parable; the first met the positive want of the religious nature; and the second stimulated all that was best on the ideal side of the intellectual nature. In this manner Christ escaped the stern and cold finality which is characteristic not only of all exclusively dogmatic teaching, but of all teaching that is narrow, shallow, and vulgar. In Christ’s “sayings” there was always something beyond—a quickening sense that the words were but the surface of the thought; there was nothing to indicate conclusion, much less exhaustion; there was ever a luminous opening even on the clouds that lay deepest along the horizon, which invited the spectator to advance and behold yet fuller visions. The dogma was decisive; but the parable set the heart longing for intercourse with the parabolist. The dogma marked the distance which had been traveled; the parable pointed to the distance which lay far ahead; dogma was finished like yesterday, parable had about it all the haze, yet all the promise and allurement of tomorrow. It was thus that in a unique sense Christ brought out of his treasure “things new,” and maintained his hold upon the ages, filling and satisfying their entire capacity of vision and desire. The parable takes the inquirer farther along the line of truth than the dogma does. It stands in relation to dogma as poetry to prose. “Parabolica,” as Bacon says, “vero set historia cum typo, quad intellectualia deduct ad sensum.” Even the dogmatic arithmetician calls in the aid of the parabolic algebraist at a certain point in the science of numbers; and from what may be described as the parabolic side of truth, pushes his inquiries farther than he could have done by the narrow dogmas of simple arithmetic. He is carried forward by symbolism which is founded on dogma yet which reaches, ideally, farther than dogma; and when the symbolic arithmetician says, “Let x represent the unknown quantity,” he says in his own special sphere of inquiry what Christ says in the loftiest region of research when he says, “The kingdom of heaven is like unto—.” The kingdom of heaven is the “unknown quantity” which Christ came to reveal, and he helped men to follow him in his wonderful process by saying, “Let a grain of mustard seed, let a costly pearl, let a man sowing good seed in his field, let leaven which a woman cast into three measures of meal, let a net cast into the sea, represent the unknown quantity.” Religious symbolism gives scope for all that is most profitable in fancy speculation, or the great dramatic element which is in every man. It provides for the enthusiasm of the renewed nature, for that “madness” which Plato declares to be essential to poet and prophet. It gives such an idea of the unexplained range of thought and the possibilities of mind, as goes far to explain and justify the bold saying of the ancient Sophists, that “probabilities were more to be valued than truths.”

“True fiction hath in it a higher end
Than fact: it is the possible compared
With what is merely positive, and gives
To the conceptive soul an inner world,
A higher, ampler heaven than that wherein
The nations sun themselves.”

In connection with this parabolic teaching Christ uttered one most remarkable “saying” to his disciples. He had been in most varied and vivid symbolism, and as he concluded he said, “Have ye understood all these things? They say unto him, Yea, Lord. Then said he unto them, “Therefore every scribe which is instructed unto the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which brings forth out of his treasure things new and old.” Here is the liberty of the Christian teacher: can any charter be more comprehensive? It comprehends all that is past and all that is to come; it is as old as time, yet new as summer. Thus interpreted, Christ becomes, as was said in the last chapter, not only the contemporary, but the leader of every age. He has the old truth for the heart, and the new phase for the eye. He meets the simple and trustful with “old things,” and encounters the doctors of all temples with questions they cannot answer, and symbolism which, while it challenges their admiration, puts to the severest test their genius for the interpretation of signs. Christ proceeds upon the principle that the world must educated by enigmas, pictures and problems, and he has commissioned his church to educate it on this basis. He shows that all human life is a parable, and that to understand it men must follow him now as his disciples did, and ask him to “declare unto them the parable.” The difficulty of our agitated time is to find men who combine the dogmatist with the parabolist; the chasm has occasioned very urgent, ungenerous and bitter strife. It is forgotten that the dogmatist may be right so far as he goes, and that the parabolist may be equally right; what is wanted is completion by amalgamation but where, in the present chaos of religious questions, can we hope to find a perfect education? The reverent inquirer, though he be a skeptic (not a derisive and self-idolatrous buffoon), may after all be a brother who has, by the very bent of his mental constitution, begun his studies rather on the parabolic than on the dogmatic side of truth, and who will yet descend from the hill of symbolism with two tables of very stern and decisive dogma.

This recalls the fact that men proceed even in religious inquiry according to the base of their intellectual nature. Some men are prepared for dogma at once, and beyond dogma they can never move. To them, Christian theology (we will not say Christian ethics) is little better than an embalmed mummy hidden in the solemn pyramid of the past, to be visited on Sabbatic occasions, looked at, admired and left in awful solitude and silence until the next visit. To men of another and better mold, “the kingdom of heaven is like unto” all that is elevating in life, or permanent in beauty, or pure in love, or satisfying in truth. What wonder if such men fail to understand one another, or if the word of strife be heard in the discussion of subjects which belong to the innermost shrine of the Temple of Peace? The cause of stuck strife is not so much to be found on the side of religious inquiry as on the side of human nature. Man does not understand man when separated by one degree of latitude; nay, man may speak of a foreign language even to his own brother. Now it is distinctly stated that Jesus “knew all men, and needed not that any should testify of man, for he knew what was in man;” that is to say, he had a perfect knowledge of human nature, and in his teaching he set “the kingdom of heaven” at every variety of angle, so that all men might get that particular view of it which would most successfully meet their wants. This could be done only by a teacher who had perfect knowledge of the nature which he undertook to educate. The consequence was that he was not followed by any particular class of men, but all men went after him—the multitude after the multitudinous man. His disciples are of course but fractional men, and the power of the Christian ministry is proportionately impaired. The preacher’s accent often makes him a stranger to his hearers. He is of course limited by his own individuality, and how can the shallow river of his thought carry the merchandise of the world? The preacher’s power must always be in the ratio of his knowledge of human nature. The more of man he has in him, the more he will command the attention and homage of men. He is but a learned fool who knows everything but himself. His teaching will be confined to a few self-contained dogmas; it will never give signs of that prophetic fire which shrines itself in poetry or parable. In discoursing upon rhetoric, Socrates wisely touches upon this subject of human nature. He tells Phaedrus that “since the power of speech is that of leading the soul, it is necessary that he who means to be an orator should know how many kinds of soul there are.” And again he says—“Unless a man has reckoned up the different natures of those who will have to hear him, and is able to divide things themselves into species and to comprehend the several particulars under one general idea, he will never be skilled in the art of speaking so far as it is possible for a man to be so;” a most marvelous illustration of the power of him who spake as never man spake, who needed not that any should testify of men, for he knew what was in man. He varied the prescription according to the diagnosis. To one man he said, “Sell all thou hast;” to another, “Ye must be born again”; to a third, “Keep the two commandments of the law:” he took the wise in their own craftiness, and upon the vision of the dreamer he opened such glories as had never shone from the artificial heavens of the poets.

We may claim for Christ’s “sayings” an originality, a compass and a loving energy, such as have not been rivaled by any speaker. This would probably be admitted even by a more self-controlled class of skeptics. Assuming this to be so, we are thrown back upon an old inquiry, “Whence hath this man this wisdom and these mighty works? Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary, and his brethren James and Joseph, and Simon and Judas? And his sisters, are they not all with us? Whence then hath this man all these things? That question remains to be answered by those why deny his Godhead. Viewed from the human standpoint, how could Christ’s contemporaries be other than confounded by Christ’s wisdom? Can any man rise above the normal conditions of his race? Is there a secret way from the nethermost stratum of society up to the eminence of superhuman wisdom? How is it that only one man has ventured on the giddy ascent? His “sayings” have no charm of style; poetic surprises are never attempted; nearly everything is curt, abrupt, and barely allusive; yet today as in the days of his flesh, all who weigh his words come to the conclusion that “never man spake like this man.” Is there no argument in this?