This book ends, as it must end, in an unresolved tension between confidence and helplessness. It ends confidently because the historical problem has been solved. The authors cannot pretend to regard their conclusion merely as a tentative guess at a solution. They have been swept on, at times against their will, by what seems to them quite overwhelming pressure, since the evidence, when treated critically, seems almost to rush to a conclusion. The New Testament documents do, in fact, yield to the modern critical method; and yet the solution of the historical problem does nothing either to compel faith or to encourage unbelief. There are here no 'assured results' of New Testament criticism. The historian can help to clarify the issue, but no more. He is unable to decide between faith and unbelief, or between faith and agnosticism. This is surely as it should be. The New Testament critic has far too often constituted himself the arbiter of faith and claimed a peculiar ability to deal out to the modern world what it may believe and what it may not. This is, however, wholly unjustifiable. The historian can outline the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth. He can, moreover, demonstrate that his life and death did become the occasion of a quite remarkable outburst of faith in the power of the living God. But he can also demonstrate that it occasioned an almost equally passionate hatred and, scorn. Upon the ultimate question of truth and falsehood he is unable, as an historian, to decide. And even if he had authority to make such decisions, his own results forbid him to detach portion. of the New Testament as good and true, and to discard the rest as of little or of no value. The critical method has itself revealed most clearly the living unity of the documents. To praise this element and to blame that would be to destroy this very delicate unity. Indeed, it is the practice of selecting this or that element and of judging its value in isolation, which has damaged much otherwise excellent critical work in the recent past. Critics have wished their work to be immediately fruitful, and have desired to present assured results which they think may be acceptable to the modern world, or may relieve the tension between the church and modern thought. The moment the critic surrenders to such a desire, he ceases to be a historian.
Yet it is none the less the historian's duty to hand over certain definite conclusions to those who are now concerned with his results. In the first place, therefore, it must be quite definitely affirmed that neither the Jesus of history nor the primitive church fits into the characteristic nexus of modern popular humanitarian or humanistic ideas. This is not merely because they belong to another age, of which the thought moved in an entirely unmodern idiom, but because their idiom was entirely foreign to that of any age, including their own. The gospel was as much a scandal to the first century as it is to the twentieth. This does not mean, however, that the gospel is in any sense anti‑humanitarian. The antithesis between it and modern idealism arises, not because Jesus and primitive Christianity were less human than humanitarianism, but because they were infinitely more so. The primitive Christians found the revelation of God in an historical figure so desperately human that there emerged within the early Church a faith in men and women so deeply rooted as to make modern humanitarianism seem doctrinaire and trivial. The New Testament does not present a complex chaos of conceptions about God and man from which one or another may be picked out and proclaimed as ultimate and true because it satisfies the highest idealism of this or of all ages; it presents a concrete and definite solution of the problems of life and death, of right and wrong, of happiness and misery in a form which constitutes a challenge to all thought and to all ethical idealism. The New Testament presents the solution in a unique event, in a particular history of human flesh and blood. The New Testament is therefore neither a collection of thoughtful essays nor an attempt to construct a system of ethics. It bears witness to a unique history, and it discovers the truth in the history. The historian is compelled to state that both the unity and the uniqueness of this claim are historical facts. And, secondly, he must state quite explicitly what is here involved. The challenge presented to human thought by the New Testament is not created by the accidental emergence of a new way of thinking about these problems, which appeared first in one man, and then in the organized body of his followers. The challenge lies in the history and not in the thought detached from the history, since the history is an integral element in the new method of thought, and in fact constitutes its surprise and its scandal. The question, 'What manner of man is this?' which is so obvious throughout the synoptic gospels, is no mere literary trick of their editors. It is put, quite as provocatively, everywhere in the New Testament. The fourth Gospel persuades and entices the reader to venture a judgement upon the history. St. Paul placards before the eyes of the world, and with the most provocative intention, Christ crucified. And precisely the same compelling provocation is found throughout that material in which it has seemed possible to see the Jesus of history himself. The historian, then, must state that the New Testament demands what he, as an historian, may not give, a judgement of the highest possible urgency for all men and women.
Finally, then, the New Testament contains everywhere a concrete and exclusive claim to provide the revelation that solves the deepest problems of human life; it contains also everywhere a concrete and exclusive claim that a decision concerning this revelation is urgent. These claims and this demand rest, however, not upon the speculations of men as to the meaning of a myth; not upon the gradual imposition of a conglomeration of heterogeneous and exotic conceptions upon an ethic, in which the historical circumstances of its emergence were unimportant, but upon a history that was consciously conditioned by the claim that it was the very act of God. The New Testament therefore cannot be left merely to the philosopher or to the poet as though it were a contribution to speculation or to culture; it records historical facts, which demand the consideration and judgement of every man and woman.
Here, then, the historian is driven to lay down his pen, not because he is defeated; not because his material has proved incapable of historical treatment, but because, at this point, he is faced by the problem of theology, just as, at this same point, the unbeliever is faced by the problem of faith.