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.