Himself the extraordinary place which He fills in the mind and the world even of primitive Christians, or was this greatness thrust upon Him without His knowledge, against His will, and in inconsistency with His true place and nature? We are familiar with the idea that we can appeal to Christ against any phenomenon of our own age which claims to be Christian; is it not conceivable that we may have to appeal to Him even against the earliest forms which Christianity assumed?
No one who is familiar with the currents of thought whether within or without the Church can doubt that these questions are of present and urgent interest. To some, indeed, it may seem that there are questions more fundamental, and that when men are discussing whether Jesus ever lived, or whether we know anything about Him, it is trifling to ask whether the apostolic faith in Him is justified by the facts of His history. No serious person, however, doubts that Jesus existed, and the second of our two questions has been stated in the most searching form conceivable. It raises in all its dimensions the problem of the life and mind of Jesus, and in answering it we shall have opportunity to examine fully the sources on which our knowledge of Jesus rests. For those who stand outside the Christian Church, this second question is naturally of greater interest than the other, yet even for them it is impossible to ignore the connexion of the two. For it is in the Church and through its testimony to Jesus that whatever knowledge we have of Him, even in the purely historical sense, has been preserved. But for those who are within the Church, the first question also has an interest of its own. To ask whether the prima facie impression which the New Testament makes upon us is verified by a closer examination—whether the interpretation of Christ which is current in the Church is that which is really yielded by the primi-
