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1.3.1 - A History of Christianity in the Apostolic Age
The Origin of Christianity
Jesus - His Sense of Divine Sonship
The Gospel of Mark opens its account of Jesus' ministry with the works: "Now after that John was delivered up, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, 'The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye and believe in the gospel.'" [Mark 1: 14-15]
It was thus as a preacher of the kingdom that Jesus began his public career; and it is only as we recognize this fact that we can understand Him at all. But in order to realize what it meant to him to be a preacher of the kingdom, we must go back a little.
Our knowledge of Jesus' early life and training is very meager. It is not altogether without significance that his youth was passed in Galilee, where the influence of the scribes and doctors of the law was less controlling than in Jerusalem, and where, though the law itself and the traditions of the elders were observed on the whole with reasonable punctiliousness, such observance did not to the same extent as in Judea dominate the thought and life of the people.
The doctors of Jerusalem regarded Galilee as much less genuinely and thoroughly Jewish than the southern portion of the Holy Land, and it received from them the contemptuous appellation of the "Court of the Gentiles." It was looked upon, moreover, as inferior to Judea not simply in religious devotion, but also in general culture. The schools were fewer and poorer, and rabbinical learning much rarer, than in the south.
Educated in Galilee, therefore, it was hardly expected that Jesus would feel the influence of rabbinical methods and of the traditions of the schools to the same extent that he must have done had he lived in Jerusalem. There is no trace of anything of the kind in his recorded utterances, and he was never accused, so far as we can learn, of being a renegade scribe or Pharisee.
An interesting and very instructive incident of his boyhood has been preserved, which throws welcome light upon his religious development, and does much to explain his subsequent career.
The incident is recorded in Luke 2: 41-51. From that passage we learn that already, at the age of twelve years, Jesus had the conviction that God was his father, and that that conviction controlled him to such an extent that is seemed quite natural and right to him, upon the occasion in question, to allow what he regarded as his filial duty to his divine father to take precedence of the ordinary duty to his human parents.
How and when this epoch-making conviction came to him, it would be idle to conjecture. Under the influence of the Hebrew Scriptures, with which he was very familiar, he might have been led to conceive of God as the father of the Jewish nation, for that idea finds at least occasional expression in those writings which he most loved to quote; but the far more remarkable fact that God's fatherhood was interpreted by him as of individual and not simply national significance, that it meant to him not merely Israel's divine sonship, but his own, can find its ultimate explanation only in his own unique religious personality.
But in whatever way and at whatever time Jesus gained the consciousness of his divine sonship, once gained, it must have dominated his thought and life, and he must have found in it more and more life's chief blessedness. And as he grew older, and learned more of the religious condition of his people, as he saw how small a place the idea of God's fatherhood occupied in contemporary thought, and to what superficiality, selfishness, formality, and hypocrisy the lack of it had le, he must have felt increasingly the importance of it, and his countrymen's supreme need of its uplifting and ennobling power.
At the same time that he was finding unfailing joy in his sense of God's fatherly love and favor, his study of the Old Testament and the surroundings in which he lived must have conspired to fill his mind with the thought of the better and brighter future in store for God's chosen people. He could hardly help sharing in the messianic hopes that were cherished by all about him. Those hopes were most vivid not among the scribes and doctors of the law, but among the more devout and humble of the common people, who found their religious nourishment chiefly in the prophets and in the numerous apocalyptic writings of the age.
There can be little doubt, the, that Jesus, like so many of his compatriots, including John himself, was looking for the speedy establishment of the Messianic kingdom; and John's proclamation of that kingdom must have found quick response in his heart.
The profound impression which the great preacher made upon him is shown in his own utterances concerning him at a later time, and the emphasis which John laid upon the necessity of repentance and righteousness as the true preparation for the approaching crisis, could not fail to meet with his hearty approval.
That he should enroll himself among John's disciples, and receive baptism at his hands, was the most natural thing in the world. The act was simply an expression of his own expectation of the speedy coming of the kingdom to which John was giving such vigorous utterance, and of his own preparedness therefor.
Used by permission of the publisher.
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