The Person of Our Lord And Recent Thought

s nothing of the steps by which He reached that stature. ' But if Jesus was human, He was so not only in what He was at His height, but in the process by which He attained that height and became what He was.'l Now, if one great object of the Gospel narrative is to set before us what manner of man He was, it is unlikely that that period of life so supreme in importance during which He was 1 Du Bose, The Gospel in the Gospels, p. 28. becoming what men found Him to be?childhood and youth?should be entirely passed over. This consideration of itself recommends the tradition embodied in the early chapters of St. Matthew and St. Luke. The absence of some such narrative would leave the Gospel story truncated and defective to a degree which we can hardly realise, familiar as we are with those most beautiful of Gospel recitals. Omitting, for the present,1 consideration of the supernatural Birth in which the two Evangelists agree, different as are the points of view from which they approach their subject, it may be admitted that these early chapters embody a stratum of Gospel tradition which became known to them comparatively late. It would naturally be so. The Gospel of the public Life and Ministry would be required and supplied first. When attention had been called to the Person of Christ on account of His work and claims, then and not before, interest would be aroused as to His origin and early years. It is so in all ordinary biography. The hero, because he is a her...