Again, it was not merely Jewish enemies who had to be convinced.
No sincere Jewish convert to Christianity would or could have admitted that the Gospels were equal in authority to the Old Testament, if he were not utterly convinced of their genuineness. And what of the pagans who became Christians? Would any educated Roman have accepted a religion so unpalatable to the decadent world of those cays, or-consented to have worshipped as the true God a man—and a foreigner at that—who had beer ignominiously branded as a public enemy by their own laws? Would any man in his right senses commit himself to a religion like that, without first assuring himself of the soundness of its claims?
To sum up then. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wrote the Gospels as we have them today. They wrote shortly after the events they record took place, when the memory of things was still fresh in their minds, and it would have been impossible to distort the facts. They were honest, truth-loving men who had nothing to gain and everything to lose for writing as they did. Who then could se-nously doubt that their picture is the actual portrait of Christ as He lived and died amongst men Indeed, even if they had wished to impose so gigantic a fraud upon their fellow-men, they certainly could, not have invented the portrait they have given us—a character so noble, so loveable, so original, so tragic—a man so human and so divine, the majesty of God hidden under the simplicity of a village carpenter, who drew all to Himself not in the glory of triumphant divinity on Mount Thabor, but in the shame of beaten humanity on Mount Calvary,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.