Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE KINGDOM OF GOD II. In Primitive Christianity The Christian sources. — Christianity, as we have seen, began as the proclamation of the near advent of the Kingdom of God. The special teaching associated with this proclamation is stated to have been given by Jesus of Nazareth, who is now regarded as the central figure of human history. If estimated by his achievements this position is well deserved; no master of men is comparable to Jesus in influence over the destinies of mankind. There are those who would say that this influence is due to an ideal formed by the Christian imagination rather than to an actual historical personage; such critics would maintain that we know so little about Jesus that we are not justified in asserting anything positively about His character and teaching. Still, I think the consensus of scholarly opinion to-day would be not only that Jesus really lived, but that His personality must have been one of unique greatness and power. But, apart from the doubtful testimony of ecclesiastical tradition, our only sources of information about Jesus are the writings collected in the New Testament, and these are all of later date — some of them of much later date — than the period of His ministry. So far as we know He wrote nothing Himself; so we are entirely dependent upon second-hand reports of His words. This renders the task of forming a judgment upon those words a difficult one, especially as that part of the New Testament which professes to record them is not the earliest. But for our present purpose this does not greatly matter, for we have to recognise that, great as the personality of Jesus may have been, Christianity was largely the product of the intellectual and religious environment in which it arose; it could not have been a co...