concerning one who caused men “to bind themselves with an oath not to enter into any wickedness, or commit thefts, robberies, or adulteries, or falsify their word, or repudiate trusts committed to them” (Epistles X. 96).  This secular ignorance is not surprising; but the silence of Josephus is.  He mentions Jesus in but one clearly genuine passage, when telling of the martyrdom of James, the “brother of Jesus, who is called the Christ” (Ant. xx. 9. 1).  Of John the Baptist, however, he has a very appreciative notice (Ant, xviii. 5. 2), and it cannot be that he was ignorant of Jesus.  His appreciation of John suggests that he could not have mentioned Jesus more fully without some approval of his life and teaching.  This would be a condemnation of his own people, whom he desired to commend to Gentile regard; and he seems to have taken the cowardly course of silence concerning a matter more noteworthy, even for that generation, than much else of which he writes very fully.

22.  The reason for the lack of written Christian records of Jesus’ life from the earliest time seems to be, not that the apostles had a small sense of the importance of his earthly ministry, but that the early generation preferred what at a later time was called the “living voice” (Papias in Euseb.  Ch.  Hist. iii. 39).  The impression made by Jesus was supremely personal; he wrote nothing, did not command his disciples to write anything, preferring to influence men’s minds by personal power, appointing them, in turn, to represent him to men as he had represented the Father to them (John xx. 21).  But the time came when the first witnesses were passing away, and they were not many who could say, “I saw him.”  Our gospels are the result of the natural desire to preserve the apostolic testimony for a generation that could no longer hear the apostolic voice; and they are precisely what such a sense of need would produce,—­vivid pictures of Jesus, agreeing in general features, differing more or less in details, reflecting individual feeling for the Master, and written not simply to inform men but to convince them of that Master’s claims.  One evidence of the reality of the gospel pictures is the fact that we so seldom feel the individual characteristics of each gospel.  This is especially true of the first three, which, to the vividness of their picture, add a remarkable similarity of detail.  Tatian, in the second century, felt it necessary to make a continuous narrative for the use of the church by interweaving the four gospels into one, and he has had many successors down to our day; but the fact that unity of impression has practically resulted from the four pictures without recourse to such an interweaving, invites consideration of the characteristics of these remarkable documents.