The Jesus of the Gospels is the Son of God. Stated in its highest form, the problem which the evangelists had in hand was how to represent a Divine being under human conditions, and to set Him forth in such a way that in that presentation there should be nothing unworthy of the Divine, and nothing inconsistent with the human conditions under which He worked and lived. This was the greatest problem ever set to literature, and how the evangelists presented and solved it is found in the Gospels. There it has been solved. Even a writer like Bousset admits: "Already for Mk is Jesus not only the Messiah of the Jewish people, but the miraculous eternal Son of God, whose glory shone in the world. .... For the faith of the community, which the oldest evangelist already shares, Jesus is the miraculous Son of God, in whom men believe, whom men put wholly on the side of God" (Was wissen wir von Jesus? 54, 57). The contrast between the Jesus of the Synoptics and the Pauline and Johannine Christ, so often emphasized, thus begins to disappear. The purpose of the Synoptics, as of John, is to lead men to "believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God," that, believing, they "may have life in his name" (Joh 20:31).
LITERATURE.
Besides the works mentioned in the article, reference may be made to the following: E.A. Abbott, article "Gospels" in Encyclopedia Britannica (11th edition), edition 9 (with Rushbrooke), Common Tradition of the Synoptic Gospels, and other works; Sanday, Gospels in the 2nd Century, The Life of Christ in Recent Criticism; Sir John Hawkins, Horae Synopticae; G. Salmon, Introduction to New Testament; H. Chase, "The Gospels in the Light of Historical Criticism," Essay X in Cambridge Biblical Essays, edited by Dr. Swete (1905); H. L. Jackson, "The Present State of the Synop, tic Problem," Essay XIII in Cambridge Biblical Essays, edited by Dr. Swete (1909); Peake, Introduction to New Testament; A. Loisy, Les evangiles synoptiques (1907-8); J.M. Thomson, The Synoptic Gospels, Arranged in Parallel Cols. (1910; this scholarly work does for English Versions of the Bible what such works as Greswell's Harmonia Evangelica, Rushbrooke's Synopticon and Wright's Synopsis have done for the Greek texts); A.A. Hobson, The Diatessaron of Tatian and the Synoptic Problem (The University of Chicago Press, 1904).
James Iverach