The Historic , Christ
Jesus. By A. E. Baker. (The Centenary Press. 7s. Gcl.) THE experienced reader opens any new attempt to treat the life of Christ with some misgivings. For whether it belongs to the extremely critical or to the extremely credulous school, whether the angle of approach be history, geography, psychology or spirituality, it is likely to tell us less about its august subject than about its author's own point of view. Mr. Baker is quite aware of this pitfall. But by his straight- forwardness, his sincerity, his realistic outlook—and also by the sustained excellence of his writing—he proves that there is really a place for such a study as he has given us ; embody- ing as it does the results of reasonable criticism whilst main- taining and elucidating that view of Christ's person which is required by an enlightened orthodoxy. His book is in the best sense Catholic without rigidity, and popular without fluidity. The eight studies which it contains endeavour to state "not what can be guessed or imagined about Jesus, but what can reasonably be said to be known about him." This claim will not be accepted by all readers ; and there are moments when Mr. Baker puts a considerable strain on our intellectual docility. Thus his sudden resort, in discussing. the miraculous elements in the Gospels, to the dubious argument, " If these and similar things did not happen, how did the stories originate ? " puts a question which all students of religious history could answer only too easily. But on the whole he does persuade us that a faithful and critical dealing with his authorities supports the view—once discredited, but now more and more widely received—that " the Catholic dogmatic conception of the Person of Jesus . . . goes back to the very beginning of the Christian movement," and is implied not only in the attitude of the early believers, but alS6 in " the consciousness and behaviour and teaching of Jesus Himself." The method is to take persons or classes of persons. and to show the impact of our Lord's personality on each. The result is to put before us a figure which " stands apart from, transcends, every civilization," and is at ores more familiar. to us and yet more unknown to us than any other great personage of the past.
Less elaborate and more orthodox than Dr. Glover's well. known Jesus of History, this study is far more successful in suggesting that natural-supernatural greatness, that mingling of the transcendent and the homely, the mystical and the ethical, that universal self-giving and unlimited demand, which the events and the teaching of the Gospels seem to require. It will fill a place of its own in Christological
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