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.

23. The first gospel impresses the careful reader with three things: (1) A
clear sense of the development of Jesus' ministry. The author introduces
his narrative by an account of the birth of Jesus, of the ministry of John
the Baptist, and of Jesus' baptism and temptation and withdrawal into
Galilee (i. 1 to iv. 17). He then depicts the public ministry by grouping
together, first, teachings of Jesus concerning the law of the kingdom of
heaven, then a series of great miracles confirming the new doctrine, then
the expansion of the ministry and deepening hostility of the Pharisees,