TOWARD THE UNDERSTANDING OF JESUS CHAPTER I THE teachings of Christ are an historical event. Let us try to understand them historically. Without an historical understanding we have before us not teachings but texts. There is hardly a text in the four gospels that is not apparently conflicting with other texts. Yet an insight is won when the teachings of Jesus are viewed and understood historically. The test of true understanding is to see in seeming contradictions but differing aspects of the same fundamental forces, to perceive in the endless expressions of life but one flow of life and to trace that flow to its sources. The test of true understanding is an understanding free from contradictions. So long as we find contradictions it is certain that what we hold in our hands are fragments; and though we may try to arrange them logically, the complete sphere of Jesus' own life and the life he preached we do not understand. The gospels themselves contain practically nothing that throws light on Jesus' life as a whole. Little is |