John 20:31

But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, etc.

This is the object of all the gospel histories. They are to so reveal Christ as to produce faith in him. He is the one object of belief. He is the Christian's creed. Faith in him,. faith that takes him as the Christ, saves the soul. All who have such faith wrought by the word of God will "have life through his name."

Here, with these words, John ends the great argument that he entered upon with the first chapter and which continues with unbroken connection until it reaches its culmination in the remarkable declaration of the purpose with which he had written. The chain of argument embraces the testimony of Moses and the prophets, the witness of John the Baptist, whom the Jews acknowledged as. man of God, the wonderful life of Christ, the supernatural wisdom and authority of his teaching, his supernatural works, and last and greatest of all, the fact of his death, burial and resurrection. The last is the crowning argument, and it is after he has established it beyond. doubt, if such. wonderful fact can be proven by human testimony, that he closes with the declaration, These were written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ the Son of God, etc.

The resurrection is so vital that, in addition to the condensed argument given at the close of the preceding section,. think it important, here, where the argument of John reaches its climax, to add some additional remarks. First,. will cite the admissions of great German scholars of the Rationalistic school, and then add the argument given by Dr. Philip Schaff in his history of Apostolic Christianity.

1. Dr. Baur, of Tubingen, who might well be called the head of the celebrated Tubingen school of rationalistic criticism, after the study of. lifetime, came at last to the conclusion, stated in revised editions of his Church History of the First Three Centuries, published shortly before his death, that nothing but the miracle of the resurrection could disperse the doubts which threatened to drive faith itself into the eternal night of death. While he adds that the nature of the resurrection itself lies outside of historical investigation, he states that "the faith of the disciples in the resurrection of Jesus becomes the most solid and irrefutable certainty. In this faith only, Christianity gained. firm foothold of its historical development.... No psychological analysis can penetrate the inner spiritual process by which in the consciousness of the disciples their unbelief at the death of Jesus was transformed into. belief of his resurrection.... We must rest satisfied with this, that for them the resurrection of Christ was. fact of their consciousness, and had for them all the reality of. historical event." Vol. I, pp. 39, 40.

2. Dr. Ewald, of Gottingen, while resolving the resurrection into. purely spiritual one, through long-continued manifestations from heaven, declares, "Nothing is historically more certain than that Christ rose from the dead and appeared to his own, and thus, their vision was the beginning of new, higher faith and of all their Christian labors."-- Apostolic Age, p. 69.

3. Dr. Keim, of Zurich,. pupil of Dr. Baur, in his Life of Christ, expresses the conviction that "it was the crucified and living Christ who, not as the risen one, but rather as the divinely glorified one, gave visions to his disciples and revealed himself to his society." In his last work on the great problem which has defied all rationalistic explanations, he comes to the conclusion that we must either, with Dr. Baur, humbly confess our ignorance, or return to the faith of the apostles "who have seen our Lord." See last edition of Life of Christ, p. 362. To these might be added other testimonies, but these are enough to show the bewilderment and confusion of the rationalistic "higher criticism" of Germany. For further treatment of this subject, see Dr. Schaff on the Resurrection, in the Appendix.