By James Stalker
I.
IT is probable that Jesus knew three languages. The language of His country was Aramaic; and some fragments of it, as they fell from His lips, have been preserved to us in the Gospels, such as Talitha, cumi, the words with which He raised the daughter of Jairus. But it is not likely that He read the Scriptures in this His native tongue. Sometimes, indeed, the quotations of the Old Testament in the New do not tally exactly with any form of the Old Testament now in our hands, and the conjecture has been hazarded that in such cases the quotations are taken from an Aramaic version then in existence; but this is no more than conjecture.
Another language He spoke was Greek. In Galilee, where He was brought up, there were so many Greek settlers that it was called " Galilee of the Gentiles; " and Greek was the language of commerce and of the more cosmopolitan kind of social intercourse. A boy brought up in Galilee in those days would have the same chance of learning Greek as in our day a boy brought up in the Highlands of Scotland has of learning English. Now in Greek there existed in Christ's time a version of the Old Testament Scriptures. We still possess it, under the name of the Septuagint, or Seventy, the supposed number of the translators who executed it in Egypt between two and three hundred years before the Christian era. It was extensively circulated in Palestine. The New Testament writers very frequently quote from it, and there is little doubt that our Lord read it.
The third language which He probably knew was Hebrew. This can only be stated as a probability; for though Hebrew was the language of the Jews, it had ceased before Christ's time to be the spoken language of Palestine. Languages sometimes decay even in the countries to which they are native, and become so mixed with foreign elements as to lose their identity. A modern example is seen in Italy, where Latin is now a dead language, having been transmuted by slow degrees in the course of centuries into Italian. Though Italian bears considerable resemblance to the ancient tongue, the boys of Italy of today have to learn Latin just as our own boys do. The same thing had taken place in Palestine. The Hebrew language, in which the Old Testament was written, had degenerated into Aramaic; and Jews who desired to read the Scriptures in the original tongue had to learn the dead language. There is reason to believe that Jesus acquired it. In some of His quotations from the Old Testament, scholars have observed, He purposely diverges from the Greek and reverts to the exact terms of the original. It will be remembered also that in the synagogue of Nazareth He was asked to read the Scriptures. Now it is probable that in the synagogue-roll the writing was in Hebrew, the reader having first to read it in that language and then to translate it into the language of the people.*
If this be so, it is surely interesting to think of Jesus learning the dead language in order to read the Word of God in the tongue in which it was written. Remember, His condition in life was only that of a mechanic; and it may have been in the brief intervals of toil that He hastened the strange letters and forms that were to bring Him face to face with the Psalms as David wrote them and with the Prophecies as they flowed from the pen of Isaiah or Jeremiah. In our own country the same sacred ambition is not unknown. At all events, a generation ago there were working men who learned Greek with the grammar stuck on the loom in front of them, that they might read the New Testament in the language in which it was written; and I have spoken with the members of a group of businessmen in Edinburgh who met every Saturday to read the Greek Testament. Certainly there is a flavour about the Bible, when read in the language it was written in, which it loses more or less in every translation; and it is perhaps surprising that in our day, when the love of the Bible is so common and the means of learning are so accessible, the ambition to read it thus is not more widely spread.
It is pathetic to think that Jesus never possessed a Bible of His own; but there can be no doubt of the fact. The expense of such a possession in those days was utterly beyond the means of one in His condition; and besides, the bulkiness of the rolls on which it was written would have prevented it from being portable, even if He could have possessed it. Possibly in His home there may have been a few of the precious rolls, containing the Psalms or other favourite portions of Holy Writ; but it must have been by frequenting the synagogue and obtaining access to the books lying there, perhaps through ingratiating Himself with their keeper, as an enthusiastic musician may do with the organist of a church in order to be permitted to use the instrument, that He was able to quench His thirst for sacred knowledge. We can procure the Holy Book for next to nothing, and every child possesses a copy. May its cheapness and universal currency never make it in our eyes a common thing!
Of course it was only the Old Testament Jesus had to read. It may be worth while to recall this as a reminder of how much more reason we have to love and prize our larger Bible. When I read in the Psalms such outbursts of affection for the Word of God as these: " Oh how I love Thy law: it is my study all the day; " " How sweet are Thy words to my taste; yea, sweeter than honey to my mouth; " " More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold; sweeter also than honey and the honey-comb,"- I say, when I read such outbursts of holy feeling, and recollect that they came from the lips of men who possessed only the Old Testament, perhaps only a fragment of it men in whose Bible there were no Gospels, of Epistles of Paul, or Apocalypse, who had never read the Sermon on the Mount or the Prodigal Son, the seventeenth of John or the eighth of Romans, the thirteenth of First Corinthians or the eleventh of Hebrews,- I ask what my feelings are towards the much larger Bible I possess, and I say to myself that surely in modern times the heart of man has become ossified, and the fountains of gratitude have dried up, and the fires of admiration and enthusiasm have been put out, so tame, in comparison, is our affection for the far more perfect Book.**
II.
There is the most indubitable evidence that Jesus was an assiduous student of the Word of God. This is furnished, not by repeated statements to this effect, but by proofs far more impressive. His recorded sayings abound with quotations from it. These are sometimes express references to the book and the verse; but oftener they are allusions to Old Testament events and personages, or unexpressed quotations so woven into the warp and woof of His own statements as to show that the Old Testament drenched His mind through and through, supplied the scenery in which His imagination habitually worked, and moulded the very language in which He thought and spoke.
If His quotations are examined, it will be found that they are derived from every part of the book, showing His acquaintance not only with its prominent features, but with its obscurest corners; so that we ourselves need not travel anywhere among the Old Testament writings without the assurance that His blessed feet have been there before us. It is, however, peculiarly enjoyable in the reading of Scripture to be able to halt at a text and know for certain, from His quoting it, that out of this very vessel, which we are raising to our lips, Jesus drank the living water. There are even texts which we may without irreverence call His favourites, because He quoted them again and again. And there are books of Scripture, which seem to have been specially dear to Him, Deuteronomy, the Psalms and Isaiah being the chief.
Not long ago it fell to my lot to look over the papers of a deceased friend. As all who have had the same duty to perform must know, it is a pathetic task. There is a haunting sense of desecration in rifling the secrets kept hidden during life and learning exactly what the man was beneath the surface. My friend had been a man of the world, exposed to many of the temptations of those who have to do its business and mingle with its company; but he had sustained the character of a religious man. I had now the means of finding out whether this was something put on from the outside or growing from within. It was with deep awe that, as I advanced, I came upon evidence after evidence of an inner life with even deeper and fresher roots than I had ventured to hope for. When I opened his Bible especially, it told an unmistakable story; for the marks of long and diligent use were visible on every page - the leaves well worn, the choice texts underlined, short breathings of the heart noted on the margins. In some parts the marks of use were peculiarly frequent. This was the case especially with Psalms, Isaiah and Hosea in the Old Testament and the writings of St. John in the New. I now knew the reality of the life that was ended, and whence its virtues had sprung.
Thus the very aspect of a man's Bible may be a record of his most secret habits and remain to those who come after him a monument of his religion or irreligion. To the living man himself there is perhaps no better test of his own religious condition than a glance through its pages; for by the tokens of use or neglect he may learn whether or not he loves it. I copied from the flyleaf of my friend's Bible a few words, which perhaps explain the source of true love to the Word: " Oh, to come nearer to Christ, nearer to God, nearer to holiness! Every day to live more completely in Him, by Him, for and with Him. There is a Christ; shall I be Christless? A cleansing; shall I remain foul? A Father's love; shall I be an alien? A heaven; shall I be cast out?"
III.
There are different methods of studying the Scriptures with profit. On these we have no express teaching from the lips of Christ; but from the records of His conduct we can see that He practised them.
According to the method by which it is studied, God's Word serves different uses in spiritual experience; one method being serviceable for one kind of use, and another for another. Jesus displayed perfect proficiency in all the ways of using it; and from this we are able to infer how He studied it.
There are especially three prominent uses to which we find Him putting the Bible, and these are very important for our imitation.
1. For Defence.
The very first use we find Him making of the Word is as a defence against temptation. When the Wicked One came to Him and tempted Him in the wilderness, He answered every suggestion with, " It is written,' The Word was in His hands the sword of the Spirit, and He turned with its edge the onsets of the enemy.
In like manner He defended Himself with it against the assaults of wicked men. When they lay in wait for Him and tried to entangle Him in His talk, He foiled them with the Word of God. Especially on that great day of controversy immediately before His end, (Matt. 22) when all His enemies set upon Him and the champions of the different parties did their utmost to confuse and confute Him, He repelled their attacks one after another with answers drawn from the Scriptures; and at last silenced them and put them to shame in the eyes of the people by showing their ignorance of the Scriptures of which they were the chosen interpreters.
There was yet another enemy He met with the same weapon. It was the last enemy. When the terrors of death were closing round Him, like a dark multitude pressing in upon a solitary man, He had recourse to His old and tried weapon. Two at least, if not more, of His seven last words from the cross were verses out of His favourite book of Psalms. One of them was His very last word, and with it He plucked His soul out of the jaws of death: " Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit."
For this use of Scripture the practice of committing it to memory is essential. In every case I have mentioned Jesus was able to recur to the contents of a memory stored with texts of Scripture and find at once the necessary weapon for the occasion. Often, when temptation comes, there is no time to search for the word to meet it; everything depends on being already armed, with sword in hand. This shows how necessary it is to fill the memory, while it is plastic, with stores of texts; we do not know what use we may get of them in future days of trial and weakness. In daily reading, when we have gone through a chapter, it is an excellent plan to select a single verse and commit it to memory. Not only does this sharpen the attention on the whole chapter, but also it lays up ammunition for future battles.
2. For Inspiration.
It is easy from Christ's Old Testament references to sec that He dwelt much among the great spirits of the past whose lives the Old Testament records. His earthly environment was unsympathetic in the extreme. In His own home He was not believed in. In His own country there was living an evil generation, as He often said, irresponsive to every motive that most profoundly affected Him. His own followers were, in mind and spirit, but children, whom He was only training to comprehend His ideas. ' His overcharged heart longed for companionship, and He had to seek it among the great figures of the past. In the silent walks and groves of Scripture He met with Abraham and Moses, with David and Elijah and Isaiah, and many more of kindred spirit. These men had lived for aims similar to His own. They had suffered for them as He was suffering; He could borrow the very words of Isaiah about his contemporaries to describe His own. If Jerusalem was persecuting Him she had always been a city that slew the prophets. So near did He get in His reading of the Word to these departed spirits, so alive in His meditations did they become, that at last two of them, the greatest of all, Moses and Elias, were actually drawn back across the boundary of visibility and appeared conversing with Him in the Holy Mount. But this conversation was only the culmination of hundreds He had held before with them and with the other prophets in the pages of Holy Writ.
To enjoy this use of the Bible a different kind of study of it is necessary from that which makes it useful for defence. For defence the verbal memory of single texts is what is necessary; for inspiration our study must take a wider sweep. It must embrace the life of a man from beginning to end; it must understand the time, which produced him, and the circumstances against which he had to react. We must read about the man till we see the world of his day, and him moving in it; we must learn to catch his tone and accent. Then he is ours; he will walk with us; he will speak to us; he will be our companion and friend. This is the privilege of the Christian who knows his Bible: whatever be his surroundings in the actual world, he can transport himself at will into the best of company, where the brow of every one is crowned with nobleness, every eye beams encouragement, and the air is redolent of faith and hope and love.
3. For Guidance.
Jesus used His Bible as the chart of His own life. Learned men, ay, and reverent men, have discussed the question at what age He became fully aware that He was the Messiah, and by what degrees He became possessed of a distinct knowledge of the path which He was to pursue: at what point, for example, He learned that He was to be not a victorious but a suffering Saviour; and they have supposed that He came to the knowledge of these things by the study of the prophecies of the Old Testament about Himself. I have never felt myself fit for such speculations; these things seem to me to be hidden behind the curtain of the mystery of His person as God and man in one. But it is easy in His words to see that He did follow His own course with intense interest in Old Testament prophecy, as in a chart. Again and again it is said He did this and that, that such and such a prophecy might be fulfilled. To the deputation sent from the Baptist, and to others, He pointed out how literally His way of life corresponded with the portrait of the Messiah sketched by Isaiah and other prophets. His intercourse with His disciples after His resurrection seems to have been mainly devoted to showing them from Moses and all the prophets that His life, sufferings and death were the exact fulfillment of all that had been foretold.
To use Scripture thus requires a method of study far more advanced than is necessary for the uses of defence or inspiration already explained: it requires the power of taking a bird's-eye view of Scripture as a whole, of discerning the main currents flowing through it from first to last, and especially of tracing clearly the great central current to which all the others tend and into which they finally empty themselves.
Evidently this was Christ's way of studying the Bible: He could lift it up and wield it as a whole. One sees this even in His mode of using single texts. He rarely quotes a text without revealing in it some hidden meaning, which no one had suspected before, but which shines clearly to all eyes as soon as it has been pointed out.*** Some rare men in all ages have had this power. You occasionally hear a preacher who can quote text so that it becomes transfigured and shines in his argument like a gem. What gives this power? It comes when the mind can go down and down through the text till it reaches the great lake of light that lies beneath all the texts and a jet from that fiery sea comes up and burns on the surface.
We are too easily satisfied with enjoying isolated texts. The shock and stimulus which a single text can give is very valuable, but a whole book of Scripture can give a far more powerful shock, if we read it from beginning to end and try to grasp its message as a whole. From this we may advance to groups of books. Sometimes we might take a single subject and go through the whole Bible to find out what is taught on it. And why should we not at last make the attempt to grasp all that the Bible has to teach, for faith on the one hand and for conduct on the other?
The best guide to the fulness of Scripture is to search it, as Jesus did, as the chart of our own life. In a different way, indeed, from that in which He found His life prefigured there, yet in a perfectly legitimate way, we shall find the exact form and image of our own. In precept and promise and example we shall see every deed we have to do, every resolution we have to form, every turn in life we have to take, laid down; and, if we act as it is written, we shall be able to follow up what we do by saying, as He so often did, " This has been done that the Scripture might be fulfilled."
Such a course earnestly followed will, however, bring us still nearer to His method of studying the Scriptures; for it will inevitably land us in the great central current which runs through the whole of Scripture from first to last. What is this? It is nothing but Christ Himself. The whole stream and drift of the Old Testament moves straight to the cross of Christ. The whole New Testament is nothing but the portrait of Christ. Let a man seek the true course of his own life in the Word, and inevitably it will land him at the cross, to seek mercy as a perishing sinner in the Saviour's wounds; and let him, starting afresh from this point of departure, seek his true course still farther, and inevitably what he will see will be, rising upon him in the distance, astonishing and enchaining him, but drawing him ever on, the image of perfection in the man Christ Jesus.
* "Vers fur Vers, abwechselnd mit dem dazu bestellten Uebersetzer, las der Aufgerufene den Text und der Uebersetzer sprach das Tangum, d. h. die aramaische Paraphrase."---HAUSRATH, Neutestamentliche Zeitgeschichte. ** No nobler tribute has ever been paid to the Divine Word than Edward lrving's Orations for the Oracles of God. We quote a few sentences from the first of them: " There is no express stirring up of faculties to meditate her high and heavenly strains -nor formal sequestration of the mind from all other concerns on purpose for her special entertainment-nor pause of solemn seeking and solemn waiting for a spiritual frame, before entering and listening to the voice of the Almighty's wisdom. Who feels the sublime dignity there is in a saying fresh descended from the porch of heaven? Who feels the awful weight there is in the least iota that hath dropped from the lips of God? Who feels the thrilling fear or trembling hope there is in words whereon the eternal destinies of himself do hang? Who feels the tide of gratitude swelling within his breast, for redemption and salvation, instead of flat despair and everlasting retribution? Or who, in perusing the Word of God, is captivated through all his faculties, transported through all his emotions, and through all his energies of action wound up?
"Oh! if books had but tongues to speak their wrongs, then might this book well exclaim-Hear, 0 heavens I and give ear, 0 earth ! I came from the love and embrace of God, and mute nature, to whom I brought no boon, did me rightful homage. To man I came and my words were to the children of men. I disclosed to you the mysteries of the hereafter, and the secrets of the throne of God. I set open to you the gates of salvation, and the way of eternal life, heretofore unknown. Nothing in heaven did I withhold from your hope and ambition; and upon your earthly lot I poured the full horn of divine providence and consolation, But ye requited me with no welcome, ye held no festivity on my arrival: ye sequester me from happiness and heroism, closeting me with sickness and infirmity; ye make not of me, nor use me for your guide to wisdom and prudence, but press me into your list of duties, and withdraw me to a mere corner of your time; and most of ye set me at nought, and utterly disregard me.
I came, the fulness of the knowledge of God: angels delighted in my company, and desired to dive into my secrets. But ye mortals place masters over me, subjecting me to the discipline and dogmatism of men, and tutoring me in your schools of learning. I came not to be silent in your dwellings, but to speak welfare to you and to your children. I came to rule, and my throne to set up in the hearts of men. Mine ancient residence was the bosom of God; no residence will I have but the soul of an immortal; and if you had entertained me, I should have possessed you of the peace which I had with God."
*** "Lord, this morning I read a chapter in the Bible, and therein observed a memorable passage, whereof I never took notice before. Why now, and no sooner, did I see it? Formerly my eyes were as open, and the letters as legible. Is there not a thin veil laid over Thy Word, which is more rarefied by reading, and at last wholly worn away? . . . I see the oil of Thy word will never leave increasing whilst any bring an empty barrel. The Old Testament will still be a New Testament to him who comes with a fresh desire of information. ., . How fruitful are the seeming barren places of Scripture. Bad ploughmen, which make balks of such ground. Wheresoever the surface of God's Word doth not laugh and sing with corn, there the heart thereof within is merry with mines, affording, where not plain matter, hidden mysteries."-FULLER, Good Thoughts in Bad Times.
