‘The Jesus of History’ in 1961

Abstract

At the beginning of 1917, there was published The Jesus of History by T. R. Glover, and it would be difficult to overestimate the influence that this book had on students and others of my generation. It seemed to bring Jesus down from the stained-glass existence in which our youthful piety had pictured Him, to make of Him a person real, vibrant and responsive to our twentieth-century needs—‘a man living upon victuals’ as Carlyle said of Richard Cœur de Lion. Glover too dispensed with all the theological jargon that seemed to us to stand as a barrier between the Jesus of the Gospels and the common man, and we heard Him speaking to us in a language that we could understand. Besides, this Jesus of History was a Jesus that could be preached, and the Gospel that was proclaimed by many younger men from their pulpits in the years following the 1914–18 War was the Gospel according to T. R. Glover. Glover has gone very much out of fashion today, and there were indeed limitations in his portrait of Jesus as there are bound to be in every such portrait made by man. Yet when I read this book again a few months ago, it seemed to me that almost everything that Glover said—and how well he said it!—was true in the sense that it fitted into the picture that any honest historian would make of the Jesus of the Gospels.