BR 121 .D43 1908 Denney, James, 1856-1917 Jesus and the gospel JESUS AND THE GOSPEL JESUS AND THE GOSPEL CHRISTIANITY JUSTIFIED IN THE MIND OF CHRIST BY JAMES DENNEY Professor op Nbw Testament Language, Litbraturb and Theology, Unitbd Free Church, Glasgow TtW /xc Xeyerc eivcu; HODDER & STOUGHTON NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY A. C. ARMSTRONG & SON UXORI DILECTISSIMAE PREFACE The Introduction to this book makes its purpose suffi- ciently clear, and a preface is hardly needed except to indicate the readers whom the writer would wish to reach. The argument appeals, on the one hand, to those who are members of Christian Churches and to the Churches themselves. Amid the vast unsettlement of opinion which has been produced by the emancipation of the mind and its exercise on the general tradition of Christianity, it calls attention anew to the certainty of the things which we have been taught. It demonstrates, as the writer believes, that the attitude to Christ which has always been maintained in the Church is the one which is characteristic of the New Testament from beginning to end, and that this attitude is the only one which is consistent with the self-revelation of Jesus during His life on earth. But it makes clear at the same time that this Christian attitude to Jesus is all that is vital to Christianity, and that it is not bound up, as it is often supposed to be, with this or that in- tellectual construction of it, or with this or that definition or what it supposes or implies. The Church must bind its members to the Christian attitude to Christ, but it has no right to bind them to anything besides. It can vii viii JESUS AND THE GOSPEL never overcome its own divisions, it can never appeal with the power of a unanimous testimony to the world, till both these truths are recognised to the full. On the other hand, the argument appeals to those who are outside of the Churches, who do not take up the Christian attitude to Christ, and who on general philosophical grounds, as they would say, decline even to discuss it. To them it is simply an appeal to look at the facts. They have a place for Jesus in their world, but it is not the place which Christian faith gives Him. It is the hope of the writer that he may convince some that it is not the place which He claims. This is surely a serious consideration. The mind of Christ is the greatest reality with which we can come into contact in the spiritual world, and it is not treating it with the respect which is its due, if we decide beforehand, as so many do, that Christ can only have in the life and faith of humanity the same kind of place as others who are spoken of as the founders of religions. The section of the book entitled The Self-Revelation of Jesus is an attempt to bring out the significance which Jesus had, in His own mind, in relation to God and man. This can be done, as the writer is convinced, in a way which is historically unimpeachable; and unless we are pre- pared summarily to set aside Christ's consciousness of Himself, it is fatal to such appreciations of Him as have just been referred to. To be a Christian means, in one aspect of it, to take Christ at His own estimate; and it is one step to this to feel that He is putting the most serious of all questions when He asks, Who say ye that I am ? PREFACE ix Much of the indifference to Christianity in certain cir- cles comes from the refusal to treat this question seriously. It would fulfil the deepest desire of the writer if what he has said of the self-revelation of Jesus prevailed with any one who has regarded it as an unreal question to take it up in earnest, and to let the Christ who is historically attested in the gospels freely appeal to his mind, not as an illus- tration of some philosophical theorem of his own about God or Man, but as the Sovereign Person that He was and is. The writer wishes to express his thanks to Messrs. T. and T. Clark for the use they have allowed him to make of an article on Preaching Christ contributed by him to their Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels, CONTENTS INTRODUCTION PAOB THE PLACE OP CHRIST IN NEW TESTAMENT FAITH, AND THE QUESTION WHETHER THIS PLACE IS THAT WHICH HE CLAIMED FOR HIMSELF . . I BOOK I CHRISTIANITY AS IT IS EXHIBITED IN THE NEW TESTAMENT INTRODUCTION : THE UNITY AND VARIETY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT I. CHRIST IN PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN PREACHING II CHRIST IN THE FAITH OF PAUL . HI. CHRIST IN THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS TV. CHRIST IN THE FIRST EPISTLE OF PETER V. CHRIST IN THE EPISTLE OF JAMES xi 12 39 42 44 Xll JESUS AND THE GOSPEL Vn. CHRIST IN THE SYNOPTIC GOGPELS (a) The Gospel according to Mark (b) The Gospel according to Matthew (c) The Gospel according to Luke VHI. CHRIST IN THE JOHANNINE WRITINGS (a) The Apocalypse {b) The Epistles of John (c) The Gospel according to John SUMMARY AND TRANSITION PAGE VI. CHRIST IN THE EPISTLE OF JUDE AND IN THE SECOND EPISTLE OF PETER .... 47 50 52 55 60 64 65 71 77 90 BOOK II THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH I. The Resurrection of Jesus. THE EASTER FAITH AND THE EASTER MESSAGE . „ 99 THE OLDEST HISTORICAL EVIDENCE . . . . 102 MORAL CONSLDERATIONS INVOLVED IN A TRUE APPRE- CIATION OF IT I IO CONTENTS xiii PAGE THE HISTORICAL AND THE SPIRITUAL EVIDENCE AS COMBINED IN I COR. XV Il8 THE APPEARANCES OF THE RISEN JESUS . . . 1 26 Difficulties as to their order . . . .126 Progressive materialisation . . . .129 Difficulties as to the scene of the appearings . 132 FUNCTION OF THE EVANGELISTS IN RELATION TO THE RESURRECTION 138 II. The Self-Revelation of Jesus. (a) Preliminary critical considerations. DOGMATIC PRECONCEPTIONS TO BE EXCLUDED . .144 CHARACTER OF THE EVANGELIC DOCUMENTS . . . 145 IDEA THAT HISTORICAL CRITICISM IS IRRELEVANT TO CHRISTIANITY 1 49 IDEA THAT ITS PRESUPPOSITIONS ARE FATAL TO CHRISTIANITY 1 53 HISTORICAL CRITICISM AND THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 156 HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF THE OTHER PRIMITIVE SOURCE — 'Q* 168 xiv JESUS AND THE GOSPEL (b) Detailed Study oj the earliest sources as illustrating the self-consciousness oj Jesus. PAGE THE BAPTISM OF JESUS . . . . . .177 THE TEMPTATIONS 1 86 f JESUS AND THE TWELVE : THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLE- SHIP 192 THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 214 THE HEALING OF THE CENTURION'S SERVANT '. FAITH IN JESUS . 226 JESUS AND JOHN THE BAPTIST 228 THE GREAT THANKSGIVING OF JESUS . . ♦ . 236 ISOLATED EXPRESSIONS IN WHICH JESUS* CONSCIOUSNESS OF HIMSELF IS REVEALED: Matt. II 2off -, I2 30 , i2"'«'« i3 ttf -,2 3 ««- 247 PASSAGES IN WHICH JESUS SPEAKS OF HIMSELF AS THE SON OF MAN . 255 MARK'S HISTORY THE HISTORY OF THE SON OF GOD . 269 A TYPICAL duvapLlf OR MIGHTY WORK IN WHICH JESUS' COxNSCIOUSNESS OF HIMSELF IS REVEALED : FAITH IN JtSUS 2 ?I CONTENTS xv PAGE THE BRIDEGROOM AND THE CHILDREN OF THE BRIDECHAMBER 279 THE UNPARDONABLE SIN IN MARK .... 283 THE MESSIAH AND THE CROSS : MarkS 27 -!© 45 . . 284 the triumphal entry into jerusalem . . . 307 the wicked husbandmen : servants and the son . 308 david's son and david's lord . . . . . 311 the date of the parousia 313 the last supper 315 THE FINAL CONFESSION 324 CONCLUSION THE ONE CHRISTIAN FAITH VINDICATED IN THE MIND OF CHRIST 329 OBJECTION BASED ON THE IRRELEVANCE OF HISTORY TO FAITH 330 OBJECTION BASED ON THE UNRELIABLENESS OF THE HISTORY IN QUESTION 332 THE RIGHT OF EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANITY SECURED . 336 THE RIGHT OF INTELLECTUAL LIBERTY SECURED . 337 xvi JESUS AND THE GOSPEL PAGE ATTITUDE OF INDIVIDUALS AND OF CHURCHES TO THESE CONCLUSIONS 34© THETR BEARING ON THE UNION OF CHURCHES . . 343 SIMPLIFICATION OF THEOLOGICAL CREEDS FALLACIOUS . 345 A UNITING CONFESSION OF FAITH 350 OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED 352 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY AND HOW TO SECURE IT . 358 INDEX OF NEW TESTAMENT PASSAGES .... 363 INTRODUCTION When we open the New Testament we find ourselves in presence of a glowing religious life. There is nothing in the world which offers any real parallel either to this life, or to the collection of books which attests it. The soul, which in contemporary literature is bound in shal- lows and in miseries, is here raised as on a great tidal wave of spiritual blessing. Nothing that belongs to a complete religious life is wanting, neither convictions nor motives, neither penitence nor ideals, neither vo- cation nor the assurance of victory. And from be- ginning to end, in all its parts and aspects and elements, this religious life is determined by Christ. It owes its character at every point to Him. Its convictions are convictions about Him. Its hopes are hopes which He has inspired and which it is for Him to fulfil. Its ideals are born of His teaching and His life. Its strength is the strength of His spirit. If we sum it up in the one word faith, it is faith in God through Him — a faith which owes to Him all that is characteristic in it, all that distinguishes it from what is elsewhere known among men by that name. This, at least, is the prima facte impression which the New Testament makes upon a reader brought up in the Christian Church. The simplest way to express it is to say that Christianity as it is represented in the New Testament is the life of faith in Jesus Christ. It is a life in which faith is directed to Him as its object, and in which everything depends upon the fact that the 2 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL believer can be sure of his Lord. Christ so conceived is a person of transcendent greatness, but He is a real person, a historical person, and the representations of His greatness are true. They reproduce the reality which He is, and they justify that attitude of the soul to Him which the early Christians called faith, and which was the spring of all their Christian experiences. This, we repeat, is the impression which the New Testament makes on the ordinary Christian reader, but it is possible to react against it. In point of fact, the reaction has taken place, and has been profound and far-reaching. Two main questions have been raised by it which it is the object of the present work to examine. The first is, How far is the description just given of the New Testament correct? Is it the case that the Christian religious life, as the New Testament exhibits it, really puts Jesus into the place indicated, and that everything in this life, and everything especially in the relations of God and man, is determined by Him? In other words, is it the case that from the very beginning Christianity has existed only in the form of a faith which has Christ as its object, and not at all in the form of a faith which has had Christ simply as its living pattern? The sec- ond question is of importance to those who accept what seems at a glance the only possible answer to the first. It is this: Can the Christian religion, as the New Tes- tament exhibits it, justify itself by appeal to Jesus? Granting that the spiritual phenomenon is what it is said to be, are the underlying historical facts sufficient to sustain it? In particular, it may be said, is the mind of Christians about Christ supported by the mind of Christ about Himself? Is that which has come to be known in the world as Christian faith — known, let us admit,- in the apostolic age and ever since — such faith as Jesus lived and died to produce? Did He take for INTRODUCTION 3 Himself the extraordinary place which He fills in the mind and the world even of primitive Christians, or was this greatness thrust upon Him without His knowledge, against His will, and in inconsistency with His true place and nature? We are familiar with the idea that we can appeal to Christ against any phenomenon of our own age which claims to be Christian; is it not conceivable that we may have to appeal to Him even against the earliest forms which Christianity assumed ? No one who is familiar with the currents of thought whether within or without the Church can doubt that these questions are of present and urgent interest. To some, indeed, it may seem that there are questions more fundamental, and that when men are discussing whether Jesus ever lived, or whether we know anything about Him, it is trifling to ask whether the apostolic faith in Him is justified by the facts of His history. No serious person, however, doubts that Jesus existed, and the second of our two questions has been stated in the most searching form conceivable. It raises in all its dimensions the problem of the life and mind of Jesus, and in answering it we shall have opportunity to examine fully the sources on which our knowledge of Jesus rests. For those who stand outside the Christian Church, this second ques- tion is naturally of greater interest than the other, yet even for them it is impossible to ignore the connexion of the two. For it is in the Church and through its testimony to Jesus that whatever knowledge we have of Him, even in the purely historical sense, has been pre- served. But for those who are within the Church, the first question also has an interest of its own. To ask whether the prima facie impression which the New Tes- tament makes upon us is verified by a closer examination — whether the interpretation of Christ which is current in the Church is that which is really yielded by the primi- 4 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL tive witnesses— is to ask in other words whether the Church's faith to-day is continuous with that of apostolic times; and there can be few Christians who are indifferent to the answer. But though the profession of indifference would be absurd, it is not absurd to aim at sincerity and truth. No one can be more anxious to know the truth than the man to whom it means a great deal that the truth should be thus or thus. If we could imagine a per- son to whom it was a matter of indifference whether the Christian Church of to-day understood rightly or wrongly what the New Testament means by Christian faith, or who did not care in the least whether the historical facts about Jesus justified that faith or not, we should have imagined a person not ideally competent but absolutely incompetent to deal with either the one question or the other. The writer does not wish to disguise the fact that he is vitally interested in both, for he is convinced that on no other condition is there any likelihood of the true answer being found. But he disclaims at the same time any 'apologetic' intention. There is no policy in what he has written, either in its manner or its substance. No- thing, so far as he is conscious, is set down for any other reason than that he believes it to be the truth, and nothing is to be discounted or allowed for as though he were mediating or negotiating between the progressive and the stationary elements in a Christian society, and would have said more or less if he had been free to speak with- out reserve. To the best of his knowledge he speaks without reserve, and has neither more nor less to say. This does not exclude the intention and the hope to say what may be of service to Christian faith and to the Christian Church; all it excludes is the idea that Chris- tian faith or the Christian Church can be served by any- thing else than simple truth. The two questions with which we have to deal are INTRODUCTION g in one important respect of very different character. The first is quite simple: Is the conception of the Christian religion which prevails and has always prevailed in the Church borne out by the New Testament ? As we know it, and as it has been known in history, the Christian life is the life of faith in Jesus Christ: is this what it was in primitive times? Does the New Testament throughout give that solitary and all-determining place to Jesus which He holds in the later Christian religion? This is a simple question, and no difficulty can be raised about the proper method of answering it. All we have to do is to go to the New Testament and scrutinise its evidence. The laws of interpretation are agreed upon among in- telligent people, and no difficulty about 'presuppositions' is raised. But the second question is of a different kind. It has to do with what is historically known of Jesus, and here the difficulty about 'presuppositions' becomes acute. It is possible to argue that much of what the New Testament records concerning Jesus cannot be his- torically known — that it transcends the conception of what is historical, and must either be known on other terms than history, or dismissed from the region of knowledge altogether. It is not necessary at this stage to raise the abstract problem; when we come to the sec- ond question it will be considered as far as the case requires. Here the writer would only express his distrust of a priori determinations of what is possible either in the natural or the historical sphere. There is only one uni- verse: nature is not the whole of it, neither is history; and neither nature nor history is a whole apart from it. Nature and history do not exist in isolation; they are caught up into a moral and spiritual system with which they are throughout in vital relations. It is not for any- one to say offhand and a priori what is or is not naturally or historicallv conceivable in such a system. Its possi- 6 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL bilities, in all likelihood, rather transcend than fall short of our anticipations; we need not be too much surprised if experience calls rather for elasticity than for rigidity of mind. If anything is certain, it is that the world is not made to the measure of any science or philosophy, but on a scale which perpetually summons philosophy and science to construct themselves anew; and it is with the undogmatic temper which recognises this that the problems indicated above are approached in this book. BOOK I CHRISTIANITY AS IT IS EXHIBITED IN THE NEW TESTAMENT BOOK I CHRISTIANITY AS IT IS EXHIBITED- IN THE NEW TESTAMENT INTRODUCTION It has been said above that in the New Testament we are confronted with a religious life in which everything is determined by Christ, and the question we have to consider is whether this is really so. Is there such a thing as New Testament Christianity, a spiritual phenom- enon with a unity of its own, and is this unity consti- tuted by the common attitude of all Christian souls to Christ? The instinctive answer of those who have been brought up in the Christian faith is in the affirmative. They cannot doubt that New Testament Christianity is one consistent thing. They are equally at home in all parts of the New Testament; they recognise throughout in it the common faith, the faith which gives Jesus the name which is above every name. This instinctive assurance of the unity of the New Testament is not disturbed by even the keenest sense of the differences which persist along with it. Criticism is a science of discrimination, and the critical study of the New Testament has had the greater part of its work to do in bringing into relief the distinctions in what was once supposed to be a uniform and dead level. The science of New Testament theology, if it is a science, has defined the various types of primitive teaching by contrast to one another; it has taught us 9 io JESUS AND THE GOSPEL to distinguish Peter and Paul, James and John, instead of losing them in the vague conception of 'apostolic' Even the reader who is not a professional student is aware of the distinctions, though he has no temptation to press them. He is conscious that the dialectical dis- cussions of Galatians and Romans are profoundly unlike the intuitive and contemplative epistles of John. When he reads the first verses of Hebrews or of the Fourth Gospel he becomes aware that he has entered a new intellectual atmosphere; this is not the air which he breathes in Matthew, Mark, or Luke. That new method of study known to Germans as the ' religionsgeschicht- liche Methode,' which regards the Christianity of the New Testament as a supreme example of religious syn- cretism, and by the help of the science of comparative religion traces all the elements of it to their independent sources, of course still further emphasises the differences. To it, Christianity is a stream which has its proximate source in Jesus; but as the stream flows out into the world tributaries pour into it from every side, swelling, colouring, sometimes poisoning its waters. This process does not begin, as we have perhaps been taught to be- lieve, when the New Testament closes, so that we have the New Testament as a standard for the perpetual restoration of the true faith: it begins at the very begin- ning. The New Testament itself is the earliest witness to it, and it is the New Testament itself which we must purge if we would get Christianity pure and undefiled. All the sacramentarianism, for example, which we find in Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians; all the nascent Catholicism of Acts and the Pastoral Epistles; all the religious materialism which in one form or another con- nects itself with the Church and its ministry, has to be explained and discounted on these lines. It cannot be traced to Christ, and therefore it is not Christian; it can NEW TESTAMENT CHRISTIANITY n be traced to other sources, and when we know what these are we understand it, and can rate it at its true value. It is not necessary to discuss this method of study here. Its right is unquestioned, and, though like all new things it is apt to go to some heads with intoxicating power, it has brought light to a few dark places in the New Testa- ment, and has doubtless more to bring. The point at present is that it emphasises certain differences which exist in the New Testament, differences which (it asserts) may amount to a direct contradiction of essential Chris-' tian truth. No one, it will be admitted, can deny that the New Testament has variety as well as unity. It is the variety which gives interest to the unity. The reality and power of the unity are in exact proportion to the variety; we feel how potent the unity must be which can hold all this variety together in the energies of a common life. The question raised by every demonstration of the undeniable differences which characterise the New Testament is, What is the vital force which triumphs over them all? What is it in which these people, differing as widely as they do, are vitally and fundamentally at one, so that through all their differences they form a brotherhood, and are conscious of an indissoluble spiritual bond? There can be no doubt that that which unites them is a common relation to Christ — a common faith in Him involving common religious convictions about Him. Such at any rate is the opinion of the writer, and it is the purpose of the following pages to give the proof of it in detail. Everywhere in the New Testament, it will be shown, we are in contact with a religious life which is determined throughout by Christ. Be the difference between the various witnesses what they will, there is no difference on this point. In the relations of God and man, every- thing turns upon Christ and upon faith in Him. There 12 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL is no Christianity known to the New Testament except that in which He has a place all His own, a place of absolute significance, to which there is no analogy else- where. We do not raise here the question whether this is right or wrong, whether it agrees or does not agree with the mind or intention of Christ Himself — this is re- served for subsequent treatment: all we are at present concerned with is the fact. It is not assumed, but it will appear as the unquestionable result of the detailed ex- amination, that Christianity never existed in the world as a religion in which men shared the faith of Jesus, but was from the very beginning, and amid all undeniable diversities, a religion in which Jesus was the object of faith. To all believers Jesus belonged to the divine as truly as to the human sphere. In the practical sense of believing in Him they all confessed His Godhead. This is the fact which we now proceed to prove and illustrate. I CHRIST IN PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN PREACHING Our investigation of the evidence naturally begins with the accounts of the primitive Christian preaching in Acts. Fortunately for our purpose we have no critical questions to encounter here. Even those who hold with Renan that the early pages of Acts are the most unhis- torical in the New Testament make an exception in favour of the passages with which we are concerned. 'Almost the only element,' says Schmiedel, 1 'that is his- torically important (in the early chapters of Acts) is the Christology of the speeches of Peter. This, however, is important in the highest degree. ... It is hardly possible 1 Encyclopaedia Biblica, 42. PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN PREACHING 13 not to believe that this Christology of the speeches of Peter must have come from a primitive source.' Perhaps what it is most important to notice is that from the very beginning there really is a Christology. The question which Jesus put to His disciples while He was with them, Whom say ye that I am? was one which they could not help putting to themselves. If we hold that the Son, properly speaking, has no place in the gospel, but only the Father, then the question is a misleading one; it sets the mind off spiritually on a wrong track. This seems, in spite of ambiguities, to be the conviction of scholars like Harnack, who thinks that Christology is a mistake, and would lighten the distressed ship of the gospel by throwing it overboard. 1 He goes so far as to censure the primitive Church for turning aside from its proper duty — teaching men to observe all things that Jesus had commanded — to the apologetic task of proving that Jesus was the Christ. 2 Our present question, we repeat, is not whether Peter and the other early preachers fulfilled their calling well or ill, but what it was that they actually did, and of this there can be no doubt. Their own relation to Jesus, as we see it in Acts, depends finally upon His Resurrection and His gift of the Spirit; and though these may be said in a sense to transcend history, they do not lie beyond experience. Peter had seen the Risen Jesus and received the Holy Spirit: in virtue of these experiences, Jesus had a place in his life and his faith which belonged to Him alone. He was both Lord and Christ, and there was nothing in the religious world of the apostle that was not henceforth determined by Him. It is this religious significance of Jesus, rather than the Christology of Peter, in the strict sense of the term, which it is our purpose to exhibit. The apostle starts in his preaching from the historical l Das Wesen des Christentums, 79 f. s Dogmengeschichte, i. 57 f. i 4 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL person of Jesus, and appeals to his hearers to confirm what he says: 'Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God unto you by miracles and portents and signs which God wrought through Him, as you yourselves know' (Acts 2 ?2 ) . We cannot tell what precisely was the sig- nificance to Peter of the wonderful works of Jesus, which are here assumed to be matter of common knowledge; the expression 'a man approved of God' is somewhat indefinite, and need not mean that Jesus was demon- strated by these works to be the Messiah. In point of fact, the characteristic of this primitive Christianity is not the belief that Jesus was the Christ, but the belief that He is the Christ. He was while on earth what all men had seen and known — a man approved of God by His might in word and deed; He is now what the preach- ing of the apostles declares Him to be — both Lord and Christ. This preaching is not, indeed, independent of the historical life of Jesus. When a man was chosen to take the place of Judas, and to be associated with the eleven as a witness of the Resurrection, he was chosen from the men 'who have companied with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and went out among us, begin- ning from the baptism of John unto the day that He was received up from us' (Acts i 21 f ). The criticism which would have us believe that from the Resurrection onward the Jesus of history was practically displaced by an ideal Christ of faith is beside the mark. The Christ of faith was the Jesus of history, and no one was regarded as qualified to bear witness to the Christ unless he had had the fullest opportunity of knowing Jesus. Nevertheless, Jesus is demonstrated to be the Christ and is preached in that character, not merely or even mainly on the ground of what He had said and done on earth, but on the ground of His exaltation to God's right hand, and His gift of the Holy Spirit. It is in this exaltation and THE CHRIST OF PETER 15 in this wonderful outpouring of divine life that He is seen to be what He is, and takes the place in human souls which establishes the Christian religion. The Christ, of course, is a Jewish title, and it is easy to say impatient or petulant things about it. There are those who profess devotion to Jesus and tell us that they do not care whether He was (or is) the Christ or not; those who thank God, not without complacency, that to them He is far more and far better than the Christ; those who assure us that Christianity is a misnomer, and that our religion should find a more descriptive name. Such superior persons betray a lack of historical discern- ment, and it is wiser on the whole to accept the world as God has made it than to reconstruct it on lines of our own. The conception of Jesus as the Christ, if we interpret it by the teaching of Peter in the early chapters of Acts, is not one which it is easy to disparage. It embodies at least two great truths about Jesus as the apostle regarded Him. The first is that Jesus is King. That is the very meaning of the term. The Christ is the Lord's Anointed, and the throne on which He has been set in His exaltation is the throne of God Himself. It is a translation of this part of the meaning of the term into less technical language when Peter says elsewhere: 'Jesus Christ, He is Lord of all' (Acts 10 36 ). Simple as it is, this assertion of the sovereignty of Jesus covers all that is characteristic in historical Christianity. If it dis- appeared, all that has ever been known to history as Christianity would disappear along with it. It belonged to Christian faith from the beginning that in it all men should stand on a level with one another, but all should at the same time confront Christ and do homage to Him as King. The second truth covered and guarded by the conception of Jesus as the Christ is this: that He is the Person through whom God's Kingdom comes, and i6 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL through whom all God's promises are fulfilled. In chk sense the name is a symbol of the continuity of the wor! of God, and a guarantee of its accomplishment. This is the historical importance of it. 'To Him bear all th ); I and the Father, He says, are one. 'One' is neuter, not masculine: Jesus and the Father constitute one power, by which the salvation of man is secured; He gives his sheep eternal life, and no power can pluck them out of His hand, because no power can pluck anything from the Father's hand, with 1 Holtzmann, Handcommentar, iv. 131. 8 4 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL whom, to this intent, Jesus is identified (io s °). Jesus is the only-begotten Son, in the bosom of the Father (i 18 , 3 lfi ) ; He quickens whom He will, and has all judg- ment committed to Him, that all men may honour the Son even as they honour the Father (5 2lfF ). A person so related to God is manifestly incommensurable with others; he is not conceived as the author of the gospel conceived him, he has not the place in our faith which he had in his, if he can be classified with even the great- est and most spiritual men. In some peculiar way be belongs to that side or aspect of reality which we call divine; he does not stand with us in the Christian reli- gion, sharing our worship and our needs, offering on his own behalf the prayers we offer on ours; he confronts us in the life, power, and grace of God. This absolute significance of Jesus for religion is vividly emphasised not only in His relation to God, but also in all His intercourse with men in the gospel. His relation to them is as incomparable as His relation to His Father. He is always a problem, but He is always suggesting to those around Him solutions of the problem which all the world can understand, and in which all the world is interested. Who is this? the Jews ask. Is it the Christ ? How shall we tell whether He is the Christ or not ? When the Christ comes, He is to come mysteriously: no one is to know whence He is; but do we not know all about this man's origin? The Christ is to come from Beth- lehem; but is not this man a Galilean? The Christ is to renew the miracles of the Exodus and the wil- derness; this man has done signs unquestionably, but are they signal enough to attest Him as the Messiah? As against this feeble professional criticism, "which what- ever else may be said of it must always be the affair of a few, Jesus offers Himself to the universal needs of men. 'I am the bread of life.' 'If anv man thirst, let CHRISTIANITY OF FOURTH GOSPEL 85 him come unto me and drink.' 'I am the light of the world.' 'I am the door.' 4 I am the good shepherd.' 4 1 am resurrection and life.' '1 am the way, the truth, and the life.' These are not words which it requires theological science to understand; they can only be interpreted by human need, but that secures that they can be understood by all. Whoever knows what it is to be hungry or thirsty, to be in the dark, to be outside, to be forlorn, wandered, dead, may know Jesus. This is the one thing of which the evangelist is sure, that there is no human need, not even the profoundest, which He cannot meet: of His fulness all may receive, and grace upon grace. In this adequacy to all the spiritual needs of the human race Jesus stands as completely alone as He does in His unique relation to the Father. The Saviour of the World (3 17 , 4 42 , 12 47 ) can no more be conceived to have a rival or a partner than the only- begotten Son of God. In examining the first epistle we saw that in the faith of the writer the eternal life which came through Christ was dependent upon His being a propitiation for sins. When he thinks of Jesus as Saviour, it is inevitably in this character that he conceives Him. The view taken in the gospel, it is sometimes alleged, is quite different. Here, it is said, there is no allusion to propitiation; the category which rules the author's thoughts is that of revelation, not that of atonement. Christ brings eternal life by making known the Father, and that is all. But such an interpretation of the gospel is misleading and superficial. There is of course a difference between a gospel and an epistle in every case; the emphasis in them will necessarily fall upon different points. But the fourth gospel, as we have already seen, has more of the character of an epistle than the other three; it is not such an immediate reflection of historical fact; the historical 86 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL fact is interpreted and illumined in it by the faith and experience of the writer, and as he himself tells us, by the teaching of the Spirit; and unless we could say beforehand that he was a different man from the author of the epistle — a proposition which has all evidence and probability against it — the presumption must be that on a question so vital the two books will be at one. This is in point of fact the conclusion to which we are led by an im- partial examination of the gospel itself. It is a book of testimony to Jesus, and what is the first testimony it presents? It is that of the Baptist in i 29 — 'Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.' If any one believes that the Baptist here is only the vehicle for the faith of the evangelist, the argu- ment is unaffected: a lamb by which sin is taken away is nothing but a sacrificial lamb, and the expression covers precisely the same spiritual debt to Christ and dependence upon Him as is covered by iXatriio^ or pro- pitiation, in the epistle (2 2 , 4 10 ). Again, at the close of the gospel, in the Johannine parallel to the apostolic commission in Matthew and Luke, we read: 'He breathed on them and said, Receive the Holy Spirit; whose so- ever sins ye forgive, they are forgiven unto them; whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained' (20 23 ). Clearly for the evangelist the forgiveness of sins lies at the heart of the gospel with which the disciples were entrusted as representatives of Jesus, and like everything else in the gospel it must be due to Him. But not only is this the case, it may be further shown that the particular way in which forgiveness is conceived as due to Jesus is the same in the gospel as in the epis- tle. Sometimes this comes out quite incidentally, and apart from any intention of the author. It is enough to recall, in illustration, his comment on the counsel of Caiaphas: 'You do not consider that it is for your CHRISTIANITY OF FOURTH GOSPEL 87 interest that one man should die for the nation, and not the whole nation perish' (11 50 ). This, the evan- gelist adds, he said not of himself, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus should die for the nation, and not for the nation only but also that He might gather together in one the dispersed children of God. Such a reflection on the brutal or cynical policy of the high priest could never have occurred to any one unless it had been divinely true for him that the death of Jesus was the life of the world. Nay, unless this had been an element of the truth in which as a re- ligious man he lived and moved and had his being, so that it was always present to him without deliberate reflection, it is impossible to see how his comment on Caiaphas should have originated. But this is only another way of saying that the death of Jesus has in the gospel the same place in the writer's faith as it has in the epistle. As illustrations of the significance which he assigns it in a more conscious fashion we may refer to the great sacramental discourses in the third and sixth chapters, and to the emphatic words about the water and the blood in 19 34 . It cannot be doubted that the last are to be interpreted in the same sense as the corresponding words, which have a similar and at the first glance a puzzling emphasis, in the epistle (5 6 : see above, p. 76). There is a reference in both places to the Christian sacra- ments of Baptism and the Supper which are in the writer's thoughts all through chapter 3 and chapter 6. If we look at chapter 3 connectedly, we see that the death of Christ comes into it precisely as it does into the epistle — indeed, precisely as it does into the epistle to the Romans. Nicodemus is being taught that we must be born again. The necessity of the new birth is the earthly thing which every one might be presumed to understand out of his 88 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL own experience: who has not sighed to be another crea- ture than he is? The heavenly thing which it is so hard to understand that the speaker may well despair of finding faith for it, is the possibility and the method of the new birth. No one can explain this heavenly thing but Jesus, and he does it in two sentences. One is that in which he describes it as a being born of water and of the spirit, where there is a reference, which it is not possible for the present writer to question, to Chris- tian baptism and to the reception of the spirit which was its normal accompaniment in the apostolic age. The other is that in which he says, 'As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth may in Him have eternal life.' Apart from the suggestion of the figure, we know what the evangelist meant by the lifting up of the Son of Man: Jesus used this word, he tells us plainly elsewhere (12 w ), to signify by what death He should die. Unless we are prepared to accuse the author of a rambling incoherence, and of tumbling out sentences which have no connexion with each other and could never find an intelligible context in the mind of his readers, we shall remember that the baptism al- luded to in ver. 5 is baptism in the name of Jesus, and specifically, as ver. 14 reminds us, in the name of Jesus who died for us upon the Cross. It is baptism, as Paul expresses it, looking to His death (Rom. 6 3 ). The new birth is mysterious, but not magical. As the evan- gelist understood it, in its specifically Christian char- acter, it is normally coincident with baptism; it is an experience which comes to men when in penitent faith they cast themselves upon the Son of God uplifted on the Cross — in other words, when they commit them- selves to the love which in the Lamb of God taketh away the sin of the world by becoming a propitiation CHRISTIANITY OF FOURTH GOSPEL 8g tor it. Apart from such a combination of ideas, the discourse with Nicodemus is chaotic and unintelligible, and the mere fact that it is thus made lucid and co- herent is sufficient to vindicate this construction. It secures for regeneration a genuinely Christian character by making it depend upon the death of Jesus, and it only gives to that death in this passage the significance claimed for it from i ay to 19 3 \ Mutatis mutandis, all that has been said of the third chapter in John may be said of the sixth. The Supper is in the author's mind in the one as Baptism is in the other. The subject is Jesus as the bread of life, and the burden of the discourse is put with the utmost generality in ver. 56: 'As the living Father sent me and I live be- cause of the Father, so he that eateth me, he shall live because of me.' But the evangelist passes, volun- tarily or involuntarily, into the liturgical terminology of the sacrament when he speaks of eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the Son of Man; and once this is recognised, there can be no question as to the refer- ence of such words. Their reference was fixed in the Christian community before this gospel was written, and they connect the life of the Christian with the death of Christ. It is not a passing idea that there is such a connexion; it is a truth embodied in a rite perpetually celebrated — a truth, therefore, never absent from the Christian mind, regarded as of primary and vital impor- tance, recurring to the thoughts spontaneously on the strangest occasions (11 i9 ff ), asserted with the most solemn emphasis (19 34 , 6 53 ). It is not serious criticism which finds in the fourth gospel a Christ whose significance for faith, as a propitiation for sin, is other than that which meets us in the first epistle of John. The Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world — the Son of Man uplifted on the Cross as Moses lifted up the Serpent in 9 o JESUS AND THE GOSPEL the Wilderness — the Only-begotten sent of God as a propitiation for our sins: these are one figure, domina- ting thought and inspiring faith to precisely the same intent in the epistle and in the gospel. And in this character, as in every other, Jesus stands alone. It is in Him and in His death, in no other person and no other act, that for the New Testament Christian sin is annulled. Here above all, we may say, for New Testa- ment faith, there is none other name. Summary and Transition Our investigation of the place which Jesus occupied in the faith of those who wrote the New Testament, and of those whom they addressed, is now complete. To the present writer it is conclusive evidence that in spite of the various modes of thought and feeling which the canonical Christian writings exhibit, there is really such a thing as a self-consistent New Testament, and a self- consistent Christian religion. There is a unity in all these early Christian books which is powerful enough to absorb and subdue their differences, and that unity is to be found in a common religious relation to Christ, a common debt to Him, a common sense that everything in the relations of God and man must be and is deter- mined by Him. We may even go further and say that in all the great types of Christianity represented in the New Testament the relations of God and man are re- garded as profoundly affected by sin, and that the sense of a common debt to Christ is the sense of what Chris- tians owe to Him in dealing with the situation which sin has created. This may not involve either a formally identical Christology, or a formally identical doctrine of Propitiation, in every part of the New Testament; but it is the justification of every effort of Christian intelli- SUMMARY AND TRANSITION 91 gence to define to itself more clearly who Jesus is and what He has done for our salvation from sin. The New Testament writers did not think of Christology and of the Atonement without sufficient motives, and as long as their sense of debt to Christ survives, the motive for thinking on the same subjects, and surely in the main on the same lines, will survive also. But this is not our interest here. What we have now to ask is whether the religion of the New Testament, consist- ing as it does in such a peculiar relation to Him as we have seen illustrated in all the documents, can be justi- fied by appeal to Christ Himself. With all its peculiari- ties, New Testament Christianity claims to rest on a historical basis, and it is a question of supreme impor- tance whether the historical basis which can be provided is adequate to support it. The question is at the present time not only important, but urgent, for the existing Christian Churches, in which the relation of faith to Jesus perpetuates on the whole the New Testament type, are perplexed by voices which call them away from it in different directions. On the one hand, we have our philosophical persons who, on the specious pretext of lifting religion into its proper atmosphere of universal and eternal truth, invite us, as has been already noticed, to dismiss historical considerations entirely. The truths by which Christianity lives are true, it is argued, what- ever we may or may not be able to find out about Jesus; they are true, not in Him, but in themselves and in God. It is a mere failure in intelligence— a sort of cowardice, to speak plainly — which makes people nervous about Jesus and the gospels. The Christian religion belongs to a world to which the historical and contingent, even though they should be represented by the life of Jesus, are matters of indifference. It will survive in all that is essential to it though Jesus should entirely disappear. 92 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL On the other hand, we have our historical persons, whose views are very different. To get back to Jesus, they tell us, is not the unimportant thing which philosophy would make it. It is vital to get back. But when we do get back, what do we find? Not, according to many of them, anything which justifies the New Tes- tament attitude to Jesus, or which supports what we have just seen to be the New Testament religion. What we find in the historical Jesus is not the author or the object of the Christian faith known to history, but a child of God like ourselves — a pious, humble, good man, who called others to trust the Father as He trusted, and to be children of God like Him. The Christian religion is not thus left to us, with the added advantage that it is historically secured; when the historical basis is laid bare, it is seen that the Christian religion cannot be sustained upon it. The Christian religion has been a mistake, a delusion, from the beginning; our duty is to revert from it to the religion of Jesus Himself, to cast away the primitive Christian faith and its testimony, and to fall back upon the pattern believer. It is obvious that there is something dogmatic in both these appeals to the Church; there is a theory of religion, of history, and of reality in general, implied alike in the philo- sophical appeal which would give us a Christianity without Jesus, and in the historical one which would give us a Jesus who could take no responsibility for anything that has ever been called Christian. The writer has no such confidence in either theory as would justify him in assenting off-hand to the stupendous im- peachment of Providence which is implied in both. It is easy enough to admit that there may have been errors of every kind in the historical development of Christianity. The adherents of the new religion may have made in- tellectual blunders and moral ones, and no doubt made SUMMARY AND TRANSITION 93 both. Once, too, the possibility of going astray is ad- mitted, it is impossible to limit it; if there can be such a thing as wandering, there may be wandering very far. But what it is not easy to admit is that Christianity itself, in the only form in which it has ever existed and functioned as a religion among men, has been a mistake and misconception from the first. This is the ultimate meaning of these 'historical' and 'philosophical' ap- peals to the Church, and it certainly needs courage to assent to them when their meaning is perceived. Less courageous men, or perhaps we may be allowed to say men with a larger perception of what is involved, will feel bound to proceed with less precipitation. It is not self-evident that eternal truth, or rather our grasp and apprehension of it, can be in no way historically con- ditioned. It is not self-evident that no historical person could really sustain the phenomenon of the Christian religion. Dismissing the summary and a priori de- cisions in which courageous spirits lay down the law beforehand to a world of which we know so little, it is our duty to raise the second of the two questions with which this discussion opened, and to examine it as dis- interestedly and as thoroughly as the first. It is the question, Does Jesus, as He is revealed to us in history, justify the Christian religion as we have had it exhibited to us in the New Testament? BOOK II THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH BOOK II THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH The question which has just been stated might be ap- proached in various ways. We might begin with an investigation of the sources to which we owe our know- ledge of Jesus, build up by degrees such an acquaint- ance with Him as could be formed in this way, and then consider what relation it bore to the place He holds in New Testament faith. A moment's reflection on what has preceded will show the insufficiency and the im- propriety of this method. The primary testimony of the disciples to Jesus was their testimony to His resurrec- tion: except as Risen and Exalted they never preached Jesus at all. It was His Resurrection and Exaltation which made Him Lord and Christ, and gave Him His place in their faith and life; and unless their testimony to this fundamental fact can be accepted, it is not worth while to carry the investigation further. Nothing that Jesus was or did, apart from the Resurrection, can jus- tify or sustain the religious life which we see in the New Testament. Those who reject the apostolic testimony at this point may, indeed, have the highest apprecia- tion for the memory of Jesus; they may reverence the figure preserved for us by the evangelists as the ideal of humanity, the supreme attainment of the race in the field of character; but they can have no relation to Jesus re- sembling that in which New Testament Christians lived and moved and had their being. The general 7 97 98 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL question, therefore, whether Jesus, as He is known to us from history, can sustain the Christian religion as it is exhibited to us in the New Testament, takes at the outset this special form: Can we accept the tes- timony which we have to the resurrection and exalta- tion of Jesus? THE RESURRECTION It is possible, as every one knows, to decline to raise this question. There is a dogmatic conception of history which tells us beforehand that there cannot be in history any such event as the resurrection of Jesus is represented in the New Testament to be: no possible or conceivable evidence could prove it. With such a dogma, which is part of a conception of reality in general, it is impossible to argue; for he who holds it cannot but regard it as a supreme standard by which he is bound to test every argument alleged against it. It is not for him an isolated and therefore a modifiable opinion; it is part of the structure of intelligence to which all real opinions will conform. But, though it is vain to controvert such a dogma by argument, it may be demolished by collision with facts; and it is surely the less prejudiced method to ask what it is that the New Testament witnesses assert, and what is the value of their testimony. Men's minds have varied about the structure of intelligence and about its constitutive or regulative laws, and it is one of the elementary principles of learning to recognise that reality is larger than any individual intelligence, and that the growth of intelligence depends on its recognition of this truth. It is quite conceivable that the fundamental fact on which the life of New Testament Christianity rests, is THE RESURRECTION 99 abruptly rejected by many, under the constraint of some such dogma, while yet they have no clear idea either of the fact itself, as the New Testament represents it, or of the evidence on which it was originally believed and has been believed by multitudes ever since. And if it is important, looking to those who deny that such an event as the resurrection of Jesus can have taken place, or is capable of proof, to present the facts bearing on the sub- ject as simply, clearly, and fully as possible, it is no less important to do so in view of those who are so preoccu- pied with the spiritual significance of the resurrection that they are willing (it might seem) to ignore the fact as of comparatively little or, indeed, of no account. When Harnack, for example, distinguishes the Easter Faith from the Easter Message, he practically takes this latter position. The Easter Faith is 'the conviction of the vic- tory of the crucified over death, of the power and the righteousness of God, and of the life of Him who is the first-born among many brethren.' This is the main thing, and just because it is a faith it is not really depen- dent on the Easter Message, which deals with the empty grave, the appearances to the disciples, and so forth. We can keep the faith without troubling about the mes- sage. 'Whatever may have happened at the grave and in the appearances, one thing is certain: from this grave the indestructible faith in the conquest of death and in an eternal life has taken its origin.' l Sympathis- ing as we must with Harnack's genuinely evangelistic desire to leave nothing standing between the mind of the age and the hope of the gospel which can possibly be put away, we may nevertheless doubt whether the Easter Faith and the Easter Message are so indifferent to each other. They were not unrelated at the begin- ning, and if we reflect on the fact that they are generally 1 Das Wesen des Christentums, 101 f. ioo JESUS AND THE GOSPEL rejected together, it may well seem precipitate to assume that they are independent of each other now. To say that the faith produced the message — that Jesus rose again in the souls of His disciples, in their resurgent faith and love, and that this, and this alone, gave birth to all the stories of the empty grave and the appearances of the Lord to His own — is to pronounce a purely dog- matic judgment. What underlies it is not the historical evidence as the documents enable us to reach it, but an estimate of the situation dictated by a philosophical theory which has discounted the evidence beforehand. It is not intended here to meet dogma with dogma, but to ask what the New Testament evidence is, what it means, and what it is worth. Much of the difficulty and embarrassment of the sub- ject is due to the fact that the study of the evidences for the resurrection has so often begun at the wrong end. People have started with the narratives in the evangelists and become immersed in the details of these, with all the intricate and perhaps insoluble questions they raise, both literary and historical. Difficulties at this point have insensibly but inevitably become difficulties in their minds attaching to the resurrection, and affecting their whole attitude to New Testament religion. It ought to be apparent that, so far as the fact of the resurrection of Jesus is concerned, the narratives of the evangelists are quite the least important part of the evidence with which we have to deal. It is no exaggeration to say that if we do not accept the resurrection on grounds which lie outside this area, we shall not accept it on the grounds presented here. The real historical evidence for the resurrection is the fact that it was believed, preached, propagated, and produced its fruit and effect in the new phenomenon of the Christian Church, long before any of our gospels was written. This is not said THE RESURRECTION 101 to disparage the gospels, or to depreciate what they tell, but only to put the question on its true basis. Faith in the resurrection was not only prevalent but immensely powerful before any of our New Testament books was written. Not one of them would ever have been written but for that faith. It is not this or that in the New Testament — it is not the story of the empty tomb, or of the appearing of Jesus in Jerusalem or in Galilee — which is the primary evidence for the resurrection; it is the New Testament itself. The life that throbs in it from beginning to end, the life that always fills us again with wonder as it beats upon us from its pages, is the life which the Risen Saviour has quickened in Christian souls. The evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is the existence of the Church in that extraordinary spiritual vitality which confronts us in the New Testament. This is its own explanation of its being. 'He,' says Peter, 'hath poured forth this which ye both see and hear' (Acts 2 33 ) ; and, apart from all minuter investigations, it is here the strength of the case for the resurrection rests. The existence of the Christian Church, the existence of the New Testament: these incomparable phenomena in human history are left without adequate or convincing explanation if the resurrection of Jesus be denied. If it be said that they can be explained, not by the resur- rection itself but by faith in the resurrection, that raises the question, already alluded to, of the origin of such faith. Does it originate in the soul itself, in memories of Jesus, in spiritual convictions about what must have been the destiny of a spirit so pure? Or were there experiences of another kind, independent historical matters of fact, by which it was generated and to which it could appeal? Was it, in short, a self -begotten Easter Faith, which produced the Easter Message in the way of self-support or self-defence; or was there an independent io- JESUS AND THE GOSPEL God-given Easter Message which evoked the Easter Faith? We could not ask a more vital question, and fortunately there are in the New Testament abundant materials to answer it. The oldest testimony we have to the resurrection of Jesus, apart from that fundamental evidence just alluded to as pervading the New Testament, is contained in i Cor. 15. The epistle is dated by Sanday ' in the spring of 55, and represents what Paul had taught in Corinth when he came to the city for the first time be- tween 50 and 52; but these dates taken by themselves might only mislead. For what Paul taught in Corinth was the common Christian tradition (ver. 3 ff.) ; he had been taught it himself when he became a Christian, and in his turn he transmitted it to others. But Paul became a Christian not very long after the death of Christ- according to Harnack one year after, to Ramsay three or four, to Lightfoot perhaps six or seven. 2 At a date so close to the alleged events we find that the funda- mental facts of Christianity as taught in the primitive circle were these — that Christ died for our sins; that He was buried; that He rose on the third day and remains in the state of exaltation; and that He appeared to cer- tain persons. The mention of the burial is important in this connexion as defining what is meant by the rising. We see from it that it would have conveyed no meaning to Paul or to any member of the original Christian circle to say that it was the spirit of Christ which rose into new life, or that He rose again in the faith of His devoted followers, who could not bear the thought that for Him death should end all. The rising is relative to the grave and the burial, and if we cannot speak of a bodily resur- rection we should not speak of resurrection at all. In 1 Encyclopedia Biblica, 903 f. ■ See article 'Chronology' in Hastings Bible Dictionary, i. p. 424. THE RESURRECTION 103 the same connexion also we should notice the specifica- tion of the third day. This is perfectly definite, and it is perfectly guaranteed. The third day was the first day of the week, and every Sunday as it comes round is a new argument for the resurrection. The decisive event in the inauguration of the new religion took place on that day — an event so decisive and so sure that it dis- placed even the Sabbath, and made not the last but the first day of the week that which Christians celebrated as holy to the Lord. The New Testament references to the first day of the week as the Lord's day (Acts 20 7 , Rev. 1 10 ) are weighty arguments for the historical resurrec- tion; that is, for a resurrection which has a place and weight among datable events. 1 An important light is cast on Paul's conception of the resurrection of Jesus by his use, in speaking of it, of the perfect tense (Ipf/sprat) — 'He hath been raised.' Christ rose, it signifies, and remains in the risen state. Death has no more dominion over Him. His resurrec- tion was not like the raisings from the dead recorded in the gospels, where restoration to the old life and its duties and necessities is even made prominent, and where the final prospect of death remains. Jesus does not come back to the old life at all. As risen, He belongs already to another world, to another mode of being. The resur- rection is above all things the revelation of life in this new order, a life which has won the final triumph over 1 The curious idea, which has now become a tradition among a certain class of scholars, that the date of the resurrection is due, not to anything which took place on the first day of the week, but to the prophecy of Hosea (6 2 ) — 'After two days will He revive us; on the third day He will raise us up and we shall live before Him' — ought surely to be disposed of by the consideration that there is no allusion to this text in connexion with the resurrection, either in the New Testament itself, or (so far as the writer is aware) in any other quarter, earlier than the nineteenth century. Curious, however, as this idea is, it is not so entirely extraor- dinary as Schmiedel's suggestion {Encyclopedia Biblica, 4067) that the date of the resurrection is deduced from 2 Kings 20 K io4 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL sin and death. This was thoroughly understood by the original witnesses; the resurrection of Jesus, or the anti- cipated resurrection of Christians as dependent upon it, was no return to nature and to the life of the world; it was the manifestation, transcending nature, of new life from God. In the passage with which we are dealing, indeed, Paul enters into no further particulars of any kind. He recites a list of persons to whom Jesus had appeared — ■ Cephas, the Twelve, more than five hundred brethren at once, James, all the apostles, himself. It is a fair inference from the mode of this enumeration that the appearances are given in their chronological order, but it is quite unwarranted to say l that Paul in this list guarantees not- only chronological order but completeness. The list gives us no ground for saying that when Paul was in contact with the Jerusalem Church its testimony to the resurrection included no such stories of the appear- ing of Jesus to women as are now found in our gospels. Neither did the purpose for which Paul adduced this series of witnesses require him to do more than mention their names as those of persons who had seen the Lord. It was the fact of the resurrection which was denied at Corinth — the resurrection of Christians, in the first in- stance, but by implication, as Paul believed, that of Jesus also — and a simple assertion of the fact was what he wanted to meet the case. This is adequately given when he recites in succession a series of persons to whom the Lord had appeared. That he says nothing more than that to these persons the Lord did appear is no proof that he had nothing more to say. He could, no doubt, have told a great deal more about that last appearance which the Lord had made to himself, if he had thought it relevant; and the probabilities are that in this outline 1 With Schmiedel (Encyclopedia Biblica, 4058). THE RESURRECTION 105 of his gospel and of the evidence on which it rested, he is merely reminding the Corinthians in a summary fashion of what he had enlarged upon in all its circum- stances and significance when he was among them. The term ^ , i John i x ). But it is not necessary to enter into this subject here, for what is ruled out by Von Soden as too supernatural has hardly an immediate bearing on the question in which we are interested. Far more im- portant in its issues, and far subtler in itself, is the criti- cism of Wellhausen. There is a section in the book- that which extends from chap. 8 27 to chap. 10 45 — which, to put his opinion bluntly, is Christian, and therefore not historical. The framework of time and space is the same as in the earlier chapters, but there is a deep inward dis- tinction. 'Here,' as it is put by Wellhausen, whose language is reproduced in what follows, 2 ' begins the 1 Die wichtigsten Fragen im Leben Jesu, 29 ff. 2 Das Evangelium Marci, 65 f . Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien, 81, f., 113. HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF MARK 163 gospel in the proper sense of the term, the gospel as the apostles preached it; till now there has been little trace of it. The resolve to go to Jerusalem, which does not seem to be occasioned by the Passover, produces a sur- prising change. A transfigured Jesus stands before us, and the two healing miracles which are still interspersed are positively incongruous. Jesus no longer teaches uni- versal truth, He prophesies regarding His own person. He no longer addresses the people, but a limited circle of His disc : ples. He discloses to them His nature and His destiny. He does this, too, in a purely esoteric fashion; they must not tell any one till after His prophecy regarding Himself has been fulfilled; nay, until then they do not understand it themselves. The occasion of re- nouncing His former reserve with them was provided by Peter's confession, Thou art the Messiah. He Himself evoked and accepted this confession, yet in the same instant He corrected it: He is not the Messiah who is to restore the Kingdom of Israel, but quite another. It is not to set up the Kingdom that He goes to Jerusalem, but to be crucified. Through suffering and death He enters into the Messianic glory, and only in this way can others enter. The Kingdom of God is no Jewish King- dom, it is destined only for certain elect individuals, the disciples. The idea that jierdvoia, repentance, is still possible for the nation is completely abandoned. Instead of a call to reperit, addressed to all, comes the summons to follow, which can only be fulfilled by a few. The con- ception of following now loses its literal meaning and assumes a higher one. What is involved is no longer as hitherto attendance on Jesus in His lifetime, going with Him where He goes; the main thing is to follow Him to death. As imitatio Jesu, following is possible even after He dies, or rather it first becomes possible then in the strict sense. The Cross is to be borne after Him. The 164 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL disciples must for the Kingdom's sake break completely with national and domestic ties; they must sacrifice everything that binds them to life, and even life itself. Reform is impossible: the hostility of the world can never be overcome. The breach with the world is de- manded which leads to martyrdom. The situation and the mood of the primitive Church are here reflected beforehand by Jesus as He goes to meet His fate. On this depends the profound pathos in which the introduc- tion to the story of the Passion surpasses the latter itself.' The facts which are here summarised have long been familiar: what is open to question is the explanation and the historical estimate of them. According to Well- hausen, this section of Mark, which contains or pre- supposes the Christian gospel, is for that very reason not historical at all. It is not conceived in the mind or in the historical situation of Jesus: what is reflected in it is the position and mood of the primitive martyr Church. Jesus, as Wellhausen puts it elsewhere, here transports Himself not merely into His own future, but into the future of His Church, whose foundation was His death and resurrection: and this, it is assumed, we cannot suppose Him to have done. On this we should remark, in the first place, that there is something essentially false in the contrast assumed to exist between the mind and historical situation of Jesus, and the position and mood of the primitive martyr Church. Jesus was Himself a martyr, and the situation in which He found Himself, in the last weeks and months of His life, was to all intents and purposes that in which the primitive Church found itself after His death. That the disciples did not under- stand what He taught them about His death is no doubt true, but we cannot infer from this that it is a mistake on the part of the evangelist to represent Him, in the cir- cumstances of that time, as teaching anything about His HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF MARK 165 death at all. The disciples' difficulty in understanding had nothing to do with the historical situation. Quite apart from that situation and its circumstances, the idea that the destined Christ should die a violent death at the hands of men was so disconcerting as to be incredible to the Twelve. It required the event and its sequel — the Resurrection — to open and reconcile their minds to it. For Jews in general it remained as incredible and unin- telligible in the days of the martyr Church as it had been for His followers while Jesus was yet with them. It does not follow, because words ascribed to Jesus have an application for disciples after His death, that these words were invented then and only put into His lips by antici- pation. 1 Jesus could anticipate. Indeed we may say that like every one who thinks of leaving the world and of leaving behind in it those who are dear to him, He could not but anticipate. He transported Himself in- stinctively into the future and addressed Himself to it. When we come to examine the texts in detail, we shall see whether or how far there is anything in them which may be pronounced impossible in His historical situation. Further, it must be observed that the critical change in the teaching of Jesus, which sets in at ch. 8 27 , has much to support it. It is not inconceivable, but inher- ently credible and likely, that such a change should have come with the crisis in the ministry of Jesus with which Mark connects it — a crisis in which the antagonism of His own people had driven Him beyond their borders, and led Him to concentrate His efforts on the training of the Twelve. That there is such a crisis intended in the narrative the writer must still believe, in spite of recent attempts to disintegrate the gospel and deprive the sequences in it of all significance. It takes a great deal of courage to question the historicity of the first 1 See an admirable page in Harnack, Spriiche und Reden Jesu, 143. 166 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL scenes in this 'Christian' section— that in which Peter confesses Jesus to be the Christ, an incident enshrined in every form of the evangelic tradition; and that in which Jesus rebukes Peter as the Satan for protesting against the idea that the Christ should suffer. But if these scenes are admittedly historical, it is hard to see on what ground anything that comes after is questioned. Nothing that comes after is more unequivocally 'Chris- tian.' To believe in Jesus as the Messiah who through death enters into glory— to believe in Him and to follow Him on the path of suffering and martyrdom— this is indeed Christian; but it is a conception of Christianity which there is no need whatever to remove from the life of the historical Jesus. The mere fact that it was intelli- gible, relevant, applicable, after He died and rose again, does not prove that it was not as intelligible, relevant, and applicable, while He lived. It must be added that there is a question-begging exaggeration in Wellhausen's list of the ' so to speak tech- nical ideas and words' which are characteristic of this section, and set it in relief against the gospel as a whole: ' the Son of Man, the gospel, the name of Jesus, this world and the world to come, the Kingdom of God, the M *a, life, salvation, following in the higher sense, minis- try, the fiupo\ 7tt , 8 22 ff -. The story of the widow's mites, which is borrowed by Luke but not by Matthew, shows us how one could take what the other left, and though the natural inclination (we might think) would be to take everything good for which there was room, it is obviously possible that there may have been things overlooked by both. The one question of great interest here is whether this lost document contained an account of the Passion of Jesus. Scholars are divided. B. Weiss, who has given unusual at- l7 o JESUS AND THE GOSPEL tention to the subject, thinks it did not; and he has been followed by the majority, including Harnack. Pro- fessor Burkitt, on the other hand, inclines to believe it did. While admitting that not a single phrase in the last three chapters of Matthew can be supposed to come from this lost source, he points out that some of the peculiar matter in the twenty-second chapter of Luke is actually given in earlier chapters of Matthew: in other words, there is found in Luke, chapter 22, matter which comes from this lost source. But if it be the case, as it really seems to be, that Luke gives his extracts from this source xa0e^ — in the order in which he found them — it is clear that the source did tell things about the Passion, and so was in some sense a gospel as truly as Mark. 1 The question, though interesting, is not vital. It is of less consequence to know the exact compass of the document than to be acquainted with its date and author- ship. Until quite recently it was held by all who ad- mitted its existence to be older than Mark. Opinions differed as to whether he had or had not made use of it in his work, but its antiquity was unchallenged. The opinion, too, was widely spread that it was of apostolic authorship. It was connected, perhaps ingeniously, perhaps also soundly, with another of the traditions of the Elder John preserved by Papias. We have al- ready quoted what this elder, an immediate disciple of Jesus, says about Mark. 'But concerning Matthew,' Eusebius proceeds in his quotation from Papias, 'the following statement is made [by him]: so then Matthew composed the oracles in the Hebrew language, and each one interpreted them as he could.' 2 The expression 1 Weiss, Einleitung in das Neue Testament, § 45 ; Die Quellen der synop- tischen Ueberlieferung, 1-96; Harnack, Spriiche und Reden Jesu, 88-102; Burkitt, The Gospel History and its Transmission, 133; Journal 0} Theo- logical Studies (Review of Harnack), viii. 454. 2 Eusebius, Hist. Eccl., iii. 39. The translation is again from Professor Gwatkin. THE SECOND PRIMITIVE SOURCE— Q 171 'composed the oracles' is probably identical in meaning with 'wrote his gospel'; but the term 'oracles' sug- gests that the main interest of the work in question is to be found in the words of divine authority which it contains. The description would suit quite well such a document as the vanished source used in common by our first and third evangelists; and as our first gospel, in the form in which we have it, is certainly not a trans- lation from Hebrew (or Aramaic), but a writing based chiefly on two sources, Mark and the one we are now discussing, which lay before the compiler (as they lay before Luke) in Greek, it was open to any one to pro- pound the hypothesis that the words of Papias referred not to our first gospel but to the Aramaic original of the source common to it and Luke — a source which would thus be of immediate apostolic authorship, the work of Matthew the publican. The first gospel owes its char- acteristic peculiarity to the fact that it amasses the oracles of the Lord and presents them so as to minister to the needs of the Church; and as preserving in a suitable his- torical framework the substance of the publican apostle's work, it might reasonably, though not with strict accuracy, be called the gospel according to Matthew. This com- bination of the data gains in plausibility when we con- sider that the lost source under consideration originally existed in an Aramaic form ; l and although, in the nature of the case, it does not admit of demonstration, it has in the judgment of the writer a far higher degree of probabil- ity than any other hypothesis with which he is acquainted. It would, of course, be thoroughly discredited if we could accept the conclusion of Wellhausen, who froi? internal evidence infers that the lost source of Matthew and Luke was somewhat inferior to Mark in age, and altogether inferior to it in authority. His most im- 1 See Wellhausen's notes on Luke 6 M , 1 1 u . i 7 2 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL portant argument is the general one that the process of 'Christianising' the material, which in Mark is practi- cally limited to the section chapter 8 '' 7 -io • has in this document been carried through from beginning to end. Jesus everywhere speaks to His disciples as Christians, and that in a predominantly esoteric fashion. It is not only when He has His Passion in view that He re veals Himself to them as the Messiah who is destined to pass through death to glory; on the contrary, He comes forward as Messiah from. 1 1 first; His preach- ing throughout is directed to this end — to found His Church, and in doing so to lay the foundation of the Kingdom of God upon earth. 1 What has been already said of V • llhausen's estimate of the 'Christian' section of Mark can be applied here also: even if we find in the source with which we are concerned features which prove that there was no solution of continuity between the life of Jesus and the life of the Church, we shall not for that reason hold that such features are necessarily unhistorical. We shall not feel obliged to argue that the Church has carried back its faith and experience into the life of Jesus, and is putting its own mind into the lips of its Master. Even if it were the case — which we do not believe — that the lost document was more recent i nan Mark, it would be a stupendous and groundless assumption that Mark meant to tell us all that was really known of the words and deeds of Jesus; and that every- thing in Matthew or Luke which goes beyond him was cither unknown to him or regarded by him as of no value. The contents of the source which Matthew and Luke used in common besides Mark did not come into exist- ence in a moment. They were not produced out of nothing by the author who wrote them down. It is as certain, as anything can be in history that in substance i Wellhausen, Einleiiung in die drei ersten Evangelien, 84. HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF Q 173 they were being taught in Christian churches at the very same time and under the very same conditions in which thr contents of Mark's gospel were being taught. Luke did not write to the excellent Theophilus to tell him what he had never heard before, but that he might know the cer- tainty about the things in which he had been instructed. Even if we cannot identify the author of this second source, nor fix the very year in which he wrote, we can be confident that it is for all practical purposes contemporary with Mark and equal with it in authority. Both have behind them the authority of the teaching, and of the teachers, who dominated the Church in the 'sixties. Nor is this authority prejudiced when we admit, as far as we need to admit, that the word of Jesus fructified in men's minds, and that there may be cases in which it is impossible to draw the line between the very words which Jesus uttered and the thoughts to which these words gave birth in the minds to which they were ad- dressed. Wellhausen argues that the spirit of Jesus lived on in the Church, and that the Church not only produced the gospel of which Jesus is the object, but also gave a further development to His ethics. This develop- ment took place, no doubt, on the foundation he had laid; and that in which His spirit expressed itself seemed to have intrinsically the same value as what He Himself would have said in similar case. It is not with the idea here that we have any quarrel, but with the inconsiderate application of it. There is no reason to doubt that many of the words of Jesus were preserved mainly by being preached, and that they were liable in this way to a certain, or rather an uncertain, amount of modification with a view to bringing out the point of them in one or another set of circumstances. Every minister in preach- ing from a text sometimes expands the text in the person, so to speak, of him who uttered it; and if the original 1 74 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL speaker was Jesus, he puts words into Jesus' mouth freely in doing so. In this sense Wellhausen is right in saying that it is the discourses in the gospels, and not the narratives, that are most liable to 'development' in the course of time; contrary to the older criticism which held that while legendary stories grew with a rank and marvellous fertility, the discourses of Jesus were com- paratively trustworthy. But the modern preacher who 'develops' a word of Jesus in the person of the Speaker knows what he is doing; and it is only natural to assume that the primitive preacher or catechist knew also. He did not mean that the words he used were literally Jesus' words; they were the word of the Lord as he under- stood it. This, however, is quite a different thing from the wholesale ascription to Jesus in a historical book — and when all is said and done the gospels are meant to be read as narratives of fact — of a great mass of dis- courses which have no immediate connexion with Him. The result of Wellhausen's criticism, applied as he ap- plies it, is, as Jiilicher has said, 1 that the most profound, simple and moving elements in the gospels are set down, simply because our literary evidence for them is supposed to be later than Mark, as of no historical value. The primitive Church is made to appear richer, greater and freer than its Head. For this, however, analogies are completely wanting; if the gospels as we have them are the fruits of faith, and not a historical testimony to Jesus, they are such fruits as have no example elsewhere. How did it come to pass that these fruits so suddenly ceased to appear on the tree of faith? How did its fertility come to an end? And when Christian faith was yield- ing such gracious fruits apparently without conscious effort, when it uttered itself spontaneously in the parables of the Kingdom or the Sermon on the Mount, how are we 1 Theologische Litter aturzeitung, 1905, col. 615. HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF Q 175 to explain the fact that neither Paul nor any other New Testament writer — and surely they all had faith — could ever produce a page which even remotely reminded us of the manner of the Lord? Their whole attitude to the realities with which they deal — to God and man and truth — is other than His, and even when they speak in the power of His spirit it is not in His style and tone. After all, the words of Jesus have a seal of their own, and are not so easily counterfeited. It is true, as Wellhausen says, that truth attests only itself, not its author; but when the various self-attesting truths coalesce into the unity of the Speaker and His life — when, as Deissmann says, they are seen to be not separate pearls threaded on one string, but flashes of one and the same diamond — the truth and its author are not separable. The sum of self-attesting truths which finds its vital unity in Jesus guarantees His historical reality in a character corresponding to these truths them- selves, and the more we come under the impression of this character, the less disposed shall we be either to pre- scribe its measure beforehand, or to assume that vital and conscious relations between it and the Christianity in which it somehow issued are necessarily unhistorical. That Jesus left no written record of Himself is true. It is true also that what He wished to leave behind Him in the world was not a protocol of His words and deeds, a documentary attestation of them such as historians or lawyers might require; what He craved was a spiritual remembrance, a living witness in the souls of men born again by His words of eternal life. But the very men on whom He made the impression which made them Chris- tians, the very men who hung on His lips because His words were what they were, would not easily lose all sense of distinction between His words and thoughts and their own. The very power and wonder of the words would preserve their singularity, and, as has already been re- i 7 6 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL marked, the conspicuous fact in, the New Testament is not the imperceptible way in which the words of Jesus merge into those of Christians, but the incomparable and solitary relief in which they stand out by themselves. The possibility of modification, of deflection, of ' Chris- tianising' even, in applying these words in any given situation, is one which need not be questioned before- hand; the mind is subject to its own laws, and the spirit has its own liberties, even in dealing with the words of Jesus. But the broad contrast which has just been pointed out remains, and it justifies us, not only in ex- amining each instance on its merits, but in approaching the examination with a presumption in favour of the wit- nesses rather than against them. When we appeal to the discourses of Jesus in Matthew and Luke for testimony to the mind of Jesus regarding Himself or His work, this is the presumption which will determine our atti- tude. For the purpose which we have in view it is not neces- sary to refer further to the critical analysis of the gospels. We shall confine ourselves to the gospel of Mark, and to that second source, common to Matthew and Luke which in accordance with custom will be cited as Q. The limits of Q, as soon as we go beyond the matter which is guaranteed as belonging to it by its occurrence both in Matthew and Luke, are quite uncertain; and therefore we shall confine our investigation to the passages which have this guarantee. 1 It is impossible to lay down before- 1 This is the course followed by Harnark in his own investigation of Q — Spriiche u. Reden Jesu; and in his review of Weiss's recent works, Die Quellcn des Lukasevangeliums and Die Quelle n der synoptischen Ueber- lieferung^ (in Theol. Littrraturzeifung, 1908 : 460 ff.), though he admits that Weiss gives an essentially correct description of the characteristics of Q, he can lay no stress on those passages in Weiss's reconstruction of it which depend upon one witness only. Weiss is practicallv certain of these, and of his restoration of them (Aufstellung der Mattha'usquelle); to Harnack they are only possibilities. The general impression left on the mind of the writer by the study of all these works is that far greater allow- THE BAPTISM OF JESUS 177 hand the precise line which the investigation must follow. In the opening sections of the gospel — those which narrate the baptism and the temptation of Jesus — we have both sources to appeal to; when we pass this point it will be convenient to consider first the testimony of Q, and then that of Mark, to the self-consciousness of Jesus. In pursuing this course, the method adopted must be left to justify itself by the result. Though no stress can be laid on the chronology of the gospels, there is an order in them of some kind, and as far as possible that will be followed. (b) Detailed study of the earliest sources as illustrating the self-consciousness of Jesus. The Baptism of Jesus (Mark i M1 ; Matt. 3 13 * 17 ; Luke 3 21f ') Both in Mark and in Q Jesus is introduced to us in connexion with John the Baptist. He comes upon the stage of history when He presents Himself to John on the banks of the Jordan to be baptized. The synoptic gospels recognise John as the forerunner of Jesus, but they do not record any testimony of John to Jesus as the Christ. John, probably in the sense of his own weakness, ance must be made than is made in any of them for the influence upon the evangelists of other than documentary evidence in the writing of the gos- pels. Assuming that Luke knew a gospel narrative — say the healing of the paralytic or the parable of the sower — both from Mark and Q, we must remember that as a person living in the Christian Church it is a thousand to one that he knew it by having heard it told independently of either. Even if he tells it in the main on the basis of Mark or of Q, we are not bound to explain his divergences from either by conscious motives discoverable by us; to the writer, in spite of Weiss's claim and of Harnack's assent to it (ut supra, 465), it is as certain as anything can be that thou- sands of the divergences for which ingenious explanations are given are purely accidental, and have no motive or meaning whatever. In other words, 'oral tradition' is a vera causa operating far more extensively than the criticism of Weiss is disposed to admit. i 7 8 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL and of his inadequacy to the task of regenerating Israel, spoke of the Coming One as mightier than himself, and as able to baptize with Holy Spirit and fire; but he did not expressly identify Him with Jesus. Yet when we consider the extraordinarily high estimate which Jesus had of John, and reflect that of all His contempora- ries John alone seems to have made any spiritual impression on Him, these lofty anticipations of the Coming One may not seem quite irrelevant to Jesus' consciousness of Himself. It is probably true to say that He felt Him- self, when He entered on His work, called and qualified to fulfil John's anticipations — the holder of a mightier power than the last of the prophets, and able in virtue of it to succeed where he had failed. But be this as it may, we come to a point of critical importance with the baptism of Jesus Himself. It was narrated in Q, as we can infer with certainty from the Temptation story, which both Matthew and Luke have taken from this source, and which in all its elements refers to the Baptism and to the voice which then de- clared Jesus Son of God. It is not Q's narrative of the Baptism, however, which has been preserved by our evangelists; at this point, with slight modifications, both Matthew and Luke follow Mark. The record, marvellous as it is, is of the simplest. 'And it came to pass in those days that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And straightway coming up out of the water He saw the heavens rent asun- der, and the Spirit as a dove descending upon Him : and a voice came out of the heavens, Thou art My beloved Son, in Thee I am well pleased' (Mark i 9 ' n ). The fact that the baptism of Jesus came at a later period to present difficulties to the Christian mind — difficulties which may be reflected in Matt. 3 H f- * to which there is no parallel in Mark or Luke — is at least an argument THE BAPTISM OF JESUS 179 that it actually took place. 1 We can hardly, indeed, imagine a period at which there would not be difficulty in the idea that a person who was himself the object of religious faith — and this, as we have shown above, was always the character of Jesus in the Church — should submit to be baptized with a baptism of repentance which looked to remission of sins (Mark 1 4 ). The faith which was embarrassed by the baptism, but found the fact in the gospel tradition, would never have given it that decisive significance in the career of Jesus which it has in all our documents unless it had been able to appeal in doing so to the authority of Jesus Himself. It would rather have slurred it over or ignored it, as some suppose the author of the fourth gospel has done, or it would have represented it as taking place on account of others, not of Jesus Himself. In our fundamental source, however, the second gospel, the whole story is told as affecting Jesus alone. It is He, not John the Baptist, who sees the heavens rent and the dove descending; and it is to Him, not to John or the by- standers, that the heavenly voice is addressed, Thou art My beloved Son. It is no strained inference, but the natural impression made by this ancient narrative, that His baptism was the occasion of extraordinary spirit- ual experiences to Jesus, experiences which no doubt had something transcendent and incommunicable in them, 1 Weiss inserts Matt. 3 M '• in his restoration of Q, and argues that in this, which for him is the oldest source of all, a vision of the Baptist only was recorded: it was John who saw the heavens open and the spirit de- scend; John to whom the heavenly voice was addressed (This is My Son, Matt. 3 17 ; not Thou art my Son, Mark 1 «). He gives literary expla- nations of how the variations which appear in our gospels arose; to the writer they are quite unconvincing. The evangelists must have heard the story a thousand times, quite apart from the version of it wkich was under their eyes as they wrote: and it is an unreal and impossible task to explain their divergences as due to literary exigencies connected with the adjustment of a text which has itself to be hypothetically reconstructed. Die Quellen der synoptischen Ueberlieferung, 2 i. i8o JESUS AND THE GOSPEL but of which He gave His disciples such an idea as they could grasp in the narrative preserved by the evangelists. The significant features in this narrative are the descent of the Spirit and the heavenly voice. We do not ex- plain these when we speak of Jesus as being for the time in an ecstasy or rapture, we rather indicate the inex- plicable element in them. The descent of the Spirit signifies that from this time forward Jesus was conscious of a divine power in His life; the Spirit, whatever else is involved in it, always includes the idea of power, and power in which God is active. This consciousness of Jesus was attested by the future course of His life. When He appeared again among men, it was in the power of the Spirit, and mighty works were wrought by His hands. It is a mark of their historicity that the canonical gospels have none of those puerile miracles of the infancy by which the apocryphal gospels are disgraced; it is not till the man Jesus, in the maturity of His manhood, has been anointed with the Holy Spirit and power, that He begins lo act in the character of the Anointed. But from this time He does begin, and the consciousness of divine power which must have attended Him from the outset of His ministry is, in however indefinite a form, the consciousness of having a place apart in the fulfilment of God's purposes, of being, in a word, the one mightier than himself for whom the Baptist looked. Nothing could be more gratuitous than to argue that the whole story of the Baptism of Jesus is here trans- formed by Christian faith. The fact of the baptism is supposed, on this view, to be puzzling in itself, and the difficulty inherent in it is got over by assimilating it to the Christian sacrament in which water and the Spirit are so far from being opposed to each other (as they are by John) that they normally coincide. It is literally preposterous to assume that Christian baptism set the THE BAPTISM OF JESUS 181 type for theft of Jesus; it is the baptism of Jesus which sets the type for the sacrament of the Church. When Loisy ' asserts that it is probable that tradition at first knew nothing but the simple fact of the baptism, and that the idea of the Messianic consecration created the narrative which we find in Mark, it is perhaps enough to reply that we do not see the probability. If Jesus was conscious, from this time on, of a divine power which took possession of His life and in which He entered on a new career for God, there is no reason why the narrative should not have come from His lips as it stands; and if He had no such consciousness — if the baptism was not in some sense a spiritual birthday for Him — we may as well say at once that we know nothing whatever about Him. Taking His anointing with spirit and power, on which the whole life depicted in the gospels is dependent, as, in the broadest sense which spirit and power can bear, indisputable fact, we must admit that Jesus stands before us from the very beginning of our knowledge of Him as a Person uniquely endowed, and probably therefore with a consciousness of Himself and of His vocation as unique as His spiritual power. This, indeed, is what is suggested by the words of the heavenly voice. It has often been remarked that this voice which, though we must call it objective, is yet a spiritual and not a physical phenomenon, utters itself in words of the Old Testament. The first clause, 4 Thou art my Son,' comes from the second Psalm, where it is addressed by God to the ideal King of Israel. The second clause, 'the beloved, in whom I am well pleased,' goes back in the same way to Isaiah 42, and recalls the Servant of the Lord on whom God puts His Spirit that in meekness and constancy He may bring forth judgment to the nations. It is impossible to suppose that this com- 1 Les Evangiles Synoptiques, i. 107. 182 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL bination is accidental, and it is quite unnecessary to sup- pose that it is the work of the apostolic Church looking back on the way in which Old Testament ideals were united in the life of Jesus. The ideals of the Old Testa- ment were far more vivid to Jesus than they were to the apostolic Church, and we fail to do justice to Jesus unless we recognise this. Further, they were much more than ideals to Him; they were promises of God which came to have the virtue of a call or vocation for Himself. Often He had steeped His thoughts in them, but at last, in this high hour of visitation by the living God, they spoke to Him with direct, identifying, appropriating power. It was His own figure, His own calling and destiny, that rose before Him in the ideal King of the Psalmist, and the lowly Servant of the Prophet; it was His inmost con- viction and assurance from this hour that both ideals were to be fulfilled in Himself. The voice of God ad- dressed Him in both characters at once. We do not need to define either ideal more closely, and just as little the combination of the two, to see the importance of this. If the ideal King of the Psalmist and the lowly Servant of Isaiah are united in Jesus, then all the promises and purposes of God are consum- mated in Him as they can be in no other. This, from the first — that is, from the moment at which we are introduced to Him — is how He conceives Himself. It is in this conception of Himself and because of it that He enters on the work which the gospels describe. It is this consciousness of Himself which is the vindication of His whole attitude to men, and of the attitude of His followers to Him. It is no objection to the truth of this conception that Jesus did not begin His ministry by announcing it. To appeal to the nearest analogy, un- worthy though it be, who tells all that he hopes or aspires to at thirty? Yet a time may come for telling, and THE BAPTISM OF JESUS 183 when it does come it may be apparent even in an ordinary life that unavowed convictions had inspired it all along, and that in these convictions lay the key to everything in it that was powerful or characteristic. Others only saw afterwards, but He whose life was involved could say from the beginning, Secretum meurn mihi — I know myself and what I have to do. In particular, it is not enlightening here to employ such technical expressions as the Messianic consciousness of Jesus, or to argue that the expression 'My Son/ as used by the heavenly voice, bears an 'official' Messianic meaning. The ideal King of the Psalm stands alone: he is a unique figure, with a unique calling in relation to the Kingdom of God. But though this is the hour at which in a flash of divine certainty His own identity with that ideal figure takes vivid possession of the mind of Jesus — or might we not rather say, because this is such an hour — the whole associations of a word like 'official' are out of place. What we are dealing with is not of- ficial, but personal and vital. The gospels do not afford us the means of tracing the antecedent preparation for this supreme experience of Jesus, either on the psycho- logical or the ethical side; but it cannot have been un- prepared. It was not to any person at random, it was to this Person and no other, that the transcendent calling came; and it must be related in some way to what Jesus was before. Now the one thing which is stamped upon the New Testament everywhere, as the outstanding characteristic of Jesus, is His filial consciousness in rela- tion to God. This was what no sensitive spiritual ob- server could miss. It was so dominant and omnipresent in Him that it constrained (Christians to conceive of God specifically as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is difficult, therefore, to suppose that Jesus could ever hear the words, This is My Son, or could ever repeat i8 4 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL them in teaching, without charging and suffusing them with this filial consciousness. The calling of the ideal King, who is spoken of by God as My Son, is not to be contrasted with this as official with personal; rather must we suppose that on the basis of this personal relation to the Father the consciousness of that high calling became suddenly and overwhelmingly real to Jesus. The con- sciousness, it might be put, of the Fatherhood of God, as something realised in Him as it was in no other, is the spiritual basis of all conceptions of His place, vocation, and destiny, and therefore it is not to be op- posed to these last nor excluded from them. .This is the line also on which our minds are led by the one scene preserved from our Lord's earliest manhood in Luke 2 40 ff - On the banks of the Jordan as in the courts of the Temple Jesus was about His Father's business. His consciousness of Himself, as determined by the heavenly voice, was solitary, incomparable, in- communicable; but it was the consciousness of one who before it and in it and through it called God Father; it was not official, but personal and ethical, filial and spiritual throughout. It is only another way of saying this if we remark that a quite unreal importance is often supposed to belong to the asking and answering of such questions as When did Jesus first claim to be the Messiah? When did the consciousness that He was Messiah awake in His own mind? What modifications, if any, did He intro- duce into the meaning of the term? All such questions exaggerate the official as opposed to the personal in the life of Jesus, and in doing so they undoubtedly mislead. Jesus was greater than any name, and we must interpret the names He uses through the Person and His experi- ences and powers, and not the Person through a formal definition of the names. However such titles as Messiah THE BAPTISM OF JESUS 185 (or Son of God as a synonym of Messiah) may take shape as the investigation goes on, what we have to start from is the experience of an endowment with divine power, and of a heavenly calling to fulfil the grandest ideals of the Old Testament. This consciousness of divine power and of a unique vocation, it is no exaggeration to say, lies behind everything in the gospels. The words and deeds of Jesus, the authority He wields, the demands He makes, His attitude to men, assume it at every point. Whatever may have been the order of His teaching, whatever the importance in His historical career of the hour at which the disciples saw into His secret and hailed Him as the Messiah, there is something of far greater consequence — the fact, namely, that the life of Jesus, wherever we come into contact with it, is the life of the Person who is revealed to us in the Baptism. It is not the life of the car- penter of Nazareth, or of a Galikean peasant, or of a simple child of God like the pious people in the first two chapters of Luke. It is the life of one who has been baptized with divine power, and who is conscious that He has been called by God with a calling which if it is His at all must be His alone. It is this which makes the whole gospel picture of Jesus intelligible, and which justifies the New Testa- ment attitude toward Jesus Himself. The attitude is justified only if the picture is substantially true; and it is not an argument against the narrative of the baptism, but an argument in favour of it, that it agrees with the whole presentation of Jesus in the gospels, and with the Christian recognition of His supreme place. It agrees with them in the large sense that the subject of the gospel narrative is from begin- ning to end a person clothed in divine power and con- scious that through His sovereignty and service the Kingdom of God is to come. 186 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL The Temptations (Mark i ut , Matt. 4 ' ", Luke 4 >■») That conception of the consciousness of Jesus with which He is introduced to us in the story of His baptism is confirmed and elucidated by the narrative of the temp- tation. This was found in the source common to Mat- thew and Luke, and is given in a more summary form in Mark. It is impossible to say how Mark comes to tell no more than he does, or why Matthew and Luke have so much fuller an account than he. The question is often discussed as if the two versions supplied by our gospels were all that had to be considered — as if Mark must have abridged the source common to Matthew and Luke, or as if that source must have expanded Mark. Surely there is every probability that the subject of these narratives was one which would have a familiar place in oral tradition, and might be known in this way in a more condensed or an ampler form. Why should not Jesus — to whom, unless it is pure fiction, the narrative must go back — have spoken of the strange experiences which succeeded His baptism, now with less and again with greater fulness of detail? At one time he might say no more than we find in Mark — that the hour of exaltation, in which He saw heaven opened, and had access of divine power, and heard the voice of God call Him with that supreme calling, was followed by weeks of severe spiri- tual conflict. He was in the wilderness, undergoing temptation by Satan; He was with the wild beasts, in dreadful solitude; yet He was sustained by heavenly help: the angels ministered to Him. At another time He might use the poetic and symbolic forms which we find in Matthew and Luke, and which were no doubt found in their common source, to give some idea of the nature and issues of this spiritual conflict. This not only THE TEMPTATIONS OF JESUS 187 seems to the writer inherently credible, but far more pro- bable than that the imagination of the Church, working on the general idea that Jesus must have had a spiritual conflict at the hour at which He entered on the Messianic career, constructed out of His subsequent experience this representation of what it knew His conflicts to be. No doubt the temptations by which Jesus is here assailed are those by which He was assailed throughout His life, but that is only to say that they are real, not imaginary. A serious spirit with a high calling faces the world seriously, and with true and profound insight. It looks out on to it as it is. It sees the paths which are actually open to it there, along which it may go if it will, and which often seem to offer a seductively short path to its goal. In face of the testimony of the gospels that Jesus did this, it is simply gratuitous to eliminate the temptation from His history, and to explain it by parallels from the mythical history of Buddha, or as the reflection of the Church upon Jesus, not the self-revelation of Jesus to the Church. The historical character of the narra- tive is supported by what most will admit to be an al- lusion to it in an undoubted word of Jesus: 'No one can enter into the house of the strong man and spoil his goods unless he first bind the strong man, and then he will spoil his house' (Mark 3 27 , Matt. 12 29 , Luke 11 2lf ). In the wilderness Jesus bound the strong man. He faced and vanquished the enemy of His calling, and of all the work and will of God for man. He contemplated the false and alluring paths which promised to bear Him swiftly to the fulfilment of His vocation, and in the strength of His rela- tion to God He turned at once and finally from them all. A closer look at the Temptations throws an important light on Jesus' consciousness of Himself. They are all relative to the character in which He is presented at the Baptism, that of the Son of God, the ideal King in and 1 88 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL through whom God's sovereignty is to be established. Jesus is this ideal King, and the question agitated in the Temptations is how His Kingship is to be realised, how in and through Him the sovereignty of God is to become an accomplished fact in the world. Conscious of His calling, conscious of the divine power which has come upon Him, He looks out upon the world, and upon the ways in which ascendency over men may be won there. The first temptation is concerned with the most obvious. Build the Kingdom, it suggests, on bread. Make it the first point in your programme to abolish hunger. Multiply loaves and fishes all the time. This, as we know from what followed the feeding of the five thousand, when the multitudes wanted to take Jesus by force and make Him their King, was a way to ascen- dency which lay invitingly open. Men would have thronged around Him had He chosen it, and the tempta- tion to do so lay in the fact that He had the deepest sym- pathy with all human distress. It was because He had compassion on the multitudes who were ready to faint in the wilderness that He spread a table for them. But he knew that the Kingdom of God could not come by giving bodily comfort a primacy in human nature. He said to Himself in the wilderness, as He said after- wards to others, Seek first the Kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you. Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that which endureth unto everlasting life. The second temptation was one which dogged Jesus through His whole career. Jews demand signs, says Paul; and a ready way to ascendency over them was to indulge in marvellous displays of power. This is what is meant by the temptation of the pinnacle. 'Cast thyself down,' means, 'Dazzle men's senses, and you will obtain the sovereignty over their souls.' This was what men themselves asserted. 'Show us a sign THE TEMPTATIONS OF JESUS r8g from heaven.' 'What sign showest Thou then that we may see and believe?' 'Let Him now come down from the cross.' It is not easy for us to understand a tempta- tion which was dependent on the possession of super- human power, but the important point to notice is that Jesus rejected appeals to the senses as a means to attain ascendency over men for God. He never attempted to dazzle. He made no use of apparatus of any description. An elaborate ritual of worship, awing and subduing the senses, would have seemed to Him, as a means of pro- ducing spiritual impressions and winning men for God, a temptation of the devil. He aimed at spiritual ends by spiritual means, and regarded anything else as a betrayal of His cause. And finally, as He looked upon the world in which the Kingdom of God was to come, He saw another kingdom established there already and in posses- sion of enormous power. ' It has been handed over to Me, and to whomsoever I will I give it.' This saying, which in Luke is put into the lips of Satan, is not meant to be regarded as untrue. There would be no temptation in it if it was untrue. It is the terrible fact, which confronts every one who is interested in the Kingdom of God, that evil in the world is enormously strong. It wields vast resources. It has enormous bribes to offer. For almost any purpose it seems able to put one into an ad- vantageous position. At times it seems as though unless one is willing to compromise with it, to recognise that it has at least a relative or temporary right to exist, it will be impossible to get a foothold in the world at all. Now this was the third temptation. Jesus would feel it the more keenly because His was truly a kingly nature, born to ascendency, exercising it unconsciously, and now called to realise the ideal and promise of God's King. It was urgent that the power which was His of right should actually come into His hands, and He would feel keenly i9o JESUS AND THE GOSPEL how easy the first steps would become if He could only make some kind of limited and temporary accommoda- tion with evil. If He could get or take its help in any way it would do so much to clear His path. But He was conscious also that for the ideal King, through whom the reign of God was to be realised, this was impossible. He saw that to negotiate with evil was really to worship Satan, and that no advantage was worth the price. He said to Himself in this temptation what He afterwards said to all, What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose himself ? The interest of the Temptations, in connexion with our subject, lies in this: they show how the Kingdom oj God is in the mind of Jesus essentially bound up with Himself. Jesus is often represented now as teaching us things about the Kingdom of God, and then assuming an attitude of pure passivity, simply waiting on God to bring the Kingdom which no action of man, whether His own or another's, can hasten or hinder; but we see here that to His own mind the corning of the Kingdom is involved in His victory over these temptations. His initial tri- umph, in principle, over all the assaults of Satan — His resolute turning away, from the very beginning, from every false path — the entrance into the world and into the life of man of a Person thus victorious — are a revela- tion of what the Kingdom is, and a guarantee that at whatever cost it will prevail. This, it will not be ques- tioned, is how Christian faith conceives Jesus all through the New Testament; but it is of supreme importance to notice that it is how Jesus conceives Himself from the opening of His career. His relation to the Kingdom of God is in no sense accidental. It is in His attitude to the possibilities of earth that its true nature is revealed, and with Him it stands or falls. And what was said of the baptism may be repeated here: it is in this character THE SELF-REVELATION OF JESUS iqi and in no other that Jesus stands behind every page of the gospel history. It is only this character which makes that history intelligible; and to try to undermine the narrative, only because we do not share the New Testa- ment attitude to Jesus, is as unwarranted historically as it is on all other grounds gratuitous. The Self-Revelation of Jesus in His Ministry It has been remarked already that no stress can be laid on the chronology of the gospels, but if it is difficult to arrange the matter in order of time, it is fatal to attempt to systematise it. Of all books on the New Testament, those which deal with the teaching and with the mind of Jesus are the least interesting, because they lapse as a rule into this false path. Nothing in the gospels is systematic. There is no set of ideas which recurs, as in John; no succession of questions emerges to be answered by the application of the same principles, as in Paul. Everything is in a manner casual: everything is indi- vidual, personal, relative in some way to the moment and its circumstances, though it may enshrine eternal truth. We may say of Jesus, with even less qualifica- tion, what has been said of Luther, that He always spoke ad hoc and often at the same time ad hominem. When words so spoken are reduced to a system the virtue has gone out of them; they no longer leave with us an im- pression of the speaker. But an impression of the Speaker is precisely what the words of Jesus do leave, and what we are in quest of; and consequently, at the risk of being tedious, it will be necessary to trace the self-revelation of Jesus as it is made from one situation to another, in one relation or another, by one significant utterance or another, in the pages of the gospels. Speaking gen- erally, the order followed will be that in which the various passages of Mark and Q occur in Huck's Synopse, and i 9 2 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL it must be remembered that it is not on any single passage, but on the cumulative effect of the whole, that the argu- ment depends. The summary account which Mark gives of the Gali- lean ministry (ch. i " f ) is no doubt to be taken as a summary: we cannot assume that on any given occasion Jesus used these very words. But there is no reason to doubt that they are a true summary, and truly repre- sent the mind and the message of Jesus. With His appearance 'the time was fulfilled': the great crisis had come in God's dealings with men. It is probably a mistake to say that the apocalyptic idea of a predestined course of events underlies this: the apocalyptic way of calculating times and seasons was foreign to the temper of Jesus, and He repeatedly disclaims it (Matt. 24 36 ; Acts 1 7 ). But if anything can be depended upon in the gospels, it is that He had the sense of living in a crisis of final importance: history up to this point had been, so to speak, preparatory and preliminary, but now the decisive hour had come. It was a gracious hour, and the announcement of what was impending was 'the gospel of God'; but it was an hour in which the true decision was a matter of life and death, and we shall see as we proceed how that decision turned upon a relation to Jesus Himself. The evangelist strikes the true key to the consciousness and the self-revelation of Jesus, when he speaks of the fulness of the time and represents Him as saying, The Kingdom of God has drawn near; repent and believe in the gospel. Jesus and the Twelve: The Conditions of Dis- cipleship (Mark 3 l3 * 19 ; Matt. 10, and parallels in Luke) The first incident recorded by Mark is the calling of two pairs of brothers, Simon and Andrew, James and THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 193 John, to a closer relation of discipleship. This is guar- anteed by the inimitable word, Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men. This was His own task, to win and gather men for the Kingdom, and they were to help Him. The ascendency which He exercised in thus drawing men away from their worldly callings and hopes into association with Himself is quite indefinite, and even in yielding to it the four first disciples could have no distinct idea of what it involved. But they did yield. They left their nets and followed Him, and as they lived in His company, heard His words, saw His character and His works, the sense deepened in their hearts of His right to command. It is not, however, until the circle is enlarged by the appointment of the Twelve, and by Jesus' commission and instructions to them, that a vivid light is cast for us on Jesus' conscious- ness of Himself. Wellhausen has recently attacked the whole narrative of Mark at this point. 1 The giving of bynames, like Cephas and Boanerges, he argues, is not a historical act; in short, we have no historical act at all in Mark 3 13 " 19 ; it is rather a set of statistics, presented as history — an index, in the form of a scene upon a lofty stage. Similarly, of Mark 6 7 " 13 , which narrates the sending out of the Twelve in pairs, he says that it contains no his- torical tradition. The passage has great value as show- ing us the way in which the earliest Christian mission was carried on in Palestine, but it is of no value for the life of Jesus. Both Mark 3 13 ~ 19 and Mark 6 7 ' 13 are editorial sections in the gospel; they reveal something of the author but nothing of the subject. It is not easy to take this seriously. The Twelve are not to be eliminated from the history of Jesus by any such flimsy devices. There is far earlier evidence for their peculiar standing in the Church than that of Mark. 1 Das Evangelium Marci, 24 ff., 45 f. U i 9 4 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL In i Cor. 15 5 Paul mentions an appearing of Jesus to the Twelve. This is part of the tradition of the Jerusalem Church about the Risen Saviour which Paul learned when he returned to Jerusalem from Damascus within a few years of the resurrection. The Twelve had not arisen spontaneously and assumed the importance which Paul's language implies. They are mentioned frequently in Mark, quite apart from their formal appointment and mission (4 10 , 9 35 , 10 32 , 11 n , 14 10, 17, 20, 43 ), and they were known to the other early source used by Matthew and Luke (Matt. 19 28 , Luke 22 80 ). Presumably not even Wellhausen intends to deny that Jesus surnamed Simon Cephas, and that He called the sons of Zebedee 'our sons of thunder.' This last particular, which is pre- served by Mark alone (3 17 ), is usually and properly regarded as a proof of close connexion between the writer and the apostolic circle. But if Jesus gave these names, what is gained by saying that the giving of by- names is not an historical act? The evangelist probably does not mean us to understand that Jesus gave them as part of the formal act by which He 'made' the Twelve; but as He writes out the list of the Twelve, it comes quite naturally to Him to mention these surnames of promise or rebuke. They may have been first bestowed on other occasions — Cephas, for example, at Matt. 16 18 , Boanerges perhaps at Luke 9 54 L ; but to appeal to them to discredit the appointment of the Twelve is beside the mark. There is as little ground for Wellhausen's attack on their mission. He does not believe it to be historical, because though the experiment is successful it is not repeated, and the Twelve are for the future as passive and as wanting in independence as before. We have no such knowledge of the circumstances as enables us to say that this experiment if successful must have been repeated. The fact that a thing is not done twice THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 195 is not a proof that it was not done once. When the Twelve returned from their experimental mission, a crisis was at hand in the ministry of Jesus; and from that time He kept them closely by Him, and devoted Himself almost exclusively to preparing them for the dark future which was now impending. The calling of the Twelve, then, being indisputably historical, what is its significance? It has no doubt a reference of some kind to Israel, the people of God. It hardly matters, for our purpose, whether we think that Jesus had in view the ancient Israel, and expected the Kingdom of God to be realised under its ancient organisa- tion; or whether when He spoke of the Twelve sitting on thrones and judging (that is, ruling) the twelve tribes of Israel, He was quite consciously using imaginative or poetic language, and had in view a new people of God in which the ideal of the old should be fulfilled. In either case, when He chose the Twelve, the new Israel of God was before His mind as something to be consti- tuted round them, and as something, at the same time, in which His own place would be supreme. He saw in His mind's eye, as they gathered about Him, what John saw in the apocalypse — the wall of the city having twelve foundations, and on them twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb. Separated from every- thing else that is known of Jesus — separated, for ex- ample, from what we are told of His baptism, and from what we shall see in more articulate form later — this may seem fanaticism if ascribed to Jesus Himself, and extravagance in an interpreter of the gospels; but taken in its actual historical relations, as the gospels supply them, the writer regards it as simple truth. But what a revelation of the mind of Jesus it gives! He does not call Himself Messiah, or Son of God, or any other lofty name; but He acts, unassumingly so far as the out- i 9 6 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL ward form goes, yet in a way which indicates His con- viction that the fulfilment of all God's purposes — for nothing less is involved in the re-constitution of God's people — is to come through Him. When Jesus sent out the Twelve on the preliminary or experimental mission to which reference has been made, He gave them a charge or commission. This is summarised in Mark 6 71 \ but what corresponds to it in Matthew fills the whole of a long chapter (ch. 10). There can be no doubt that this chapter, like the Sermon on the Mount, is a composition of the evangelist; he has gathered into it for catechetical or other practical reasons all the words of Jesus to His disciples which have any bearing on their work as missionaries. Some of these words are relevant to the historical occasion on which Matthew represents them as spoken; others are only relevant if the outlook of the speaker is conceived to be not on the Jewish world immediately around him, the Galilaean cities and villages where he was usually so welcome, but on the Jewish world as it was after His death, that Judsean environment which in its representa- tives was so hostile to the disciples, or even on the wider Gentile world beyond. It does not follow, however, that the words put into the lips of Jesus in Matthew 10 are not genuine, or that they misrepresent His conscious- ness of Himself. To a certain extent they have parallels in the eschatological discourse in Mark (Matt. 10 17 " 22 being parallel to Mark 13 9 " 13 ), and to a much larger extent in Luke. In Luke, indeed, there is a peculiarity that we have two missionary or apostolic charges of Jesus, one to the Twelve (Luke 9 l ff ) , and another to the Seventy (Luke io lff ). It is not necessary here to con- sider whether the mission of the Seventy has any his- torical character, or whether it is simply invented or assumed by the evangelist as a counterpart to that of THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 197 the Twelve, a means of justifying, by appeal to Jesus, the Gentile as well as the Jewish mission. Even if this idea were in the evangelist's mind he has made no applica- tion of it. The words of Jesus which he gives, whether addressed to the Twelve or the Seventy, are substan- tially those which we find in Matthew addressed to the Twelve alone; and the Seventy in point of fact never approach Gentiles. They prepare the way of the Lord in Palestine. Considering how little we know of the methods of Jesus, it is probably rash to say that the mission of this larger number of disciples only embodies a thought of Luke, and not a historical fact. The first point in which the evangelists are agreed is that Jesus in sending out His disciples imparted to them power over evil spirits. The importance which this power had in His own mind will appear later. What is to be observed here is that we see already Him who had been baptized with the Holy Spirit and power baptizing His followers with the same. It was a primary experi- ence of the Twelve that they owed to Jesus such a re- inforcement of their spiritual resources as enabled them to vanquish the most hideous manifestations of demonic power and malignity. They could heal those who were under the tyranny of the devil because He had sent and empowered them. It does not matter what theory we hold of demonic possession and its cure — whether we believe, as every one believed then, in bad spirits which invaded and victimised wretched men; or in mental and perhaps moral disorders ranging from hysteria to the wildest forms of madness — some experience of the disciples lies behind the words, He gave them authority over the unclean spirits. They could do what they could not do before because He enabled them to do it, and the sense of this is a rudimentary form of the specifically Christian consciousness. The greatness of Jesus would grow upon 198 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL them in a thousand ways, but this was one of the experi- ences in which it was signally if mysteriously made real. The power over unclean spirits belongs to the gracious side of the commission, but what strikes one most in the brief report of .Mark (6 11 ), with its parallels in Matthew (io H ) and Luke (9 s ), is the severity with which Jesus speaks. He lives in the sense of the absolute signifi- cance of His message. It is not something on which He proposes to negotiate with men — a matter in regard to which there is room for reflection and for arranging terms. It is in the highest degree urgent, and it is a matter of life and death. ' Into whatsoever city ye enter and they receive you not, go out into the streets and say, Even the dust that cleaves to us from your city on our feet we wipe off against you. Verily I say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for that city.' There is no- thing, it may be said, personal in this: nothing that tends to put Jesus into a place apart. Religion, as philosophers tell us, is always a form of the absolute consciousness; and in presenting His message in this absolute and uncompromising tone Jesus only exhibits Himself as a supremely religious spirit. Even if we could insulate the words just cited it might be doubted whether this interpretation did justice to them; but when we take them in connexion with all that has pre- ceded — with the consciousness with which Jesus entered on His work, as revealed in the narratives of the Bap- tism and Temptation, and with His communication to the disciples of His own power to cast out evil spirits, and so to give a kind of sacramental pledge that the Kingdom of God had drawn near — it is certain that it does not do them justice. Jesus counted for more than a voice in the preaching of the Kingdom, and though the Twelve might have been puzzled at the time to say THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 199 for what more, they must have felt the quick of the matter touched when He said, Behold, it is I who send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves (Matt. 10 16 ). There was a sense in which He could call the cause of God His cause, as not even the most devoted of prophets could do; He was identified with it and it with Him in a way to which the past afforded no parallel; and as this sunk ever deeper and deeper into the minds of His followers they grew un- consciously to a more adequate — let us say, a more Chris- tian — view of what their Master was, and of what ought to be their own attitude to Him. The second part of the charge to the Twelve in Mat- thew (chapter 10 17 ff ) has parallels chiefly in the twelfth and fourteenth chapters of Luke. The situation which it contemplates is in the main that of the followers of Jesus in Palestine in the generation after His death. The various sayings of which it is composed are addressed, perhaps, rather to disciples in general than to the apostles; but they have a special application to those who led the new community and represented it before men. What we have to remember in reading it is that it was not spoken at one time, and certainly not on the one occasion when Jesus sent out the Twelve two and two; but it is a quite gratuitous supposition that the mind which it expresses is not the mind of Jesus, or that the words in which it is conveyed are not substantially His words. Some of them, as has already been pointed out, have parallels in the es- chatological discourse in Mark 13; and it seems to the writer incredible that Jesus should have left His cause and His followers in the world without a word to guide or brace them for the perilous future. He cannot but have looked forward to the task and the trials which awaited them, and the fact that much of what is recorded in this chapter has this task and these trials in view is no proof that the words are not His. It only shows that when the 2oo JESUS AND THE GOSPEL time came He felt and spoke as the call of the time re- quired. The very first words in Matthew (10 17 f ) bring us to the heart of our subject. 'Beware of men. For they will hand you over to councils, and in their synagogues they shall scourge you. And ye shall be brought be- fore governors and kings, too, on My account (evexev i.uod), for a testimony to them and to the gentiles.' The words 'on My account' make it clear that in the mind of the writer at least the work of the disciples was somehow identified with Jesus. In all their preaching and heal- ing they must have referred to Him; the cause which they represented stood or fell with their relation to Him; it was for His sake that they themselves were identified with the cause. This, no doubt, is the truth. It answers to everything we know of the attitude of the earliest Chris- tians to Jesus and the gospel. But it has been questioned whether the words Svexev e/jlou, though they truly rep- resent the attitude of the first disciples, as truly represent the consciousness or the claim of Jesus. They occur again in ver. 39, and Harnack omits them there because they are wanting in the parallel in Luke (17 M ). 1 Here Luke has no independent parallel, but a parallel is found in Mark 13 9 and (probably in dependence on Mark) in Luke 21 12 . The passage in Mark occurs in the eschato- logical discourse, but not in the little (Jewish ?) apocalypse which many recognise as embedded in that discourse; on the contrary, it is generally admitted to be part of the oldest tradition concerning Jesus. But it also con- tains Zvexev i/iou, which is varied in Luke into ?wexev rod ovd/iard? (xou, for My name's sake. All three evangel- ists, it may be remarked, at the close of this paragraph in the eschatological discourse, unite in the synonymous expression did rd Svofxd p.00 (Matt. 24 9 , Mark 13 IS , 1 Spriiche und Reden Jesu, 63. THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 201 Luke 21 17 ). This alone would make us hesitate to question the words 'for My sake' in Matt. 10 18 ; but we hesitate all the more, indeed we feel that all ground for suspense is taken away, when we notice that Jesus in this very chapter says the same thing over and over, both ex- plicitly and implicitly, in terms which no one ventures to doubt. Thus in ver. 32 f. : 'Every one therefore who shall confess Me before men, him will I also confess before My Father in heaven. But whosoever shall deny Me before men, him will I also deny before My Father in heaven.' The parallel here between Matthew and Luke is exceedingly close, the use of the Semitic idiom dfioXoyetv iv in both evangelists being among the clearest evidences of the essentially identical translations which they employed of the Aramaic sayings of Jesus. 1 But if Jesus really used these words about confessing and deny- ing Him before men, and about being confessed and denied accordingly by Him before God, why should He not have said, Ye shall be brought before governors and kings for My sake ? It is impossible to exaggerate the solemnity of the utterance in Matt. 10 32f -, or the greatness of the claim which it makes. It says as clearly as lan- guage can say it that fidelity to Jesus is that on which the final destiny of man depends. It is the testimony of Jesus to men on which at last they stand or fall before God, and this testimony is concentrated on the question whether or not they have been loyal to Him. One in- dubitable word like this lights up for us much which might have remained obscure, and raises into full assur- ance much which might have left room for question. The mind out of which it sprung can only be the mind of one who is conscious that He is related as no other can be to the purposes of God and to the life of men; conscious, to express it otherwise, that the place in which New 1 J. H. Moulton, Grammar 0} New Testament Greek, 104. 202 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL Testament faith sets its Lord is the place due to Himself. It has often been pointed out that Jesus does not here rep- resent Himself as the final Judge by whose verdict man's destiny is decided, but only as the great Witness by whose testimony the verdict is determined. But it does not matter whether we call Him judge or witness. The real point is that what He speaks of as having absolute significance in the final judgment is the attitude of men to Himself as faithful or unfaithful. It is on this that everything depends; and if we bear on our minds a true impression of this tremendous saying, and admit that it reflects the mind of Christ about Himself and His rela- tion to God and men, we shall be slow to question the place which He holds in all New Testament faith. So much of the scepticism about the 'Christian' ele- ments in the gospel — so much of the disposition to ascribe them to the faith of the Church in the Risen Lord instead of to the historical Jesus — rests upon the failure to ap- preciate words like this, that it is worth while to insist both on their genuineness and their meaning. They are not only found both in Matthew and in Luke, but, as has just been observed, they are found in both with a pecu- liarity of expression (6fioXoyelv iv) which shows that the evangelists used the same translation of an Aramaic source. The saying therefore was current and on record, in the language in which Jesus spoke, before it was taken into our gospels. The fact that Luke speaks of Jesus confessing or denying men 'before the angels of God/ while Matthew has 'before My Father in heaven,' may not require any particular explanation: Luke may have unconsciously conceived the scenery of the final judg- ment more picturesquely than Matthew. But it is prob- able that this variation, as well as Luke's use of 'the Son of Man' (in ch. 12 8 ) where Matthew has 'I,' are rather to be explained by reference to a similar passage THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 203 found in all the evangelists (Mark 8 38 , Matt. 16 27 , Luke 9 26 ). There the angels and the Son of Man are combined in the picture of the judgment, and the familiarity of that solemn scene would involuntarily occasion such remi- niscences of it as can here be traced in Luke. The free- dom with which the essential import of the words of Jesus is given only sets that import in relief. In words which circulated in the Church from the beginning He proclaimed the absolute significance of His own person, and identified loyalty to Himself with loyalty to God and His cause. One of the peculiarities of the fourth gospel on the ground of which its historical character has been depreciated is that it is perpetually emphasising this absolute significance of Jesus in abstract forms. It represents Jesus saying of Himself I am, tyw ?Jia, with- out any predicate, as if the evangelist in his sense of Jesus' greatness had become inarticulate. It is as though he had something to say about his Lord — or rather as though Jesus had something to say about Himself— to which no human language was equal; the absolute unqualified 'I am' (John 8 24 " 28 : also ver. 58)? means that no words can exhaust His significance; He is the all-decisive personality on relation to whom everything turns. It cannot be questioned that the fourth gospel is written in the language of the evangelist rather than in that of Jesus: but is there anything in its boldest asser- tions of the absolute significance of Jesus which tran- scends this thoroughly attested word in Matt. 10 32 ? The writer is unable to see it. The attitude to Himself on the part of men which is here explicitly claimed by Jesus — the absolute loyalty which involves an absolute trust — it is literally impossible to transcend. It is not only in Christian faith, as we find it expressed in the apostolic epistles, but in the consciousness of Jesus, that this religious relation of men to Him is rooted. It is not only 2o 4 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL that they identify themselves with Him in a fidelity in- distinguishable from that which is due to God alone, but that He, in the most solemn, explicit, and overpowering words, requires from them that identification, and makes their eternal destiny depend upon it. This is the more remarkable when we consider the condition under which this loyalty to Jesus has to be displayed. It may require, He tells His followers, the sacrifice of the tenderest natural affection. The connex- ion between Matt, io 33 and Matt. 10 34 may be due to the evangelist — the parallels are not connected in Luke —but even if it is, it answers to the truth. When Jesus claimed confession, He thought of what would make it hard; and whether He spoke of this at the moment or not, He did speak of it, and Matthew appropriately introduces His words here. The parallel in Luke is not close, so much so that Harnack doubts whether the com- mon source on which the evangelists so largely depend does lie behind them at this point. Even if it does not, he holds that in the last resort some common source is implied; and we may fairly say that whether or not we are dealing with the very words of Jesus, we are in con- tact with His mind. Matthew's report is the simplest. 'Think not that I came to send peace on the earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law: and a man's foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he that loveth son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me.' Perhaps the key to this passage is to be found in the consideration that Jesus speaks in it out of His own experience. Fidelity to God on His part introduced misunderstanding and division into the home at Nazareth. His mother could THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 205 not comprehend Him. His brothers did not believe in Him. We can see from the incident preserved in Mark 3 30 f , 31 ff -, and Matt. 12 46 ff -, what painful tension resulted in the family relations. Jesus must have loved His mother and His brothers with a natural affection as pure and strong as His nature; can we estimate the pain it cost Him to recognise that their influence over Him was deliberately exerted to obstruct or frustrate His work? If the sword of which Simeon prophesied pierced the heart of Mary as she heard her Son say, Who is My mother and who are My brothers? — ruling her and them alike out of His life as unable to understand and not entitled to interfere — did it not pierce His own heart also ? He knew in experience the pang it cost to be thus cruel to what was after all a genuine natural affection; but, though He felt the pain more keenly than those on whom it was inflicted, His calling demanded that He should be thus cruel; and the law under which He Himself lived was that to which He called all His followers. Only, there is one significant difference. What He does for the sake of His calling, He requires them to do for His sake. The consciousness of His unique signifi- cance, of the solitary and peculiar place which He holds in the working out of the purposes of God, is always apparent when He speaks of His having come for this or that end. It is so, for example, in Matt. 5 17 (/ came not to destroy, but to fulfil) , or in Matt. 9 13 (/ came not to call the righteous but sinners), or in Luke 19 10 (The Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost); it is so here when He says, / came not to bring peace but a sword. Jesus is thinking and speaking deliberately about Himself and His work in the world, and in what amazing words He speaks! He contem- plates the agonising disruption of families which will take place according as He is or is not accepted by the mem- 2 o6 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL bers of them, and He says deliberately that the dearest and most intimate bond is to be broken rather than the bond of fidelity to Him. Whom does the man make Himself, what place does He venture to claim in the relations of God and human beings, who with clear consciousness says — He that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me, and he that loveth son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me? This is personal, concrete language, asserting an im- mediate relation of the Speaker and of all who hear Him; but it is for this very reason far more wonderful than any formal assumption of a title or a dignity could be. It makes a far deeper impression on us, if it makes any impression at all, than if Jesus had claimed in set terms to be the Messiah or the Son of God or the Son of Man. There is something in it which for boldness transcends all that such titles suggest. It involves the exercise of whatever authority we can conceive them to confer: it exhibits Jesus acting as one too great for any title to describe — as one with right to a name which w> above every name. It is thoroughly in harmony with the utterance already considered about confessing and denying Him; and all the more if it were spoken in another context does it justify us in believing that, wonderful and almost incredible as it is, it is a vital part of the self-revelation of Jesus. We repeat that there is nothing in the New Testament, not even in Paul or John, which goes beyond it; and it will be admitted, unless we wantonly deny that it is from the lips of Jesus, that that is no true Christianity which comes short of it. Much interest has gathered round the passage in Luke which is usually and no doubt rightly regarded as parallel to this, because of its use of the extraordinary word 'hate.' 'If any man comes to Me and does not hate his father THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 207 and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple' (Luke 14 26 ). There is a certain amount of generalisa- tion here, which may be editorial, for Luke is discussing the conditions of following Jesus; but the mind of the Speaker and the claim He makes upon others are in- distinguishable from what we find in Matthew, and curiosity or perplexity centres on the word 'hate.' It is often assumed that this is a fanatical extravagance, conceivable enough in a Church maddened by persecu- tion, and hardly knowing what it said in the vehemence with which it asserted its fidelity to Jesus, but inconceivable in the lips of Jesus Himself. This, however, is not so clear. Loisy is disposed to think that as the most ex- pressive and the most absolute the formula of Luke may be more primitive than that of Matthew. The latter softens down the terrible severity of the original: to say that we must not love father or mother, son or daughter, more than Jesus, is not so staggering as to say that we must hate them all to follow Him. It suits better the reality of existence and the common condition of men. 1 The question is a difficult one, and perhaps not to be answered at all by weighing Matthew and Luke against each other. The conditions of discipleship must often have been discussed by Jesus, and it may be that where divergences of this kind occur we have to consider not two reports of the same saying, but two lessons on the same subject. Such memorable words of Jesus were no doubt familiar in the Church, not only through Matthew and Luke, or through a written source antecedent to them, but through the oral teaching of the original disciples; and even if Matthew and Luke rested in the main on a common document for their knowledge of the Lord's words, there is no reason why 2 Les 2?vangiles Synoptiques, i. 894. 208 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL they should not have been influenced here or there by reminiscences of these words in forms familiar to them independently of that document. It is not necessary to suppose that Matthew mitigated the severity of Luke, or that Luke intensified to fanaticism the austerity of Matthew. There may be no intention at all in the differences between them. If an opinion may be ex- pressed on purely subjective grounds, the writer is in- clined to agree with Loisy that the term 'hate' goes back to Jesus. But it is surely a mistake to say that it suggests the small account (le peu de cas) which is to be made of family bonds and affections where the Kingdom of heaven is concerned. There is nothing in either evangelist about the Kingdom of heaven; what Jesus speaks of in both is the relation of men to Himself — their being worthy or not worthy of Him, able or unable to be His disciples. His significance is not merged in the Kingdom; it is the very peculiarity of the passages that the significance of the Kingdom is absorbed in Him. Psychologically it seems probable that the terrible word 'hate' expresses the pain with which Jesus Himself had made the renunciation which He demands from others. He knew how sore it was, and 'hate' is a kind of vehe- ment protest against the pleas to which human nature, and much that is good in it, as well as much that is evil, is only too ready to give a hearing. It is as though He could not afford to let these tender voices be heard, so painful would it be to silence them. But this is the very opposite of making small account of them — pen de cas, as M. Loisy puts it — and we are glad to think it is the very opposite. In both Matthew and Luke the saying which requires the sacrifice of natural affection is followed immediately by another which raises the claim of Jesus, if it be pos- sible, to a still higher point. In Matthew's form it runs, THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 209 'And he that doth not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me' (Matt. 10 38 ). The habit of general- ising the idea of the cross, and applying to it any diffi- culty or pain that comes in the way of duty, blinds many to the extraordinary force of these words. The cross was the instrument of execution, and the condemned criminal, as we see from the case of Jesus Himself, had to carry it to the place of punishment. The English equivalent of the words in Matt. 10 38 is that no one is worthy of Jesus who does not follow Him, as it were, with the rope round his neck — ready to die the most ignominious death rather than prove untrue. Whether ver. 39 was spoken in this connexion or not, it was again a true instinct which led the evangelist to introduce it here: 'He that findeth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for My sake (ivexev i/iob) shall find it.' The typical Christian is the martyr, the man who lays down his life in the cause which is identical with Jesus; it is he who is sure of immortality: the life of the Kingdom of God, incorruptible and glorious, is his. On the other hand, the man who, when it comes to the decisive point, declines the cross and falls short of the supreme devotion required of the martyr, forfeits everything. In the im- mortality of which the martyr is assured he has neither part nor lot; in saving his life he has lost it. It is not to be doubted that this is the primary meaning of the words in the gospel, however they may have to be attenuated to match with circumstances in which no one is crucified or hanged for following Jesus; and, read in this sense, they confirm and deepen the impression of all that precedes. To the use which has just been made of this passage two objections are commonly raised. One is that the saying about taking up the cross obviously refers to the death of Jesus as something which had already taken place, and that therefore it cannot be regarded as coming 14 2io JESUS AND THE GOSPEL from Jesus Himself. Holtzmann ! even thought at one time that such passages as Gal. 2 19f -, where Paul speaks of being crucified with Christ, were the antecedents of the gospel sayings about the cross. But as Loisy — who nevertheless questions the genuineness of the words ascribed to Jesus — points out, the meaning of Paul is not that of the passage before us. 2 When the true meaning here is fixed, the writer can only say that he sees no difficulty whatever in believing that Jesus spoke in pre- cisely such terms. He was not the first person to be crucified; and though crucifixion was not a Jewish but a Roman punishment, it was one that a hundred years of Roman government must have made sufficiently familiar and terrible even to the Jews. If Jesus could say to His followers, The man who is not ready to face the most shameful death in My cause is not worthy of Me, there is no reason why He should not have said, The man who does not take up his cross and follow Me is not worthy of Me. The fact, which His hearers certainly could not foresee at the moment, that He was Himself to die upon the Cross, would give a singular pathos to His words when they recalled them, afterwards; but a knowledge of that fact was not necessary to the under- standing of them. The other objection refers to the words hexev tjiou in Matt. 10 39 . In what is regarded as the parallel saying in Luke 1 7 33 — -' Whosoever shall seek to gain his life shall lose it, but whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it'— Zvexev ip.00 is wanting. Hence Harnack in his restoration of Q would omit them from this saying: he thinks Matthew has introduced them from Mark. 3 On this ground some would object to the use which we make of the words as throwing light on Jesus' consciousness of Himself; what He says of saving the 1 Handcommentar, ad loc. ■ Les £vangiles Synoptiques, i. 895. 3 Spriiche u. Reden Jesu, 63. THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 211 life and losing it (the objection runs) is said with the ut- most generality; it is a law of the Kingdom of God, but it has no necessary relation to Him. That it is a law of the Kingdom of God is true, but that it has no necessary relation to Jesus must not be taken for granted; that is the very point at issue. The whole burden of the words of Jesus, as we have read them hitherto, is that He has a relation to the Kingdom of God which makes it possible for Him to say things which no other could say; and it may quite well be so here. Not that we should lay any stress on the occurrence of Zvexev 1/j.ov in Matt. 10 S9 . It is quite likely that a saying which Jesus must often have repeated, and which occurs twice in both Matthew and Luke, was not always given in exactly the same words. The principle might sometimes be stated in its absolute generality, and sometimes so as to bring out the peculiar way in which Jesus was identified with the cause for which men were to be prepared to die. That He was identified with it in some peculiar way has been made abundantly clear already, and does not depend in the least on whether h&xev ifiou was introduced into Matt. 10 39 by the evan- gelist or not. The parallel in Luke 17 3S , which omits it, is certainly in every other respect secondary and inferior to Matthew : it is the evangelist there who is responsible for xeptxoirjrTfurOai and Catoyovrj&et, and who may be responsible for the absence of i»ezev i/xod. In the passage in which Mark preserves this saying, and in which Matthew and Luke repeat it (Mark 8 35 , Matt. 16 25 , Luke 9 24 ), all three agree in inserting the words. But, as has already been remarked, the legitimacy of using the passage to illumine the consciousness of Jesus does not depend upon whether on any given occasion he added ivexsv ifiou when He spoke of saving the life or losing it. The principle of that addition is secured if we admit that Jesus said, He that loveth father or mother more 2 i2 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL than Me is not worthy of Me, and he that taketh not his cross and followeth after Me is not worthy of Me; the evangelist not only acted with a good conscience, he wrote out of the same mind of Christ which is revealed in vcr. 39 when he inserted (if he did insert) hexev ifiou in ver. 40. There is nothing theological in the attitude of Jesus here, no filling of a role, whether it be the Mes- sianic or another, but there is the revelation of a con- sciousness to which history presents no parallel. Con- sider how great this Man is who declares that the final di tiny of men depends on whether or not they are loyal to Him, and who demands absolute loyalty though it involve the sacrifice of the tenderest affections, or the surrender of life in the most ignominious death. It is hard to take it in — so hard that multitudes of minds seem to close automatically against it, and yet there is nothing surer in the gospel record. The real difficulty in accepting these sayings is the an- tipathy of the general mind to the supernatural. It is one form of this when people refuse to believe in miracles, and declare that a man who can still a storm with a word, or feed five thousand people with five loaves, or call the dead to life, is a man with no reality for them. The Jesus who lived a historical life must have lived it within common historical and human limits, and when actions are ascribed to Him which transcend these limits, we know that we have lost touch with fact. The same intellectual tendency which leads to this conclusion really, however, pushes much further. Its latent conviction is not only that Jesus must only have done what other people could do, but that Jesus can only have been what other people are. The mystery of personality is ad- mitted and perhaps enlarged upon by those who thus judge, but the measure of Jesus is taken beforehand. A person who seriously says what Jesus says in Matt. THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 213 IO 32-38 jg a p erson f or whom their world has no room, and they have no disposition to reconstruct it so that it shall have room. Such a person is not one more added to the population, who can be accommodated or can find accommodation for himself, like the rest. He is not another like our neighbours, with whom we can negotiate, and to whom we can more or less be what they are to us. He stands alone. In the strictest sense which we can put upon the words He is a supernatural person. He claims a unique place in our life. As our examination of the New Testament has shown, His followers have always given Him such a place; and what w T e wish to insist upon is that in doing so they have not propagated a religion inconsistent with His will, but have only recognised the facts involved in His revelation of Himself. It may quite well be that there are those who do not wish to give Him the place He claimed, and the place He held from the beginning in the faith of His disciples. It is impossible to have a merely intellectual relation to a person: all relations to persons are moral. The person who comes before us speaking as Jesus speaks in this passage is least of all one in whom we can have only a scientific interest. If we admit the reality of the Per- son, we feel at once that He not only said these things to men in Palestine, but is saying them to ourselves now; and to feel this is to be brought face to face with the su- preme moral responsibility. It is not always in human nature to welcome this, and the instinctive desire of human nature to avoid responsibility so exacting and tremendous is no doubt a latent motive in much of the disintegrating criticism of the self-revelation of Jesus. It is not saying anything personal to say this. There is that in man which does not wish to have anything to do with such a person as Jesus here reveals Himself to be; and when that 214 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL element in man tells upon the criticism of the gospels, it tells as a solvent on all that gives Jesus His peculiar place. Nevertheless, His place is sure. There are things too wonderful for invention or imagination, things which could never have been conceived unless they were true; and not to speak of the witness of the Spirit, or their his- torical authentication, the sayings of Jesus that we have just been considering belong to this class of things. We should accept them, were it for nothing else, because of the incredible way in which they transcend all imagin- able words of common men. The Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7, Luke 6 2049 , and other parallels to Matthew) A considerable part of the matter common to Matthew and Luke is found in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7, Luke 6 20 " 49 ). This sermon, as it is presented in Matthew, is to a large extent the composition of the evangelist, but it is not an arbitrary or free composition. Comparison with Luke shows that the framework of it was fixed before either evangelist wrote: it began with beatitudes and ended with the parable of the builders on the rock and the sand, and it had as its kernel the enforcement, in the boldest and most paradoxical terms, of the supremacy of the law of love. In all probability, therefore, an actual discourse of Jesus, corresponding to this in outline, lay behind it; and when Matthew, according to his custom— a custom which we have just seen illustrated in His charge to the Twelve— expands this by introducing into it congruous or relevant mat- ter which strictly belonged to other occasions, we have no call to say that he is misrepresenting Jesus. In point of fact, a large proportion of what he does intro- duce, though not found in Luke's Sermon on the Mount, is found elsewhere in the third evangelist, and is recog- THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 215 nised by critics as belonging to the oldest stratum of evangelic tradition. It is impossible to evade the im- pression that in both evangelists the sermon has the character of a manifesto, and it is the more important therefore to read it with a view to the self-consciousness of the Speaker. It may be alleged, indeed, that this character of manifesto is imposed upon it by the evan- gelists, and that it is only their conception of Jesus which can be inferred from it, not Jesus' sense of His own position and authority. Perhaps if the Sermon on the Mount stood alone in the gospels the case for this opinion would have more weight, but when we remember the self-revelation of Jesus in such utterances as have already been examined, we shall probably feel that we ought not to be too hasty in declaring that this or that is due not to Him but to the reporter. There are three particulars which we have to consider in this connexion. (1) Both in Matthew and in Luke the sermon begins with beatitudes, and though the beatitudes differ con- siderably both in number and in expression they have this singular feature in common, that at a certain point the address, so to speak, becomes more personal; the beatitude is put with emphasis in the second person, and — what is to be particularly noticed — the personality of Jesus Himself is introduced into it. 'Blessed/ it runs in Matthew, 'are ye when men shall revile you and per- secute you and say all manner of evil against you falsely for My sake' (5 "). In Luke it reads, 'Blessed are ye when men hate you and when they separate you and reproach you and cast out your name as evil (or : give you a bad name 1 ) for the Son of Man's sake.'' When we re- member that the words of Jesus were at first preserved 1 Wellhausen thinks the Aramaic original had this meaning : Das Evangelium Lucae, 24. 216 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL by being preached, we need not be astonished at such variations as the one underlined. To the preacher, Jesus and the Son of Man were one, but the Son of Man was a solemn way of saying Jesus; and it would be natural for him to put this title into Jesus' lips whenever he was re- producing words in which the personality of the Speaker was of signal importance. There is not more in 'for the Son of Man's sake' than in 'for My sake,' but it has a certain rhetorical advantage; there is more in it for the ear and the imagination; and when the word of Jesus was not backed, so to speak, by His bodily presence, but only reported by a preacher, we can understand the preacher's motive for preferring the title to the pronoun. Harnack, however, and many others have argued that here, as at Matt, io 39 , the words referring to the person of Jesus should be omitted altogether. 1 The mere fact that Matthew and Luke vary in reporting them, in the way which has just been explained, is certainly no reason for omitting them: and just as little are the other variations which have some MS. support. The old Syriac versions read 'for My name's sake,' which is possibly not a vari- ant, but an idiomatic rendering of hexev ifiov; and it is only a mechanical repetition from the previous verse when some 'Western' MSS. read 'for righteousness' sake' instead of 'for My sake.' There is no authority whatever for any form of the beatitude which does not represent the reproach and persecution of which the dis- ciples were the objects as taking place on account of some- thing; and if Jesus could speak of Himself as we have seen Him speak in the charge to the Twelve— if He could say, Whoso confesseth Me before men, him will I also confess before My Father in heaven— there is no reason why He should not have said, Blessed are ye when men shall revile you for My sake. The truth rather is that the suffering 'See above, p. 210: Harnack, Spruche u. Reden Jesu, 40. THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 217 which good men always endure in a bad world — that is, suffering for righteousness' sake (Matt. 5 10 ) — becomes, where the disciples of Jesus are concerned, definitely and specifically suffering for I lis sake. That is not only their consciousness about it, but His; it is not only the mind of the evangelists which we encounter in this ivsxev faou or ivexev too oloo too dvdpwnou; it is the mind of the Lord Himself. 1 We cannot measure what it means that a person who lived a human life like others should identify Him- self in this extraordinary way with the cause of God and righteousness and should, it is not enough to say claim, but rather assume that He will obtain, that martyr devo- tion to which only righteousness and God are entitled; but until we see this we do not see Jesus. A beatitude com- bines the expression of a rare and high virtue with a rare and high felicity: what are we to say of the Person for whom the supreme beatitude is that men should suffer shame for His sake? We may surely say that He is revealing Himself as the Person to whom the only legit- imate attitude is the attitude of the New Testament Christians to their Lord. (2) The second point in the Sermon on the Mount which calls for particular consideration here is what may be described as the legislative consciousness of Jesus. A great part of the sermon in Matthew — that in which Jesus contrasts the new law of the Kingdom with what was said to them of old time — is not reproduced in Luke, but it can hardly have been unknown to him. In ch. 6 29f he has a parallel to that critical part of it which is preserved in Matt. 5 39f ", and in ch. 6 27 the peculiar and awkward expression dUd u t uTu Xiyat rois dxouuuaiv (but I say unto you that hear) seems most easily ex- plained as due to the influence of the formula which 1 On the various readings and the interpretations of this passage, v. Zahn, Das Evangelium des Matthaus, 193. 218 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL recurs in Matthew, Ye have heard that it was said, but I say unto you. 1 The common source of Matthew and Luke must therefore have represented Jesus in that attitude which is fully illustrated in Matt. 5 21 " 48 — the attitude of one conscious that in Himself the earlier revelation of God's will has been transcended, and a new and higher revelation made. It did not belong to Luke's purpose, writing as he did for Gentile Christians, whose interest in the Old Law was slight, to emphasise this contrast; and though it is emphasised in Matthew, who had in view a community brought up under the law as Judaism understood it, it does not originate with him. It is earlier than either evangelist, and undoubtedly goes back to Jesus Himself. Possibly He did not on any one occasion accumulate all the illustrations of it which Matthew gathers into his sermon here, but, as we shall see, he betrays in innumerable ways the sense of the orig- inality and absoluteness of the revelation which has come into the world in Him. It is quite common to speak of Jesus as a prophet, and so even disciples spoke of Him from the first (Luke 24 19 ), but in truth there can be no greater contrast than that of the prophetic consciousness, as we can discern it from the Old Testament, and the con- sciousness of Jesus as it is revealed in the Sermon on the Mount. There is not in the Old Testament the remotest analogy to such words as, Ye have heard that it was said to them of old time, but I say unto you. The sovereign legis- lative authority which breathes throughout the Sermon on the Mount stands absolutely alone in Scripture. It is the more remarkable, when we consider the profound rever- ence which Jesus had for the earlier revelation, that He moves in this perfect freedom and independence in presence of it. If any one says that it is the evangelist to whom 1 See B. Weiss, Das Matthdusevangelium u. seine Lucas-parallelen, l 7°, 174- THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 219 this representation is due— that it is he who pictures Jesus as legislating in this tone of sovereignty and finality —and that we cannot reason from His recurrent formula, Ye have heard, but I say unto you, to the mind of Jesus Himself, we are entitled to ask for the ground of such an assertion. Even if we granted that the recurrent for- mula of the evangelist did not reproduce the ipsissima verba of Jesus, we should be entitled to say that it con- densed the impression which the teaching and the attitude of Jesus made on some one in immediate contact with Him; and such an impression is part of the word of the Lord, whether it is given in words which He Himself used or not. But it is only if we insulate the report of the Sermon, and approach it with the presupposition that the Speaker cannot be any more, essentially, than one of His hearers — cannot have a relation to God or truth or the King- dom essentially different from theirs— that we have any motive for questioning the evangelist's representation. We have only to recall the fact that behind the new Law stands the Person to whom we have been intro- duced in the baptism, the Person who in the beatitudes and in the charge to the Twelve claims and assumes that He will find an absolute devotion on the part of men, to feel that the formula of the evangelist is the congruous and natural expression of Jesus' consciousness of Himself. If He said other things about which no question could reasonably be raised — if He said what we read in Matt. 5 ", Matt. 10 32, 33, 37 — then there is not the slightest reason to suppose that He could not have spoken of Himself as He does throughout the legislative part of the Sermon; and there is the authority not only of Matthew, but of the older evangelic source common to Matthew and Luke, for believing that He did so speak. So far from the representation in the evangelist being historically incredible, it falls in with all that is most 220 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL surely known of Jesus' sense of what He was; it belongs to the completeness and concrete reality of the testimony concerning Him, that when He spoke of the new law of life for His disciples He should speak not otherwise but with the deliberate sovereign authority which is again and again exhibited here. No mention has yet been made of the words with which the sermon proper, and the relation of Jesus to the new law and the old, are introduced in Matthew: Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets: I did not come to destroy but to fulfil. There is no exact parallel to this saying elsewhere in the gospels, though if we may judge from many examples Jesus was in the habit of reflecting on His mission, and giving expression to His reflections, in this form. For instance, / came not to call the righteous, but sinners (Matt. 9 i3 ) ; / came not to send peace but a sword (Matt. 10 34 f ) ; The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto but to min- ister (Matt. 20 28 ); / came to cast fire upon the earth (Luke 12 49 ); The Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost (Luke up 11 )- Several of these in- stances are found also in Mark, and the same formula occurs with characteristic variations in John: / came that they might have life (10 10 ) ; / came not to judge the world (12 47 ); for this cause have I come into the world that I might bear witness to the truth (18 37 ). The re- currence of this mode of thought and expression in all the gospels is most easily understood on the assumption that it goes back to Jesus Himself; it was so character- istic of Him to think and speak of the purpose of His mission — He was so distinctly an object of thought to Himself — that no one could report Him truly who did not report this. Hence the much-discussed saying of Matthew 5 xl is in all probability genuine. That as an expression of the real attitude and the actual achievement THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 221 of Jesus it is both true and felicitous, there is no reason to deny, and it is not easy to see why it should be ascribed not to Him, but to another reflecting on His significance. We have seen much reason to believe that no one reflected so profoundly on His significance as He did Himself, and the very fact that one subject of reflection was His re- lation to the ancient revelation, alike in law and in proph- ecy, proves how singular His consciousness of Himself must have been. Think it out as we may, it was Jesus' consciousness of Himself that all that God had initiated in the earlier dispensation of requirement and promise was to be consummated in Him; and that puts Him into a solitary and incomparable place. That is the place which He holds in the faith of the primitive Church, but He does not owe it to that faith. It is the place which through- out His life He assumes as His own; He only accepts it from the believing Church because He has all along made it apparent that it is His due. It is not necessary for our purpose to go into detail about the relation of Jesus to the Law; ! and His consciousness of Himself in relation to prophecy, or to the purpose of God as adumbrated and initiated in the Old Testament, will come up better in another connexion. (3) The third point in the Sermon on the Mount at which the self-consciousness of Jesus is opened to us is that in which He is represented as the final Judge of men. Here there is some difficulty in determining what precisely Jesus said. In both Matthew and Luke, what immediately precedes the close of the Sermon is the passage on the trees which bear good and bad fruit. It is by their fruit they are known, and Matthew prepares for what is to follow by inserting verse 19: Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire. This has nothing corresponding to it in • See article ' Law in the New Testament' in Hastings' Bible Dictionary, 222 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL Luke, who introduces at this point a saying found much later in Matt. (12 35 ), carrying on the idea that as trees are to be known by their fruit, so men also have un- mistakable ways of showing what they are. But after this little divergence the two evangelists run parallel again. The difficulty is, that though the parallelism is unmistakable it is far from close, and that the elements of it have to be brought together from different quarters in Luke. The passage is so important that it is worth while to go into some detail. In Matt. 7 21 ~ 23 we read: 'Not every one who says to Me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he who doeth the will of My Father who is in heaven. Many shall say to Me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Thy name, and in Thy name cast out devils, and in Thy name done many mighty works? And then shall I openly declare unto them, I never knew you: depart from Me, ye that work lawlessness.' In Luke's ac- count of the Sermon only the first sentence of this has an echo at the corresponding place (6 46 ) : ' And why do you call Me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?' The formula Lord, Lord, the occurrence of the saying at this precise point, and the use to which it is put, are a strong argument that some equivalent of it stood here in the source common to Matthew and Luke. It is not apparent, however, that this equivalent, which according to Harnack l was probably more remote from Matthew and Luke than the source they ordinarily used in common, made any reference to the last judgment. Such a reference, nevertheless, which is introduced by Matthew here, is found further on in Luke in parabolic form (i3 26f ). The parable deals with persons who to their own astonishment find themselves at last excluded from the Kingdom — the same class of person in view in Matt. 1 Spruche u. Reden Jesu, 52. THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 223 7 w f - ' Then shall ye begin to say, We did eat and drink in Thy presence, and Thou didst teach in our streets. And He shall say, I tell you, I know you not whence ye are: depart from Me, all ye workers of unrighteousness.' It is usually argued that in comparison with Matt. 7 22 f this must be the more accurate version of Jesus' words. He is speaking to His contemporaries, and when He is represented — for He is of course the olxodeeicdrq? of the parable — as saying to them at last, I do not know you (Luke 13 25 ), it is easy to imagine their astonished re- monstrance: 'Not know us! Why, we ate and drank with you, and it was in our streets you taught.' In comparison with this, Matthew's version reads much more like a preacher's application of the words of Jesus in the apostolic age, and with its experiences in view, than like a precise report of what Jesus said. There was no such thing as prophesying in the name of Jesus till after Pentecost, and the words which Matthew puts into the lips of Jesus would not have been intelligible to any one when the Sermon on the Mount was spoken. No one then had seen or could anticipate prophesying, casting out devils, and working miracles, by the name of Jesus. But while this is so, the application which the evangelist makes to his contemporaries in the apos- tolic church — as though Jesus were speaking to them, and not to His own contemporaries in His lifetime — of the words which Jesus actually used, is quite legitimate; it does not in the least misrepresent the mind of Jesus. In Matthew and in Luke alike — in the simpler form of words which is strictly appropriate to the lips of Jesus Himself (Luke 13 2- 13 , Luke 7 "•, 1328-30) In Luke the Sermon on the Mount is followed im- mediately by the account of Jesus' return to Capernaum, and the healing there of a centurion's servant. The same incident is recorded in Matt. 8 5 " 13 , and comparison of Luke 7 * with Matt. 7 28 , 8 5 , makes it more than prob- able that the sequence here indicated goes back to the common source. 1 We have this early authority, therefore, for one of the healing miracles, and in spite of the notable variation of the evangelists with regard to the centurion's mode of approaching Jesus, there is an even more not- able agreement — it virtually amounts to identity — in their report both of the officers' words and of Jesus' reply. 'Sir, I am not worthy that Thou shouldest come under my roof, but speak the word only and my boy shall be healed. For I also am a man under authority, having under myself soldiers, and I say to one Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my ser- vant, Do this, and he doeth it' (Matt. 8 8f - Luke 7 6fL ). The centurion evidently believed that Jesus had at His disposal spiritual messengers who could execute His commands, just as he himself had soldiers and slaves, and that therefore His personal presence was not essen- tial to the carrying out of His will. We do not need to accept his interpretation of the way in which Jesus exercised His power: the point is that Jesus enthusi- astically welcomed and approved his attitude. 'When He heard, He marvelled and said to those who followed, Verily I say unto you, not even in Israel have I found 1 So Harnack, Spruche u. Reden Jesu, 54, who says it follows 'with certainty that great parts of the Sermon stood together in Q and were fol- lowed by this narrative.' Allen, Commentary on St. Matthew, p. 79, doubts this because of the remarkable differences between Matthew and Luke. THE CENTURION'S FAITH 227 such faith.' We see here that Jesus wanted to find faith, and we see also what faith is. It is that attitude of the soul to Jesus which is confident that the saving help of God is present in Him, and that there is no limit to what it can do. It has become a commonplace to point out that whereas in the theological books of the New Testament Jesus Himself is the object of faith, in the synoptic gospels, which are truer to history, this is never the case. The only case in the synoptics in which Jesus speaks of men believing on Himself is Matt. 18 * (these little ones who believe on Me), and in the parallel passage in Mark g 42 the decisive words 'on Me' are wanting. Faith in the synoptics, it is argued — that is, faith as it was understood and required by Jesus — is always faith in God. In this there is both truth and error. God is undoubtedly the only and the ultimate object of faith, but what the synoptic gospels in point of fact present to us on this and many other occasions is (to borrow the language of 1 Peter 1 21 ) the spectacle of men who believe in God through Him. Their faith is their assurance that God's saving power is there, in Jesus, for the relief of their needs. Such faith Jesus demands as the condition upon which God's help be- comes effective; and the more ardent and unqualified it is the more joyfully is it welcomed. The faith in Christ which is illustrated in the epistles is in essence the same thing. It has no doubt other needs and blessings in view than those which are uppermost in the synoptics, but as an attitude to Jesus it is identical with that which is there called by the same name. It will be more con- venient to examine this subject further when we come to look at the self-revelation of Jesus in Mark, for there the narratives of the 'mighty works' bring it to the front: but it seemed worth while to emphasise here, in con- nexion with a miracle recorded in the oldest evangelic 22 8 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL source, the memorable utterance of Jesus in which He sets the seal of His joyous approbation on that attitude of the soul to Himself as the bearer of God's saving power in which the Christian religion has had its being from the first. There is no inconsistency here between the Christian consciousness of what Jesus is, and Jesus' consciousness of Himself. Jesus and John the Baptist (Matt, ii 2 - 19 , 21 23 - 32 , Luke 7 l8 " 35 ) It has already been remarked that the only one of His contemporaries who made a strong impression upon Jesus was John the Baptist. We do not know that they ever met except on the one occasion when Jesus was baptized in Jordan, but the personality, the mission, and the method of John were much in Jesus' mind. He not only thought much, He spoke repeatedly about him. In the last days of His life He recalled John and his ministry to the Jewish authorities (Mark n 27f -, Matt. 21 23 ff -, Luke 20 ! ff ), and according to the fourth gospel, where John is particularly prominent, He spent some of the last weeks of His life in the scenes of the Baptist's early ministry (John 10 40 ). On different occasions He expressly compared or contrasted John with Himself, and in doing so revealed with peculiar vividness His sense of what He Himself was, and of the relation in which He stood to the whole work of God, past and to come. It is fortunate that the record of this has been preserved for the most part in the common source of Matthew and Luke (Matt, n 2 " 19 , Luke 7 18 " 35 ), and to this we shall confine ourselves here. There is a certain amount of difference in the his- torical introduction to the words of Jesus, but both evangelists tell of a message sent by the Baptist, and both give his question to Jesus in precisely the same JESUS AND THE BAPTIST 229 terms: 'Art Thou the Coming One, or must we look for another?' The message was sent because John had heard in his prison — according to Luke through his own disciples — c* wonderful works wrought by Jesus. For the evangelists, these works identified Jesus as the promised Messiah: Matthew calls them expressly (ch. 11 2 ) 'the works of the Christ.' John's attitude, how- ever, is doubtful. It has become almost a tradition in a certain school of criticism that what we have here is the dawning in John's mind for the first time of the idea that Jesus might be the Messiah; and he is supposed to send to Jesus that this nascent idea may be confirmed or corrected. The inference, of course, would be that the story of the baptism — unless John were completely ex- cluded from all knowledge of what it involved — is false; nothing happened at that early date to make John look for anything remarkable from Jesus. But it is gratui- tous to set aside the gospel tradition on such dubious grounds. John's state of mind is surely not hard to understand, even if the tradition be maintained. What ever his hopes or expectations of Jesus may have been, they were religious hopes, not mathematical certainties; they belonged to faith, and faith may always be tried and shaken. John had had much to shake his faith. The Messiah in whom be believed was one who was pre-eminently the Judge: when He came, it was to punish the wicked, and especially to right the wronged. Could Jesus be the Coming One when a man like John lay in Herod's dungeon for no other reason than that he had been faithful to the right ? If Jesus were indeed the Messiah, would it not be the very first Jemonstration of His Messiahship He gave, that He would come and avenge upon Herod the wrongs of the just and holy man who had prepared His way? It is not the voice of dawning faith, but the appeal of disappointment ready to 230 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL break down into despair that is heard in John's question. And that this is so is confirmed by the significant words with which the direct answer of Jesus closes: Blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in Me. This answer undoubtedly has in it a note of warning. But a note of warning is only appropriate on the evangelic, not on the so-called critical, view of the situation. Jesus would not snub nascent faith by unprovoked severity, but it was necessary for Him to warn even one whose services to God had been so distinguished as John's against stum- bling at the divine as it was represented by Himself. The gospels do not speak of any one as being offended in Jesus unless He has first felt His attraction. It is people who are conscious of something in Jesus which appeals to them, and who go with Him a certain length, but then encounter something in Him which they cannot get over, who are represented as 'offended.' The warn- ing involved in the beatitude is appropriate only to a person thus affected or in danger of being thus affected to Jesus; in other words, it is appropriate to John as a person who had once had hopes of Jesus which his own unfortunate experiences, in spite of all he heard, were making it difficult for him to sustain. It is gratuitous, therefore, to say that the narrative invalidates that of the baptism, and on any theory whatever of the spiritual history of John it throws a welcome light on Jesus' mind about Himself. The following points in it call for special notice. First, there is the reference of Jesus to His works. 'Go and tell John the things ye see and hear: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead are raised and the poor have the gospel preached to them.' The evangelists, no one doubts, understood this literally, but it is another critical tradition that it must be taken figuratively. Perhaps it JESUS AND THE BAPTIST 231 should be taken both ways, but it is to be taken literally at least. In Matt. 1 1 21 ~ 23 , which with its parallel in Luke 10 13 f - goes back to the source we are at present depend- ing on, Jesus speaks twice of his Suvdfiet? or mighty works, and it is impossible to question that these are what we usually speak of as His miracles. Jesus ap- pealed to His wonderful works, crowned as they were by the preaching of glad tidings to the poor, to identify Him as the Coming One. They were not, perhaps, what John expected, whose imagination was filled with the axe and the fan; but they were the true insignia of the Messiah. It is with the sense of their worth that Jesus adds, And blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in Me. This sentence may be easily passed by, but there is not a word in the gospel which reveals more clearly the solitary place of Jesus. It stands on the same plane with those wonderful utterances already considered in which He speaks of confessing and deny- ing Him before men, of hating father and mother, son and daughter for His sake. Unemphatic as it may appear, it makes the blessedness of men depend upon a right relation to Himself; happy, with the rare and high happiness on which God congratulates man, is he who is not at fault about Jesus, but takes Him for all that in His own consciousness He is. That Jesus in this informal utterance claims to be the Christ is un- questionable; or if 'claims' is an aggressive word, we can only correct it by saying that He speaks as the Christ. That is the character which He bears in His own mind, and in the consciousness of which He declares Himself. He is 6 Ipyofievor, and He is there, the bearer of God's redeeming love, the Person through whom the purpose of God is to be achieved and His promises fulfilled. We do not need to raise any such technical question as, What precisely is meant by calling Jesus the Christ ? It is 232 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL not by studying Messianic dogmatic that we learn to understand the gospels, it is in the words and deeds of Jesus that we find the material for filling with their proper meaning this and all other titles which are ap- plied to Him. But taking this simple sentence in its simplicity we do not hesitate to say of it, as of Matt. io 32 , that there is nothing in the fourth gospel which transcends it. The attitude which it so calmly and sove- reignly assumes to men, the attitude which it as calmly and sovereignly demands from men — even from men so great as John the Baptist — is precisely the attitude of Christians to their Lord in the most 'Christian' parts of the New Testament. It is not they who gratuitously, and under mistaken ideas of what He is, put Him into a place which no human being ought to give to another; but He Himself from the very beginning spontaneously assumes this place as His. The Christian faith in Christ, which the New Testament exhibits throughout, would be justified by this one word even if it stood alone. But it does not stand alone even in this passage. The word of warning spoken by Jesus might have seemed to those who heard it to reflect upon the character of the Baptist, but the moment the messengers are gone Jesus breaks into a striking panegyric upon John. 1 He is not a reed shaken with the wind— a weak and inconstant nature. He is not clothed in soft raiment, with a silken tunic under his camel's hair— a man making his own privately out of a pretended divine mission. He is a prophet, yes, and far more than a prophet. The prophets had their place in the carrying out of God's gracious purpose towards men, but this man's place excelled theirs. Both Matthew and Luke, and no doubt therefore their source, explain this by applying to John the pro- 1 It may be that all that is here reported does not belong to the present or to any one occasion, but this is immaterial. JESUS AND THE BAPTIST 233 phecy of Malachi (3 l ) : ' Behold I send my messenger before thy face who shall prepare thy way before thee. 1 It must be admitted that it is very difficult to suppose that these are the words of Jesus. In the Old Testa- ment it is Israel which is addressed, and God speaks throughout in the first person: 'Behold I send My messenger, and he shall prepare the way before Me; and the Lord, whom ye seek, will suddenly come to His temple; and the messenger of the covenant, whom ye desire, behold, he cometh, saith Jehovah of hosts.' The Septuagint variations do not affect the character of the passage in this respect. But in the New Testa- ment, both here and in Mark 1 2 , it is not Israel which is addressed, but the Messiah (notice the change of before Me into before thee)) and the messenger prepares the way for the Messiah, not, as in Malachi, for God. It may be, as Zahn argues, 1 that the disciples would never have ventured on this modification of the prophecy un- less Jesus had applied to Himself what is said of the earnestly expected Lord, the Mediator of the Covenant, in Malachi, but of this we cannot be sure. What is indubitable is the solemn asseveration of Jesus which follows: 'There hath not arisen among them that are born of women a greater than John the Baptist, but he that is least in the Kingdom of God is greater than he.' It does not matter whether the greatness of John is conceived as that of official dignity or that of personal character; he had both. He had an incomparably high vocation as the immediate messenger of the Kingdom, and his personality was equal to it. What does matter is that there is a still higher greatness than John's which belongs even to the least in the Kingdom. It is im- possible to suppose that Jesus here thinks of the King- dom as purely transcendent, and means that whoever 1 Commentary on Matthew, ad loc. 234 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL finds an inheritance in it when it comes — all its future citizens — will stand on a higher plane than John. The ruxpuTepos, of whom he speaks in the passage, is only the most typical example of the fiupoi, or little ones, to whom he refers so often. Taking them as a body, the citizens of the Kingdom as Jesus knows them are insignificant people — 'these little ones,' or 'these little ones who believe'; but the cause with which they are identified makes them partakers in its incomparable greatness. He asserts this in all kinds of indirect ways. The smallest service done to them is registered and repaid: Whosoever shall give to drink to one of these little ones a cup of cold water only, in the name of a disciple, verily I say unto you, He shall in no wise lose his reward (Matt. io 42 ). The most terrible indig- nation flames out against those who lead them astray: Whosoe'er shall offend one of these little ones which believe (on Me), it were better for him that a great mill- stone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea (Matt. 18 6 ). The most wonderful privileges are asserted for them: Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto you, that in heaven their angels do always behold the face of My Father which is in heaven — that is, they have immediate and unimpeded access to plead their cause with the Highest. The greatness of the little ones is a familiar thought with Jesus, illustrated in these and other ways, and it is only put with startling boldness when He declares that the moat insignificant of them all is greater than John. But the only difference was that for the little ones Jesus and the Kingdom were realities which interpenetrated; all their hopes of the Kingdom were hopes to be realised through Him; whereas John, when this word was spoken, stood looking toward Jesus indeed, but with a look critical and perplexed. No one JESUS AND THE BAPTIST 235 who takes this attitude to Jesus knows or can know the supreme good which God bestows upon man; whatever his eminence in other respects — in ability, in public service, in native capacity for the spiritual life — the most insignificant disciple of Jesus stands on a higher plane. There is no formal 'claim' made here, but there is the revelation, on the part of Jesus, of a consciousness in relation to God and humanity in which He stands absolutely alone. The same consciousness is implied also in the difficult saying which follows immediately in Matthew (n l2f ), and which Luke gives in a considerably different form in another connexion (16 16 ). The difficulties hardly con- cern us here, and, fortunately, the one point which is perfectly clear is that which does concern us, namely, the consciousness of Jesus that with the ministry of John a new religious era had dawned. Up till now t it had been the reign of the law and the prophets, an age of preparation and expectation, during which men could live the life of obedient routine, and wait for God to fulfil the hopes He had inspired. But with the appear- ance of John that more tranquil age had come to an end; men lived and they knew it, at a religious crisis; a situa- tion had emerged which called for instant and decisive action. It is within this situation we have to inter- pret the difficult words tj ftaffthia ribv obpavwv fitdCerat xai fita