i____________c_________________^_a________i__________E3_:

YALE UNIVERSITY
Cibrarg ofthe ©toinitg School
GIFT OF
Douglas Cllgflc JWacintosh
DWIGHT PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY
DWIGHT PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY AND
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
1916-1942
lVITIViyiTI_^'"W"'»^"'m_IVWITIl,IVIVIVIVITIVIVI*ww»wiwiw<'_

JESUS AND THE GOSPEL

WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Studies in Theology. Lectures delivered in Chicago
Theological Seminary. Tenth Edition. $s.
The Death of Christ : its Place and Interpretation
in the New Testament. Sixth Edition. 6s.
The Atonement and the Modern Mind. Second
Edition. 2s. 6d.
The Epistles to the Thessalonians. Fifth Edition.
Js. 6d.
The Second Epistle to the Corinthians. Fourth
Edition. Is. 6d.
Gospel Questions and Answers. Second Edition.
is. 6d.

LONDON : HODDER AND STOUGHTON

JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
CHRISTIANITY JUSTIFIED
IN THE MIND OF CHRIST
BY
JAMES DENNEY, D. D.
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professor of new testament language
literature and theology, united free
church college, glasgow

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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

viii JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
intellectual construction of it, or with this or that
definition of 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 never overcome its own divisions, it
can never appeal with the power of a unanimous testi
mony 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,

PREFACE ix
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? Much of the indifference to Chris
tianity in certain circles 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 illustration 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
THE PLACE OF CHRIST IN NEW TESTAMENT FAITH, AND THE
QUESTION WHETHER THIS PLACE IS THAT WHICH HE
CLAIMED FOR HIMSELF .....

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
III. CHRIST IN THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS
IV. CHRIST IN THE FIRST EPISTLE OF PETER
V. CHRIST IN THE EPISTLE OF JAMES

9
2043
46 49

Xll

JESUS AND THE GOSPEL

VI. CHRIST IN THE EPISTLE OF JUDE AND IN THE SECOND
EPISTLE OF PETER

VII. CHRIST IN THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS
(a) The Gospel according to Mark
(b) The Gospel according to Matthew
(c) The Gospel according to Luke
VIII. CHRIST IN THE JOHANNINE WRITINGS

(a) The Apocalypse
(b) The Epistles of John
(c) The Gospel according to John

SUMMARY AND TRANSITION

55

¦

57

61

67

7i
72
79
86
100
BOOK II
THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF THE CHRISTIAN
FAITH
I. The Resurrection of Jesus.
THE EASTER FAITH AND THE EASTER MESSAGE
THE OLDEST HISTORICAL EVIDENCE
108
112
MORAL CONSIDERATIONS INVOLVED IN A TRUE APPRECIATION
OF IT . . . . . . .122
CONTENTS xiii

THE HISTORICAL AND THE SPIRITUAL EVIDENCE AS COMBINED
IN I COR. XV.

Difficulties as to their order
Progressive materialisation

FUNCTION OF THE EVANGELISTS IN RELATION TO THE RESUR
RECTION .

PAGE

131

THE APPEARANCES OF THE RISEN JESUS . . .140

140143

Difficulties as to the scene of the appearings . . 146

153

II. The Self-Revelation of Jesus.
(a) Preliminary critical considerations.
DOGMATIC PRECONCEPTIONS TO BE EXCLUDED . . 159
CHARACTER OF THE EVANGELIC DOCUMENTS . . . 161
IDEA THAT HISTORICAL CRITICISM IS IRRELEVANT TO CHRIS
TIANITY ....... 166
IDEA THAT ITS PRESUPPOSITIONS ARE FATAL TO CHRISTIANITY, 1 70
HISTORICAL CRITICISM AND THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO
MARK . ..... 174
HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF THE OTHER PRIMITIVE SOURCE —
'Q,' . . . . . . 188

xiv JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
(b) Detailed Study of the earliest sources as illustrating the
self-consciousness of Jesus. PAGE
THE BAPTISM OF JESUS . . . . . .198
THE TEMPTATIONS . . . . . .208
JESUS AND THE TWELVE: THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP . 215
THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT ..... 240
THE HEALING OF THE CENTURION'S SERVANT : FAITH IN
JESUS ....... 253
JESUS AND JOHN THE BAPTIST . . . .256
THE GREAT THANKSGIVING OF JESUS .... 265
ISOLATED EXPRESSIONS IN WHICH JESUS' CONSCIOUSNESS OF
HIMSELF IS REVEALED : Matt. II 20ff-, 12 30, 12 & 41. -^ jj 16^
23 ....... 277
PASSAGES IN WHICH JESUS SPEAKS OF HIMSELF AS THE SON OF
MAN ....... 286
MARK'S HISTORY THE HISTORY OF THE SON OF GOD . . 303
A TYPICAL Svva/M. OR MIGHTY WORK IN WHICH JESUS' CON
SCIOUSNESS OF HIMSELF IS REVEALED : FAITH IN JESUS . 305

THE BRIDEGROOM AND THE CHILDREN OF THE BRIDECHAMBER .

3M

CONTENTS xv
PAGE
THE UNPARDONABLE SIN IN MARK . . . .318
THE MESSIAH AND THE CROSS : Mark 8 27-IO 45 . . 320
the triumphal entry into jerusalem . . . 346
the wicked husbandmen : servants and the son . . 347
david's son and david's lord . . . • 351
the date of the parousia ..... 353
the last supper ...... 356
the final confession ..... 366
CONCLUSION
THE ONE CHRISTIAN FAITH VINDICATED IN THE MIND OF
CHRIST ....... 373
OBJECTION BASED ON THE IRRELEVANCE OF HISTORY TO FAITH 374
OBJECTION BASED ON THE UNRELIABLENESS OF THE HISTORY IN
QUESTION ....... 376
THE RIGHT OF EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANITY SECURED . 38 1
THE RIGHT OF INTELLECTUAL LIBERTY SECURED . . 382
ATTITUDE OF INDIVIDUALS AND OF CHURCHES TO THESE CON
CLUSIONS ....... 386

xvi JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
PAGE
THEIR BEARING ON THE UNION OF CHURCHES . . 389
SIMPLIFICATION OF THEOLOGICAL CREEDS FALLACIOUS . . 39 1
A UNITING CONFESSION OF FAITH .... 397
OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED ..... 398
THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY AND HOW TO SECURE IT . 407
INDEX OF NEW TESTAMENT PASSAGES . . . .413

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
shallows 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 convic
tions nor motives, neither penitence nor ideals, neither
vocation 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 facie impression which
the New Testament makes upon a reader brought up in
the Christian Church. The simplest way to express it
A

2 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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
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 second 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 Testament exhibits it, justify itself by appeal

INTRODUCTION 3
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
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 conceiv
able 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 dimen
sions 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.

4 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
For those who stand outside the Christian Church, this
second question 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 preserved. 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 Testament 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 primitive 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 person 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

INTRODUCTION 5
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
without 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 Christian
faith or the Christian Church can be served by anything
else than simple truth.
The two questions with which we have to deal are
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 '

6 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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
historically 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
second question it will be considered as far as the case
requires. Here the writer would only express his dis
trust of a priori determinations of what is possible either
in the natural or the historical sphere. There is only
one universe : 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 historically conceivable in such a system.
Its possibilities, 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 pheno
menon 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

10 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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
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
believe, 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.

NEW TESTAMENT CHRISTIANITY 11
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
connects 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
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

12 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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
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.

PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN PREACHING 13

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
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.2 He goes so far as to censure
the primitive Church for turning aside from its proper
1 Encyclopaedia Biblica, 42. 2 Das Wesen des Christentums, 79 f.

14 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
duty — teaching men to observe all things that Jesus had
commanded — to the apologetic task of proving that Jesus
was the Christ.1 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
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 22). 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
1 Dogmengeschichte, i. 57 f.

THE CHRIST OF PETER 15
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 ofthe 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
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;

16 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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 io 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
through whom all God's promises are fulfilled. In this
sense the name is a symbol of the continuity of the work
of God, and a guarantee of its accomplishment. This is

THE CHRISTIANITY OF PETER 17
the historical importance of it. 'To Him bear all the
prophets witness ' (Acts io 43). All prophecy is in essence
Messianic. All the hopes which God has inspired in the
hearts of men, whether by articulate voices in the Old
Testament, or by the providential guidance of the race,
or by the very constitution of human nature, must look
to Him to be made good. To borrow the language of
Paul, ' How many soever are the promises of God, in
him is the Yea' (2 Cor. 1 20). They must be fulfilled in
Him, or not at all ; or rather we should say, They have
been fulfilled in Him, and in no other.
The exclusive place which is thus given to Jesus as
the Christ is insisted upon from the first. Whether we
regard Him as the King to whom all must do homage,
or as the central and supreme figure in history, through
whom God's final purpose is to be achieved, He stands
alone. There cannot be another, who shares as He
does the throne of God ; there cannot be another to
whom all the prophets bear witness, and on whom all the
hopes of humanity depend. This is not only implied in
the place taken by Jesus in the faith of the apostle ; it
has come to clear consciousness in the apostle's mind,
and is explicitly asserted in his preaching. ' In none
other is there salvation ; for neither is there any other
name under heaven, that is given among men, wherein
we must be saved ' (Acts 4 12). If we can rely upon
these words as representing the mind of Peter — and the
writer can see no reason to question them — it is clear
that Jesus had in the earliest preaching and the earliest
faith of Christians that solitary and incommunicable
place which the Church assigns Him still.
B

18 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
It is worth while, however, to bring out more distinctly
the spiritual contents which the apostle found in his
Christ. For those to whom he preached there was a
hideous contradiction in the very idea that one should
be the Christ who had died the accursed death of the
Cross, and in so far as Peter's sermons are apologetic
they deal with this difficulty. He meets it in two ways.
On the one hand, the death of Jesus was divinely neces
sary ; He was delivered up by the determined counsel
and foreknowledge of God. The evidence of this divine
necessity was no doubt found in the Scriptures (Acts
2 23 ; i Cor. 1 5 3) ; and when we notice that in describing
the death of Jesus Peter twice uses the Deuteronomic
phrase ' hanged upon a tree,' which to Paul was the
symbol of Christ made a curse for us (Acts 5 30, 10 39;
Deut. 2 1 23 ; Gal. 3 13), it is perhaps not going too far to
suggest that the atoning virtue of Christ's death was an
idea as well as a power in the primitive Church. But
however that may be, it is certain that the difficulties
presented by His death to faith in the Messiahship of
Jesus were practically annulled by His Resurrection and
Exaltation. It was this which made Him both Lord
and Christ, and in this character He determined for the
apostles and for all believers their whole relation to God.
To Him they owed already the gift of the Holy Spirit ;
and the gift of the Holy Spirit, Peter argues elsewhere, is
the sufficient and final proof that men are right with God
(Acts 11 15 17, 158). To His coming again, or rather to
His coming in His character of the Christ, they looked
for times of refreshing, nay for the consummation of
human history, ' the times of the restoration of all things

THE CHRISTIANITY OF PETER 19
whereof God spake by the mouth of His holy prophets
which have been from of old' (Acts 3 21). Much stress
has been laid on the eschatological aspects of the primi
tive faith in Jesus as the Christ, and they are not to be
ignored ; but neither may we ignore the spiritual char
acter of the salvation which men owe here and now to
the Christ who is to come. ' Repent and be baptized
every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for remis
sion of your sins, and ye shall receive the gift ofthe Holy
Spirit ' (Acts 2 38). Remission of sins and the gift of the
Holy Spirit : these are the present religious experiences
which are offered to men through faith in the ' eschato
logical ' Christ. But these are supremely gifts of God,
and we do not appreciate truly the place of Christ in the
apostle's faith until we see that where salvation is con
cerned He stands upon God's side, confronting men.
The most vivid expression is given to this in Acts 2 33 :
' Being therefore by the right hand of God exalted, and
having received of the Father the promise of the Holy
Spirit, He hath poured forth this which ye see and hear.'
There can be no doubt that in this passage Peter looks
upon Jesus in His exaltation as forming with God His
Father one Divine causality at work through the Spirit
for the salvation of men. His humanity is not ques
tioned or curtailed ; it has been spoken of without pre
judice in words which immediately precede. But His
relation to those experiences which constitute Christian
life is that of being their Author, the Divine Source
from which they come ; he is not to Christian faith a
Christian, but all Christians owe their being, as such, to
Him. We may have any opinion we please about the

20 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
rightness or the wrongness of this, but it is not possible
to question the fact. We may argue that the history of
the Church, like that of the human race, began with a
fall — that the apostolic belief in the Resurrection was
a mistake, and the spiritual experiences which accom
panied it morbid phenomena to be referred to the
mental pathologist ; but even if we do, we must admit
that primitive Christianity gave Jesus in its faith the
extraordinary place which has just been described. He
is the Christ, the Prince of Life, Lord of all, Judge of
the living and the dead, at God's right hand, the Giver
of the Spirit, the fulfiller of all the promises of God. He
is not the first of Christians or the best of men, but
something absolutely different from this. The apostles
and their converts are not persons who share the faith
of Jesus ; they are persons who have Jesus as the object
of their faith, and who believe in God through Him.

II
CHRIST IN THE FAITH OF PAUL
There is an idea abroad that it does not much matter
what Paul thought of Christ, because he never knew
Him. He had not that acquaintance with Him during
His public ministry on which, as we have seen, stress
was laid in choosing a successor to Judas ; his Christ,
therefore, cannot but have been an ideal and theological
rather than a real person. He has even been charged,
on the ground of a difficult expression in one of his
epistles (2 Cor. 5 16), with disparaging the kind of know-

THE CHRISTIANITY OF PAUL 21
ledge to which importance was attached in Jerusalem,
and much of the modern criticism of his theology really
assumes with the Pharisaic Christianity of Acts that he
lacked the indispensable qualifications of an apostle.
We even find scholars like Gunkel congratulating them
selves on this ground that Paul's influence speedily
waned.1 It would have been all over with Christianity
as a beneficent historical force if the synoptic gospels
had not come to the front and established an ascendancy
in the Church which to a great extent neutralised the
Pauline gospel. If the question before us were, What
did Paul know of Jesus of Nazareth ? it would not be
difficult to reduce these assertions to their true propor
tions. Paul did not live in a vacuum ; he lived in the
primitive Christian society in which all that was known
of Jesus was current, and he could not, by the most
determined and obstinate effort, have been as ignorant of
Jesus as he is sometimes represented to be. Among
his most intimate friends and fellow-workers, at different
periods of his life, were Mark and Luke, the authors of
our second and third gospels. There is much to be said
for the idea of Mr. Wright,2 that they worked as cate-
chists in the Pauline Churches. Is it conceivable that
the apostle did not know what they taught, or did not
care? If this reasoning seems too a priori, or too
much based on mere probabilities, to carry conviction, it
only needs such a searching examination of the apostle's
writings as Feine's Jesus Christus und Paulus to raise it
beyond doubt. Paul was in no sense ignorant of Jesus.
1 Die Wirkungen des heiligen Geistes, 56.
2 The Composition ofthe Four Gospels, cc. i. and ii.

22 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
If our synoptic gospels are not works of imagination, but
a genuine deposit of tradition — and this is the only view
which is represented by serious scholars — then the sub
stance of them must have been as familiar to Paul as
it is to us.
In view, however, of the question which we are dis
cussing, Paul's knowledge of Jesus is beside the mark.
Whether he knew Jesus or not, whether his influence on
Christianity has been pernicious or not, he is the most
important figure in Christian history. He did more than
any of the apostles to win for the Christian religion its
place in the life of the world, and he has done more than
any of them in always winning that place again when
it seemed in danger of being lost. Evangelical revival,
in personalities so powerful as Luther, Wesley, and
Chalmers, has always been kindled afresh at the flame
which burns inextinguishable in his testimony to Christ.
Hence, quite apart from any question as to its justi
fication or otherwise, nothing can be of more conse
quence than to ascertain the place which Christ actually
filled in the faith and life of the apostle. Was He to
him what we have seen Him to be in the faith of the
primitive Church ?
In one respect, at least, the answer cannot be doubt
ful. Paul's Christian life began with the appearance to
him of the Risen Saviour ; to him, as to Peter, in virtue
of His exaltation the crucified Jesus was both Lord and
Christ. With the splendour of that appearance present
to his mind Paul calls Jesus the Lord of glory (i Cor. 28) ;
to acknowledge Him in this character is to make the
fundamental Christian confession in which all believers

THE CHRISTIANITY OF PAUL 23
are united (i Cor. 12 8; Rom. 10 9). It is often said
that whatever doctrinal differences may be detected in
the New Testament, there is no trace of Christological
disputes. It is not quite clear that this is the case,
nor is it clear that it must be so. It may quite fairly be
argued from such a passage as 2 Cor. 1 19 — Now Gods
Son — ' God's ' has a strong emphasis — who was preached
among you by us, I mean by me and Silvanus and
Timotheus, was not yea and nay — that Paul was ac
quainted with preachers of another stamp than himself
and his friends, whose Jesus was not in his sense God's
Son, but perhaps only the son of David. There is some
thing, too, to support this in 2 Cor. 11*, where we hear
of ' another Jesus,' which means a ' different spirit ' and
a • different gospel.' But however this may be, it is
certain that the Risen Jesus fills the same place in the
religion of Paul as in that of Peter. To both apostles
He is Lord and Christ. To both He is exalted at God's
right hand. In the faith of both He comes again
to judge the living and the dead. It is of Him that
both say, with that great and terrible day in view, ' Who
soever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be
saved' (Acts 221; Rom. 10 1S). If Peter cries to the
Jews, ' There is not salvation in any other ' (Acts 4 12),
Paul writes to the Gentiles, ' Other foundation can no
man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ ' (1 Cor.
3 u). The absolute religious significance of Jesus, in all
the relations of God and man, is the specific quality of
the new faith as it appears in both.
The place Paul has filled in the history of Christianity
justifies us in showing with some detail how this

24 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
absolute religious significance of Christ pervades and
dominates his spiritual life.
Sometimes it comes out quite casually, where, as we
might say, he is not specially thinking about it. Thus
in the salutations of his epistles he habitually wishes the
churches grace and peace from God our Father and the
Lord Jesus Christ (Rom. i7; i Cor. i3; 2 Cor. i2;
Gal. Is, etc.), or he writes to them as societies which
have their being in God the Father and the Lord Jesus
Christ ( 1 Thess. 1 1 ; 2 Thess. 1 J). This is exactly parallel,
in the place it gives to Jesus, to what we have already
seen in Acts 2. Paul would not think any more than
Peter of questioning the real and complete humanity of
Jesus ; but when he thinks of the grace and peace by
which the Church lives, he does not think of Jesus as
sharing in them with himself; he sets Him instinctively
and spontaneously on the side of God from whom they
come. If the Father is the source, Christ is the channel
of these blessings ; the Father and the Son together
confront men as the divine power to which salvation is
due. Sometimes, again, the place Christ has in Paul's faith
comes out in a single word ; for example, when in
1 Cor. 1528 he calls Him without qualification 'the Son.'
This passage, in which the apostle tells us that when the
end comes the Son Himself shall be subject to Him who
put all things under Him, that God may be all in all, is
sometimes cited to justify minimising or disparaging
views of Christ's place, but nothing could be more inept.
The person here spoken of has already brought to
nought 'every principality, and every authority and

THE CHRISTIANITY OF PAUL 25
power.' He has put all His enemies under His feet. He
has destroyed death. He has fulfilled all the purposes
and promises of God. All that God has designed to do
for men He has now done through Him as Messianic
King, and the ends of His Kingship being achieved
Christ hands over the kingdom to His Father. But that
does not touch the fact that these ends have been
achieved through Him, and that they can be achieved
through no other. What other could do what Christ is
here represented as having done for men ? What other
could hold the place in the apostle's mind which He
holds ? What other could be called simpliciter ' the
Son ' ? The handing over of the kingdom to the Father
does not compromise the solitary greatness which is
conveyed by this name ; it leaves the Son in that incom
parable place which is suggested by His own solemn
words in Mark 1 3 32.
The religious attitude of Paul to Christ is made
plainer still by the passages in which he involuntarily or
deliberately contrasts Him with men. Thus in defend
ing his apostleship to the Galatians he speaks of him
self as an apostle who did not owe his calling to a
human source nor get it through a human channel, but
through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised
Him from the dead (Gal. 1 1). The last words show
that when he mentions Jesus Christ it is the Risen Lord
he has in view, and nothing could bring out more
clearly than the broad contrast of this sentence how in
stinctively and decisively Paul sets the Risen Christ side
by side with God the Father in contrast to all that is
human. That is His place in the Christian religion.

26 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
He is not in any sense one of those who have been or
are being saved ; he is included in the divine causality
by which salvation is accomplished. It would never
have occurred to Paul to deny that Jesus of Nazareth
who was crucified at Jerusalem was true man, but how
ever he may have reconciled this with his faith as a
Christian, that faith indubitably put Jesus into the sphere
of the divine. The apostolic calling which came to Paul
through Him was not a calling of man, but of God, and
the same holds of all the experiences which the apostle
owes to Christ. Another illustration of this may be
given. ' What is Apollos ? What is Paul ? ' the apostle
asks, rebuking the party spirit at Corinth. ' Ministers
through whom ye believed, and each as the Lord gave
to him.' The Lord here, as always in Paul, is Christ,
and is directly contrasted with His most distinguished
servants. It is in the same spirit that the apostle ex
claims, ' Was Paul crucified for you ? or were you bap
tized in the name of Paul ? ' The idea which he here
takes for granted is that the name of Jesus is an incom
parable, incommensurable name. We can compare Paul
and Apollos if we please ; we can say that one planted
and the other watered, though the apostle does not look
on the making of such comparisons as a very profitable
employment. But we must not compare Paul and
Christ. They are not, like Paul and Apollos, members
of one class by the ideal of which they can be judged.
They are not teachers of religion, whether in rivalry or
in partnership, who can equally be criticised through the
idea of what religious teaching ought to be. This view
is quite common in modern times even among men who

THE CHRISTIANITY OF PAUL 27
profess to preach the Christian religion, but it is not the
view of Paul. The very idea of it shocked him. His
own relation to the Church, or that of Apollos, was in
no way analogous to that of Christ. No doubt if he
and Apollos had refused or renounced Christianity, the
Church would have missed them, but their places could
have been supplied. The Church would have been
there though they had been wanting, and the Lord who
Himself gives the apostles and prophets and evangelists
would have raised up others for His work. But without
Christ there would be no Church and no ministry at all ;
everything that we call Christian is absolutely dependent
on Him. From this side again, therefore, we see the
unique place which Christ filled in the faith of Paul.
This exclusive and divine significance of Christ is
even more conspicuous when we look at the two great
religious controversies which engaged the apostle's mind
in his earlier and later years, and brought his faith to
articulate and conscious expression. The first is that
which has left its most vivid record in the epistle to
the Galatians, and which is described from a greater
distance and with less passion, perhaps less appreciation
of all that was involved, in the fifteenth chapter of Acts.
What was really at stake was the essence of Christianity.
All who were Christians, Paul and his Pharisaic op
ponents alike, in some sense believed in Christ; the
question was whether for perfect Christianity anything
else was required. The Pharisaic Christians said Yes.
The Gentile faith in Christ was very well as a beginning ;
but if these foreign believers were to be completely
Christian and to inherit the blessings of the Messianic

28 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
kingdom on the same footing with them, their faith in
Christ must be supplemented by circumcision and the
keeping of the Mosaic law. Paul said No. Christ is the
whole of Christianity — Christ crucified and risen. He
is the whole of it on the external side, regarded as the
revelation and action of God for the salvation of sinful
men ; and faith in Christ — that abandonment of the soul
to Him in which Paul as a Christian lived and moved
and had his being — is the whole of it on the internal
side. Anything that compromises this simple and abso
lute truth, anything that proposes to supplement Christ
on the one side or faith on the other, is treason to the
gospel. It strikes at the root of Christianity, at the
absolute sufficiency of grace in God and of faith in man
to solve the problem of salvation ; it denies the glory of
Christ and destroys the hope of sinners. This is how
Paul conceived it, and it is this, and not any personal
intolerance of opposition, which prompts the solemn
vehemence of Gal. i 8 : Though we, or an angel from
heaven, should preach unto you any gospel other than
that which we preached unto you, let him be anathema.
The interest of the words for us is the force with which
they bring out the absolute and unshared place which
Christ filled in the religion of Paul. His faith in Christ
was such that it admitted of no other object; Christ
completely filled his religious horizon ; his whole being,
as a spiritual man with a life toward God, depended
upon and was determined by Christ alone. And for
this view, which he was perhaps the first to think out in
clearness and simplicity, Paul was able to command the
assent of the apostles who had been admitted to the

THE CHRISTIANITY OF PAUL 29
intimacy of Jesus. James, Cephas and John gave him and
his fellow-worker Barnabas the right hand of fellowship.
It is essentially the same religious question which is
raised in another form in the second great controversy
of the apostle's life — that to which we are introduced in
the epistle to the Colossians. The law appears here
also, but the real danger now is not that of supplement
ing Christ by ritual observances, but that of dispensing
with Him, to a greater or less extent, in favour of angelic
mediators. Paul's attitude in this new situation is pre
cisely what it was in Galatians. Christ is all, is the
burden of his argument. We do not need to look any
where but to Him for that knowledge and presence of
God on which salvation depends ; in Him are all the
treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden away ; in
Him dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. Once
more it may be repeated that we are not dealing with
the truth or falsehood of these views, with the possi
bility or impossibility of justifying them, but only with
the fact. This is how Paul unquestionably thought of
Jesus ; this is indubitably the place which Jesus filled in
his religious life. It is not putting it too strongly to say
that He had for Paul the religious value of God. To
suppose that Paul could have classified Him, and put
Him in a series along with other great men who have
contributed to the spiritual elevation of the race, is to
deride his sincerity and passion. In the religion of the
apostle, Jesus held a place which no human being could
share. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning
and the end, the First and the Last.
Although we are not concerned with the Christology

30 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
of the apostle, in the strict sense of the term, but only
with the significance which Christ had for his faith, it
will exhibit that significance more clearly, and so con
tribute to our purpose, if we look at the principal ways
in which he seems to have conceived Christ. In a sense,
this is entering the region of doctrine rather than of faith,
but it is not with a doctrinal purpose ; what we wish is
to see through the doctrine what Christ was in the life
of Paul. There are three distinguishable forms in
which Christ is present to the mind of the apostle, and
in different ways the same religious conclusion can be
drawn from all.
(i) The simplest way to conceive Christ is that which
regards him as an individual historical person, practi
cally contemporary with Paul himself; one who had
lived and died in Palestine, and been familiarly known to
many who were yet alive. No doubt Paul often thought
of Him in this light ; it would be impossible for any one
in those days to think otherwise. But there was always
one immense qualification of this ' purely historical '
view. Paul never thought of Christ, and could not
think of Him, except as risen and exalted. Christianity
may exist without any speculative Christology, but it
never has existed and never can exist without faith in
a living Saviour. It is quite possible that there was
a stage in his Christian life when Paul had asked no
theological questions about Jesus of Nazareth whom
God had made by His exaltation both Lord and Christ.
It is quite possible that he received the Holy Spirit and
the apostolic commission and preached the gospel with
divine power and blessing, before he had asked any

THE CHRISTIANITY OF PAUL 31
question about the nature of Christ, or His original re
lation to God or to the human race, or about the mode
in which the historical personality originated in which he
now recognised the only Lord and Saviour. It is not
his speculative Christology, if we are to call it such,
which secures for Christ His place in Paul's religious
life ; Christ holds that place by another title, before the
speculative Christology appears. The importance of
that Christology lies not so immediately in itself as in
the testimony it bears to the immense stimulation of
intelligence by the new faith. If we look, for example,
at the epistles to the Thessalonians, we find no trace of
Christology in the technical sense. There is an entire
absence of speculative construction or interpretation
of the Person of Christ. The Lord Jesus Christ is
simply the historical person, known to Paul's contempo
raries, who had been put to death by the Jews, and
whom God had raised from the dead. There is not a
word about pre-existence, or the incarnation, or an eternal
relation to God, or a universal relation to men. Yet the
person who is thus simply conceived is one on whom
Christians are absolutely dependent ; as all men live
and move and have their being in God, so Christians live
and move and have their being in Christ. The Church
of the Thessalonians is a church in God the Father and
the Lord Jesus Christ; the grace and peace which are
the sum and the fruit of all the divine blessings it enjoys
come to it from God the Father and the Lord Jesus
Christ (i Thess. i a ; 2 Thess. 1 lf). And this co-ordina
tion of Christ with the Father, this elevation into the
sphere of the divine in which Christ and the Father

32 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
work harmoniously the salvation of men, is not a
formality of salutation : it pervades the epistles through
out. Every function of the Christian life is determined
by it ; the place of Christ in the faith and life of Christians
can only be characterised as the place of God, not of
man. Paul has confidence in the Lord toward the
Thessalonians (ii. 3 4) ; he charges and entreats them in
the Lord Jesus Christ (11. 3 lz) ; they stand in the Lord
(1. 3 9) ; he gives them commandments through the Lord
Jesus (1. 4 2) ; church rulers are those who are over them
in the Lord (1. 5 12) ; the Christian rule of life is the will of
God in Christ Jesus concerning them (1. 5 18) ; the Christian
departed are the dead in Christ (1. 4 16) ; all benediction is
summed up in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ (1. 5 ss;
n. i12, 318) ; Jesus and the Father are co-ordinated as the
object of prayer (1. 3 n), and prayer is directly addressed
to the Lord, i.e. Christ (1.312). Our Lord Jesus Christ,
through whom we are to obtain salvation at the great
day, is He who died for us, that whether we wake or
sleep we should live together with Him (1. 5 10). It is
as though all that God does for us He does in and
through Christ, so that Christ confronts us as Saviour in
divine glory and omnipotence. We may trust Him as
God is trusted, live in Him as we live in God, and
appeal to Him to save us as only God can save ; and
this is the essentially Christian relation to Him. It is
what w,e found before in the primitive preaching of Acts ;
it is what we find in Paul when his theology is at its,
simplest, and where the Christology of his later epistles
gives no indication of its presence.
(2) The impression made upon us is not altered when

THE CHRISTIANITY OF PAUL 33
we pass to that more developed mode of conceiving
Christ which is characteristic of the second group of the
apostle's writings — the controversial epistles of the third
missionary journey, Corinthians, Galatians, and Romans.
Of course the non-theological way of presenting Christ
is also to be found in these, as in all Paul's letters ; he
could not but think of Him often simply as the historical
person whom God had exalted to be Lord of all. But
along with this there is the conception of Christ as
a representative, typical, or universal person, who has
for a new Christian humanity the same kind of signifi
cance which Adam had for the old. Sometimes it is
the nature of this Person on which stress is laid ; He is
a spiritual man, and belongs to heaven, as opposed to
Adam, who was a natural (psychical) man, and of the
earth earthen (i Cor. i545ff). Sometimes the stress is
laid not on His nature, but on His action ; it can be
characterised by the one word obedience, as opposed to
the disobedience or transgression of Adam ; and like the
disobedience of the first man, the obedience of the
second is of universal and absolute significance. It is
the salvation ofthe world (Rom. 5 12ff). This is the con
ception which lends itself most readily to what are usually
called ' mystical ' interpretations of Christ's life and
work. What is most important in it is the truth which
it embodies of the kinship of Christ with all mankind,
and the progressive verification of that truth which
comes with the universal preaching of the gospel. Paul
was convinced of the representative character of
Christ and of all His acts; the death that He died for
all has somehow the significance that the death of all
c

34 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
would itself have ; in His resurrection we see the first
fruits of a new race which shall wear the image of
the heavenly man. It may indeed be said that any
man is kin to all humanity, but not any man is kin
in such a sense that, men of all races can find their centre
and rallying-point in Him. The progress of Christian
missions is the demonstration in point of fact that Christ
is the second Adam, and while His true humanity is
asserted in this, as it is taken for granted everywhere in
the New Testament, it leaves Him still in a place which
is His alone. When Paul thinks of Christ as the second
Adam, he does not reduce Him to the level of common
humanity, as if He were only one more in the mass ; on
the contrary, the mass is conceived as absorbed and
summed up in Him. It is not a way of denying, it is one
way more of asserting, His peculiar place.
(3) The same may be said with even greater confi
dence of Christ as He is presented to us in the later
Epistle to the Colossians.1 We have here to do not with
a historical individual whom God has exalted — not with
a representative or universal person who is Man rather
than one particular man— but with a person who can
only be characterised as eternal and divine. When Jesus
is represented as the Christ, it is as though He were
explained by reference to the history of Israel ; as the
second Adam, he can be understood only when the
reference is widened to take in the constitution and
fortunes of the whole human race ; but in the later
mind of Paul there is something more profound and far-
reaching than either. It is not possible to do justice to
1 See also 1 Cor. 86.

THE CHRISTIANITY OF PAUL 35
Jesus until we realise that in Him we are in contact with
the eternal truth and being of God. This is the burden
ofthe Epistle to the Colossians. What comes to us and
acts upon us in Christ is nothing less than the eternal truth
of God's being and character ; it is not adequately ex
plained by thinking of Israel or by thinking of humanity,
but only by thinking of God, The Jesus Christ of the
apostle's faith was indeed an Israelite after the flesh ;
He was true and complete man, born of a woman ; but
the ultimate truth about Him is that in Him dwells all the
fulness of the Godhead bodily, and that we are complete
in Him. There is not anything that can be understood
if its relation to Him is ignored. All that we call being,
and all that we call redemption, must be referred to Him
alone ; this is the divine way to comprehend it. In Him
were all things created, and it pleased the Father through
Him to reconcile all things to Himself (Col. i and 2).
These are overwhelming ideas when we think of Jesus
of Nazareth, a Galilean carpenter, who had not where to
lay His head, and reflect that they have to be associated
with Him. The intellectual daring of them is almost
inconceivable ; imagination fails to realise the pressure
under which the mind must have been working when it
rose to the height of such assertions. Yet the serious
ness and passion of the apostle are unquestionable, and
the writer can only express his conviction that the
attempts made to explain what may be called the
Christology of Colossians by reference to Philo are
essentially beside the mark. At the utmost, they help us
to understand a casual expression here or there in Paul ;
they contribute nothing to the substance of his thought.

36 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
Christ was not a lay figure that Paul could drape as
he chose in the finery of Palestinian apocalyptic or of
Alexandrian philosophy. He was the living Lord and
Saviour, and if we can be sure of anything, it is that in
what the apostle says of Him there is nothing merely
formal, nothing which has the character of literary or
speculative borrowing, but that everything rests on
experience. If Christ had been to Paul only a name in
a book, a name which he might use as a philosophic
symbol or plaything, we might set a higher value upon
the Philonic or other explanations which are sometimes
offered of the Christology of the Epistle to the Colos
sians ; but when we consider what Christ really was to
the apostle, such explanations become meaningless.
Paul was not a philosopher like Philo, baffled by the diffi
culty of connecting the spiritual God and the material
universe, and finding the solution of his ever-recurring
problem in the idea of the Logos, an idea which in
some unexplained, not to say incomprehensible, way he
was led to identify with Christ. The relation of God to
the world had no more difficulty for him than for Amos
or Isaiah ; the God in whom he believed was not the
philosophical abstraction of Philo, but the living God of
the Bible, who made the world and who acted in it as
He pleased. Paul did not transfer to Christ the attri
butes of the Logos ; he did not make Him divine or half-
divine, that he might provide an answer to speculative
difficulties about the relation of God to the world of
matter. The process in his mind was the very reverse.
He was conscious in his experience as a Christian that
what he came in contact with in Christ was nothing less

THE CHRISTIANITY OF PAUL 37
than the eternal truth and love of God ; it was the very
reality which God is, the revelation of His eternal being
in a human person, the fulness of the Godhead bodily
(Col. 2 9). It does not matter whether ' bodily ' means
' incarnate as man,' or ' in organic unity and complete
ness,' as opposed to partial or imperfect revelation. The
point is that Paul was conscious of meeting God in
Christ. Here, he felt, he touched the last reality in the
universe, the ens realissimum, the ultimate truth through
which and by relation to which all things must be defined
and understood. Paul does not, in writing to the Colos
sians, invest Christ in a character and greatness which
have no relation to His true nature, merely to stop a
hole in his philosophy. On the contrary, the presence of
God in Christ — His presence in the eternal truth of His
being and character — is for Paul the primary certainty ;
and that certainty carries with it for him the requirement
of a specifically Christian view of the universe. He
would not be true to Christ, as Christ had revealed
Himself to him in experience, unless he had the courage
to Christianise all his thoughts of God and the world.
And this is what he is doing in the Epistle to the Colos
sians. He is not directly deifying Christ, he is Christi
anising the universe. He is not exhibiting Christ as
divine or quasi-divine, by investing Him in the waver
ing and uncertain glories of the Alexandrian Logos ; he
is casting upon all creation and redemption the steadfast
and unwavering light of that divine presence of which
he was assured in Christ, and for which the Alexandrians
had groped in vain. There is nothing in Paul more
original, nothing in which his mind is more profoundly

38 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
stimulated and his faith in Christ more vitally active,
than the Epistle to the Colossians ; and no greater
injustice could be done him than to explain the signifi
cance which he here assigns to Christ by pointing to the
alien and formal influence of a feeble dualistic philosophy,
or to strike out of the epistle, as some would do, the
very sentences which are the key to the whole.1 If there
is anything in Paul's writings which is his very own, born
of his own experience, his own reflection, the necessities
of his own thought, it is the conception of Christ as an
eternal or divine person characteristic of this epistle.
Here again, therefore, we find our previous observa
tion of the New Testament confirmed. Christ has a
place in the faith of Christians which is without parallel
elsewhere. But while we must not fail to recognise this,
we need not misunderstand it. It is misunderstood, for
example, by Wernle, when he says that the consciousness
of God must have been weakened in Paul before he
could have said of Christ the things which he says in Col
ossians.2 Christ, in other words, practically displaces God
in this epistle ; the Jewish sneer is almost justified which
represents Christians as teaching that there is no God,
but that Jesus is His Son. But Christ does not displace
God ; it is in Christ alone that Paul gets that assurance
of God, and of his eternal truth and love, in which he
lives, and in the light of which he cannot but interpret
all things. Nothing that he says justifies the Jewish
sneer : what it does justify is the truly evangelical
1 See Von Soden, Hand Commentar, iii. 32 f.
2 Die Anf&nge unserer Religion, 205 : ' Die paulinische Gnosis geht hier
von einem sehr lebendigen Gefiihl des Christlichen aus, aber zugleich von
einem ganzlich toten Gottesbegriff.1

THE CHRISTIANITY OF PAUL 39
remark of Dr. Chalmers — ' I find that without a hold of
Christ there is no hold of God at all.'1 In truth, what
we have in Colossians is only another assertion of the
absolute significance of Christ for Christian faith. It is
consciously pursued, no doubt, in its consequences further
than elsewhere, but it is the same thing. A person of
absolute significance — an eternal person — a person to
whom in one way or another the idea of finality attaches :
all these are indistinguishable. If we say that Christ is
the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, we
represent His absolute significance in one way; it is
eternity for the imagination. If we say that He is the
final Judge of all, on whose decision their destiny depends,
we represent His absolute significance in another way ;
it is eternity for the conscience. But imagination and
conscience have not rights in human nature which can
be denied to the intelligence or speculative faculty ; and
it is to this last, and not merely to imagination and
conscience, that Paul interprets in Colossians the abso
lute significance of the Lord. It is not our business at
this point to consider whether or not he can be justified
in doing so by appeal to Jesus Himself, but it seemed
necessary to say what has been said because the question
of justification cannot be fairly raised until there is agree
ment upon what he has actually done.
In several passages of Paul's writings there is a con
ception of Christ which to most readers will seem akin to
that which we have just been discussing, but which is in
truth much more difficult to apprehend — the conception
of Him as pre-existent. The one difficulty which haunts
1 Hanna's Life, ii. 448.

40 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
theological thinking everywhere, the difficulty or rather
the impossibility of defining the relation of time to
eternity, is peculiarly felt here. Is an eternal person
rightly or adequately thought of as a person existing
before all things, or is the idea of pre-existence an im
perfect means of representing eternity in the form of
time — an idea, therefore, which is bound to lead to in
consistencies and contradictions ? When Paul speaks of
the pre-existence of Christ, is he carrying out in this
inadequate form his own conviction, based on experi
ence, that Christ is a person in whom the eternal truth
of God has come into the world, and who, therefore,
belongs to God's eternal being? Or is he simply
applying to Him the common Jewish belief that the
Messiah existed with God before He appeared among
men ? It is not easy to say : even if we admit the
inadequacy of an idea like pre-existence to represent the
eternal significance of Christ, and see no reason to doubt
that current Jewish beliefs made this inadequate repre
sentation easier to the apostle, we must admit that in
the most characteristic passages in which he uses it
(2 Cor. 8 9 ; Phil. 2 6ff) it has been thoroughly Christian
ised. Judged by the Christian knowledge of God's
revelation in Christ, the act by which the eternal person,
conceived as pre-existent, enters into the world of time,
is a characteristically divine act. It is one in which the
eternal truth of the divine nature — that God's name is
Redeemer from of old, and that He humbles Himself to
bear us and our burdens (Isa. 63 16 ; Ps. 68 19) — is con
spicuously revealed. In itself, the idea of pre-existence
is harder to understand and to appreciate than that of

THE CHRISTIANITY OF PAUL 41
eternal reality and worth; but even those who find it,
abstractly considered, least congenial, must admit that
in its Pauline applications it is in thorough harmony
with the mind of Christ. Our interest in it here, how
ever, need not carry us further ; its application to Christ,
and to Him alone, is only a final indication of the
incomparable place He fills in the faith of Paul.
What has now been said is conclusive, and yet it
makes practically no reference to the one signal proof
Paul's writings afford of the unique and incommunicable
place Christ held in his faith. That proof is afforded by
what the apostle teaches of the meaning and power of
Christ's death. This is not the place to enter into an
exposition of this : it is sufficient to refer to the fact.
He died for us, that whether we wake or sleep we might
live together with Him (i Thess. 5 10). Paul delivers to
men first of all that Christ died for our sins, according to
the Scriptures ; this is the divinely laid foundation of
the gospel (1 Cor. 158). He died for all, so then all
died — their death was somehow involved and compre
hended in His ; Him, who knew no sin, God made to
be sin on our behalf, that we might be made the right
eousness of God in Him (2 Cor. 5 1421). In His cruci
fixion He became a curse for us (Gal. 3 13). God set
Him forth as a propitiation, through faith, in His blood ;
when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by
the death of His Son (Rom. 3 2B, 5 10). In Him we have
our redemption, through His blood, even the forgiveness
of our trespasses (Eph. 1 7). So it runs through the
epistles from beginning to end. There is no other person
of whom such things can be said, or who can claim even

42 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
to have some part of them extended to him when they
are said of Christ. They are all for Him and for Him
alone. They make it impossible to dispute the fact that
Christ held a unique place in Paul's faith, and they make
us feel deeply that this unique place was held by Christ in
virtue of something which made Paul infinitely his debtor.
What has now been said hardly needs to be sum
marised. Whether the apostle was right or wrong;
whether he was impelled by his experience as a Chris
tian, or prompted by reminiscences of pre-Christian
Messianic theology, and extra-Christian Alexandrian
philosophy, there is no doubt about the place he gave
to Christ. Look at it as we will, it was a place which
no man could share. Christ determined everything in
the relations of God and men ; but this, though it is
central, is only the starting-point. All things whatso
ever have to be determined by relation to Him ; in Him
alone is the key to their meaning to be found. All
nature, all history, all revelation and redemption, all
that is human and all that is divine, can be understood
only through Him. The universe has to be reconstituted
with Him as its centre, the principle of its unity, its goal.
To understand the world is to discover that it is a
Christian world — that spiritual law, the very law in
which Christ lived and died — pervades the constitution
of nature and the history of man. There is not in the
history of the human mind an instance of intellectual
boldness to compare with this, and it is the supreme
daring of it which convinces us that it is the native birth
of Paul's Christian faith. No one ever soared so high
on borrowed wings.

THE PLACE OF CHRIST IN HEBREWS 43
III
CHRIST IN THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS
When we pass from Paul, it is open to us, in view of
the chronological and other uncertainties regarding the
books of the New Testament, to take them in almost
any order. The Epistle to the Hebrews, while it has
affinities with almost all types of Christian thought —
with the synoptic gospels and the early chapters of Acts,
with Paul and with the Judaism of Alexandria — never
theless stands alone in the New Testament. It is the
most solitary of the primitive Christian books. In its
presentation of Christ we might almost say that extremes
meet. On the one hand, it is the most humanitarian of
apostolic writings. It speaks with a kind of predilection
of Jesus, not the Christ ; it recalls ' the days of His flesh,'
when, with strong crying and tears, He offered prayers
and supplications to Him that was able to save Him
from death, and was heard because of His godly fear ;
it holds Him up to us as a pattern of faith, the ideal
subject of religion, who was tempted in all things like
as we are, yet without sin ; who passed through a curri
culum of suffering by which He was made perfect for His
calling, and who learned in doing so what it is to obey ;
who lived the life of faith in God from beginning to end,
and is in short the typical believer. All this touches
the heart of the reader as it no doubt moved the writer
of the epistle, but it does not disclose to us the full
significance of Jesus for his own faith. The most
humanitarian book of the New Testament can also be

44 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
fairly described as the most theological. Jesus is not
only the pattern of true piety, but everything in the
relations of God and men is determined by Him. He
is the mediator of a new covenant ; to Him we owe the
bringing in of a better hope through which we draw
near to God. It is the virtue of His priesthood and
sacrifice which consecrates us as a worshipping people,
and by annulling sin makes it possible for us to live in
fellowship with the most holy. The sentence with
which the epistle opens gathers up all this and more in
one sublime period. ' God having of old time spoken
unto the fathers in the prophets by divers portions and
in divers manners, hath at the end of these days spoken
unto us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all
things, through whom also He made the worlds ; who
being the effulgence of His glory, and the very image
of His substance, and upholding all things by the word
of His power, when He had made purification of sins,
sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high;
having become by so much better than the angels as He
hath inherited a more excellent name than they.' The
absolute significance of Jesus is here presented from
every point of view. Whether we think of God and His
self-revelation in Israel's history, or of the final con
summation to which all things are tending, or of the
creation and maintenance of the world in which we live,
or of the atonement for sin which makes access to God
possible for us, we must think of Christ. He is the key
to the ultimate problems in all these regions. His
place and worth in religion are incommensurable with
the place and worth of any other beings, human or

THE PLACE OF CHRIST IN HEBREWS 45
angelic : the final truth has been revealed ; the final,
because the perfect, religious relation to God has been
established and is maintained through Him. Two of
the characteristic words of the epistle serve to bring
this out. One is 'better' (Kparrav), which the writer
uses when he compares Christ and Christianity with
other religions and their representative figures ; the
other is alavios, by which he conveys the idea that
Christ and Christianity are final, and that there is in
truth no ground for comparisons. Thus Christ is ' better'
than the angels (i 4) ; in Christianity there is the intro
duction of a 'better' hope (719); Jesus has become
surety and mediator of a ' better ' covenant, established
upon ' better' promises (yw, 86) ; the heavenly sanctuary
into which He has entered with His own blood must be
purified with ' better ' sacrifices than the earthly (9 23) ;
the blood of sprinkling — the blood which Jesus shed —
speaks 'better' things than that of Abel (12 24). This
is as though the writer said to men attracted by the old
religion, Do not bring it into comparison with what we
owe to Christ ; it cannot stand it. But when he uses
alavios, eternal, to characterise the new dispensation in
its various aspects, he means more. It is not only that
the earlier form of religion with which he had to reckon
is surpassed by that which looks to Jesus, but that the
latter can never be surpassed. It is the eternal, final,
perfect form of man's relation to God ; in the strict
sense of the term it is incomparable ; and it depends for
its very being on Christ, and on our faith in what He is
and has done for us. It is in this conviction that he
speaks of the 'eternal' salvation of which Christ is

46 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
author to all who obey Him (5 9) ; of the ' eternal '
redemption which He won by His own blood (912) ; of
the ' eternal ' spirit— the final revelation of divine love
— through which He offered Himself without spot to
God (9 14) ; of the ' eternal ' inheritance promised to those
who hear His voice (9 15) ; of the 'eternal' covenant
established in His blood (13 20). When we recognise
what these expressions mean, we see that for the writer
of this epistle Christ has the same absolute religious
significance which He has for Paul. It is not possible,
on the ground pf the prominence which he gives to the
true humanity and the genuine religious experience of
Jesus, to argue that for him Jesus was only another man
like himself, a perfect pattern of piety indeed, but no
more ; in his religion— in all that affected his relation
as a sinful man to God^ — Jesus had a place and work
which belonged to Him alone. All that God had done
for the salvation of men He had done in Him ; nay,
all that He could ever do. For beyond that offering
of Himself which Jesus had once made through the
eternal spirit, there remains no more any sacrifice for
sin(io2e).

IV
CHRIST IN THE FIRST EPISTLE OF PETER
The Catholic epistles, which were the last of the
early Christian writings to secure a place in the canon,
are often taken to represent an average type of Chris
tianity, without the sharp edges or the individuality of

THE CHRISTIANITY OF FIRST PETER 47
view which we find in Paul, John, or the writer to the
Hebrews. If this were so, they might be more impor
tant as witnesses to the place of Jesus in Christian
faith than the writings of the most original intellects in
the Church ; for, as Mr. Bagehot says of politics, it is
the average man who is truly representative. But the
writer cannot agree with this estimate of the Catholic
epistles. If for critical reasons we leave Second Peter
out of account, it would be hard to imagine writings
with a more distinct stamp of individuality upon them
than James, Jude, and John. Even the First Epistle
of Peter, influenced as it undoubtedly is by modes of
thought and turns of phrase which have their most
characteristic expression in Paul, is a document which
no sympathetic reader could ascribe to the apostle of
the Gentiles. It is the work of another mind, a mind
with distinct qualities and virtues of its own ; and in
view of the overwhelming attestation of its authorship,
there is no sufficient reason either in its Pauline affinities
or in its supposed references to one or another form of
legalised persecution, to deny it to Peter. The early
chapters of Acts have already shown us the place which
Jesus held in the faith and life of His chief apostle, and
the impression they leave is confirmed by all we find in
the epistle. It emphasises as they do the resurrection
of Jesus, and the expectation of His return. It calls on
Christians to sanctify Christ as Lord in their hearts (3 15),
thus applying to Him words which in Isaiah are applied
to Jehovah, just as Peter in Acts similarly applies to
Jesus words which refer to Jehovah in Joel (Acts 2 21).
The new life of Christians and their hope of immortality

48 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
are due to Christ's resurrection ( i 8), and all that they
know as redemption from sin has been accomplished by
Him (i18f', 221ff-, 318). The difficult passage extending
from 318 to 46, about preaching to the spirits in prison and
bringing the gospel to the dead, has at least thus much of
undisputed meaning in it : there is no world, no time, no
order of being, in which the writer can think of any
other salvation than that which comes by Christ. In his
universe Christ is supreme, angels and principalities and
powers being made subject to Him (322). In the saluta
tion of the epistle Christ stands side by side with the
Father and the Spirit ; and just as in Acts 2 33 and in
various Pauline passages (e.g. 1 Cor. 124"6, Eph. 2 18),
the three confront man as the one divine causality on
which salvation depends. The foreknowledge of God
the Father, consecration wrought by the Spirit, and
sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ, these represent
the divine action in the salvation of men (1 2). But
probably the most decisive expression in the epistle, as
bringing out the significance of Jesus for the religion of
the writer, is that which he employs in 1 20f- to describe
the Christian standing of its recipients : you, he says,
who through Him are believers in God. He does not
mean that they did not believe in God before they
believed in Christ ; there was true faith in God in the
world before there was Christian faith. But although it
was true, it was not faith in its final or adequate form :
that is only made possible when men believe in God
through Christ. The final faith in God owes its diffe
rentia, that which makes it what it is, its specific and
characteristic qualities, to Him. The God in whom the

THE CHRISTIANITY OF JAMES 49
Christian believes is the God who is Father of our Lord
Jesus Christ, the God who gave Him up for us all, who
raised Him from the dead and gave Him glory, and
who has called us to this eternal glory in Him. There
could not be such faith in God, or faith in such a God,
apart from the presence of Jesus, His atoning death,
and His exaltation to God's right hand ; it is only as we
believe thus in Jesus that we can have the new Christian
faith in God. Jesus is not to the writer one of us, who
shares a faith in God which is independently access
ible to all men ; He is the Person to whom alone the
Christian religion owes its character and its being ; God
would be a word of another meaning to us but for Him.
It does not seem to go in any way beyond the truth if
we say that with the fullest recognition of what Jesus
was and suffered as a man upon earth, the risen Lord,
in whom the writer believes, stands on the divine side
of reality, and is the channel through which all God's
power flows to men for their salvation.
V
CHRIST IN THE EPISTLE OF JAMES
The Epistle of James was long one of the cruces of
New Testament criticism. It was regarded by many
and is still regarded by some as the earliest of the
canonical books ; by others it is regarded as among the
latest, if not the last of all — a writing which was only
in time to secure admission to the canon before the door
was shut. It says little, comparatively, about Christ,
and the place which He fills in the life of the Christian,
D

50 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
and this has been used to support both opinions about
its age. It is argued, on the one hand, that it agrees
with an early date at which Christological ideas were
but little developed; and, on the other hand, that it
agrees with a decidedly later date, when Christianity
was thoroughly settled in the world, and was distin
guished by its moral temper rather than by any peculiar
relation to a person. It is not easy to assent to either
argument. It is not Christological ideas which we are
in quest of, or which the apostolic writings anywhere
provide ; and from the very earliest times, as our ex
amination of Peter's speeches in Acts has shown, the
place of Christ in Christian life was central and dominant.
In spite of the inevitable difference in an epistle which
is not missionary nor evangelistic but disciplinary, we
venture to hold that it is so here also. The writer
introduces himself as a bond-servant of God and of the
Lord Jesus Christ. The co-ordination of God and Christ
in this passage, and the choice of the term SoCXos to
denote the author's relation to God and Christ, are alike
remarkable. Again, when he wishes to describe the
Christian religion in the most general terms, he calls it
'the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ' (21) — that is, the
faith of which He is the object. We cannot be certain
in this passage how the writer means us to take the
words tt)s Sd^s ; they may be in apposition with ' our
Lord Jesus Christ,' who would then be Himself the
glory, the manifested holiness and love of God ; or as
the English version has it, and as seems on the whole
more likely, they may be meant to describe our Lord
Jesus Christ as the Lord of glory. This would emphasise

THE CHRISTIANITY OF JAMES 51
the reference to His exaltation contained in the title Lord,
and it has an exact parallel in i Cor. 2 8. But in either
case it is important to notice that the believing relation
of Christians to the Lord Jesus Christ must determine
everything in their conduct : whatever is inconsistent
with it — like respect of persons — is ipso facto condemned.
If the name of Jesus is less frequently mentioned in
James than in other New Testament writings, there is
none which is more pervaded by the authority of His
word. If the Jewish Wisdom literature is present to
the writer's mind, the tones of the Sermon on the Mount
echo without ceasing in his conscience. The coming
of the Lord is the object of all Christian hope ; the
demand which its delay makes for patience is the sum
of all Christian trials (5 78). The name of Jesus is the
noble name which has been invoked upon Christians
at their baptism (2 7), and pious regard for it is a de
cisive Christian motive. The Lord Jesus Christ is the
Judge who stands before the door (4 s), and His name is
the resource of the Christian when confronted with sick
ness, sin, and death (5 1S"16). It ought to be noticed here
that the true reading in 5 u is, Let them pray over him,
anointing him with oil in the Name. Of course the
Name meant is that of Jesus, but this did not need to
be stated ; for the writer, as for Peter and for all Chris
tians, there was no other name. The other examples of
this use in the New Testament have the same signifi
cance. ' They departed from the presence of the council
rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer shame
for the Name ' (Acts 5 "). ' For the sake of the Name
they went forth taking nothing from the Gentiles'

52 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
(3 John ver. 7). A writer who shares this way of think
ing about the name of Jesus, who calls himself in one
breath slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, who
finds in the relation to Christ and His name assumed
in baptism and described as faith the finest and most
powerful motives, whose conscience has been quickened
by the word of Jesus, and whose hope means that Jesus
is coming to judge the world and right the wronged, can
hardly be said to stand on a lower level of Christianity,
whatever his date, than the other New Testament writers.
He may or may not have had theologising interests,
though he found no call to exhibit them in this letter ;
but it is clear that in his religion Christ occupied the
central and controlling place. He would not have been
at home in any Christian society we have yet discovered
if it had been otherwise. VI
CHRIST IN THE EPISTLE OF JUDE AND IN THE
SECOND EPISTLE OF PETER
The close but obscure connexion of these two epistles
justifies us in taking them together, and even if we
regard them both as pseudepigraphic they are witnesses
to the place of Jesus in the mind and life of early Chris
tians. If they do not tell us about Peter and Jude, they
tell us about other people, whose faith is as much a
matter of historical fact as that of the two apostles.
Like James (and Paul in some of his epistles), both Jude
and Peter announce themselves as bond-servants of Jesus
Christ, and both introduce for the first time in their

THE CHRISTIANITY OF JUDE 53
description of Jesus the word 8_o-7.or.7_, which *s proper
to this relation : they speak of false teachers and bad
men 'who deny our only Master (8e<nrorr)v) and Lord
Jesus Christ' (Jude, ver. 4), or ' who deny even the Master
who bought them' (2 Peter 21). In the first of these
passages it has been questioned whether two persons
are not meant: does not 'our only Master,' it is said,
signify God, in distinction from ' our Lord Jesus Christ ' ?
The same question is raised again in 2 Peter 1 1, where
it is open to discussion whether the writer speaks of ' the
righteousness of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ'
(one person, as it is rendered in the Revised Version) ;
or of ' the righteousness of our God, and the Saviour
Jesus Christ ' (two persons, as in margin of Revised
Version). The difficulty is the same as in Titus 2 1S,
where the text of the Revised Version has ' the glory of
our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ' (one person);
and the margin, ' the glory of the great God, and our
Saviour Jesus Christ' (two persons). Strict grammar
favours the rendering according to which there is only
one person mentioned in all these places, Jesus Christ,
who is called ' our only Master and Lord,' and ' our great
God and Saviour.' There are cases, however, in which
strict grammar is misleading, and these may be among
them. It is awkward to call Jesus Christ 'our God and
Saviour ' in 2 Peter 1 1, and then to speak in the very
next sentence of the knowledge of 'God, and of Jesus our
Lord.' Dr. Moulton thinks that 'familiarity with the
everlasting apotheosis that flaunts itself in the papyri and
inscriptions of Ptolemaic and Imperial times lends strong
support to Wendland's contention that Christians from

54 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
the latter part of the first century onward, deliberately
annexed for their Divine Master the phraseology that was
impiously arrogated to themselves by some of the worst
of men.' 1 A writer like Jude, however, who is conscious
of sustaining a tradition, and exhorts his readers to
contend earnestly for the faith once for all delivered to
the saints, would hardly have described Jesus as the
only Seo-7ror77_ and Kvpws merely under constraint from
the impieties of emperor worship. His divine greatness
is realised on independent grounds and represented in
independent ways. It is conspicuous in the two pas
sages which always redeem Jude in the common Chris
tian mind from the reproach of quoting Enoch. One is
the sublime doxology in vv. 24, 25, in which glory,
majesty, dominion and power are ascribed 'to the only
wise God our Saviour through Jesus Christ our Lord ' :
it is this mediation of Christ in Christian worship in
which His final significance for faith is expressed. The
other is the equally sublime exhortation of v. 20 : ' But
ye, beloved, building yourselves up on your most holy
faith, praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in
the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord
Jesus Christ unto eternal life.' Here as in so many
other passages we are confronted with the Holy Spirit,
God, and our Lord Jesus Christ, as the total manifesta
tion of that on which our salvation depends. It is in
the same region as that in which God and His Spirit
work that our Lord Jesus Christ works; it is to that
side of reality that He belongs ; the whole religious life
of men is divinely determined by Him as it could not be
1 Grammar of NewJTestament Greek, i. 84.

CHRIST IN THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS 55
by any other; this is His permanent and incomparable
place in the faith and life of Christians.
It is not necessary to look for peculiarities which
distinguish 2nd Peter from Jude : its dependence can
hardly be questioned. It is enough to remark that the
writer has a strong partiality for those full descriptions
which bring out the importance of Christ to the Chris
tian mind ; he speaks three times of ' our Lord Jesus
Christ,' three times again of 'our Lord and Saviour
Jesus Christ,' and once of 'the apostles of our Lord
and Saviour.' This fulness does not strike one in read
ing as an orthodox formalism, but rather conveys a deep
sense, on the part of the writer, of the superhuman
greatness of the person of whom he speaks. It is the
oldest, it might be said the only, doctrine of revealed
religion, that salvation belongs to the Lord ; and when
Jesus is habitually confessed as Lord and Saviour, His
significance for Christian faith is absolute and divine.

VII
CHRIST IN THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS
When we come to the synoptic gospels, we are con
fronted with difficulties of a new kind. The synoptic
gospels contain not only the testimony of the writers to
Jesus, but also (through that testimony) the testimony
of Jesus to Himself. It is certain that the writers of
the gospels drew no clear and conscious distinction be
tween these two things, and could not have conceived
that one of them should ever be used to discredit the

56 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
other. They never thought that the place which Jesus
had in their faith was anything else than the place which
belonged to Him, and was truly and rightly His :
they never thought they were giving Him what was not
His due, or what He had not really claimed ; the dis
tinction between the religion in which they lived and
the historical support which could be asserted for it in
the personality and life of Jesus was one which had no
formal existence for them. This may be said quite con
fidently, in spite of all that we hear about the ' apologetic '
motives which are alleged to account for so much of
what we read in our gospels. Jesus, we are told, had
such and such a character or value in the faith of His
disciples, and in order to justify this character there
must be such and such words or deeds or events in His
life. If they were not supplied in tradition they were
produced more or less spontaneously by the Christian
consciousness or imagination. There was no sin in this,
no intent to deceive either others or oneself ; Christ must
have said or done such and such things, and of course
therefore He did say and do them. He is represented
in our gospels as so saying and doing them, and that is
why it is so difficult to use the gospels simply as historical
documents. Their writers have no independent his
torical interest, and what they give us is not the repre
sentation of Christ as He really was, but Christ as to
them He must have been, Christ transfigured in the
luminous haze of faith. The task of the historian is
to dissipate the haze, to see Jesus as He really was,
to reduce Him to the historic proportions in which alone
He can have lived and moved among men. To faith

THE CHRISTIANITY OF MARK 57
it may be an ungrateful task, in performing which it
is impossible to avoid wounding the tenderest feelings ;
yet faith in God can have no interest superior to that
of truth, and ought to be confident that whatever it may
lose in the process the end can be nothing but gain.
At the point which we have now reached in our dis
cussion it is necessary to have the possibilities here
indicated in view, but the critical appreciation of them
will come later. It will be sufficient for our present
purpose to say that while everything that we find in an
evangelist concerning Jesus — including all that is said
and done by Jesus Himself — must be taken into account
in reproducing that evangelist's religion, we shall here
confine our attention to that minimum of matter in which
the mind of the evangelist can be clearly distinguished
from that of his subject. There are characteristics in
Mark, in Matthew, and in Luke which belong to each
in particular, and in these, though not in these only, we
have a clue to what we seek.
(a) The Gospel according to Mark
The oldest of our gospels has a title : ' the beginning
of the gospel of Jesus Christ (Son of God).' It can
hardly be doubted that the author uses the term gospel
in the sense of the apostolic church. Luke does not use
it at all, and Matthew never without qualification (see
Matt. 428, 9SS, 2414, 26 ls) ; but Mark has it six times without
any qualification, and in two others he has ' the gospel of
God ' (114), indicating its author, and ' the gospel of Jesus
Christ' (i1), indicating its subject. He does not call
his book a gospel, but to present Jesus as He is pre-

58 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
sented in this book is to preach the gospel, or at least to
exhibit, as Mark understood them, the facts on the basis
of which the gospel was preached. For him Jesus is not
so much a preacher of the gospel, though he says that
He came proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying
'Repent and believe in the gospel'; He is the subject
of the gospel, and its contents. He is not the first of a
series of messengers who all came with the same message,
and were all related to it in the same way ; the message
itself which is called gospel is embodied in Him, and the
only way to deliver it is to make Him visible. This is
implied in the very use of the term gospel, and it is
sufficient to put Mark, as a witness to the place of Jesus
in Christianity, in line with those whose testimony we
have already examined. Whatever his Christology may
be, Jesus has a place in his religion to which there is no
analogy. The gospel is the gospel of Jesus Christ as it
is not the gospel of any other. Could Mark, or can we,
conceive any other figure sharing in the place and the
religious significance of Jesus as they are presented to
us in his brief and vivid record ?
Mark, as his title shows, conceived Jesus as the Christ.
What this means has been explained already in the
section on primitive Christian preaching. It means that
he thought of Jesus while he wrote as exalted at God's
right hand, and ready to come again and to establish
the Kingdom of God with power. But the present
exaltation of Jesus is not unrelated to His past. The
character or dignity or function of the Christ attached to
Jesus while He was on earth, though it was known at
first only to Himself, and though it only came to be

THE CHRISTIANITY OF MARK 59
apprehended, fitfully and uncertainly, even by those who
knew Him best. This has indeed been disputed and
denied in recent times. An acute but unbalanced German
scholar, the late Professor Wrede of Breslau, argued
that no one ever thought of Jesus as the Christ till after
the resurrection, and that many of the difficulties and
obscurities in the Gospel of Mark are due to the evan
gelist's efforts to carry back into the career of Jesus upon
earth this conception of Messiahship which is applicable
only to the Risen Lord. This, again, we do not need
to consider here. Whether he was justified or not in
doing so, it is certain that the evangelist does carry back
the conception of the Christ into the lifetime of Jesus ;
he represents Peter confessing Him to be the Christ,
and Jesus accepting the confession, and making it the
starting-point for teaching those truths about Himself
and His work which peculiarly constituted ' the gospel.'
As Wellhausen has pointed out, there is a whole section
of the Gospel according to Mark, that which extends
from Peter's confession (8 27) to Jesus' reply to the
ambitious request of the sons of Zebedee (io45), which
has a peculiarly ' Christian ' character. It is concerned
very much with the doctrine of the suffering Christ, the
Son of Man, who has come to give His life a ransom for
many, and who after His death will come again in the
glory of His Father with the holy angels ; and whatever
its historic relation to Jesus, it certainly embodies the
convictions of Mark as to the place of Jesus in religion.
Apart from this, we are not able to say much. Mark
never refers to any fulfilment of prophecy in the life of
Jesus, as proving or illuminating His Messianic character ;

60 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
the textual difficulties connected with the quotation of
Malachi and Isaiah in chap, i, 2 f., make it quite probable
that these verses were inserted by another hand. It is
more plausible to argue that he thought of the mighty
works which he records, works in the main of healing
love, as appropriate to the Messianic character; this at
least would be in keeping with the line of thought
taken in Acts 2 22, 10 38 by Peter, with whose name the
Gospel of Mark is connected in the earliest tradition.
In His baptism, Jesus was anointed with Holy Spirit and
power, and the manifestations of that power in His life
time were indications of what He was. The words ' Son
of God ' in Mark 1 x are of doubtful authenticity, and we
cannot argue from them. Where they stand, they are
probably meant to be taken as synonymous with Christ
or Messiah. As far as we can see, it is in His baptism
with the Holy Spirit that Jesus, as Mark understood it,
became the Christ, the Son of God. From that hour He
was all that in the faith and experience of Christians He
ever came to be. But He could not tell what He was
as one can impart a piece of indifferent information to
another. He had to reveal Himself as what He was,
in life and word and works ; He had to be discovered
as what He was by men who associated with Him in
obedience, trust, and love. The truncated form in which
the gospel has come to us, with no resurrection scene,
and no words of the Risen Lord, prevents us from seeing
as directly in Mark, as we do in the other evangelists,
the full scope of the writer's faith. But we have seen
what he means by the term gospel, and we know from
words which he ascribes to Jesus that he believed the

THE CHRISTIANITY OF MATTHEW 61
gospel to be meant for all mankind ( 1 3 10, 14 9). Jesus
exalted as Lord and Saviour of all, the Jesus whom the
evangelist can exhibit to us in this character even in the
days of His flesh, is the same incomparable and incom
mensurable person whom we have met everywhere in
New Testament religion.
(b) The Gospel according to Matthew
In the Gospel according to Matthew it is much
easier to distinguish the author from the subject, for
there is much more which belongs to the author alone.
The first two chapters have no parallel in the earlier
gospel narrative, and they show us at once the peculiar
place which Jesus held in the evangelist's faith. Like
all New Testament writers, he conceives Jesus as the
Christ. Whether ' the book of the generation ' (i1) refers
to the genealogy and the stories of the birth only, or
to the narrative as a whole, it is concerned with Jesus
as Messiah, son of David, son of Abraham. The idea
underlying the genealogy is that the history of Israel,
which means the history of God's gracious dealing with
the human race, is consummated in Jesus. He is the
ideal Son of David to whom it all looks forward, and it
is in Him that all the promises made by God to the
fathers are to be fulfilled. The characteristic of the
Gospel according to Matthew, or perhaps we should
rather say the characteristic interest of the author, is seen
in his continual reference to Scriptures which have been
fulfilled in Jesus. The proof from prophecy that Jesus
is the Messiah preoccupies him from beginning to end :
' that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord

62 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
through the prophet' runs through his work like a
refrain. It is quite true that many of his proofs are to
us unconvincing. We can see no religious and no in
tellectual value in references like those in Matthew 2 15
to Hosea, or Matthew 2 18 to Jeremiah. We do not
think of a Messianic programme, set out beforehand in
the Old Testament, and carried through by Jesus, with
precise correspondence, from point to point ; corre
spondence, we feel, is one thing, and fulfilment another.
But this only means that the form through which the
evangelist expresses his conviction about Jesus is in
adequate to the truth in his mind. What he is assured
of is that the whole divine intention which pervades the
ancient revelation has been consummated at last, and
that the consummation is Jesus. The argument from
prophecy that Jesus is the Christ is not for us an argu
ment that this or that detail in the life of Jesus answers
to this or that phrase in the Hebrew scriptures ; it is
the argument that the Old Testament and the New
are one and continuous, and that what God is pre
paring in the one He has achieved in the other.
Imperfect as is the form in which this is occasionally
conveyed by the evangelist, it cannot be doubted that
this is substantially his thought. The unity of the Old
Testament and the New, which makes Jesus the centre
and the key to God's purposes, was the core of the
evangelist's religious convictions, and it is in harmony
with the place assigned to Jesus in the common faith.
In speaking of the title of St. Mark's Gospel — 'the
beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ (Son of God) ' —
it has been remarked that the bracketed words, which

THE CHRISTIANITY OF MATTHEW 63
are of doubtful genuineness, are probably to be taken as
synonymous with the Christ. Though this is probable,
however, it is by no means certain. It is quite possible,
if Mark wrote these words, that he understood them as
Paul would have done ; and that though the narrative
part of his gospel, which is included in the limits set in
Acts i 21f-, represents the Divine Sonship of Jesus as in
a peculiar way connected with His baptism, Mark may
have conceived it in a higher and independent sense.
In view of the fact that the consciousness of Divine Son-
ship — in other words, of the Fatherhood of God — is the
characteristic mark of the Christian religion, the very
God whom Christians worship being the God who is
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, it has always seemed
to the writer difficult to believe that Son of God when
applied by Christians to Jesus meant nothing but
Messiah. It must have taken an effort of which
Christians were incapable to evacuate the title of every
thing filial in the Christian sense, of everything which
went to constitute their own religious consciousness,
while yet that consciousness owed its very being to the
Divine Sonship of Jesus. But be the case as it may with
Mark, it is certain that to Matthew the Son of God is
more than the Messianic King. It would be inappro
priate to refer here to words which the evangelist records
as spoken by Jesus ; such words will come up for con
sideration at a later stage. It is enough to recall the
story of the birth of the Christ. The evangelist sees in
it the fulfilment of the prophecy of Isaiah : Behold the
virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son,
and they shall call his name Immanuel. Attention has

64 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
usually been concentrated here on the supernatural mode
in which Jesus entered the world ; but if we wish to see
the place He held in the religion of the evangelist, and
of those for whom he wrote, the most important word is
the name of the child. Immanuel, which is, being inter
preted, God with us : it is here his significance lies.
The Divine Sonship is something more than is declared
with power in the resurrection ; it is something more
than is revealed to Jesus Himself in the baptism ; it is
something essential to this person, something which
enters into the very constitution of His being, which
connects Him immediately with God, and makes His
presence with us the guarantee and the equivalent of the
presence of God Himself. This, at least, is how the
evangelist conceived it, and nothing could show more
clearly the place which Jesus filled in his faith. Of
necessity it is a place in which He can have neither
rival nor partner. As God with us, Jesus is protected
by the same jealousy which says, Thou shalt have no
other Gods before me. In everything that concerns our
religious life, our relations to God, we must be deter
mined by Him alone.
There is another point in his narrative at which the
peculiarities of Matthew's gospel may be supposed to
throw light on the religious value which he ascribed to
Jesus. It is that at which Peter makes the confession
of Jesus' Messiahship at Caesarea Philippi. In Mark's
version Jesus asks simply, Whom say ye that I am ? and
Peter answers as simply, Thou art the Christ. In
Matthew both the question and the answer are signifi
cantly expanded. The question becomes, Who do men

THE CHRISTIANITY OF MATTHEW 65
say that the Son of Man is ? and the answer, Thou art
the Christ, the Son of the living God. The balancing
of the Son of Man and the Son of the living God is
remarkable. Possibly there is the germ in it of what
came centuries afterwards to be known as the doctrine
of the two distinct natures, divine and human, in the one
person of the Saviour ; but even if such precise theo
logical definition were far from the evangelist's thoughts,
we feel that the person so solemnly and sublimely
described is one who stands quite alone. In a way of
which we cannot but be sensible, though we may not be
able to explain it, He is related to God and to man, and
has a significance for God and for man which cannot be
shared. To think of Him as a person who can be put
into His place among the distinguished servants of God
who from time to time appear in the world to animate
and bless their weaker fellows — as ' a prophet, or one
of the prophets ' — is not to think of Him as Matthew
does. The place which Jesus occupied in the faith of Matthew
is, however, seen most conspicuously and unambiguously
in his account of the appearance of the Risen Saviour to
the eleven. Thbse who will not regard as historical the
words ascribed to Jesus on this occasion are all the more
bound to look at them, as they usually do, as expressing
the evangelist's own faith. Jesus is exalted as Lord of all.
He has all power given to Him in heaven and on earth.
He commissions His disciples, in virtue of this exalta
tion, to go and make all nations His disciples, baptizing
them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Spirit, and teaching them to observe all things whatso-

66 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
/ever He had commanded ; and He promises them His
j abiding presence to the end of the world. Granting for
the moment that what we hear in this place is not so
much the historical voice of Jesus, as the voice of the
Catholic Church telling itself through the evangelist what
it has realised Jesus to be, there can be no mistake about
/the place in which it sets Him. He shares the throne of
God, and there is no power in heaven or on earth which
can dispute with His. He is destined to a universal
sovereignty in grace, and sends His chosen witnesses to
make disciples of all the nations. Baptism, the initiatory
rite of the new religious community, is baptism in the
name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit ; its
value is that when men accept it in penitence and faith
it brings their life into vital relation to that name ; all
that is signified by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit becomes
theirs ; the benediction, inspiration, and protection of this
holy name enter into and cover all their life. But here,
as we have often had occasion to remark already, the Son
stands in the same line with the Father and the Spirit,
confronting all nations. He belongs to the Divine as
contrasted with the human side in religious experience.
That He was truly human it could never have occurred
to the evangelist to doubt ; but just as little could it
have occurred to him to think that He was merely
human, another child of the same race, to whom we
are related precisely as we are to each other. Jesus
as Matthew sees Him and exhibits Him at last is the
Lord — the Lord who is exalted in divine power and
glory, and who is perpetually present with His own.
How far this conception of Jesus modified the presenta-

THE CHRISTIANITY OF LUKE 67
tion of His life in the gospel, or whether it modified it at
all, are questions reserved for the present : what we are
concerned to note is that His place in the faith of the
evangelist is that which is assigned Him in New Testa
ment faith in general. The facts may or may not be able
to support His greatness, but this greatness is whatjhey
are asked to support.
(c) The Gospel according to Luke
In the third gospel it is easier even than in Matthew
to point out the characteristics of the writer's faith.
- They are conspicuous alike in what he tells of the birth
of Jesus, and of His intercourse with the disciples after
the resurrection.— Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God;
and the evangelist does not leave us in any doubt as to
what these epithets mean. He does, indeed, in the
opening chapters, use language of a peculiarly Jewish cast
in describing the Saviour and the work He had to do :
' He shall be great and shall be called Son ofthe High
est, and the Lord God shall give unto Him the throne of
His father David, and He shall rule over the house of
Jacob for ever, and of His kingdom there shall be no
end ' (i 32f). But like Matthew he refers the origination
of the historic person who is the subject of this prophecy
to the immediate act of God. 'The Holy Spirit shall
come upon thee,' the angel says to His mother, 'and the
power ofthe Most High shall overshadow thee; where
fore also that which is to be born shall be called holy,
the Son of God ' (i 36). Clearly, to the writer, the
Divine Sonship of Jesus was nothing official, nothing to
which any Israelite might aspire, or to which any man

68 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
by the favour of heaven might be promoted ; it is of His
very being, and in the nature of the case can belong to
Him alone. Any one who will may say that the mode
in which the personality of Jesus originated cannot be a
question of religious importance ; but however that may
be, those who believed that His personality did originate
in this unparalleled way must have given him an un
paralleled place in their faith.
In the body of his gospel, the scene which throws most
light upon Luke's way of regarding Jesus, is that which
is given in ch. 4 18'30. This scene is antedated by the
evangelist, as is clear from the reference to a ministry of
Jesus at Capernaum in ver. 23, but it stands where it does
because it is characteristic for the writer, and forms to
his mind an appropriate frontispiece to the story of Jesus.
The heart of it lies in the words, This day is this scrip
ture fulfilled in your ears; but as these are words of
Jesus, not of the evangelist, their full import need not
be considered here. All we are called to remark is that
Luke, though he makes no continuous appeal, like
Matthew's, to the argument from prophecy, still writes
from the beginning in the consciousness that God's
gracious promises to His people were fulfilled in Jesus.
' The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for He hath anointed
Me to preach glad tidings to the poor.' The universal
scope of the gospel — the fact that it is destined for all
mankind, and that Jesus, therefore, is Lord of all — is
hinted also in this typical introduction to His ministry.
He is rejected in His own city, but reminds His un
believing townsmen how in ancient times, though there
were many widows and many lepers in Israel, only a

THE CHRISTIANITY OF LUKE 69
Sidonian and a Syrian had experienced the mercy of
God. But all that is characteristic in Luke's faith is
condensed into what he tells us of the Risen Jesus and
His intercourse with the eleven. It is the Risen Jesus
who is the Christ, and we see in Luke 24 44ff- his sig
nificance in the evangelist's religion. It is He who is
the subject of the Old Testament throughout ; in the
law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms — in the
three great divisions of the Hebrew Scriptures — there/
are things written which have been fulfilled in Him, and
to which His life, death, and resurrection are the only
key. He opens the mind of His disciples to understand
these things. The purport of all revelation, He would
have them know — and this certainly is the under
standing of Luke — is that the Christ should suffer, and
should rise again on the third day, and that repentance
for remission of sins should be preached in His name to
all nations. That the commission implied in this may
be properly discharged, and the disciples prove worthy
witnesses to their Master, He promises to send forth
upon them the promise of the Father, the Spirit which
will invest them in power from on high, "it needs a
greater effort than we can easily make to realise that
Jesus had the place which this implies in the hearts of
men who knew Him upon earth.-*' But it is not open to
question that it is the place He had in the mind of Luke.
He owed His being in the world to the immediate and
mysterious act of God. In His baptism He Himself
was clothed with power from on high. The great and
gracious purpose of God, shadowed forth in ancient
Scripture, was achieved in Him. The hope of the sinful

70 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
world lay in the repentance and remission of sins preached
in His name. The spiritual power — in other words, the
power of God — which accompanied the apostles' testi
mony and evoked new life in the souls of men, was His
gift. The words in ch. 24 M — ' they worshipped Him ' —
are possibly not part of the original text, but there is
nothing in them out of harmony with this representation
of Jesus. The person whose origin and career are such
as the evangelist describes — the Person who is now ex
alted to God's right hand, and who sends the promised
Spirit — is not a member of the Church but its Head.
Luke has a peculiar interest in His humanity ; on six
separate occasions he tells us of His prayers, besides
referring to His habit of withdrawing to desert places
for devotion ; but side by side with this simple human
d.egendence on God there is that transcendent something
which is fully revealed in His exaltation, in His gift of
the Spirit, and in His mission of the apostles to all the
world. It is not the particular way in which Luke con
ceived this or any part of it— in other words, it is not his
Christology as an intellectual construction — with which
we are concerned ; it is the fact that Jesus had in the
religious life of the evangelist the place and the import
ance which are here implied. Not that there is anything
in it which we have not seen elsewhere, but it shows us
once more, and if possible more clearly than ever, how
incomparable is the significance of Jesus for Christian
faith. It is natural for us to examine the synoptic gospels
) separately, yet we must not overlook the fact that they
are not independent, and that it is not the personal

THE CHRISTIANITY OF JOHN 71
peculiarities of their authors which make them important.
In point of fact they are anonymous writings, and though
there are excellent reasons for connecting them with the
persons whose names they bear, it is not on this that
their value depends. It lies greatly in the fact that they
were produced in the Church, for the Church, and by
men who were members of the Church, so that they are
witnesses to us not of the individual peculiarities of their
writers, but of the common faith. They were all written
in the generation which followed the death of St. Paul,
and what we see in them, speaking broadly, is Jesus as
He was apprehended by the Church of those early days.
The Jesus whom we see here is the Jesus on which
the Christian community over all the world depended
for its being. As far as He lived at all for the early
Catholic Church He lived in the characternrnvrii_±~Hg~i's
hereexhibited, In other words, He lived not as another
good man, however distinguished His goodness might
be, but as one who confronted men in the saving power,
and therefore in the truth and reality of God. Whether
the words in Luke 24 62 are genuine or not, the fact remains
that at no date can we find any trace of a Church which
did not worship Him.

VIII
CHRIST IN THE JOHANNINE WRITINGS
The New Testament writings which bear the name
of John are certainly connected somehow, though how it
is not easy to determine. It is not so long ago since

72 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
the Apocalypse and the Fourth Gospel were regarded
as the opposite extremes of early Christianity, represen
tative of modes of thought and feeling so remote and
antagonistic as to be virtually exclusive of each other;
but deeper study has brought them in some respects
into closer mutual relation than any books of the New
Testament. In both there is the same passionate un
compromising temper, the same sense of the absolute
distinction between that which is and that which is not
Christian. In the Apocalypse it is manifested on the
field of history and of conduct ; there is war without
truce and without quarter between the followers of the
Lamb and those of the beast, and the supreme, we might
almost say the sole, Christian virtue is fidelity unto death.
In the gospel it sometimes seems to be put more
abstractly ; it is exhibited in the antitheses of light and
darkness, life and death, love and hatred. These anti
theses, however, are absolute, and they centre round
Christ. He who has the Son has life ; he who has not
the Son has not the life. He who believes on the Son
is not condemned ; he who believes not is condemned
already, because he has not believed on the name of the
only begotten Son of God. In spite, however, of the
fundamental affinity of these writings in temper, it will
be convenient to examine them apart and to see in each
in turn the significance of Christ for the writer's faith.
(a) The Apocalypse
There is a sense in which the Apocalypse might be
called the most Christian book in the New Testament.
Written at a time of persecution and conflict, every

CHRISTIANITY OF THE APOCALYPSE 73
feeling in it is strained and intense ; there is a passion
in all it asserts of Christ, and in all its longings for
Christ, which can hardly be paralleled elsewhere. If
what we had to do was to reconstruct the Christology of
the writer we might have a difficult task. His picture
of Jesus has features which seem to come from the most
various sources — Jewish Messianic expectations, resting
on the book of Daniel or apocalyptic books of the same
kind ; the earthly life and the passion of Jesus ; the
epistles of Paul, and possibly even the Jewish specula
tion of Alexandria. Bousset refers only to one part of
the book — the epistles to the seven churches — but his
words hold good of the whole when he writes : ' What
we have here is a layman's faith, undisturbed by any
theological reflexion, a faith which, with untroubled
naivete", simply identifies Christ in His predicates and
attributes with God, and on the other hand also calmly
takes over quite archaic elements.' 1 It is the writer's
faith in Christ we wish to define, and the absence of
theology should make our task the easier.
The book is described as the revelation of Jesus
Christ which God gave to Him. The subordination of
Jesus Christ to God is assumed, but Jesus Christ is for
the Church the source and in some sense also the subject
of all that is revealed. This is part at least of what is
meant in 1910: the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of
prophecy. The inspired voices which are heard in the
Christian community are moved by Him and bear
witness to Him. But passing from this point, we find at
once the fullest revelation of the seer's faith in Christ in
1 Die Offenbarung Johannis, 280.

74 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
what may be called his covering letter, enclosing the
epistles of cc. 2 and 3 : ' John, to the seven churches
that are in Asia : Grace to you and peace, from Him
which is and which was and which is to come ; and from
the seven Spirits which are before His throne ; and from
Jesus Christ, who is the faithful Witness, the firstborn of
the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth. Unto
Him that loveth us, and loosed us from our sins by His
blood ; and He made us to be a kingdom, to be priests
unto His God and Father ; to Him be the glory and the
dominion for ever and ever. Amen. Behold, He cometh
with the clouds ; and every eye shall see Him, and they
which pierced Him ; and all the tribes of the earth shall
mourn over Him. Even so, Amen.' What first strikes
us here, as it has so often done already, is the co
ordination of Jesus Christ with God and His Spirit. We
may say ' His Spirit' quite freely ; for whatever may be
the genealogy of the expression, ' the seven spirits which
are before His throne ' — and it can hardly be questioned
that it is connected with the Persian Amshaspands — the
seven spirits are never separated in the Apocalypse ;
they have not, as in the Persian mythology, proper
names ; they are treated as a unity in which the fulness
of the divine power is gathered up. The Eternal God,
the Spirit in its plenitude, and Jesus Christ : this is the
sum of the divine reality from which grace and peace
come to the churches. No one has in his mind all that
a Christian means when he says God unless he has in
his mind all that is covered in these three names. For
the writer of the Apocalypse, and for the faith by which
he lives, Jesus Christ belongs to the sphere of the divine.

CHRISTIANITY OF THE APOCALYPSE 75
After naming Jesus he proceeds to describe Him as ' the
faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, the ruler of the
kings of the earth.' Possibly all these words describe
Jesus in His exaltation : He is the faithful witness as
bearing from heaven that true testimony to God (or to
Himself) by which, as we have seen, the prophets ofthe
Christian Church are inspired. But in the doxology
which follows there is more than this. The writer turns
from the exaltation of Jesus to His passion, and it is the
passion, in its motive and its fruits, which inspires his
praise. ' Unto Him that loveth us, and loosed us from
our sins in His blood ... be the glory and the dominion
for ever and ever.' Nothing could be conceived in
worship more intense, more passionate and unreserved,
than this : it gives to Jesus Christ, with irrepressible
abandonment, the utmost that the soul can ever give to
God. This is not theology, but worship, and it is here
the interest lies. It is not orthodoxy, it is living faith,
and it shows us the place of Christ in the religion of
John and of those to whom he wrote. And the Church
not only owes to Jesus the wonderful emancipation and
exaltation here described — the liberation from sin and
the kingly and priestly dignity — it owes to Him also
everything for which it still hopes. ' Behold, He cometh
with the clouds.' What His coming means it takes the
whole book to tell, but it so includes every Christian
hope that all Christian prayers can be briefly compre
hended in the words, 'Come, Lord Jesus' (22 20).
The vision of the Son of Man in ch. 1 12 ff- is remark
able as applying to Jesus several of the features which in
Daniel 7, on which it is based, belong to the Ancient of

76 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
Days ; but what is most remarkable in it is the assump
tion of divine attributes by the Risen Lord Himself. ' I
am the first and the last and the living one, and I became
dead, and behold I am alive for ever and ever, and have
the keys of death and of Hades.' This is not the lan
guage of the first of the saints, but of one whose relation
to believers is quite disparate from any relation they can
ever bear to each other. What gives it impressiveness,
too, is the fact that it is no mere theologoumenon, no
piece of speculative doctrine which has been artificially
produced and is without practical consequence ; the
divine significance of Jesus which is exhibited in it is
applied with heart-searching power, in the seven epistles,
to everything in the moral life of the Church. Addressed
as they are to local communities, and dealing with local
conditions, these epistles are almost as directly as the
central chapters of the fourth gospel a testimony of
Jesus to Himself. They are concerned throughout with
Him, and with His relations to the churches, and His
interest in them. It is worth while to read them think
ing only of the Speaker, or noticing only what is said
in the first person. ' I know thy works. . Thou hast
patience and didst endure for My name's sake. I have
it against thee that thou hast left thy first love. I will
remove thy candlestick out of its place unless thou
repent. Thou hatest . . . what I also hate. To him
that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of
life. These things saith the First and the Last . . .
Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee the
crown of life. These things saith He that hath the
sharp two-edged sword. . . . Thou holdest fast My name

CHRISTIANITY OF THE APOCALYPSE 77
and didst not deny My faith even in the days when
Antipas, My witness, My faithful one, was slain among
you. . . . To him that overcometh will I give of the
hidden manna. These things saith the Son of God,
who hath His eyes as a flame of fire. ... I know thy
works . . . but I have against thee. . . . All the
churches shall know that I am He that searcheth reins
and hearts and shall give you each according to your
works. . . . What ye have hold fast until I come. And
he that overcometh and keepeth My works unto the end,
I will give him authority over the nations. These
things saith He that hath the seven spirits of God. . . .
I know thy works. ... I have found no works of thine
fulfilled before My God. . . . Thou hast a few names in
Sardis that have not defiled their garments, and they
shall walk with Me in white, for they are worthy. He
that overcometh shall be clothed thus in white garments,
and I will not blot out his name out of the book of life,
and I will confess his name before My Father and before
His angels. These things saith He that is holy, He
that is true. . . . Thou hast kept My word and hast not
denied My name. I will make them know that I have
loved thee. Thou hast kept the word of My patience,
and I will keep thee from the hour of temptation. He
that overcometh, I will make him a pillar in the Temple
of My God, and he shall go no more out, and I will
write upon him the name of My God, and the name of
the city of My God, the new Jerusalem, and My new
name. These things saith the Amen, the faithful
and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God.
I know thy works. Thou art wretched and miserable

78 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
and poor and blind and naked. I counsel thee to buy of
Me. As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten. Behold,
I stand at the door and knock. If any man hear My
voice and open the door, I will come in to him and will
sup with him, and he with Me. He that overcometh, I
will give to him to sit down with Me in My throne, even
as I overcame and sat down with My Father in His
throne.' For the practical comprehension of the
place of Jesus, not in the creed or the theology, but in
the faith and life of primitive Christianity, these extracts
from the epistles to the seven churches are priceless. It
does not matter what the speculative Christology of the
writer was, or whether he had any such thing ; it does
not matter, in phrases like ' the beginning of the creation
of God' (314), and 'the word of God' (19 13), whether
we are or are not to trace the influence of Paul or of the
Alexandrian philosophers : here we are in contact with
the living soul of Christianity, and however He may have
been conceived, we see what Christ vitally and prac
tically meant for it. In any meaning we can attach to
the term, His significance for it was divine. It is impos
sible to convey any idea of it if we think of Jesus as
related to the Church and its members merely in the way
in which they are related to each other. The whole
conception is the more remarkable in the Apocalypse
because the writer shows himself peculiarly sensitive
about worship being offered to angels, superhuman
though they are (19 10, 22 9), and because the idea of
apotheosis, or the bestowing of divine honours on a
human being, is, as his attitude to Caesar worship shows,
one which he regards with the utmost horror. The

CHRISTIANITY OF JOHN'S EPISTLES 79
adoration of the Lamb, an adoration in which not only
those who are redeemed to God by His blood partici
pate, but every creature in heaven and earth and under
the earth, is in keeping with the divine significance He
has for Christian souls. If He sometimes stands between
the throne and the Redeemed, as their representative
with God, at others He is on the throne, as God's
omnipotent love ruling all things on their behalf. The
throne itself is the throne of God and of the Lamb, and
it is the glory of those who partake in the first resurrec
tion that they become priests of God and of Christ (20 6).
If we add to this that the sum of all Christian hope is
the coming of Christ, and that with His final advent all
things are made new, it is unnecessary to say more. The
writer's Christology may mingle naively archaic elements
like the lion of the tribe of Judah, or the iron sceptre
which dashes nations in pieces, with speculative ideas
like the first principle of creation or the eternal divine
word — it matters not. What his work reveals is that
Jesus is practically greater than any or all these ways
of representing Him ; neither the imagination of the
Jew nor the philosophical faculty of the Greek can
embody Him ; in the faith and life of the Seer He has an
importance to which neither is adequate ; the only true
name for Him is one which is above every name.
(b) The Epistles of John
It is convenient to take the epistles of John before the
Gospel, not because they are earlier in date, which is im
probable, but because they are epistles, and we can see

80 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
without difficulty the place which Jesus holds in the
writer's faith. The interest of these documents is all the
greater that the author himself is deeply concerned to
show that that place can be historically justified.
The Christian religion has to do with what he calls
eternal life. This life has been manifested, and has
become an experience and a possession of men. The
writer himself shares in it, and it is his desire and the
purpose of his epistle that his readers should share in it
also. ' What we have seen and heard we announce to
you also, that you also may have fellowship with us : yea,
and our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son,
Jesus Christ ' (i. i 3). This co-ordination of the Son with
the Father, which we have traced in all the New Testa
ment writings from the epistles to the Thessalonians
onward, is peculiarly characteristic of the epistles of
John. The Son and the Father are terms of absolute
significance ; there is only one Son as there is only one
Father, and the salvation of men depends upon a rela
tion to the Son and the Father in which neither can be
conceived apart from the other. ' God has given to us
eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He who has the
Son has the life, he who has not the Son of God has not
the life ' (i. 5 n f). He who denies the Son has not the
Father either, but he who confesses the Son has the
Father also (1. 2 23). The perfect Christian life is that
of those who abide in the Son and in the Father (1. 2 24).
' We know that the Son of God is come, and hath given
us an understanding that we know Him that is true, and
we are in Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus Christ.
This is the true God and eternal life ' (1. 5 20). This is

CHRISTIANITY OF JOHN'S EPISTLES 81
the language, not of theology, but of spiritual experience,
and it shows, with a clearness which cannot be mistaken,
the place which Jesus holds in the religious life of the
apostle. He owes to Him as to God, or he owes to
God in and through Him alone, all that he calls truth
and life. It is this incomparable significance of Christ,
this experimentally ascertained fact, that He is to God
what no other is, and therefore discharges in the carry
ing out of God's redeeming work functions on which no
other can intrude, which is represented when He is
designated the only-begotten Son (i. 4 9). It is perhaps
an outcome of it that the apostle never calls Christians
sons of God ; the title Son is reserved for the Only-
begotten, on whom all are dependent for their knowledge
of the Father ; the other members of the family are not
viol (sons) to John, but Tenva (children). It even leads
to such an unparalleled expression as we find in the
salutation of the second epistle : Grace, mercy, peace
shall be with you from God the Father, and from Jesus
Christ the Son of the Father, in truth and love.
The fellowship with the Father and the Son in which
eternal life consists is maintained by walking in the
light. When Christians walk in the light, it is made
evident in two results : first, their unity is maintained 
they have fellowship one with other ; second, their holi
ness is promoted — the blood of Jesus, God's Son, cleanses
them from all sin (1. 1 7). Sin is that which mars fellow
ship with God, and makes it impossible ; and if eternal
life can only be realised in divine fellowship, then the
work of the Son of God, in putting such fellowship
within our reach, must be in its very essence a work
F

82 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
related to sin. This may be said without exaggeration
to be the burden of the first epistle. ' My little children,
these things write I unto you that ye may not sin. And
if any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father,
Jesus Christ the Righteous; and He is the propitiation
for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the whole
world ' (i. 2 "¦). ' I write to you, little children, be
cause your sins have been forgiven you for His name's
sake ' (i. 2 12). These two ideas — the eternal life into
which men are initiated by Christ ; and the propitiation
for sins on which it is dependent — are combined in the
wonderful passage in I. 4 8t, where both are inter
preted as manifestations of the love of God. ' In this
was the love of God manifested in our case, that God
hath sent His only begotten Son into the world that we
might live through Him. In this is love, not that we
loved God but that He loved us, and sent His Son a
propitiation for our sins' When we put these various
utterances together we see the universal and absolute
significance of Jesus in the faith of the writer. Jesus
determines everything in the relations of God and man,
not only eventually or once for all, but continuously;
His blood cleanses, in the present tense ; if any man
sin, we have an advocate for the emergency ; Christians
are those who are in the Son (1. 2 6), and who abide in
Him (1. 2 6). The full apostolic testimony is that the
Father has sent His Son as Saviour of the world
(1. 4 14). It is only excessive familiarity which can deaden
our minds to assertions so stupendous. There is no
thing like them elsewhere in Scripture. No earlier
messenger of God, Moses, Elijah, or Isaiah, has any-

CHRISTIANITY OF JOHN'S EPISTLES 83
thing analogous said of him. The conception of a
prophet does not help us in the very least to appreciate
the conception of the only-begotten Son, who is the
Saviour of the world because He is the propitiation for
its sins. He cannot be understood except as one who
confronts men in the truth, love, and power of God — not
one of ourselves, to whom we owe no more, at least in
kind, than we owe to each other ; but one through
whom, and through whom alone, God enlightens, re
deems and quickens men. The idea of His exaltation
is not so constantly expressed as in the epistles of Paul,
but His Parousia or manifestation in glory is expected,
and the consummation of all Christian hopes is connected
with it. The believer is so to live that he may not be
ashamed before Him at His coming (i. 2 28), nay, that
he may have boldness in the day of judgment (1. 4 1T) :
we know that if He shall be manifested we shall be like
Him ; and having this hope set upon Him we must
purify ourselves as He was pure (1. 3 2f).
And yet, side by side with this presentation of Jesus,
which may be said to be at once transcendent and ex
perimental, we find a persistent emphasis laid on the
reality of His human life. The epistle is a testimony to
one who had lived as man among men, and everything
that imperils this historical basis of Christianity imperils
the Christian life itself. This at least is how the matter
is conceived by the author. He is the only New Testa
ment writer who uses the term antichrist ; and the anti
christ is identified by him with the denial of Jesus
Christ as having come in the flesh (1. 2 18'22, 4 3, 11. verse 7).
The reference in these passages is to the mode of

84 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
thoughtwhich is usually associated with the name of Cerin
thus. Cerinthus distinguished Jesus from the Christ.1
The Christ was a divine being who descended from
heaven and was associated with Jesus from His baptism
onward ; this is what is meant by coming ' through the
water.' But according to Cerinthus, he came through
the water only ; he was not indissolubly associated with
Jesus so as to pass also through His agony and death.
He did not come in the water and in the blood. This
is the mode of thought which, to the writer, is ' antichrist,'
a denial of the essential facts on which Christianity de
pends for its being. For him the only Christ is Jesus ; the
only fatal lie is that which declares that Jesus is not the
Christ (i. 2 22). He has what might almost be called a
dogmatic test for ' spirits ' speaking in the Church :
every spirit which confesses Jesus Christ as come in the
flesh is of God, and every spirit that does not confess
Jesus is not of God (i. 4 3). The one victor over the world
is he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God, the
Jesus who came in the water and in the blood, and whose
whole life from the baptism to the passion, unquestioned
in its historical reality, is perpetuated in the Church, in
its spiritual meaning and virtue, in the Christian sacra
ments — Baptism answering to 'the water' and the Supper
to ' the blood.' 2 What has been already said about
the Son as standing in some sort of co-ordination
with the Father — about His confronting men as the
Saviour of the world, the propitiation for all sin, the sole
bearer of eternal life — is not to be put into any kind of
1 Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. i. 21.
2 See Expositor, May 1908. Article by the writer.

CHRISTIANITY OF JOHN'S EPISTLES 85
competition or contrast with this ; in the mind of the
writer, the Person of whom these extraordinary things
are true is the historical person who was baptized by John
in Jordan and who hung at Calvary on the Cross. It is
the historical truth and reality ofthe life of Jesus on which
the eternal life of believers is dependent ; toassail or under
mine the one is to threaten the other at its foundation.
The Cerinthian interpretation of Christianity was no
doubt derived from the dualistic philosophy of the time ;
people shrank, or affected to shrink, from the idea that a.
spiritual or divine nature could be intimately or per
manently related to matter, and especially from the idea
that it could pass through the degrading and odious squalor
of the crucifixion. Although the same motives do not
operate now, what is practically the same result is often
reached under another impulse. Men are attracted by the
idea that the Christian religion should be lifted above the
region in which historic doubts are possible ; they wish
to refine it, to spiritualise it, to make it an affair of ideas
to which any given historical fact is immaterial. It is as
if they said, All these things are true — but they are true
in independence of Jesus. There are such realities as
eternal life, divine sonship, forgiveness of sins — yes, and
even propitiation for sins — but they are realities which
belong to the eternal world ; they have their being in
God, and Jesus is only accidentally related to them.
Once grasp the principle of Christianity, and Jesus, like
every other historical person, is indifferent to it. He
has no place in the gospel, though He (and no other)
may have been the occasion of these eternal truths
breaking upon one or another mind. All that has to be

86 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
said about this at present is that it is not the understand
ing of the writer of these epistles. It is a mode of
thought which in all essentials was present to his mind,
and which he deliberately and decisively rejected. It
was not simply incongruous or uncongenial, it was fatal
to Christianity as he understood it. For it is impossible
to read otherwise than literally the words with which he
introduces himself to his readers : ' That which was
from the beginning, which we have heard, which we
have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and
our hands handled, concerning the word of life — and
the life was manifested, and we have seen and bear
witness and announce to you the eternal life which was
with the Father and was manifested unto us — that which
we have seen and heard we announce to you also, that
you also may have fellowship with us ; yea, and our
fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus
Christ' (i. i1"3). It is this unity of the historical and
the eternal, this eternal and divine significance of the
historical, which is the very stamp and seal of the
Christian religion.

(c) The Gospel according to John
In examining the synoptic gospels we had occasion
to remark on the distinction which has to be drawn in
them between the testimony of the evangelists to Jesus
and the testimony of Jesus to Himself. Though the
writers of these gospels would not have drawn such a
distinction themselves, and did their work, so far as we
can see, quite unconscious of it, it is necessary that we

CHRISTIANITY OF FOURTH GOSPEL 87
should draw it, and it is not in their case too difficult to
apply it. The difficulty is very much increased, and
amounts at various points to an impossibility, when we
come to the fourth gospel. There is only one style in
the gospel from beginning to end, and every one speaks
in it — John the Baptist, Jesus, the evangelist himself.
There is only one mode of thought represented in it from
beginning to end, and every one shares it — John the
Baptist, Jesus, the evangelist himself. What it enables
us to see with indubitable clearness is the place which
Jesus holds in the faith and life of the writer ; what we
cannot so easily recover from it is the exact relation of
this place to that which Jesus Himself claimed. It is
true that to a large extent the writer's testimony to Jesus
is given through Jesus' life ; it is represented as the very
word of the Lord Himself. But the critical study of the
gospel, and especially the comparison of it with the
synoptics, makes it doubtful how far we can take this
literally. It is the preponderating opinion of all who have
investigated the subject that the fourth gospel is in sub
stance the fulfilment of the words of Jesus which we read
inc. 1 6 12 : 'I have many things to say unto you, but ye
cannot bear them now. But when He is come, the Spirit
of truth, He shall lead you into all the truth . . . He shall
glorify Me, for He shall take of Mine and shall declare it
unto you.' The Jesus who speaks in its pages, though
it is in form a gospel, and follows the course of His life
on earth, is not only the Jesus, who taught in the syna
gogues and fields of Galilee, or in the temple courts and
streets of Jerusalem, but also the exalted Lord whose
spirit vivifies and interprets the memories of Jesus in

88 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
the heart of an intimate, devoted, and experienced dis
ciple. The words of Jesus are connected, of course,
with times and places, for they are given as part of a
historical career, but they do not belong to time or place ;
they are the expression of the eternal truth which was
revealed in Jesus, and which for the writer is identical
with Him. They are the word, rather than the words,
of the Lord. They are the authentic revelation of what
He is and was, as His Spirit has interpreted Him to the
evangelist, rather than the ipsissima verba of Jesus of
Nazareth. But while this makes it more difficult to use
the fourth gospel without reflection in answering the
second of the two questions with which we are concerned,
it gives us ampler material to answer the first. The way
in which Jesus presents Himself in the gospel can gene
rally be taken as embodying the evangelist's own sense
of his place and significance for faith.
Although the procedure is open to criticism, we begin
with the prologue. The immense influence which these
few verses have had in determining the doctrine of the
Catholic Church, and the tendency of a once dominant
critical school to interpret them in a purely philosophical
and speculative interest, should not blind us to their essen
tially practical, historical, and it may even be added, ex
perimental character. The main propositions they contain
are those of vv. 14 and 16 : ' The Word was made flesh
and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, glory as of
the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and
truth. . . . Of His fulness we all received, and grace
upon grace.' This is entirely in keeping with what we
have found in the first epistle ; and in spite of the

CHRISTIANITY OF FOURTH GOSPEL 89
attempts that have been made to find divergent modes
of thought in the two documents and to assign them to
different hands, the view of Lightfoot still seems to me
to have everything in its favour — viz., that the epistle is
a sort of covering letter accompanying and recommend
ing the gospel.1 The gospel exhibits Jesus in His life in
the flesh in precisely that significance for faith which He
has in the epistle. There is the same insistence on the
flesh, on the historical reality, to which immediate testi
mony is borne ; there is the same emphasis on the con
ception of Christ as ' Only-begotten,' one who gives
others the right to become children of God (i 12), but has
an incomparable sonship of His own ; there is the same
sense of owing everything to Him (i 16). There is not
in the prologue a single word which betrays a purely
speculative interest, such as we find, for example, in
Philo. There is not a single technical term. The writer
has no philosophical problems or conundrums for the
solving of which he makes use of the category of the
Logos. The one immeasurable reality which fills and
holds his mind is Jesus. Jesus has been to him the
Interpreter of God (i 1S) : in knowing Him he has known
God as he never did before ; in seeing Him he has seen
the Father : in associating with Him he has been flooded,
as it were, wave upon wave, with the fulness of grace
and truth which dwelt in Him. This is fundamental
in the prologue as it stands, and is the key to every
thing else it contains. Possibly we understand it best
by comparing it with the other gospels. To all the
evangelists Jesus is a great person, and it lies on them
1 Biblical Essays, 63, 198.

90 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
somehow to exhibit and explain His greatness. Mark,
who is the earliest, does least. He connects Jesus with
John the Baptist, and by a single allusion to the pro
phecies of Isaiah and Malachi, which were fulfilled in the
forerunner, leaves us to infer that in Jesus God's ancient
purposes are being achieved. Matthew goes further.
He introduces Jesus as the Christ, son of David, son of
Abraham. He is the key to the whole of Jewish his
tory : the one true religion, beginning with the father of
the faithful, has its consummation in Him. Luke goes
further still. He traces the genealogy of Jesus not to
Abraham but to Adam. He is sensible that His signifi
cance is not national but universal, and that to appreciate
His greatness we must understand His essential relation
not only to Israel but to the whole human race. But for
John none of these ways of representing the greatness
and significance of Jesus is adequate. To exhibit the
truth about Him, or rather to exhibit Him in the truth of
His being, we must relate Him not to the Baptist merely,
or to Abraham, or to the father of mankind, but to the
eternal being of God. This is what the writer does by
means of the Logos idea, and it is for this purpose alone
that he makes use ofthe idea. He does not arbitrarily
assign to Jesus all or any of the functions assigned to
the Logos in Heraclitus and the Stoics, or in the Alex
andrian philosophy of Philo ; in such things he has less
than no interest. His heart is where his treasure is,
with Jesus. In coming into contact with Jesus he has
come into contact with the eternal truth and love of God;
the final and all-sufficient revelation of Him whom no
man has seen has been made in the Only-begotten.

CHRISTIANITY OF FOURTH GOSPEL 91
There is nothing in the universe — nothing in nature, in
history, in all that has ever been known as religion or
revelation — that can truly be understood except in this
light (vv. 1-12). The world, as it has been put before,
is a Christian world, and we do not understand it finally
till everything in it has been set into relation to Christ.
To set everything into relation to Christ, under this pro
found sense of His universal significance, is the purpose
of the writer in the opening verses of his gospel. He
does so in bold outlines, in a few brief sentences ; and he
borrows the conception of the Logos for a moment, be
cause in the environment for which he wrote it facilitated
the execution of his purpose. But though he borrows the
conception, he does not borrow from it. He does not
invest Jesus with an unreal greatness which belongs to
this philosophical conception and not to the Person.
Jesus is too great for this, and too real ; the writer knows
Him too well, and his devotion to Him is too absolute ;
as the gospel itself will show, he can say everything he
has to say about Jesus without so much as using the
term; and the interest of the prologue for our present
purpose is that it puts at the very outset, though in a form
that has created some misapprehension, his sense of the
divine, eternal, and universal significance of Jesus. At
the risk of being tiresome, it may be said once more that
he did not borrow this from the Logos ; he borrowed the
Logos, because it lent itself to the convenient and intelli
gible expression of this independent Christian conviction.
The value of the Logos doctrine for a Christian is that
it can be used in this way, and if it ceased to be as con
venient or as intelligible to modern readers as it was to

92 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
Christians of Asia Minor when the gospel was published,
its value would be gone.
When we pass from the prologue to the body of the
gospel, we are practically in the same world of thought
and experience which we know already from the first
epistle. The writer himself tells us formally the purpose
of his work. ' These things are written that ye may
believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that
believing ye may have life in His name ' (ch. 20 31). The
ultimate aim of the evangelist here is the same with that
which we find on the lips of Jesus Himself in c. io10: 'I
am come that they might have life'; and in more solemn
and formal terms in ch. i72£ : 'Thou hast given Him power
over all flesh, that all which Thou hast given Him He
, may give unto them eternal life. And this is life eternal,
that they should know Thee, the only true God, and
Him whom Thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.' In view
of these passages and others like them which occur on
every page, it is hardly worth while investigating the
titles by which the evangelist or those who figure in his
pages represent to themselves the significance of Jesus —
the Christ, the Son of God, the King of Israel, the Son
of Man. The Person to whom men owe eternal life is a
Person to whom no previously defined name is adequate ;
whatever term we apply to Him is transfigured by the
very application ; in contact with Him it fills with a
meaning which it never had before. A remarkable
proof of this is the way in which Jesus uses of Himself in
the gospel the expression eye. ei/xz, ' I am,' without any
definite predicate. ' If ye do not believe that I am, ye
shall die in your sins ' (8 2i). ' When ye have lifted up

CHRISTIANITY OF FOURTH GOSPEL 93
the Son of Man, then shall ye know that I am ' (8 98).
'Henceforth I tell you before it come to pass, that ye may
believe when it has come to pass, that I am ' (13 1B). The
only appropriate supplement in such passages is ' the
all decisive personality,'1 by relation to whom every
thing in human destiny is determined. Jesus is what He
is ; no one can reduce this to a finite formula, but every
thing that we mean by eternal life is dependent upon it.
Sometimes the emphasis in exhibiting what He is falls
upon His relation to God. To know the only true God,
and Him whom He sent, Jesus Christ, is one (17 3). He
who has seen Jesus has seen the Father, and there is no
other way to see Him. He is in the Father and the
Father in Him (14 9f); 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
whom, to this intent, Jesus is identified (10 30). Jesus is
the only-begotten Son, in the bosom of the Father
(1 18, 3 16) ; 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 21ff). 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
greatest and most spiritual men. In some peculiar way
he belongs to that side or aspect of reality which we call
1 Holtzmann, Handcommentar, iv. 131.

94 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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 ofthe 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 mys
teriously ; 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 Bethlehem ; but is not this man a Galilean ?
The Christ is to renew the miracles of the Exodus and
the wilderness ; 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 any man thirst, let
him come unto Me and drink.' ' I am the light of the
world.' ' I am the door.' ' I am the good shepherd.'
' I am resurrection and life.' ' I 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

CHRISTIANITY OF FOURTH GOSPEL 95
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 (317, 442, 1247) 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
fact is interpreted and illumined in it by the faith and
experience of the writer, and as he himself tells us, by the
teaching ofthe Spirit ; and unless we could say beforehand

96 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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
argument is unaffected : a lamb by which sin is taken
away is nothing but a sacrificial lamb, and the expres
sion covers precisely the same spiritual debt to Christ
and dependence upon Him as is covered by .\a07_0_, or
propitiation, in the epistle (2 2, 410). 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
epistle. 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

CHRISTIANITY OF FOURTH GOSPEL 97
counsel of Caiaphas : ' You do not consider that it is
for your interest that one man should die for the nation,
and not the whole nation perish' (ii60). This, the
evangelist 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 religious man he lived and moved and had his
being, so that it was always present to him without de
liberate reflection, it is impossible to see how his com
ment 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 1934. 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 s: see above, p. 84).
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
G

98 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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 own experience : who has not sighed to be another
creature 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 33), 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
alluded 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

CHRISTIANITY OF FOURTH GOSPEL 99
Paul expresses it, looking to His death (Rom. 6 s).
The new birth is mysterious, but not magical. As the
evangelist understood it, in its specifically Christian
character, 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
for 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 29 to 1934.
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
because of the Father, so he that eateth me, he
shall live because of me.' But the evangelist passes,
voluntarily 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

100 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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 import
ance, recurring to the thoughts spontaneously on the
strangest occasions (i i 49ff-), asserted with the most solemn
emphasis (19 34, 653). 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
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

SUMMARY AND TRANSITION 101
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
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 import-

102 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
ance 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.
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 philo
sophy would make it. It is vital to get back. But
when we do get back, what do we find ? Not, accord
ing to many of them, anything which justifies the New
Testament 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

SUMMARY AND TRANSITION 103
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
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

104 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
mistake and misconception from the first. This is the
ultimate meaning of these ' historical ' and ' philosophical '
appeals 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
approached 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
justify or sustain the religious life which we see in the
New Testament. Those who reject the apostolic testi
mony at this point may, indeed, have the highest
appreciation for the memory of Jesus ; they may rever
ence the figure preserved for us by the evangelists as the
107

108 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
ideal of humanity, the supreme attainment of the race
in the field of character ; but they can have no relation
to Jesus resembling that in which New Testament
Christians lived and moved and had their being. The
general 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
testimony 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,

THE RESURRECTION 109
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
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
victory of the crucified over death, of the power and the
righteousness of God, and ofthe 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

110 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
message. ' 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.'1 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
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
1 D as Wesen des Christentums, 101 f.

THE RESURRECTION 111
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
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

112 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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 indepen
dent 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 abun
dant 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 Sanday1 in the
spring of 55, and represents what Paul had taught in
Corinth when he came to the city for the first time
1 Encyclopcedia Biblica, 903 f.

THE RESURRECTION 118
between 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.1 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
certain 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
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-
1 See article ' Chronology ' in Hastings' Bible Dictionary, i. p. 424.
H

114 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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. 110) 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 (iyyyy 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
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,
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 (62)—' 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 extraordinary as Schmiedel's
suggestion (Encyclopcedia Biblica, 4067) that the date of the resurrection is
deduced from 2 Kings 20 6.

THE RESURRECTION 115
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 say1 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
1 With Schmiedel (Encyclopcedia Biblica, 4058).

116 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
it relevant; and the probabilities are that in this outline
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 w<f>dr) (He appeared), which is used alike in speaking
of Christ's appearing to Paul and to the others who had
the same experience, does not enable us to define that
experience with any precision. It is used elsewhere,
certainly, of ' visionary ' seeing, but it is used equally, for
example, in Acts 726, of seeing which is in no sense
visionary. What it suggests in almost every case is the
idea of something sudden or unexpected ; that which is
seen is conceived to be so, not because one is looking at
it or for it, but because it has unexpectedly thrust itself
upon the sight. The translation ' He appeared,' rather
than ' He was seen,' adequately represents this. But
though Paul can use the active form, as in ch. 9 u — ' Have
not I seen Jesus our Lord ? ' — neither by that nor by the
passive does he do more than convey the fact that he had
had, in what he can only describe in terms of vision, an
experience in which he was conscious of the presence
of the Risen Saviour.
Into this experience we may not be able to penetrate,
but we are entitled to reject explanations of it which
assume it to be a mere illusion. Such as it was, it left
Paul in no doubt that Jesus of Nazareth, who had been
crucified at Calvary, was exalted to the right hand of God
in divine power and glory. Power and glory are the
two words which the apostle most frequently uses in
speaking of the resurrection. The Risen Jesus is the

THE RESURRECTION 117
Lord of glory (i Cor. 2 s). He was declared or consti
tuted Son of God in power by the resurrection from the
dead (Rom. i4). He was raised from the dead by the
glory of the Father (Rom. 64). The working of the
strength of His might which He wrought in Christ when
He raised Him from the dead and set Him at His own
right hand in the heavenly places, far above all princi
pality and power and might and dominion, and every
name that is named not only in this world but also in
that which is to come — this was the supreme manifesta
tion of what the power of God could do. Paul has no
abstract term like omnipotence, and when he wishes to
give a practical religious equivalent for it he points to the
power which has raised Christ from the grave and set
Him on the throne with all things under His feet. The
power which has done this is the greatest which the
apostle can conceive ; it is the power which works in us,
and it is great enough for every need of the soul (Ephes.
3 20, i19f). In one passage he uses the expression 'the
body of His glory ' (Phil. 3 21). The Risen Lord, in con
trast with mortal men upon the earth, who bear about a
'body of humiliation ' or 'lowliness,' lives in the splen
dour and immortality of heaven. It is no use asking for
a definition of such words : Paul could no more have
given them than we can. It is no use asking for an ex
planation of the precise relation between the body of
humiliation and the body of glory ; such an explanation
was entirely out of his reach. All he could have asserted,
and what he undoubtedly did assert, was that the same
Jesus whose body had been broken on the cross had
manifested Himself to him in divine splendour and

118 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
power ; and though he should never be able to say any
thing about the connexion of the two modes of being
further than this, that Jesus had been raised from the
dead by the glory of the Father, it would not in the least
affect his assurance that the exaltation of Jesus was as
real as His crucifixion. If any one wished to argue that
for Paul's belief in the resurrection of Christ, the empty
tomb in Joseph's garden is immaterial, he might make a
plausible case ; the apostle's certainty of the resurrection
rested immediately and finally on the appearing of Jesus
to himself, and he would have possessed that certainty
and lived in it though he had never become acquainted
with the circumstances of the death and burial of Jesus,
and with the subsequent events as they are recorded in
the gospels. But the whole of the discussion in the
fifteenth chapter of ist Corinthians shows that though a
plausible case could be stated on these lines, it is not the
case for which we could claim the support of the apostle
himself. Unable as he is to explain the relation of the
natural to the spiritual body, of the body of humiliation
to the body of glory — a ' mystery ' (ver. 51) can only be
announced, it cannot be explained — his assumption
throughout is certainly not that the two have nothing to
do with each other. It is the body of humiliation itself
which in the case of Christians is transformed and
fashioned like the body of Christ's glory ; and it is this,
rather than the idea that there is no connexion between
the two bodies, which suggests the line on which the
apostle's own thoughts would run.
But what, it may be said, is the value, historically
speaking, of such evidence as this to the resurrection of

THE RESURRECTION 119
Jesus? Grant that Paul and the other persons whom
he enumerates had experiences which they announced
to the world in the terms, 'We have seen the Lord,' the
question as to the nature of these experiences remains.
In the Christian religion one interpretation has been put
upon them. They have been regarded as historical and
independent guarantees of a transcendent world, a life
beyond death, the sovereignty of Jesus, the reconcilia
tion of the sinful world and God. But is this interpre
tation necessary? No one any longer questions the
honesty of the apostolic testimony to the resurrection :
the only question is as to its meaning and value. There
can be no doubt that appearances did appear to certain
persons ; the problem is how are we to give such appear
ances their proper place and interpretation in the whole
scheme of things ? Is it not much more probable that
they are to be explained from within, from the moods of
thought and feeling in the souls which experienced them,
than from anything so inconceivable, and so incommen
surable with experience, as the intrusion of another world
into this ? Is it not much more probable, in short, that
they were what philosophers call ' subjective,' states or
products of the soul itself, and not ' objective,' realities
independent of the soul ? This is not equivalent to
denying them any reality, though it relieves us from the
necessity of discussing such questions as the empty
tomb. Neither does it impair the greatness of Jesus.
On the contrary, it may even be argued that it magnifies
Jesus. How great this man must have been who could
not be extinguished even by death, but who had made
an impression on the minds of His friends so profound

120 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
and ineffaceable, who had inspired them with faith and
hope in Himself so vivid and invincible, that He rose in
their hearts out of the gloom and despair of the cruci
fixion to celestial glory and sovereignty! This is a line
of argument which is constantly and powerfully urged
at the present time, and that too by many who are far
from wanting sympathy with the life and teaching of
Jesus. This is of itself a reason which entitles it to the
most careful consideration. But it demands attention
further because it is clear that, if it leaves anything at
all which can be called Christian religion, it is not that
form of Christianity which alone we have been able to
discover in the New Testament.
Without professing or feeling any undue sympathy
with the Paley or Old Bailey school of apologetics, we
may surely have our doubts as to whether the testimony
of the first witnesses can be so easily disposed of.
Practically this estimate of it means that it is to be
treated as a pathological phenomenon : it belongs to the
disease and disorder, not to the health and sanity of the
human spirit. Paul and the other apostles no doubt
had visions of Jesus in power and glory, but they ought
not to have had them. Unless their brains had been
overheated they would not have had them. It can
never be anything but a pity that they did have them.
There are people who say such things because their
philosophy constrains them, and there are people also,
equally entitled to have an opinion, who would not say
such things for any philosophy. It is not easy to dis
credit offhand, as mere illusion, what has meant so
much in the life of the human race. It is not easy to

THE RESURRECTION 121
suppose that men, who in other respects were quite of
sound mind, were all in this extraordinary experience
victims of the same delusion. There are, of course, things
which no testimony could establish ; but where there is,
as here, a great mass of testimony, and that in conditions
which compel us to treat it seriously, it is, to say the least,
rash to put upon it an interpretation which annuls com
pletely the significance it had for the witnesses themselves.
It is at this point, therefore, that we must take into
account those considerations which gave weight from
the beginning to the apostolic testimony, and won
acceptance for it. If the resurrection of Jesus could be
treated purely as a question in metaphysics, and the
witness of the apostles purely as a question in psycho
logy, we should find ourselves confronted with insoluble
difficulties. A theory of the universe which had no
room for the resurrection would find in psychology the
means of reducing the evidence ; those who could not
reduce the evidence would plead for a more elastic view
of the universe ; but the issue would never be decided.
If, however, we leave these abstractions behind us, and
come face to face with the facts, the situation is entirely
changed. The resurrection is not attested to meta
physicians or psychologists as a thing in itself; it is
preached to sinful men, in its divine significance for
their salvation, and it is in this concrete reality alone
that it exists or has interest for the primitive witnesses.
' Him hath God exalted with His right hand to be a
Prince and a Saviour, to give repentance to Israel and
remission of sins ' (Acts 5 S1). 'And He charged us to
preach unto the people, and to testify that this is He

122 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
which is ordained of God to be the Judge of quick
and dead ' (Acts io 42). The considerations which are
thus brought into the scale, it is easy to caricature and
easy to abuse, but fatal to neglect. Any one who
appeals to them is sure to be charged with shifting his
ground, with evading the issue, with ju,eTa/3ao-._ ets dWo
yivos, and all the other devices of the apologist at his
wits' end ; hay, he may even be represented as saying
to his supposed adversary, '/ believe this because I am
accessible to spiritual considerations, and you disbelieve
it because you are not ; if you were as good a man as I
am, you would believe it too.' But it is surely possible,
without being either complacent or censorious, certainly
without making any personal comparisons, to view the
testimony to the resurrection not as an abstract or
insulated phenomenon, but in the totality of the relations
in which it was delivered ; and if these relations include
some which are specifically moral, so that the attitude
of men to the evidence was from the beginning and
must ever be, in part at least, morally conditioned, it is
surely possible to say so without being either a Pharisee
or an intellectually dishonest man.
Now there are three ways in which the testimony to
the resurrection is morally qualified, if one may so
speak, and therefore needs to be morally appreciated.
In the first place, it is the resurrection of Jesus. If
the witnesses had asserted about Herod, or about any
ordinary person, what they did about Jesus, the pre
sumption would have been all against them. The moral
incongruity would have discredited their testimony from
the first. But the resurrection was that of one in whom

THE RESURRECTION 123
His friends had recognised, while He lived, a power and
goodness beyond the common measure of humanity, and
they were sensible when it took place that it was in
keeping with all they had known, hoped, and believed
of Him. When Peter is reported to have said that God
loosed the pangs of death because it was not possible
that He should be holden of it (Acts 2 24), it is not too
much to infer that this was the truth present to his
mind. Is it too much to infer that sometimes, when the
resurrection of Jesus is rejected, the rejecter forgets
that it is this resurrection which is in question? He
thinks of resurrection in general, the resurrection of any
one ; possibly he thinks of it really as the re-animation
of a corpse ; and he judges quite confidently, and if this
be all that is in his mind quite rightly, that it is not
worth while weighing anything so light against a well-
founded conception of reality in general. But if he
realised what ' Jesus ' means — if he had present to his
mind and conscience, in His incomparable moral value,
the Person whose resurrection is declared — the problem
would be quite different. He might find himself far
more ready, under the impression of the worth of such
a person, to question the finality of his scheme of the
universe ; more willing to admit that if there was not to
be a perpetual contradiction at the heart of things, a
perpetual extinction of the higher by the lower, such a
personality must find it possible somehow to transcend
the limitations pf nature and its laws.
This consideration, it may be said, is capable of being
turned in the opposite direction. Those who hold that
Jesus only rose again in the hearts of His disciples may

124 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
assert that they put to the proper account whatever
truth it contains. They admit that only Jesus could
have risen, only a person who had so wonderfully
impressed Himself on the memory and affections of
His followers ; but it was this wonderfully deep and
vivid impression which itself produced the resurrection.
Death, for a moment, so to speak, had extinguished
Jesus in their lives, but the extinction could not be
lasting. Very soon He reasserted His power. He
came to life again more triumphant than ever. One
may venture to think that in all this there is much con
fusion, and even much playing with words, in a style
quite unworthy of what is at stake. To lose a dear and
valued friend is no uncommon experience, and we know
how to describe what follows. Those who do not for
get their departed friends remember them. But to
remember them means to recall them as they were ; it
means to have them present to our minds in the familiar
associations of the past. We may say if we please that
they live in our memory ; if we have been so unhappy
as to forget them, and then remember them once more,
we may say that they have come to life again in our
memory ; but it is the old familiar friend who so comes
to life. There is no revelation here, no suggestion of
being in a new and higher order, nothing, in spite of
the language of life and death in which it is expressed,
which has any analogy whatever with the resurrection of
Jesus. Hence we may say confidently that no brooding
of His friends on the memory of Jesus would have given
that revival to His personality which they asserted when
they preached the resurrection. Their sense of the

THE RESURRECTION 125
greatness and the worth of Jesus, in all probability,
would come back on them and fill their minds in the
hours which followed His death ; but though this pre
pared them in a manner for His appearance, it had no
tendency whatever to produce it. Jesus did not appear
as they had known Him, in the lowliness and familiarity
of the life they had shared in Galilee ; He appeared as
one exalted to the right hand of God, and having all
power given Him in heaven and on earth. Their belief
that such an appearing was no illusion, but the revela
tion of the final truth about Jesus, was morally con
ditioned, no doubt, by their previous knowledge and
appreciation of Him ; but it is hardly short of unmean
ing to say that their previous knowledge and apprecia
tion of Him evoked it in their minds. It was no coming
to life again in memory of the dear familiar friend whom
even death could not dislodge from the heart ; it was
something transcendently and unimaginably new, and
it needs a cause proportioned to it to explain its
presence. To say that the testimony to the resurrection is
morally qualified by the mere fact that it is the resurrec
tion oi Jesus which is attested does not exhaust the
truth. The apostles did not preach the resurrection of
Jesus itself as a mere fact ; what they preached was the
gospel ofthe resurrection. It was the fact read out to the
mind, heart, and conscience of men in its divine signi
ficance — the fact and its interpretation as indissolubly
one, and constituting a supreme appeal on the part of
God to man. If we could imagine a person to whom
all the ideas and experiences which for the first witnesses

126 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
were part and parcel of their faith in the exaltation of
Jesus were meaningless or unreal ; a person who had no
interest in the forgiveness of sins or in judgment to
come ; to whom a life like that of Jesus, ending in a
death like His, presented no problem, or none that
much disturbed his soul ; to whom it was not a matter
of any moment to be assured that sin and death were
not the final realities in the universe, but were destined
to be swallowed up in victory — if one could imagine
such a person, we should have imagined one to whom the
resurrection must be permanently incredible. He could
not believe it, because, to begin with, he could not even
conceive it. He could have no idea of what those who
attested it had in their minds ; and even if he accepted
something which did not transcend his conception of
the ' purely ' historical, some bare fact with none but a
metaphysical significance, it would not amount to believ
ing in the resurrection in the sense of the New Testa
ment. No one can really appreciate the testimony
unless the moral conditions under which its meaning is
realised are to some extent real for him.
It is possible, as has been already noticed, to carica
ture this truth on the one side, and to abuse it on the
other. Those who reject the resurrection caricature it
when they say that it is a mere evasion, an attempt to
prove what is either a historical fact or nothing by
evidence which is not historical at all ; and those who
accept the resurrection abuse it when they presume to
judge others on the ground of it, and insinuate that their
unbelieving attitude is due to their insensibility to the
spiritual truths which the gospel of the resurrection

THE RESURRECTION 127
embodies. But when we bring into view the fact that
the testimony to the resurrection is morally qualified in
the way which has just been described, we do not dis
regard the testimony itself. The primary fact is that we
have such testimony. There were really men in the
world who stood forth before their fellows and said ' We
have seen the Lord.' That is fundamental, and must
always be so. There is no attempt to make inward
evidence take the place of outward — no argument that
the witness of the Spirit, as theologians have called it,
can establish a historical fact ; what is asserted is that the
historical testimony to the resurrection of Jesus is testi
mony to a fact of moral significance, a fact of such a kind
that the testimony to it cannot be duly appreciated, even
in respect to its credibility, by a person for whom its
moral significance has no interest. This is not a way of
asserting that the resurrection is historical, and at the
same time securing it against historical criticism ; it is
only pointing out, what is surely the case, that the
historical fact with which we are here concerned must
be taken as what the historical witnesses represent it to
be, and not as something different — as the concrete and
significant reality which it was for them, and not as an
abstract and isolated somewhat, which has no significance
whatever. Perhaps if ' man ' could be reduced to ' his
torian ' or ' natural philosopher ' the resurrection might
remain for ever a mere puzzle to the brain ; all that the
considerations with which we are here concerned import
is that this reduction is impossible. ' Man ' is more
than 'natural philosopher' or 'historian.' His relations
to reality are more various and complex than those of

128 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
such scientific abstractions, and, therefore, his power of
responding to it, of apprehending and comprehending it,
is greater. Neither nature nor history is invaded in its
rights by the resurrection, but both are transcended.
Neither natural science nor history can deny the resur
rection except by claiming for themselves to exhaust the
truth and reality of the universe — a claim the untruth of
which is self-evident. It is just because of its moral
significance — because of its meaning and purpose in the
relations of God and man — that the resurrection, as the
apostles preached it, rises above what is called the purely
historical ; it makes a kind of appeal to men which a
purely historical event, if we could realise such an
abstraction, never makes ; it is on our susceptibility to
this appeal that our appreciation of the testimony to it
depends, and yet the testimony itself, in the last resort,
is historical testimony. There would be nothing to go
upon whatever if there were not men who had seen the
risen Jesus — here is the point of attachment with history;
but what the testimony of these men shall amount to for
us — what weight it shall have in our minds — whether we
shall take it as simply as it is given, or feel ourselves
obliged to attempt the reduction of it to something by
which the equilibrium of our world shall be maintained
and disturbing revelations excluded — here is the point
at which the moral elements in the case exert their
legitimate influence. To see this and to say it is not to
be Pharisaical, even if one believes in the resurrection.
It gives no right to judge others. It is necessary, how
ever, that the preacher of the resurrection should be
conscious of it, otherwise he may preach something

THE RESURRECTION 129
which is out of touch with the apostolic gospel of the
Risen Christ — something which attempts more than the
first witnesses attempted, a demonstration of the fact
apart from its significance ; something, too, which is less
interesting than their message, a fact so emptied of
divine and human meaning that it defies the intelligence
instead of appealing to the whole man.
About the third way in which the evidence for the
resurrection is morally qualified there can hardly be any
dispute. If the alleged fact had been insulated in
human history, if it had been ineffective and fruitless, it
might well have been questioned whether it were a fact
at all. But from the very beginning men were per
suaded that the resurrection was a fact, because they
saw it operate as a moral power. It has been said
already that the supreme evidence for the resurrection is
the existence of the Church in the fulness of that
exuberant life which we see in the apostolic writings.
And this was understood from the first. The sermon of
Peter in Acts 2 is conscious of all the moral qualifications
which we have reviewed. The primary historical fact
of course is that the Lord had appeared to Peter and
those for whom he spoke : they were witnesses of His
resurrection. But Peter knew the weight which his
word would receive from an appreciation of the character
of Jesus : ' it was not possible that He should be holden
of death.' He knew the added power with which it
would tell when the Risen Christ was preached as the
author of reconciliation to God : ' repent and be baptized
every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for remission
of your sins. ' H e knew that he gave conclusive evidence

130 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
of the exaltation of Jesus when he pointed to the spiritual
phenomena of the early Christian days : ' He hath
poured forth this which ye both see and hear.' We
must not narrow unduly the application of the last
words. If we thought of nothing but speaking with
tongues, and took our ideas of this from Paul, we should
probably not rate it very high. But ' this that ye both
see and hear ' covers the whole phenomena of that event
ful time. The wonder of it was not that the apostles
spoke in foreign languages, but that they spoke ; men
who had till then been silent or rather dumb opened
their lips, and preached with tongues of fire. With
great power they gave their testimony to the resurrec
tion of the Lord Jesus. This is the truly significant
thing, the transformation of the apostles and the birth
of the Church. What we think of the apostolic testi
mony to the resurrection cannot but be influenced by
our estimate of these moral phenomena and of the mode
of their causation. The greater they appear, the more
valuable in their spiritual contents, the more decisive in
the history of humanity, so much the more inevitable
must it seem that what lies behind them is not an
illusion or a morbid experience misunderstood, but the
highest reality and truth which have ever told with
regenerating power on the life of man. Yet here again
a straightforward mind is bound to guard the argument
from reproach by making it quite clear that there is no
desire to evade any historical issue. There are historical
witnesses : to that we must always recur. The moral
phenomena to which reference has been made are trans
acted on the stage of history. But something in our

THE RESURRECTION 181
appreciation of the witnesses will always depend on our
appreciation of the moral phenomena ; and it is not
scientific conscientiousness, but philosophical perversity,
which tries to ignore this obvious truth. Surely it only
needs to be stated that the man to whom Christian
history and the New Testament life are the divinest
things he can conceive, and the man to whom they are
meaningless or even pathological phenomena, must take
different views of what their earliest representatives
attest as their cause. In this sense, it is fair enough to
say that beliefjn the resurrection ig ft, valnp-jiirlgmpnt
But it is not implied, when the word is used in this sense,
that the resurrection never took place, and that we
cannot speak of historical evidence in connexion with it.
It is well worth remarking that in the earliest great
discussion of this subject — that in the first epistle to the
Corinthians — Paul does justice to both the historical and
the spiritual evidence for the resurrection, and sets the
two in their proper relation to each other. The histori
cal evidence comes first. ' He appeared to Peter, then
to the Twelve . . . He appeared to me also.' It cannot
be repeated too often that this is fundamental. If there
had not been men who could say this, there would never
have been such a thing in the world as Christian life,
with the evidence for the resurrection which it brings.
Unless the apostolic testimony among men, supported
as it was by the spiritual power with which it was
delivered, had commanded faith, the Christian religion
could never have come to be. There is the exaggera
tion of paradox in a saying like Mr. Inge's1 that ' re-
1 In Contentio Veritatis, p. 90.

132 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
ligion, when it confines itself strictly to its own province,
never speaks in the past tense. It is concerned only
with what is, not with what was. History as history is
not its business.' Paul spoke in the past tense when he
said, ' He appeared unto me.' If we drop what was out
of what is, how much is left ? The true case of any one
who believes in the resurrection is not that ' history as
history ' is not the business of religion ; but that, as
Paul says about older idols, 'history as history' is
nothing in the world. If Jesus actually rose, as Paul
attests on the ground that He had appeared to him in
His exaltation, we may require to enlarge our concep
tions of the historical, but we cannot say that religion
and history are independent of each other. This is very
far from the mind of Paul. The apostle never argues
that ' the real basis of our belief in the resurrection of
Christ is a great psychological fact — a spiritual experi
ence.'1 The resurrection must certainly be attested, if
it is to win faith, by witnesses like Peter and Paul who
have been spiritually transformed by it ; if the appearing
of Jesus had made no difference to them, if it had left
them the men they were before, no one would have
believed them when they told He had appeared. But
testimony does not cease to be testimony when it is
delivered by men who have been themselves transformed
by what they attest. The truth does not cease to be
independently true when its power is demonstrated in
its moral workings, and we must take care that the desire
to put Christianity on a basis independent of history, a
basis beyond the reach of historical doubt, does not lead
1 Inge, ut supra, p. 87.

THE RESURRECTION 133
us to withdraw from under it the only basis on which it
has ever been sustained.
Premising this, however, it is of extreme interest to
notice how Paul adds to the direct historical testimony
for the resurrection an indirect spiritual evidence which
in its place is of the highest value. To put it broadly,
Christian experience in all its forms implies the resur
rection. State the content of this experience as you
will, take any aspect or illustration of it you please, and
if you deny the resurrection, instead of being the highest
and truest form of human life, such experience must be
considered a thing illegitimate, abnormal, delusive. All
through his argument Paul employs the reductio ad
absurdum. At first he states his case quite indefinitely :
' if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is vain, and
your faith is vain too ' ( i Cor. 1 5 14). Vain, /cow, means
empty, with nothing in it. Whatever is to be said of
Paul's preaching, we surely cannot say this. A nature
so powerful and passionate as his cannot be raised to
the most intense action, and sustained in it through life,
by that which has nothing in it. A preaching that so
stimulated the intelligence of the preacher himself, that
put the irresistible constraint on him which he so often
describes,1 that carried away the auditors as it swept
upon them ' in power and in the Holy Spirit, and in much
assurance ' (1 Thess. 1 ') must have had something in it.
It must have had behind it a power corresponding in
character and in force to the effects which it produced
both in the apostle and his audience ; and that power,
as Paul apprehended it, was the power of the Risen
1 See 1 Cor. 9 16, 2 Cor. 5 13f-, Acts 18 6— this last also at Corinth.

134 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
Saviour. But the apostle proceeds to give a more special
point to this general truth. ' If Christ is not raised, your
faith is vain, ye are yet in your sins.' Vain is in this
place /jbaraia, not Kevij, futile or to no purpose, rather
than having nothing in it. Your faith means your
Christianity, your new religion. The great blessing it
has brought you is, as you imagine, reconciliation to
God ; as believers, you are no longer in your sins ; in
the consciousness of reconciliation to God they are
annulled both in their guilt and in their power; the
regenerative pardon of God in Christ has made you
new creatures. But this regenerative pardon is the
pardon of God in Christ : it is preached to men in the
Risen Lord who died for sin, and who sends His spirit
to those who believe in Him ; apart from this Risen
Lord it has no legitimacy, no reality at all. But who
will dare to say that the consciousness of reconciliation
to God, which is the essence of all Christian experience,
the inspiration of all Christian praise, the spring of all
Christian life, is no more than an illusion ? To Christians,
at all events, it is more real than anything else which
human beings call reality, and its reality stands and falls
with that of the resurrection. There may be morbid
phenomena in the Christian life, as in life on every plane,
and no doubt there are ; but to say that the Christian
life itself, in that which is most intimately characteristic
of it, is nothing but a morbid phenomenon, is too much.
At all events it was too much for Paul. For him the
doxologies in which men who were no longer in their
sins celebrated the living Lord who had redeemed them
were not wild and whirling words : they were the only

THE RESURRECTION 135
words in which utterance was given to the final truth of
life. And he has still other ways in which he can press his
case. If Christ is not risen, 'then they also who have fallen
asleep in Christ are perished.' Paul had seen men fall
asleep in Christ. He had watched Stephen stoned, and
heard him cry, ' Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.' He had
seen our poor human nature, in mortal weakness, lay
hold of the immortal love of God in Christ, and through
faith in Him triumph over the last enemy. He be
lieved that there was nothing on earth so priceless as
such faith, nothing so real and so honouring to God.
He could not believe that it was in vain. God would
be ashamed of such people, to be called their God, unless
their hope of immortality was made good. He would
be unworthy of their trust. But such hope was inspired
by the resurrection of Jesus ; it is only through the
resurrection it can be satisfied ; and therefore for Paul
who so judges, and for all who share his appreciation of
the dying Christian's faith, the resurrection is as certain
as the fidelity of God to those who trust Him even in
death. The final turn which the apostle gives to his
argument has been much censured by superior moralists :
' if in this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of
all men most miserable.' The enlightened multitude
which has advanced so far as to know' that virtue is its
own reward has been very severe upon this. A man,
we are told, ought to live the highest life quite irrespective
of whether there is a life beyond or not. It is hardly
profitable, however, to discuss the kind of life a man will
live quite irrespective of conditions. Life is determined

136 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
by the kind of motives which enter into it. If a man
believes as Paul did in the Risen Christ and in the im
mortal life beyond death, motives from that sphere of
reality will enter into his life here, and give it a new
character; and it will be time enough to disparage the
morality of this verse when we find the people who dis
pense with the apostolic motive leading the apostolic
life. That man would be of all men most miserable who
ran a race for a hope set before him, and found when he
had reached the goal that he himself and the hope and
all that had inspired him crumbled into dust. It is in
the same temper that the apostle writes immediately
afterwards : ' If after the manner of men I fought with
beasts at Ephesus, what doth it profit me ? If the dead
are not raised, let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we
die.' This is not a childish petulance, as if he had said,
' I will not be good unless I get to heaven ' ; it is rather
the passionate expression of the feeling that if goodness
and all that is identified with it is not finally victorious
— in a word, is not eternal — there is no such thing as
goodness at all. If life is bounded by time, men will
live in one way ; if it has an outlook beyond death, they
will live in another way, for the range and balance of
their motives will be different. Paul is concerned about
the Corinthian denial of the resurrection, because it
seems to him to spring from a moral preference for the
limited view and the narrower range of motives, a pre
ference by which life is inevitably degraded. He does
not argue that a man who rejects the resurrection is a
bad man, sensual or petty in his morals, but he does
assume that the mind of a bad man, whether it be sensual

THE RESURRECTION 187
or only small, is weighted against the evidence for the
resurrection ; and in that he is undoubtedly right. Such
a man does not so easily see or sympathise with the
meaning of the resurrection ; he does not relish what it
stands for, and is so far disqualified from doing justice
to the evidence on which it rests.
It is not possible to present the various ways in which
the evidence for the resurrection is morally qualified
without saying or assuming things which to some minds
will seem unfair. But this seeming unfairness is not to'
be imputed to the person who presents the case ; it is
involved in the necessities of every case in which moral
considerations come into play. If a man can easily
assume that the Christian consciousness of reconciliation
to God, the Christian hope of immortality, the Christian
devotion of the apostolic life, are things which have no
proper place in the moral experience of human beings ;
if it is easy for him to argue that they must be eliminated,
reduced or discounted somehow, to bring the mind to
moral sanity ; if he can seriously think that the New
Testament is no more than the wonderful monument of
an immense delusion, he will not easily be persuaded to
believe in the resurrection of Jesus. Not that he is
invited to believe in it on the ground of these moral
phenomena, in the appreciation of which men may con
ceivably differ. But with these phenomena present to
his mind, or rather, as we must say of all moral pheno
mena, to his conscience — with some sense of the character
of Jesus, with some perception of the gospel of the resur
rection, the appeal which God makes through it to
sinful man, with some knowledge of what it has pro-

138 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
duced in human life — he is invited to accept the testimony
of witnesses who say, ' We have seen the Lord.' It is the
whole of this complex of facts taken together which
constitutes the evidence for the resurrection ; and the
moral qualifications of it, which the writer has tried to
explain, may be said at once to impair and to strengthen
its appeal. They impair it for those whose estimate of
the moral phenomena involved is low ; they strengthen
it for those whose estimate of these phenomena is high.
If there were no such phenomena at all — if the alleged
resurrection of Jesus were an insulated somewhat, with
neither antecedents nor consequences — no one could
believe it ; that which has neither relations nor results
does not exist. But the mere fact that the phenomena
with which the alleged resurrection is bound up are
moral phenomena, which will be differently appreciated
by different men, makes it impossible to give a demon
stration of it as we give a demonstration in mathematics
or in natural science. As far as demonstration can be
given in history, it is given by the word of credible and
competent witnesses like Peter and Paul. No historian
questions that Paul had the experience which he de
scribed as seeing the Lord ; the open question is, what
is the worth of the experience which he so describes?
Was it an illusion ? was it the accompaniment of an
epileptic fit ? was it the self-begotten vision of an
overheated brain ? Or was it a real manifestation of the
exalted Lord, with all the significance which Paul dis
covered in it ? There is no value in an offhand answer
prescribed by a general view of what is or is not possible
in nature or in history. The only answer which has

THE RESURRECTION 139
value is that which takes into account, first, the con
firmation — if there be such a thing — of the testimony of
Paul by that of other witnesses; and second, the other
realities of experience which stand in necessary relation
to the alleged fact. It is on its estimate of this evidence
as a whole that the Christian Church has since the be
ginning based its faith in the resurrection of Jesus, and the
writer cannot feel that any philosophy or criticism has di
minished in the least its convincing and persuasive power.
To present the evidence for the resurrection in this
way will not surprise those who have thought about the
subject. The broad facts on which the certainty of it
rests are that it is attested by men who declare that
Jesus appeared to them, and that it stands in such relation
to other realities as guarantees that it is itself real. Of
course this leaves a great many questions unanswered.
It does not tell us anything we can realise as to the
mode of being in which Jesus appeared : it does not
enable us to interpret the appearances scientifically, and
to relate the Risen Saviour to the constitution and
course of nature with which we are familiar. The
original witnesses like Paul never bring Him back into
this world, so as to be a part of it as He was before
death ; His appearing is the revelation of a transcendent
life, and of another world which eludes the resources of
physical science. But it is on the broad foundation of
the certainty which the resurrection of Jesus had for
Paul, and which it has for all who accept the primitive
testimony in the large scope given to it above, that we
have to investigate such narratives of the appearings of
Jesus, and of His intercourse with His disciples, as we

140 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
find in the synoptic gospels and the book of Acts.
Though we should find these full of difficulties which
elude all attempts at explanation — nay, though there
should turn out to be features in them to which we could
not assign any historical value — our faith in the resur
rection, firmly established beforehand on its proper basis,
would not be disturbed. We should know less than we
thought we did about how the resurrection life was mani
fested, but we should be as sure as ever that the
manifestation was made, and that is all in which we are
concerned. The strict sequence of the argument, therefore, does
not require us to enter into such details, but they have
been so prominent in most discussions of the resurrec
tion that it is worth while to refer to them in passing.
The principal difficulties have been found in connexion
with three features in the narratives. The first concerns
the sequence of the appearances of Jesus ; the second,
the progressive materialising, or what is alleged to be
such, in the representations of the Risen One ; and the
third, the place of His appearing.
As for the first, it has to be frankly admitted that no
one has ever succeeded in constructing a harmony which
combines without inconsistency or contradiction all that
we read in the Gospels, in Acts, and in ist Corinthians,
on this subject. He who wishes to see the best case
that can be stated for the accuracy and credibility of the
New Testament witnesses may find it in the Essay of
Dr. Chase 1 ; he who wishes to see the strongest case
that can be made against them may consult Schmiedel's
1 Cambridge Theological Essays.

THE RESURRECTION 141
article in the Encyclopcedia Biblica} Whether the time
over which these appearings extended were longer or
shorter — and everything in the New Testament favours
the idea that it was comparatively short — it must have
been a time of intense excitement for all concerned. The
agitation of the actors, their emotions, their amazement,
incredulity, fear, joy, are vividly reflected in the stories.
If their depositions had been taken on oath immediately
afterwards, it is certain that discrepancies in detail would
have appeared ; but no one who knows what evidence is
would maintain that discrepancies of this kind discredit
the main fact which is attested. We do not know how
soon accounts of the resurrection appearances of Jesus
began to be put on record ; but as has been already
observed, the gospels as we have them were not written
till after the death of Paul, and it was too late then to
find out with any precision how this or that appearing
preserved in tradition was related in time to the others.
The series in ist Corinthians xv. is no doubt chrono
logical, but it does not profess to be complete, and it
leaves us perfectly free to combine other appearances
with those it records as best we can. One of the great
est difficulties connected with the temporal aspect of the
resurrection is that which rises out of the apparent incon
sistency of one and the same writer — the author of the
third gospel and of Acts. The first impression left upon
the mind by the gospel is that it was on the day of the
resurrection itself that Jesus appeared to the two dis
ciples on His way to Emmaus, to Peter, and to the
company in Jerusalem; and that on that same day, after
1 Resurrection and Ascension Narratives, vol. iv. 4039 ff.

142 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
giving this company His final charge, He led them out
to Bethany and there parted from them with blessing
(and ascended into heaven). But this, notoriously, is
not what we find in Acts. There the parting and the
ascension at Bethany do not take place till six weeks
after the resurrection. It is not easy to believe that
Luke, in writing the sequel to his gospel which he had
in view from the beginning, which is indeed only the
second chapter of the same work, and which was in all
probability produced continuously with it, was conscious
of any such inconsistency in his own mind. He did not
write for people who knew nothing of his story, but for
a circle — for his work was never intended for Theophilus
alone — which was acquainted with him and the tradition
he represented ; and not to insist on the fact that a day
of impossible length would be required to take in all the
events of the last chapter of the gospel, the probabilities
are that its earliest readers, who may never have read it
apart from Acts, knew that its closing section was essen
tially an abridgment or summary, and that whether it was
to be interrupted at this point or that — after ver. 43 or
after ver. 49 — it covered a much longer period than twelve
or eighteen hours. There is much to be said for the
idea that in the last verses of the gospel Luke condenses
into a few lines what he is able in the opening of Acts
to expand in some detail, just as in the last verses of
Acts he condenses into a sentence two whole years of
Paul's preaching in Rome, which he would have expanded
in a third book, had he been able to bring his history
of Christianity down to a provisional termination with
the fall of Jerusalem and the death of his two great

THE RESURRECTION 143
figures, Peter and Paul. But however this may be,
no chronological difficulty impairs in the slightest
degree the value of the testimony to the resurrection
on which faith has rested from the first. We see how
such difficulties would arise ; we see how inevitably
they must have arisen ; and seeing this we know how to
discount them.
Many have felt the second class of difficulties more
serious — those arising out of the progressive materialisa
tion of the appearances of Jesus. At first, it is said, He
only appears ; and the visionary reality of an appearance
is not to be disputed. Appearances do appear, however
they are to be interpreted. It is a step further when the
appearance speaks. Still, speaking is only the counter
part of hearing, and as hearing may be as inward and
subjective as seeing, the speaking also may be allowed to
pass as a way of representing one aspect of the experi
ence. This, it may be said, is all the length we are
carried by Paul. He saw the Lord, and the Lord spoke
to him, but there is nothing materialistic in this. He
does, indeed, speak of His body, but it is the body of His
glory (Phil. 3 21) — that incorruptible spiritual body into
the likeness of which He will change the body of our
humiliation ; not a body of flesh and blood, which cannot
inherit the Kingdom of God. We might conceive the
Risen Saviour saying to Thomas, ' Reach hither thy
finger and see My hands ; and reach hither thy hand and
put it into My side ; and be not faithless, but believing' :
we might conceive this in consistency with Paul, for the
body of His glory is the body in which He suffered,
changed as we shall be changed when this corruptible has

144 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
put on incorruption. But can we, in consistency with
Paul's doctrine of the resurrection body, conceive Jesus
saying, ' Handle Me and see, for a spirit hath not flesh
and bones as ye behold Me having ' ? Can we conceive
that He took a piece of broiled fish and ate it before the
disciples (Luke 24 s9'43)? It is not wanton to ask such
questions : they rise involuntarily in the mind, and we
have no choice but to face them. One way of doing so
is to argue that the only reality in the resurrection stories
is that of visionary appearances of Jesus, and that every
thing else in the gospel record is to be explained as the
effort of those who believed in these appearances to per
suade others to believe in them — the effort to exhibit
them as so indubitably and convincingly real that no one
would be able to refuse his faith. But reality for the
popular mind is that which is demonstrable to the senses ;
it is material reality ; and hence the proof of the resur
rection is more and more materialised. The first step in
this process of materialisation is the introduction of the
empty grave : the real proof of the resurrection, such as
it is, had originally nothing to do with the grave ; it was
the quite independent fact that Jesus had appeared be
yond the grave. To the empty tomb one infallible sign
was added after another — conversations, the hands and
the side, the flesh and the bones, and at last the crudity
of eating and drinking. It is a strong argument against
this way of explaining all these phenomena that if this be
their genesis, it has left no trace of its motive in the New
Testament. The empty tomb comes before us only as
a fact, not as an argument. It is never referred to as
throwing light either on the character or the reality of

THE RESURRECTION 145
the resurrection, though it is assumed, of course, in
Matthew 28, that if the Jews had been able to produce
the body of Jesus the evidence for the resurrection would
have been destroyed. It is not easy to dispute this
assumption. The confidence of the disciples in their
Master's victory over death could not be without relation
to His victory over the grave. They did not believe
that He would rise again at the last day, they believed
from the very beginning that He had risen again already;
and it is merely incredible that with such a faith inspiring
them they never so much as thought of the grave, or had
not a moment of trouble in reconciling to their belief in
the resurrection of Jesus the demonstration given by the
grave, if His body still lay there, that He too saw cor
ruption. The empty grave is not the product of a naive
apologetic spirit, a spirit not content with the evidence
for the resurrection contained in the fact that the Lord
had appeared to His own and had quickened them into
new victorious life ; it is not the first stage in a process
which aims unconsciously as much as voluntarily at
making the evidence palpable, and independent, as far as
may be, of the moral qualifications to which we have
already adverted ; it is an original, independent and un-
motived part of the apostolic testimony. The whole
mysteriousness of the resurrection is in it ; in combina
tion with the appearances of Jesus, and with all that
flowed from them, it brings us to a point at which the
resources of science are exhausted, the point at which the
transcendent world revealed in the resurrection touches
this world, at once enlarging the mind and bringing it to
a stand. This mysteriousness attaches to all that we read
K

146 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
in the gospels of the appearances of Jesus — His coming
and going, His form, as it is called in Mark 1612, His
showing of His hands and His side ; but whether it can
be extended in any way to His eating may well seem
doubtful. Meats for the belly and the belly for meats,
Paul says, and God shall destroy both it and them.
Eating is a function which belongs to the reality of this
life, but not to that of immortality ; and there does seem
something which is not only incongruous but repellent in
the idea of the Risen Lord eating. It makes Him real
by bringing Him back to earth and incorporating Him
again in this life, whereas the reality of which His
resurrection assures us is not that of this life, but of
another life transcending this. The eating is only men
tioned by Luke (Gospel, 24 39a, Acts 1 4, 10 41), and when
we consider the fact, which a comparison with the other
gospels renders unquestionable, that Luke everywhere
betrays a tendency to materialise the supernatural, it is
not too much to suppose that this tendency has left
traces on his resurrection narrative too. But though we
have to discount this, the resurrection itself, as the reve
lation of life in another order, is not touched. It only
means that we do not assign to the resurrection life,
which has a higher reality of its own, that same kind of
reality, with all its material conditions and limitations,
with which we are familiar in this world. To reject the
eating is not to reject the resurrection life of Jesus, it is
to preserve it in its truth as a revelation of life at a new
level — life in which eating and drinking are as inappro
priate as marrying or giving in marriage.
We now come to the third of the difficulties con-

THE RESURRECTION 147
nected with the gospel narratives of the resurrection,
that which concerns the place of Jesus' appearing. If
we take the gospels as they stand, and attempt to har
monise them, we may think at ¦ first that there are
sufficient facilities for doing so. If in Matthew Jesus
appears to His disciples only in Galilee, and in Luke
only in Jerusalem, in John He appears to them in both ;
and it may seem reasonable to apply to difficulties about
space the same considerations which have already enabled
us to discount the difficulties about time. But a closer
scrutiny reveals to us that in their representation of the
scene of Jesus' appearances the evangelists do not differ
from each other merely as men might differ who were
recording the testimony of agitated observers. In this
case there might no doubt be divergences, but they
would be of an accidental character; they would explain
themselves, or would need no explanation. What we
find in the gospels is far more conscious, deliberate, and
serious than this, and there is something perplexing,
not to say disconcerting about it, until we understand
the evangelists' point of view. What are the facts,
then, under this head, and how are we to look at
them ?
In the gospel according to Matthew, ch. 2631f-, we
have the remarkable word of Jesus spoken to His dis
ciples as they left the upper room for the garden of
Gethsemane. 'All ye shall be offended in Me this
night ; for it is written, I will smite the shepherd, and the
sheep of the flock shall be scattered abroad. But after
I am raised up, I will go before you into Galilee.' This
is not the only passage, as we shall afterwards see, in

148 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
which Jesus predicts His resurrection, but it is the only
one in which He connects it with the immediate future
of His disciples, and gives what is in a sense the pro
gramme of His appearances. There is no reason to
suppose that Jesus did not speak these words. It is not
always safe to lean on internal evidence, but the truly
poetic conception of the Good Shepherd rallying His
dispersed flock and going before them (cf. John io4) to
the old familiar fields, is at least in keeping with the
occasion and its mood. The evangelist certainly takes
the words seriously, and his resurrection narrative
carries out the scheme which they suggest. When the
women visit the tomb on the first day of the week, an
angel says to them : ' Go quickly, and tell His disciples
that He has risen from the dead; and behold He goeth
before you into Galilee; there shall ye see Him' (Matt.
28 7). The same message is repeated by Jesus when He
appears to these women on their way to execute the charge
of the angel : ' Go tell My brethren that they depart into
Galilee, and there shall they see Me ' (Matt. 28 10). It is
not necessary to consider whether verses 9 and 10 are no
more than a ' doublet ' of what precedes — the tradition
of the same fact in another form ; the point is that this
is the programme which is carried out in the first gospel.
The eleven disciples departed into Galilee (v. 16), and
saw Jesus there. There also they received the great
commission, Go and make disciples of all nations. Not
only is there no appearance of Jesus to the disciples at
Jerusalem, but any such appearance is carefully excluded.
The disciples are promptly directed away from Jerusalem
— go quickly and tell them — both by the angel and by

THE RESURRECTION 149
Jesus, and we must assume that they left at once. As
far as they are concerned the appearing of Jesus is an
experience which is connected with Galilee alone.
If we turn to the gospel of Mark, we find there also,
at ch. 14 a7, the prophetic words of Jesus quoted above.
It can hardly be doubted that for him also, as for
Matthew, they determined the character of his resurrection
narrative. He reproduces them in his account of what
took place at the grave. The angel says to the women,
Go tell His disciples and Peter that He goeth before you
into Galilee : there shall ye see Him, as He said unto you.
The gospel of Mark, like everything in the New Testa
ment, was written by a believer in the resurrection ; and
it is inconceivable that it broke off without the fulfilment
of this programme. The consternation of the women
described in verse 8 — ' And they went out and fled from
the tomb : for trembling and astonishment had come
upon them ; and they said nothing to any one ; for they
were afraid ' — is not the end of the story ; and in spite
of the ingenious comment of Wellhausen can never have
been the end of it. As it stands at present, the gospel
according to Mark records no appearance of Jesus what
ever ; but it is no rash assumption that with the same
prophetic intimation as Matthew (Mark i428=Matt.
26 82), and the same or an even more emphatic repro
duction of it by the angel at the tomb (Mark 16 7 = Matt.
28 7), the original conclusion ran on the same lines as
that of our first gospel. The fear-stricken women may
have been met, as in Matthew, and reassured by the
Risen Jesus Himself; and when they did their errand
the eleven would start for Galilee and see the Lord

150 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
there. Indeed, the relation of the two evangelists is
such that the only plausible construction of the facts is
that the last chapter of Matthew, barring what is said
about bribing the soldiers, which corresponds to a
passage earlier in Matthew and with no parallel in Mark,
is based throughout on Mark's original conclusion. Had
this been preserved, it would have answered to Matt.
2g 16.20. tj-at js> jt woui(j have given a Galilaean appear
ance of Jesus to the eleven, and would have excluded an
appearance at Jerusalem.
When we turn to Luke, it is of the first importance to
remember that he wrote with Mark before him. It is
not possible here to give the proof of this ; but though
there are still scholars who hold that the evangelists had
no literary relation to one another, and that each wrote
immediately and only from oral tradition, the writer can
only express his own conviction of the entire inadequacy
of any such view to do justice to the phenomena. As
suming, therefore, that Luke knew Mark, we notice in
the first place that he does not give the words of Jesus
on leaving the upper room. There is nothing about the
smiting of the shepherd, the scattering of the flock, the
rising and going before into Galilee. This is not because
Luke was ignorant of the words, or accidentally over
looked them, for we can see when we come to his resur
rection narrative that the sound of them was in his ears.
His two angels say to the women, ' He is not here, but
is risen ; remember how He spake unto you while He
was yet in Galilee, saying that the Son of Man must be
delivered up into the hands of sinful men, and be cruci
fied, and the third day rise again.' Here a general re-

THE RESURRECTION 151
ference to Jesus' predictions of His death and resurrection,
made while He was yet in Galilee, is substituted for the
direction to the disciples to go into Galilee and meet
H im there. We may say ' substituted ' without hesita
tion ; for there is nothing accidental about it. Luke
had what he thought sufficient reasons for omitting
altogether what he read in Mark 14 27 f- ; and for giving
what he read in Mark 1 6 7 an entirely different turn. A
reader unfamiliar with the minute comparison of the
gospels may think these reckless statements, but no one
who has been at pains to examine the way in which
Luke habitually makes use of Mark will find any diffi
culty in them. The only question they raise is, Can we
find out the reasons on the strength of which Luke
felt entitled or bound to treat these passages as he has
done? The answer is obvious. Luke omitted or modified
these passages because they connected the appearances
of the Risen Jesus with Galilee, whereas everything he
had to tell about Him was connected with Jerusalem.
Hence he not only records appearances only at Jeru
salem or in its vicinity, but he takes as much pains to
confine the disciples to Jerusalem as Matthew takes to
get them away. The women do not, as in Matthew,
see Jesus on the way from the tomb, but He appears
on the very day of the resurrection to Cleophas and his
friend, to Peter, and to the eleven and those with them.
He bids them, apparently on this occasion, continue in
the city until they are clothed in power from on high
(24 49). They are not only not represented as going to
Galilee and seeing Jesus there, according to His command-

152 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
ment : His commandment is reversed ; they are forbidden
to leave Jerusalem ; and it is there, and not amid the
scenes of His early fellowship with them, that they receive
the great commission. These are the facts : what do
they signify, and how are they to be explained ?
If we were merely dealing with texts, the relation of
which to reality was indeterminable except from them
selves, we might be hopelessly baffled. We should have
to say that both these ways of representing the case
could not be true, and that quite possibly neither was.
If one witness says, Jesus appeared to His disciples in
Galilee only, not in Jerusalem ; and another, He ap
peared to them in Jerusalem only, not in Galilee ; the
temptation is strong to say that we cannot depend on
anything that is said about His appearing. But here it
is necessary to remember the evidence for the resurrec
tion which is quite independent of Matthew and Luke.
Those manifestations of the Risen Saviour which in
themselves and in the spiritual quickening which accom
panied them created the Christian Church and the New
Testament retain their original certainty even under the
extreme supposition that we can make nothing what
ever of the testimony of the evangelists. But there is
no need even to contemplate a case so extreme. The
faith of the evangelists themselves did not rest on the
isolated stories they told of the appearing of Jesus,
whether in one place or another ; it rested where such
faith must always rest, on the basis of the apostolic
testimony in general, and on the powerful working in
the Church of the spirit sent from Christ. The apostolic
testimony, however, was much broader and more com-

THE RESURRECTION 153
prehensive than anything we find in the evangelists, as
a glance at i Corinthians 1 5 4'8 is sufficient to show. Of
this, the writer believes, the evangelists themselves
were as well aware as we ; they could not have been
ignorant of a tradition which was common, when Paul
wrote, to all Christendom — handed over to him at Jeru
salem, and by him transmitted to the Gentile churches.
The question suggested by the phenomena of the gospels
accordingly takes another form. It is not, How are we
to believe in the resurrection in face of the indubitable
and intentional inconsistencies of Matthew and Luke ?
but, What was the interest which guided an evangelist
in what he wrote about the resurrection ? What did he
conceive to be his duty in this matter, and how were
Matthew and Luke led to do their duty in a way which
at first sight is so disconcerting to the reader ?
In view of the facts which have just been presented, it
is not too rash to suggest that in their resurrection nar
ratives the evangelists did not conceive themselves to
be stating systematically or exhaustively the evidence
for the resurrection. Not that these narratives are not
evidence, but as the writers must have been aware, they
are quite inadequate to represent the evidence as a
whole. The aim of the various writers — their concep
tion of an evangelist's function — seems rather to have
been this : believing in the resurrection themselves, and
writing for those who believed in it, they aimed at giving
such an account of it as should bring out its permanent
significance for the Church. The main thing in all the
resurrection narratives in the gospels is the appearing of
Jesus to the eleven, and His final charge or commission.

154 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
This is obviously the case in Matthew, where apart from
the appearance to the women in ch. 289f-, which is only
used to prepare for this, there is no other manifestation
of Jesus at all. To the writer, it is not doubtful that in
the original form of Mark it would have been the same.
Even the later conclusion to Mark, which mentions
appearances to Mary of Magdala and to ' two of them
as they walked, on their way into the country,' has no
thing to tell of these borrowings from Luke and John ;
in keeping with the true conception of a gospel narrative
it enlarges only on the appearance to the eleven, and on
what Jesus said to them. Luke, no doubt, in his exquisite
story of the two disciples at Emmaus, represents the
Lord as interpreting to them in all the Scriptures the
things concerning Himself, but he too concentrates
attention on an appearance to the eleven and on the
great commission given on that occasion. If we leave
out of account the supplementary twenty-first chapter,
and regard the fourth gospel as closing according to
the original intention of the writer with ch. 20 31, we
see that there also the same holds good. What John is
interested in is to be seen in ch. 20 19"23. Incidentally
an evangelist might mention this or that with regard to
an appearing of Jesus to an individual ; he might tell
expressly that He was seen of Mary Magdalene, as John
does ; or of more women than one, as Matthew does ;
he might imply, without expressly telling, or having any
details to tell, that He had appeared to Peter, as Luke
does ; but it was not in these incidents that he was inter
ested, and it is not on the precision of his knowledge
as to their time, place, or circumstances, that his belief in

THE RESURRECTION 155
the resurrection or his sense of its significance depends.
The one main thing is that Jesus appeared to the dis
ciples, the men whom He had chosen to be with Him,
and whom He had trained to continue His work ; and
that in His intercourse with these chosen men their
minds were opened to the meaning of the resurrection
both for Him and for themselves. His greatness rose
upon them as it had never done in the days of His flesh.
They became conscious of His exaltation, of His entrance
into the sphere of the divine. They saw Him seated at
the right hand of God. He had all power given to Him
in heaven and on earth, and in the strength of this
exaltation He sent them forth to win the world for
Him. It is not in the least improbable — or so, at least, it
seems to the writer — that in the great appearing of
Jesus to the eleven recorded in all the gospels (Matt.
28 16-20, Mark 1614-18, Luke 24 38'49, John 20 1923) we have
not the literal record of what took place on a single
occasion, but the condensation into a representative
scene of all that the appearances of Jesus to His disciples
meant. These appearances may well have been more
numerous — with 1 Cor. 15 in our hands we may say
quite freely that they were more numerous — than the
evangelists enable us to see; but it is not separate
appearances, nor the incidental phenomena connected
with them, nor the details of time and place, in which
the evangelists and the Church for which they write are
interested. It is the significance of the resurrection it
self. If for the purpose of bringing out this significance
the whole manifestation of Jesus to His disciples was

156 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
condensed into a single representative or typical scene,
and if Jesus nevertheless had in point of fact appeared
in different places, we can understand how one evangelist
should put this typical scene in Galilee and another in
Jerusalem. When we see what is being done we should
rather say that both are right than that either is wrong.
If the gospel according to Matthew rests on the authority
of an original disciple of Jesus, it is very natural that he
should make Galilee the scene of the appearing ; Galilee,
as we have seen, had been prepared for by the word of
Jesus, and it would be endeared by old associations.
Luke, on the other hand, knew Christianity only as a
faith which had its cradle and capital at Jerusalem, and
it was as natural that he should put the representative
appearing there. In either case, however, it is a re
presentative appearing that is meant, and with whatever
relative right it is located in Jerusalem or in Galilee, it
is not in the location that the writer's interest lies. It is
in the revelation which is made of the exaltation of Jesus
and the calling of the Church. This, too, has a repre
sentative character, as is evident from the fact that
though the meaning is substantially the same in all the
gospels, the language in which it is conveyed is sur
prisingly different. If we compare the words which
Jesus speaks in the four passages just referred to — all of
which unquestionably serve the same purpose in the
gospels in which they respectively stand — it is evident
that we have no literal report of words of the Lord.
We have an expression ofthe significance of His exalta
tion for Himself and for the Church. What this signi
ficance was we have considered already in speaking of the

THE RESURRECTION 157
place of Christ in the faith of the synoptic evangelists ;
it covered their assurance that He was Lord of all, that
He was exalted a Prince and a Saviour, that forgiveness
was to be preached to all men in His name ; it included
the gift of the Holy Spirit and His own spiritual pres
ence. This is what an evangelist is concerned to attest,
and if the difficulties which a literal and formal criticism
finds in his narrative had been presented to him, the
probability is that he would not have taken them seriously.
He might cheerfully have admitted that with a perfectly
honest mind he had been mistaken about a detail
here or there ; but that he had been mistaken about the
main thing — that the Lord had appeared to His own,
and that this great commission was what His appearing
signified — he could not possibly admit. Nor need we.
The resurrection is not attested in the gospels by out
side witnesses who had inquired into it as the Psychical
Research Society inquires into ghost stories ; it is at
tested — in the only way in which it can be attested at
all — by people who are within the circle of realities to
which it belongs, who share in the life it has begotten,
and who therefore know that it is, and can tell what it
means. To see this is to get the right point of view for
dealing with the difficulties in the narratives ; it is not
too much to add, that it takes away from these difficulties
any religious importance. Whether we can tell precisely
how they originated or not, the testimony of the apostles
and the Church to the resurrection is unimpaired : Jesus
lives in His exaltation, and He holds from the beginning
in the faith of His disciples that incomparable place
which He can never lose.

158 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
The question with which we are ultimately concerned
— whether the Christian faith which we see in the New
Testament has a basis of fact sufficient to sustain it — is
in part answered by what has now been said. The New
Testament life would have no sufficient basis, indeed it
would never have been manifested in history, but for
the resurrection. It is in a sense the fulfilment of the
word of Jesus in the fourth gospel : Because I live, ye
shall live also ; we could never have seen or known it if
the creed had ended, as some people think a Christian
creed might end, with ' crucified, dead, and buried.' But
though without the resurrection the New Testament
attitude to Christ would have no justification, and would
in point of fact be plainly impossible, the resurrection,
taken by itself, is not that complete historical justifica
tion of Christianity which our ultimate question had in
view. The resurrection is the resurrection of Jesus, and
though it lifts Jesus, as it were, into His place of incom
municable greatness, it is this Person and no other who
is thus transcendently exalted, and there must be some
inner relation between what He is and what He was.
There must be some proportion between the life which
He now lives at God's right hand, and that which He
lived among men upon the earth ; there must, if Chris
tian faith is to be vindicated, be some congruity between
His present significance for God and man, as faith appre
hends it, and that which can be traced in His historical
career. It is in the life He lived on earth that His mind
is mainly revealed to us ; and if His mind, as we there
come in contact with it — His mind, in particular, with
regard to Himself, and the significance of His being and

THE SELF-REVELATION OF JESUS 159
work in the relations of God and man — did not stand in
essential relation to the believing Christian attitude
towards Him, we should feel that Christian faith, his
torically speaking, had an insecure foundation. The
New Testament estimate of Christ can only be vindi
cated if we can show that the historical Person, whose
resurrection is attested by the apostles, explicitly or
virtually asserted for Himself, during His life in the
world, a place in the relations of God and man as incom
municable and all-determining as that which we have
seen bestowed upon Him in the primitive Christian
books. The question, therefore, we have now to answer
is, What do we know of Jesus ? In particular, what
place — in His own apprehension— did Jesus fill in the
relations of men to God ?

II
THE SELF- REVELATION OF JESUS
(a) Preliminary critical considerations.
In proposing this question for discussion, at least in
the second and more definite form, we encounter the
same preliminary objections which confronted us in
dealing with the resurrection. There are those for
whom it is not a question at all, and who therefore will
not seriously raise it. To ask what place Jesus filled in
the relations of God and men contemplates the possi
bility of finding that He did fill some place of peculiar
interest and importance — the possibility, to put it
extremely, that He was and is to both God and man

160 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
what no other can be, and that all divine and human
relations are determined by Him; and this is a possi
bility which principle does not allow them to contemplate.
Jesus was a historical character, they argue ; and there
cannot be in history a man whose relations to God and
his kind are essentially different from those of other men.
A man may be a great spiritual genius, through whom
the realities and possibilities of the spiritual life are
revealed to others, but no man can be so identified with
the truth which he reveals as that if he were lost it would
be lost also. Plausible as this may seem, it is an a
priori settlement of a question which insists on being
settled otherwise. The only reason we have for raising
the question is that Jesus has, in point of fact, from the
very beginning, had a place assigned to Him by Chris
tian faith which is distinct in kind from that assigned to
other men ; He has been believed to be, both to God
and to the human race, what no other is or can be.
After what has been said in the earlier part of this dis
cussion, we cannot think this statement of the facts open
to question, and we do not feel at liberty to decide a
priori that the Christian faith from the beginning was a
complete mistake. There may have been grounds for
giving Jesus His incomparable place. It may not have
been an irrational enthusiasm, but the irresistible com
pulsion of fact in His character, His personality, His
attitude and claims, that made His followers exalt Him
as they did. No dogmatic preconception as to what is
possible or impossible in the field of history can exempt
us from the duty of inquiring into the facts. The very
men who were the first to have their religious life so

THE SELF-REVELATION OF JESUS 161
absolutely determined by Jesus once thought of Him as
only a neighbour, another like themselves. But they
came to think of Him very differently, and it is not for
the historian to decide peremptorily and off-hand that
they were wrong ; his function is rather to inquire what
it was in Jesus which changed their attitude to Him.
Even if he could not find out, he would have no right to
say that the change was gratuitous or irrational. He
could only say it awaited explanation.
What we have to do, therefore, is to get at the facts
in the most unprejudiced way we can. The difficulties
in the way of doing so are not to be ignored, but neither
are they to be exaggerated. Exaggerated they un
doubtedly are by those who point to the general char
acter of the gospels, and infer from it the impossibility
of using them with confidence for any historical purpose.
History, as Quintilian says, is written ad narrandum,
non ad probandum — to tell a story, not to make out a
case. But the gospels are written to make out a case.
This is avowed by the writer of the fourth ; his case is
that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and he writes
that men may believe this, and that believing they may
have life in His name (John 20 31). It is the case of the
others also, and though they do not state it so explicitly,
they are none the less under the influence of it while
they write. It is not so much that they deliberately
misrepresent facts, as that facts are unconsciously trans
formed in their minds to suit their case. Stories grow,
are amplified, heightened, illumined, made demon
strative. Jesus, in the only documents to which we can
appeal, is presented in a role, that of the Messiah, and
L

162 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
in every situation He acts up to the part. All the gospels
represent stages in the idealising of their hero, a process
which began, no doubt, in the imagination of His enthu
siastic disciples even while He lived, but which received an
irresistible and incalculable impulse when He rose from
the dead. The glory of His exaltation was reflected upon
His earthly career ; it was manifested in works, words,
and experiences answering to the greatness of the
Messiah, and of the hopes associated with Him. What,
therefore, we are enabled to trace by the help of the
gospels, is not so much the history of Jesus, as ' the
history of the faith of ancient Christendom during the
first half century of its existence.' 1 The gospels are not
historical sources ; they are documents which reflect ' the
faith and the religious imagination ofthe early churches.'2
It is more than seventy years now since Strauss in his
Life of Jesus gave the first systematic expression to this
general mode of appreciating the evangelic narratives,
and it has been echoed in writers whose name is Legion
down to the present hour. In the precise form which its
author gave it, the mythical theory may have been dissi
pated or reduced to insignificant proportions ; but in the
mental attitude to the gospel history which is here in
view — an attitude which has prevailed widely for two
generations, and is at the present moment perhaps more
prevalent than ever — we have an extraordinary testi
mony to its power. As long as this mental attitude
prevails we cannot get our question fairly considered,
Men's temperaments may vary, and with them the spirit
in which they address themselves to the study of the
1 J. Weiss, Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments, 36. 2 Ibid., 47,

THE SELF-REVELATION OF JESUS 163
gospels. One man's treatment may be poetic, or pos
sibly sentimental ; the gospels for him are the finest
flowering of the Christian imagination ; of course they
cannot be taken for truth, but they must always be
delicately and even reverently handled. Another is
mocking and unsympathetic ; another still dispassionate,
not to say unfeeling. But the result is always the same.
Jesus remains out of our reach. The figure which we
see in the gospels is the Christ of the Church's faith,
not a historical person. That figure did not create the
Church, it was created by it. As we have them, the
gospels are not the foundation of the Christian religion,
they are its fruit. They show us the Christian conscious
ness, not the consciousness of Christ.
Those who thus remind us that the gospels are not
historical but religious books — that their motive is not to
provide materials for the scientific biographer or his
torian, but to evoke and to build up faith — might perhaps
ask themselves whether the contrast which is here
implied is as real or as complete as they suppose. It is
quite true that it is one thing to tell a story, and another
to make out a case ; but if a man has a sound case, the
simplest way to make it out is to tell his story. It is
surely conceivable that his case may be constituted by
the facts. It is only if he has a bad case that he is under
any temptation to misrepresent, or colour, or suppress,
or produce facts. The attitude to the gospel narratives
which has just been described, and of which Strauss's
mythical theory is the most consistent and far-shining
example, is prescribed beforehand by the assumption
that the evangelists have a bad case. Jesus, it is

164 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
assumed, cannot really have that place in the relations
of God and man which the primitive Church assigned
Him, and therefore everything in the gospels which is
congruous with that place, which conditions it or is con
ditioned by it, must have some other explanation than
that it is true. But this assumption forecloses the
question, and is one which we are not entitled to make.
Why should not the evangelists, or the primitive Church
for which they wrote, have had a good case? Why
must it have been something else than reality which
made them give to Jesus the place they did ? And if it
is conceivable — as surely it is — that the New Testament
attitude to Jesus is right, it is as conceivable that the
attitude we have been considering to the narratives of
His life is wrong. In spite of protestations made in the
name of 'scientific' history, the possibilities of history
are not to be dogmatically determined beforehand.
If we could have such a thing as Christianity on
the basis here exhibited, it would manifestly be Chris
tianity without Jesus. It would be a religion which in
some way was connected with Him when it made its
entrance into history ; but the connexion would be
partly undiscoverable, and so far as it was discovered it
would be illegitimate. This position is frankly avowed,
for example, by Wellhausen. He distinguishes in the
broadest manner between Jesus and the gospel — that
is, between Jesus and the Christian religion as it has
existed from the beginning ; and he is not only certain
that the attempt to get back to the historical Jesus is
one which must always be frustrated, but one which,
even if it were successful, could only lead to disappoint-

THE SELF-REVELATION OF JESUS 165
ment. The historical Jesus, could we come face to
face with Him, would not sustain the Christian con
ception of the Christ ; He would not provide a justifica
tion for the religion which has attached itself to His
name. The true policy of the Church, therefore, is to
stick to the gospel, and not to try to return to Jesus.1
Those who retain any connexion with historical Chris
tianity find it hard to comprehend this state of mind.
They can draw no such distinction between Jesus and
the gospel. They know that if they eliminated Jesus
from what they call the gospel they would eliminate
everything. Their religion rests on historical realities
which are inseparable from the person of Jesus, or it
ceases to be. It would not follow, though it ceased to
be, that they could have no religion whatever. They
might still be believers in God as men were in Old
Testament times, but they could not be believers in
God 'through Him' (i Peter i 20). Their religion would
have no title to be called Christian, no claim to the
character of gospel. It is impossible, therefore, to sup
pose that the members of any Christian Church can find
relief from the stress of intellectual difficulty by dis
tinguishing between the gospel and Jesus. This is not
relief, but ruin ; it is not the rescuing of their religion,
but the abandonment, not to say the renunciation of it.
The assumption which underlies it has been frankly
stated by a writer already referred to : ' Jesus was
nothing more than a human being like the rest of us.'2
1 Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien, 108 ff.
1 J. Weiss, Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments, i. 67. The very words
ought to be quoted. ' Gerade dass Jesus nichts weiter war als ein Men-
schenkind wie wir andern auch, &c.' Weiss asserts in the same sentence

166 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
Of course if this can be assumed there is no more to be
said. The place which Jesus has always held in Chris
tian faith is one which is not open to the rest of us, never
has been and never can be; and if He is no more than
the rest of us, it should never have been open to Him.
Nevertheless, the connexion between Jesus and the Chris
tian religion remains ; and unless we are content to leave
it entirely in the dark, we shall find ourselves compelled
to raise the ulterior question which by this assumption
is foreclosed. Granting that the figure in the gospels is
the product of the Church's faith, by what was that faith
itself produced ? The New Testament taken as a whole
represents the most astonishing outburst of intellectual
and spiritual energy in the history of our race : by what
was it evoked ? Surely the probabilities are that some
extraordinary reality — something quite unlike the rest
of us — lies behind and explains all this : a reality so
powerful and impressive that it could not easily be lost
within the limits of a generation, either by simply falling
out of memory, or by being so transfigured and exalted
in imagination as to preserve almost no trace of its
original aspect or proportions. It is with this prejudice,
rather than with the opposite one, that we think it
reasonable to approach the investigation of a question
which can never be less than vital to those who have
been educated in Christian faith.
Before proceeding, however, to examination of the
facts, it is desirable to refer to two prevalent but some
what summary ways in which an attempt has been made
the greatness and power of the personality of Jesus and his own reverence
for it.

THE SELF-REVELATION OF JESUS 167
to get into contact with the reality which lies beneath
the gospel narratives, without entering into any scrutiny
in detail. The one, while there is nothing in it incon
sistent with history, is mainly inspired by a religious
interest. When a man who is morally in earnest, ab
sorbed in the effort to lead a spiritual life in the world of
nature, a life of freedom in the realm of necessity, takes
the gospels into his hand and looks upon the figure of
Jesus, the last thing which will occur to him is that this
figure is unreal. There may be a great deal in the
gospel narratives which puzzles him, which he does not
know what to do with, and for the present must ignore ;
but there is something also which is its own evidence
and which rises out of the narrative in unquestionable
reality — the spiritual life of Jesus. There is a person
before his eyes in the gospel whose spiritual reality (to
express it thus) is so indisputable that it carries his
historical reality along with it. A life of such perfect
trust in God, such wonderful love to God and man —
a life that by its very mass attracts to itself so irresist
ibly all feeble lives that have the faintest affinity with it
or capacity for it — a life that gathers into its own deep
and powerful stream all souls in search of God and
bears them on to the salvation they seek : what could
be idler than to speak of such a life as unhistorical or
unreal ? Those who come to the gospels thus can only
feel that the life of Jesus, even in the historical sense, is
the most real thing in the world ; and so far from admit
ting that Jesus is practically unknown to us, they are
certain that they know Him better than any one who
has ever lived, better even than themselves. They are

168 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
quite willing to leave to historical criticism the investiga
tion of incident and detail ; their conviction is not de
pendent on what is thought of any isolated word or act
ascribed to Jesus in the gospels ; but the reality, and it
must be added the historical reality, of the spiritual life
of Jesus is established for them on grounds which his
torical criticism must acknowledge, and which it cannot
set aside.
This is a way of approaching the gospels, and of getting
into contact with the reality attested in them, of which
we are bound to speak with the utmost respect. It is a
truly religious way of approaching them, and must largely
reproduce in the soul the experiences of the first dis
ciples of Jesus. But the more completely Jesus, through
the picture of His life in the gospels, establishes His
ascendency over souls seeking God and freedom, the
more inevitably will those questions arise which deal
with His place in the relations of the soul and God.
How is it that such an ascendency comes to be His ?
How does it come to be His alone? When we say,
' Yes, this life is real ; it is the life of one whom we
experience through it and in virtue of it to be Saviour and
Lord,' what do we mean ? Who is He ? Is there any
indication, in words ascribed to Him, of a consciousness
on His own part answering to or agreeing with these
experiences of ours ? Such questions cannot fail to arise
and to press for an answer, and it is in investigating the
gospels to find material for the answer, rather than in
dwelling upon the general assurance of the reality of the
inner life of Jesus, that any contribution is likely to be
made to the subject with which we are concerned. It is

THE SELF-REVELATION OF JESUS 169
too easily taken for granted by many who study the
genesis of faith in the modern man that he will rest con
tent with the immediate impression made by Jesus in the
gospels, and that ulterior questions need not be asked.
There are even those who think that it does not matter
how the ulterior questions are answered ; the impressions
are their own evidence and will remain what they are,
though the questions they naturally prompt should by
some never be raised, and by others pronounced insoluble.
But this is not so certain. Capable as the human mind
is of inconsistency, it does not readily disown the re
sponsibility of explaining and justifying its convictions.
What if Jesus Himself, in the special case with which
we are engaged, pressed this responsibility upon it?
What if He directly prompted the ulterior questions ?
It may turn out to be the case that in His whole bearing
toward men and God He assumes one way of answering
them to be adequate, and others not ; the extraordinary
influence which in the pages of the gospels He wields
over others may be merely the reflection of an extra
ordinary consciousness on His part of the place He fills
in all the relations of God and human souls. If upon
examination this should prove to be so, then valuable as
it is as a starting-point, that conviction of the historical
reality of Jesus which confines itself to the self-evidencing
reality of His spiritual life — a life assumed to be assimil
able, to the last fibre, by us — is not all we have to take
into account. While it assures us that Jesus was truly
a historical person, and a historical person who was a
great conductor of spiritual force, it does not face with
sufficient definiteness the question whether there was

170 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
in this historical person, not that which makes a spiritual
movement of some kind credible, but that which justifies
the particular spiritual movement which appeals to Him
as its Author. When we speak of the spiritual or inner
life of Jesus — an expression which we instinctively inter
pret by those experiences in ourselves which we should
describe by the same name — there is an involuntary
tendency to obliterate or ignore any difference which
may exist between Jesus and those to whom His spiritual
life appeals. Without consciously thinking of it, we
regard Him for the time as if He were only what the
rest of us are. But this amounts to deciding, also with
out thinking, the greatest question which the gospels
and the Christian religion raise. The self-consciousness
of Jesus is not a happy expression, but it is preferable to
the inner life of Jesus in one way: it safeguards more
effectively the objectivity and personal peculiarity of
that which it denotes. It leaves room for the possibility
that in the mind of Jesus about Himself there may be
not only the consciousness that He is one with us,
but such a consciousness as justifies the transcendent
place apart given to Him in the faith of the Church.
Hence it is the mind of Christ about Himself — His
self-consciousness in the technical sense — and not His
inner life or spiritual experiences in general, which
must be our principal subject of inquiry ; and to investi
gate this subject satisfactorily we must go beyond the
vague impressions in which the life of Jesus first proves
its reality to us, and study the gospel evidence in
detail. The second of the two summary ways of getting into

THE SELF-REVELATION OF JESUS 171
contact with the reality in the gospels is the polar
opposite of the one just discussed. It is that which is
illustrated in the well-known article of Schmiedel in the
Encyclopcedia Biblica. ' When a profane historian,' says
Schmiedel, ' finds before him a historical document which
testifies to the worship of a hero unknown to other
sources, he attaches first and foremost importance to
those features which cannot be deduced merely from the
fact of this worship, and he does so on the simple and
sufficient ground that they would not be found in this
source unless the author had met with them as fixed
data of tradition. The same fundamental principle may
safely be applied in the case of the gospels, for they also
are all of them written by worshippers of Jesus.'1 We
only put this more simply when we say that anything in
the gospels may be regarded as signally true if it is in
consistent with the worship of Jesus. If we could not
find such things at all, Schmiedel holds ' it would be
impossible to prove to a sceptic that any historical value
whatever was to be assigned to the gospels ; he would
be in a position to declare the picture of Jesus contained
in them to be purely a work of phantasy, and could
remove the person of Jesus from the field of history.'
If we accepted this canon of criticism, it might be re
assuring to us as historians to find that there are passages
in the gospels which no worshipper of Jesus could have
invented, passages, consequently, which were data to the
evangelists, and which we are safe in counting historical.
Of these the article referred to mentions five, which along
with four others, all the latter being connected with the
1 Encyclopedia Biblica, 1872 ff.

172 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
miracles and employed to discredit them, ' might be
called the foundation pillars for a truly scientific life of
Jesus.' The five passages in question are worth re
peating. They are — (i) Mark io17 : Why callest thou Me
good? None is good save God only. (2) Mark 3 21 :
He is beside Himself. (3) Matt. 1232: Whoso speaketh
a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him.
(4) Mark 1 3 32 ; Of that day and of that hour knoweth
no one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son
but the Father. And (5) Mark 1 5 u : My God, My God,
why hast Thou forsaken Me? It is a curious comment
on the things most surely believed among profane
historians, that, of these foundation pillars the third and
fifth have since been found by some decidedly shaky.
This, however, does not matter to us at present. What
does matter is that Jesus is only admitted to be real in
a sense which, avowedly, leaves the whole phenomenon
of New Testament religion not only unjustified but in
explicable. We have no testimony to Jesus at all, as
Schmiedel points out, except that of men who worshipped
Him ; but though some of that testimony, as will be
afterwards shown, comes from intimates and contem
poraries, the only part of it which we can receive as true
is that which is inconsistent with such worship. The idea
that there should be reality in Jesus of such a kind as to
justify worship is summarily excluded ab initio : its ex
clusion, indeed, is the first principle of this criticism. It
is one way of criticising this to point out that it takes for
granted that the worship of Jesus is wrong, that the
Christian attitude to Him is unjustifiable, and that the
Christian religion was from the beginning a mistake ; it

THE SELF-REVELATION OF JESUS 173
is another, and not a less relevant one, to point out
that it leaves the Christian religion, in the only form in
which it is known to history, without any historical ex
planation. It is impossible to rest seriously in such a
situation, and it is as impossible to suppose seriously
that we have got out of it when Schmiedel tells us that
'the thoroughly disinterested historian, recognising it
to be his duty to investigate the grounds for this so great
reverence for himself which Jesus was able to call forth,
will then first and foremost find himself led to recognise
as true the two great facts that Jesus had compassion for
the multitudes and that he preached with power, not
as the scribes.' The importance of these two great facts
is not to be disputed, but few will find in them the whole
explanation of the New Testament attitude to Jesus.
There must be a more intelligible proportion than we
can discover here between the cause and the effect ; and
while it may relieve some anxious minds to know that
the most rigorous scepticism is obliged to admit the
existence of Jesus, inquirers with an eye on all the facts
to be explained may find that a more searching investi
gation brings them into contact with a still greater reality
in Jesus than this paradoxically sceptical criticism has
discovered. We cannot admit beforehand, nor can we
allow others to assume, that there is a complete breach
of continuity between the Jesus who can be discovered
in history and the Christ who has had from the first
the transcendent place, with which we are familiar,
in Christian faith; whether there is or is not a true
continuity between them, such a continuity that the
historical Jesus justifies the attitude of believers to their

174 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
Lord and Saviour, is a question which has to be tested
by examination of the evidence in our hands. That
evidence is contained in the gospels, and it is to an
examination of these documents we now proceed.
For reasons on which it is needless to enlarge, our
attention will be confined to the synoptic gospels —
Matthew, Mark, and Luke. It is so difficult in the
gospel according to John to distinguish between the
mind of the writer and that of the subject — between the
seed of the word and that to which it grows in the soul
— between what John heard in Galilee or the upper
room, and what the Lord by the Spirit said in His heart
in later days — that it could only be used inconclusively
in the present discussion. Even the first three gospels
cannot be used without reflection ; and though this is not
the place to make any contribution, were one capable of
it, to the solution of the synoptic problem, it is necessary
to indicate the position from which one writes, and to
justify it so far as the case requires.
The criticism of the gospels, literary and historical,
has now gone on for more than a hundred and fifty years,
and much as remains and perhaps must ever remain
uncertain, there are one or two important conclusions
on which experts are agreed. To begin with, it is agreed
that the gospels of Matthew and Luke are based upon
Mark. With a very few slight omissions, the whole of Mark
is embodied in the other evangelists. He has provided
for them the framework of their narrative, and it is
indeed the strongest proof of his priority that while
Matthew and Luke frequently diverge from each other

HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF MARK 175
in respect to the order of events in the life of Jesus, they
never agree against Mark in such divergences. In other
words, where divergence in the order of incidents occurs,
either Matthew supports Mark against Luke, or Luke
supports him against Matthew : a clear proof that his
is the original order underlying both, and that no
authority common to both can be pleaded against it.
The priority of Mark to the other gospels being
established, it becomes a question of importance who
Mark was, and what was his relation to the events which,
as far as we know, first obtained from his hand that
literary representation through which we are familiar
with them. Mark, the author of the gospel, was assumed
till yesterday to be identical with the John Mark of the
book of Acts ( 1 2 12) and the Mark mentioned by Peter
(ist Epist. 513) and Paul (Col. 410, Philemon24, 2 Tim.
4 u), and in spite of recent suspicions x there is no solid
ground for questioning this view. A very ancient
tradition, quoted by Eusebius from Papias, who was
bishop of Hierapolis before the middle of the second
century, is all the external help we have to define more
precisely the relation of Mark to the facts with which he
deals. It runs as follows:2 'And the Elder said this
also : Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter,
wrote down accurately everything that he remembered,
without, however, recording in order what was either
said or done by Christ. For neither did he hear the
Lord, nor did he follow Him ; but afterwards, as I said,
1 See J. Weiss, Das alteste Evangelium, 385 ff.
2 See Eusebius, Hist. Eccl., iii. 39. The translation is taken from Pro
fessor Gwatkin's Selections from Early Christian Writers, p. 43 ff.

176 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
[attended] Peter, who adapted his instructions to the
needs [of his hearers], but had no design of giving a
connected account of the Lord's oracles. So then Mark
made no mistake, while he thus wrote down some things
as he remembered them ; for he made it his one care not
to omit anything that he had heard, or to set down any
false statement therein. Such then is the account given
by Papias concerning Mark.' This brief statement has
been put upon the rack a thousand times, though to an
unsuspicious mind it seems fairly unambiguous. The
presbyter, to whom Papias refers as his authority, had
been himself an immediate disciple of Jesus, and Papias
was personally acquainted with him.1 It is hardly con
ceivable that he should have mistaken what this early
disciple used to say (ekeyev) about the gospel ; although
he is disparaged by Eusebius, for theological reasons, as
a person of very mean intelligence, Papias was quite
capable of recording a fact. What is required in a
1 Euseb. Hist. Eccl., iii. 39, 7. ' And Papias, of whom we are now
speaking, confesses that he received the words of the apostles from those
that followed them, but says that he was himself a hearer of Aristion and
the presbyter John.' The much-discussed question whether this John whom
Papias had heard is or is not one with John the son of Zebedee, the apostle
to whom the fourth gospel is ascribed, is not of vital consequence here ;
he was in any case a ' disciple of the Lord,' which cannot mean simply a
Christian, but only one who had been in contact with Jesus. Papias does
not give John's opinion from a book ; but in his own book, quoted by
Eusebius, he reports the account the presbyter used to give about the
gospel of Mark. For opposite views about John and his importance here
v. Zahn, Forschungen zur Geschichte des neut. Kanons, vi. 109 ff.; Harnack,
Chronologie der altchr. Litteratur, 660 ff. Harnack's attempt to minimise
the significance of the phrase ' the disciples of the Lord,' applied to Aristion
and John, is rather ingenious than convincing. When he remarks that
paBrjTai was ganz wesentlich auf Palastina (fur die Gesammtheit) beschrankt,
he seems to overlook the fact that in Acts it is freely used of Christians
everywhere, and that outside of Acts and the gospels it does not occur
in the New Testament at all.

HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF MARK 177
witness is not largeness of mind, but fidelity. The
one important fact in the testimony of the presbyter
who had kept company with Jesus is this, that the
gospel according to Mark is the work of a man who
was the companion and interpreter of Peter. Indirectly,
if not immediately, it has the authority of an apostle
behind it.1
If we turn from this tradition to the gospel itself, we
find significant features in the narrative by which it is
confirmed. Detail begins in Mark with the hour at
which Peter and Andrew are called, and enter into more
or less constant attendance upon Jesus (ch. i 16ff). The
one full Sabbath day which is narrated in the gospel
centres round Simon's house (i29ff). When the next
morning early Jesus, who had retired into a desert place
to pray, was 'hunted down,' it was by ' Simon and they
that were with him ' ; we can imagine how Peter in
telling the story simply said ' we.' When Jesus appoints
the Twelve, we are told how He gave Simon the sur
name Peter, though no explanation of the new name is
1 Harnack, Chronologie, i. 686 f., after quoting the passage from Clem.
Alex, preserved in Eusebius, H. E., vi. 14, and ending with the words (re
ferring to Mark's composition of the gospel at the request of Peter's
hearers in Rome) onep emyvovra tov nirpov _-p.rpe_-7.K->- /«)- - KaXvcai /->J. .
irpoTpe\jracrdai, adds : ' Das heisst doch mit diirren Worten : Dieses Evan
gelium hat keine petrinische Autoritat ; Petrus ist fiir dasselbe nicht
verantwortlich ; es steht lediglich auf sich selber.' This is only true because
it is ambiguous. The book did not bear Peter's imprimatur; he issued
no certificate with it to secure it a legitimate place in the Church. But
though it was sent out on its own merits it had Peter's preaching behind it ;
and the writer's qualification, according to the very passage on which
Harnack bases these strong assertions, was his long and familiar acquaint
ance with this preaching (ao-av aKoKovdfjiravTa avra woppadev ual p.(\i.vrjpAvov
rii>u Xex&. r o>. ). It is in this sense it is said to have, and does have, Peter's
authority. M

178 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
given. At a later stage — at what, indeed, it was once
customary to regard as the crisis and the turning-point
in the career of Jesus — it is Peter who confesses Jesus
to be the Christ ; and in close connexion with the first
prediction of the Passion, which is the immediate sequel,
it is Peter who remonstrates with Jesus, and draws down
upon himself a severe rebuke (8 29 ff). It is Peter again
who, when the rich ruler refuses to sell all that he has,
as a preliminary to following Jesus, reminds the Master
that He and His companions have done what had proved
too hard for this promising recruit, and tacitly at least
inquires what reward they shall have. In the closing
scenes of the gospel he is still more conspicuous. He is
one of the little party to whom the prophetic discourse
of Jesus is addressed on the Mount of Olives (i33ff-);
we are told in vivid terms how he boasted of his devotion
to Jesus, how he was reproached in the garden that he
could not watch with his Master one hour, how in spite
of repeated warnings he denied him with oaths and
curses : we are told also of his swift and deep repentance
(14 27ff ). Finally (in ch. 16 7) there is the message of the
angels to the women at the tomb : Go tell His disciples
and Peter that He goeth before you into Galilee — a
message which, as has been already observed, justifies
the inference that this gospel originally closed with an
appearance of Jesus to the eleven, but either added to
that or combined with it an appearing, to some special
intent, to Peter. It is quite true that all these things
about Peter might have been known and told by some
other than himself. When, however, we notice the
peculiar character of the events which make up the first

HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF MARK 179
exciting day ; when we consider that incidents in the
life of Jesus are depicted only from the calling of Peter
onward ; when we review, especially, the circumstantial
and vivid narrative of the closing chapters in which the
apostle plays so mournful a part, it is impossible to come
to any other conclusion than that the tradition preserved
by Papias is confirmed. That tradition is not of the
nature of a learned deduction ; it is given as a piece of
information by one who was in a position to know what
he was speaking about, but it is supported by an ex
amination of the gospel itself. It is quite safe to assume,
then, that in some real sense the preaching of Peter
underlies the gospel of Mark. The date at which the
gospel was composed cannot be precisely determined,
but there is a growing preponderance of opinion which
puts it in the sixties of the Christian era, before, though
not long before, the destruction of Jerusalem.1
This early date and apostolic connexion are not to be
underrated. We cannot indeed presume upon them so
far as to say that we have the testimony of an eye-witness
for everything recorded in Mark, but they have, un
doubtedly, historical importance. They prove that in
the life and experience of one man at least there was no
radical inconsistency, no breach of continuity, between
an actual acquaintance with Jesus as He lived on earth,
and the Christian attitude to Jesus as the object of faith.
The idea of much modern criticism of the gospels is that
'Jesus' can be pleaded against 'the Christ,' 'history'
1 Harnack puts it, as a probability, between 65 and 70 : Die Chronologie
der altchristlichen Litteratur, i. 718 ; J. Weiss between 64 and 66: Die
Schriften des Neuen Testaments, i. 61.

180 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
invoked to discredit ' faith ' ; but the primary fact which
we have to go upon is that the very man who stood
closest to the historical Jesus appealed to the historical
knowledge of Him to vindicate and evoke faith. It is
quite possible that at one point or another there may be
secondary elements in the representation of Jesus by
Mark. It is quite possible that at one point or another
the Christian teaching with which the evangelist was
familiar may have left traces on his language which are
suggestive rather of the period at which he wrote than
of that concerning which he writes. Instances of either
must be judged upon their merits. When we consider,
however, that the gospel of Mark was composed within
thirty or forty years of the death of Jesus, that the sub
ject with which it deals had been the matter of incessant
and public teaching throughout this period, and that the
narrative rests, as we have seen, at its beginning, its
crisis, and its close, upon the authority of an immediate
and intimate disciple, we shall probably be disposed to
infer that the presumptions are strongly in favour of its
historical character. Certainly we shall not feel at
liberty to pronounce anything unhistorical merely because
it helps to make Christianity intelligible, or to evince
the continuity between the historical life of Jesus and the
life of the Christian Church.
There are cruder and subtler ways in which this has
already been done. A scholar who admits the evidence
which connects the second gospel with the preaching of
Peter proceeds to distinguish in the narrative what can
and what cannot claim to be covered by this apostolic
testimony. His criterion is the very simple one that

HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF MARK 181
everything supernatural — perhaps one should say every
thing too supernatural — must be excluded. As such
things cannot possibly have taken place, they cannot
possibly rest on the word of an eye-witness. This short
and easy method of dealing with certain elements in the
gospel story is applied with cheerful confidence, for ex
ample, by Von Soden.1 It was more plausible to argue
thus when the gospels were dated in the second century,
and legends had had time and space to grow ; it is not
so easy to believe that the faith of Christians — for it is
always faith which is the parent of the marvellous — could
deform or transfigure the story of Jesus in the lifetime of
those who were familiar with him, under their very eyes,
while they were engaged in bearing their own testimony
to him, and had, so far as we have any means of judging,
a lively sense of the importance of its historical truth
(Acts i 21f-' i John i 1). 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, io45 — 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.

182 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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 disciples. 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 (lerdvota, repentance, is still
possible for the nation is completely abandoned. Instead
of a call to repent, 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

HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF MARK 183
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
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

184 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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
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.
1 See an admirable page in Harnack, Sprilche und Reden Jesu, 143.

HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF MARK 185
Further, it must be observed that the critical change
in the teaching of Jesus, which sets in at ch. 8 2r, 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
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

186 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
exaggeration in Wellhausen's list of the 'so to speak
technical 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 So£a, life, salvation, following in the higher sense,
ministry, the p,tKpoi irto-revovres, the cr/cavSaXa.' a Several
of these, as a glance at the Concordance will show, occur
earlier in the gospel ; most of them can be paralleled
from an evangelic document which is independent of
Mark;2 and not one of them is technical except in the
sense in which any word becomes technical when it is
applied in new conditions. But the conditions in which
these words are applied in the gospels, as will become
evident when we examine them in detail — or such of
them as throw light on our problem — are conditions in
which they may quite well have been applied by Jesus
Himself; on any other hypothesis, indeed, the mind and
the language of Christianity present insoluble difficulties.
It is no doubt the case that in this section of Mark it is
conspicuously impossible to see in Jesus n ur ein Menchen-
kind, wie wir andern auch, but it is impossible to accept
this personal prejudice as a principle of criticism. Well
hausen only puts it in a new form when with a view to
discrediting this ' Christian ' part of the gospel he tells us
that Jesus was not a Christian but a Jew, and not a Jew
who taught a new faith, but only a new and better way
of doing the will of God, which for him as for all his
countrymen was revealed in the Old Testament. No
1 Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien, 81.
2 See Harnack's list ofthe substantives in Q, Spriicht u. Reden Jesu, 108 ff.

HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF MARK 187
doubt He was a Jew, but He was a Jew to whom the
Christian religion in some way owes its origin ; and it is
not a prima facie reason for scepticism when we find in
the record of His life hints or suggestions of what was
unquestionably its outcome. To apply this to the dis
ciple whose authority, we have seen reason to believe,
lies behind the narrative : if there was, as there must
have been, a continuity of some sort between Peter's
experiences with Jesus in His lifetime and his relation to
Him after death — if the Christian attitude to the Lord
is not to appear as something entirely irrational and
groundless, but as something with true antecedents in
the relation of His followers to Jesus — the presumption is
that the ' Christian ' section of Mark is as historical as
the rest. But possibly the one consideration which in
fluences criticism here most decisively is the attitude of
the critic himself to the resurrection. If Jesus did not
rise from the dead at all, it relieves Him from the
reproach of self-delusion if we assume that He did not
anticipate or predict His rising, as in these chapters He
repeatedly does. But if He did rise again on the third
day — if His future really included that unparalleled ex
perience—it is by no means inconceivable that a person
with a destiny so extraordinary should have contemplated
and spoken of it. If the certainties with which we start
are that Jesus was only a human being, exactly like the
rest of us, and that He had no resurrection on the third
day, but only came to life again in the hearts of His
followers, then Mark 8 27 to io46 must seem radically
untrue. But so must a great deal more in the life of
Jesus— so must everything, in short, which connects that

188 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
life with Christian faith. But these certainties are as
sumed, not proved, and we can approach with unpreju
diced minds this as all the other parts of the gospel. It
is not doing anything but justice to the whole of the facts
involved if we say that we ought to have a bias in favour
of what connects Christianity with Jesus, rather than in
favour of ideas which fix a great gulf between them.
The priority of Mark to Matthew and Luke, its relation
to Peter, and its date in the sixties, are the first important
conclusion of gospel criticism. There is a second which
is perhaps even of higher interest. A comparison of
Matthew and Luke shows not only that each of them
has embodied practically the whole of Mark, but that
each of them has also in common with the other a large
quantity of matter which is not found in Mark. This
matter consists in the main of words of Jesus, and it is
pretty generally agreed that besides Mark, which sup
plied them with the narrative outline which they fol
low, Matthew and Luke used a second source which
supplied them with reports of Jesus' teaching. Many
attempts have been made to reconstruct this document,
but naturally with precarious results.1 It is easy to take
the first step, and to refer to it all the matter which
is common to Matthew and Luke, but wanting to Mark.
But this does not take us far. It is quite possible that
one of the evangelists may have made extracts from it
which the other ignored. For example, it contained an
account of the ministry of the Baptist from which both
certainly borrowed. But what of the differences between
1 For the two latest, v. Harnack's Spriiche und Reden Jesu ; B. Weiss,
Die Quellen der synoptischen Ueberlieferung.

THE SECOND PRIMITIVE SOURCE— Q 189
Matthew and Luke at this point ? Matthew alone tells
us of a reluctance on John's part to baptize Jesus
(Matt. 3 14f): was this found in the source common to
him and Luke, but passed over by the latter? Luke
alone gives a report of John's teaching to the multitudes,
to publicans, and to soldiers (3 1014) : was this found in
the common source, and similarly passed over by
Matthew ? We cannot tell. The document which both
our evangelists use may have been more comprehensive
than they enable us to see. If we notice the way in
which they make use of Mark, a document which we
have in our hands, we may even infer that it was possible
for them to omit what we should regard as very charac
teristic or interesting things. For instance, neither takes
over from Mark the fact that Jesus called the sons of
Zebedee sons of thunder ; neither mentions the irreverent
exclamation of His friends, He is beside himself; neither
reproduces the beautiful parable of the seed growing
spontaneously, first the blade, then the ear, then the full
corn in the ear ; neither records the singular miracles of
781ff-, 822ff- The story ofthe 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 obvi
ously possible that there may have been things over
looked 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 attention to the subject, thinks it did
not ; and he has been followed by the majority, includ-

190 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
ing Harnack. Professor 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 KaQegfjs — in the
order in which he found them — it is clear that the source
«j_-
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
admitted 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
already 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
1 Weiss, Einleitung in das Neue Testament, § 45 ; Die Quellen der synop-
tischen Ueberlieferung, 1-96 ; Harnack, Spruche und Reden Jesu, 88-102 ;
Burkitt, The Gospel History and its Transmission, 133 ; Journal of Theo
logical Studies (Review of Harnack), viii. 454.

THE SECOND PRIMITIVE SOURCE— Q 191
composed the oracles in the Hebrew language, and
each one interpreted them as he could.' x The expres
sion 'composed the oracles' is probably identical in
meaning with ' wrote his gospel ' ; but the term ' oracles '
suggests 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 historical 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 combination of the data gains in
plausibility when we consider that the lost source under
consideration originally existed in an Aramaic form ; 2
and although, in the nature of the case, it does not admit
1 Eusebius, Hist. Eccl., iii. 39. The translation is again from Professor
Gwatkin. 2 See Wellhausen's notes on Luke 623, 11 41.

192 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
of demonstration, it has in the judgment of the writer a
far higher degree of probability than any other hypo
thesis with which he is acquainted.
It would, of course, be thoroughly discredited if we
could accept the conclusion of Wellhausen, who from
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
portant argument is the general one that the process of
' Christianising ' the material, which in Mark is practi
cally limited to the section chapter 827-io45, 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
reveals Himself to them as the Messiah who is destined
to pass through death to glory ; on the contrary, He
comes forward as Messiah from the 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 Wellhausen'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
1 Wellhausen, Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien, 84.

HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF Q 193
we do not believe — that the lost document was more
recent than Mark, it would be a stupendous and ground
less assumption that Mark meant to tell us all that was
really known of the words and deeds of Jesus ; and that
everything in Matthew or Luke which goes beyond
him was either 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 existence 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 sub
stance they were being taught in Christian churches at
the very same time and under the very same conditions
in which the 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 certainty 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
addressed, Wellhausen argues that the spirit of Jesus
N

194 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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
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 —

HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF Q 195
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
applies 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 yielding such gracious fruits apparently without con
scious effort, when it uttered itself spontaneously in
the parables of the Kingdom or the Sermon on the
Mount, how are we 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
1 Theologische Litteraturzeilung, 1905, col. 615.

196 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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
Christians, 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
remarked, 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

HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF Q 197
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 testi
mony to the mind of Jesus regarding Himself or His
work, this is the presumption which will determine our
attitude. For the purpose which we have in view it is not
necessary 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 un
certain ; and therefore we shall confine our investigation
to the passages which have this guarantee.1 It is im-
1 This is the course followed by Harnack in his own investigation of Q—
Spruche u. Reden Jesu ; and in his review of Weiss's recent works, Die
Quellen des Lukasevangeliums and Die Quellen der synoptischen Ueber-
lieferung (in Theol. Litteraturzeitung, 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 practically certain of these, and
of his restoration of them (Aufstellung der Matthausquelle) ; 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 allowance 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 gospels. Assuming
that Luke knew a gospel narrative — say the healing of the paralytic or the

198 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
possible to lay down beforehand 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 9U ; Matt. 3 1317 ; 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
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 thousands 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.

THE BAPTISM OF JESUS 199
weakness, and of his inadequacy to the task of regener
ating 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
contemporaries 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 Himself, 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
declared 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 straight
way coming up out of the water He saw the heavens
rent asunder, 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 9U).

200 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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 14f-' to
which there is no parallel in Mark or Luke — is at least
an argument 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 repent
ance 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 funda
mental source, however, the second gospel, the whole
story is told as affecting . Jesus alone. It is He, not
1 Weiss inserts Matt. 3 14f- 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 descend ;
John to whom the heavenly voice was addressed (This is My Son, Matt.
317; not Thou art my Son, Mark 1 n). He gives literary explanations 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 which 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 f.

THE BAPTISM OF JESUS 201
John the Baptist, who sees the heavens rent and the
dove descending ; and it is to Him, not to John or the
bystanders, 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
spiritual experiences to Jesus, experiences which no
doubt had something transcendent and incommunicable
in them, 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 explain these when we speak of Jesus as being for
the time in an ecstasy or rapture, we rather indicate the
inexplicable 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 dis
graced ; 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 to act in the character of the
Anointed. But from this time He does begin, and the
consciousness of divine power which must have attended

202 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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
type for that of Jesus; it is the baptism of Jesus which
sets the type for the sacrament of the Church. When
Loisy 1 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
1 Les Evangiles Synoptiques, i. 107.

THE BAPTISM OF JESUS 203
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,
' 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 con
stancy He may bring forth judgment to the nations. It
is impossible to suppose that this combination is acci
dental, and it is quite unnecessary to suppose 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 Testament 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

204 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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 conviction and assurance from this hour that
both ideals were to be fulfilled in Himself. The voice
of God addressed 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 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 meum
mihi — I know myself and what I have to do.

THE BAPTISM OF JESUS 205
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
official, 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
observer could miss. It was so dominant and omni
present 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
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

206 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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 opposed 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 40ff- 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 soli
tary, incomparable, incommunicable ; 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 ofthe names. However such titles as Messiah

THE BAPTISM OF JESUS 207
(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 de
mands 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 some
thing 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 carpenter of Nazareth,
or of a Galilaean 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

208 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
gospel narrative is from beginning to end a person
clothed in divine power and conscious that through His
sovereignty and service the Kingdom of God is to
come. The Temptations (Mark i 12t, Matt. 4111, Luke 41"13).
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
temptation. This was found in the source common to
Matthew 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

THE TEMPTATIONS OF JESUS 209
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
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
allusion 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
o

210 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
will spoil his house ' (Mark 3 27, Matt. 12 29, Luke 1 1 21f).
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 relation 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
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
sympathy with all human distress. It was because He

THE TEMPTATIONS OF JESUS 211
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
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

212 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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
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 TEMPTATIONS OF JESUS 213
The interest of the Temptations, in connexion with
our subject, lies in this : they show how the Kingdom of
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 coming of the Kingdom is involved
in His victory over these temptations. His initial
triumph, 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
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.

214 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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
impression 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. Speak
ing generally, the order followed will be that in which
the various passages of Mark and Q occur in Huck's
Synopse, and it must be remembered that it is not on any
single passage, but on the cumulative effect of the whole,
that the argument depends.

THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 215
The summary account which Mark gives of the
Galilaean ministry (ch. i14f) 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
represent 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 DISCIPLESHIP
(Mark 3 13"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

216 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
John, to a closer relation of discipleship. This is
guaranteed 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 313"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 6 713, which narrates the sending out
of the Twelve in pairs, he says that it contains no
historical tradition. The passage has great value as
showing 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 1319 and Mark 6713
are editorial sections in the gospel ; they reveal some
thing of the author but nothing of the subject.
1 Das Evangelium Marci, 24 ff., 45 f.

THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 217
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.
In i Cor. 15 B 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 (410, g36, io32, n11, 1 4 10'17'20'43), and they were
known to the other early source used by Matthew and
Luke (Matt. 19 28, Luke 22 30). 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
preserved 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
bynames is not an historical act? The evangelist pro
bably 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. ; but to appeal
to them to discredit the appointment of the Twelve is

218 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
beside the mark. There is as little ground for Well-
hausen'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 circum
stances as enables us to say that this experiment if
successful must have been repeated. The fact that a
thing is not done twice is not a proof that it was not
done once. When the Twelve returned from their ex
perimental 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 prepar
ing 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 ofthe 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

THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 219
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 outward form goes, yet in a way which indicates His
conviction 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 6 711, but what corresponds to it in
Matthew fills the whole of a long chapter (ch. io). 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
Galila_an cities and villages where he was usually so

220 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
welcome, but on the Jewish world as it was after His
death, that Judaean 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 io
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, io17'22
being parallel to Mark 13 9'13), and to a much larger
extent in Luke. In Luke, indeed, ther,e is the peculiarity
that we have two missionary or apostolic charges of
Jesus, one to the Twelve (Luke 9 lff), and another to the
Seventy (Luke iolff). It is not necessary here to con
sider whether the mission of the Seventy has any
historical character, or whether it is simply invented or
assumed by the evangelist as a counterpart to that of
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 substanti
ally 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

THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 221
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
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 u), with its parallels in Matthew
(io14) and Luke (96), 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

222 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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
nothing, 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
preceded — with the consciousness with which Jesus
entered on His work, as revealed in the narratives of the
Baptism 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
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. io16).
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

THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 223
sunk ever deeper and deeper into the minds of His
followers they grew unconsciously to a more adequate —
let us say, a more Christian — 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
Matthew (chapter io17ff) 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 ad
dressed, 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 eschatological dis
course in Mark 1 3 ; 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 for
ward 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 time
came He felt and spoke as the call of the time required.
The very first words in Matthew (io17f-) bring us to

224 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
the heart of our subject. ' Beware of men. For
they will hand you over to councils, and in their syna
gogues they shall scourge you. And ye shall be brought
before governors and kings, too, on My account (eveicev
i/xov), 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 Christians to Jesus and the gospel. But it has
been questioned whether the words eveKtv ipov, though
they truly represent 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 33).1 Here Luke has no independent parallel, but a
parallel is found in Mark 1 3 9 and (probably in depend
ence on Mark) in Luke 2 1 12. The passage in Mark
occurs in the eschatological 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 contains eve/cev i/iov, which is varied in Luke into
iveKev rov ovoparos p.ov, for My name's sake. All three
evangelists, it may be remarked, at the close of this
paragraph in the eschatological discourse, unite in the
1 Spriiche und Reden Jesu, 63.

THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 225
synonymous expression Sid to ovofid p.ov (Matt. 24",
Mark 1318, Luke 2117). This alone would make us
hesitate to question the words ' for My sake ' in Matt.
io18; 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 explicitly 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 6p,o\oyetv 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 denying 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. io32t, or the greatness of the
claim which it makes. It says as clearly as language
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
indubitable word like this lights up for us much which
1 J. H. Moulton, Grammar of New Testament Greek, 104.
P

226 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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 Testament faith sets its Lord is
the place due to Himself. It has often been pointed
out that Jesus does not here represent 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 relation 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'
elements 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 appreciate 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 Luke,
but, as has just been observed, they are found in both
with a peculiarity of expression (6/_o\oyetv iv) which
shows that the evangelists used the same translation of

THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 227
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 'be
fore the angels of God,' while Matthew has 'before My
Father in heaven,' may not require any particular ex
planation : Luke may have unconsciously conceived the
scenery of the final judgment more picturesquely than
Matthew. But it is probable that this variation, as well
as Luke's use of ' the Son of Man ' (in ch. 1 2 8) where
Matthew has ' I,' are rather to be explained by reference
to a similar passage found in all the evangelists (Mark 838,
Matt. 1 6 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 involun
tarily occasion such reminiscences of it as can here be
traced in Luke. The freedom 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 signifi
cance of His own person, and identified loyalty to Him
self 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 signifi
cance of Jesus in abstract forms. It represents Jesus
saying of Himself, I am, eye. ei/u, without 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

228 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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 per
sonality 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 assertions
of the absolute significance of Jesus which transcends
this thoroughly attested word in Matt, io32? 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 that they identify themselves with Him
in a fidelity indistinguishable from that which is due to
God alone, but that He, in the most solemn, explicit,
and overpowering words, requires from them that identi
fication, and makes their eternal destiny depend upon it.
This is the more remarkable when we consider the
conditions 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 con
nexion between Matt, io83 and Matt, io34 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

THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 229
appropriately introduces His words here. The parallel
in Luke is not close, so much so that Harnack doubts
whether the common 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 contact 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 not comprehend Him.
His brothers did not believe in Him. We can see from
the incident preserved in Mark 320f-, 31 ff-, and Matt.
1 2 48 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

230 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
My brothers? — ruling her and them alike out of His
life as unable to understand and not entitled to inter
fere — did it not pierce His own heart also ? He knew
in experience the pang it cost toxbe 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 (I came
not to destroy, but to fulfil), or in Matt. 9 13 (I came not
to call the righteous but sinners), or in Luke 1910 (The
Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was
lost) ; it is so here when He says, I 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
members 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

THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 231
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
immediate 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 is
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, won
derful 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 and mother and wife and children and
brothers and sisters, yes and his own life also, he cannot

232 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
be My disciple ' (Luke 14 26). There is a certain amount
of generalisation 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 indistinguishable 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, con
ceivable enough in a Church maddened by persecution,
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
expressive 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 disciple
ship 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
1 Les ivangiles Synoptiques, i. 894.

THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 283
rested in the main on a common document for their
knowledge of the Lord's words, there is no reason why
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
expressed on purely subjective grounds, the writer is
inclined 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 eas) 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
vehement 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 —

234 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL ¦
peu de eas, 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,
'And he that doth not take his cross and follow after Me
is not worthy of Me ' (Matt, io 38). The habit of general
ising the idea of the cross, and applying it to 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, io38 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 (iveKev ipov) 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
immortality of which the martyr is assured he has neither
part nor lot ; in saving his life he has lost it. It is not

THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 235
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
from Jesus Himself. Holtzmann1 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
1 Handcommentar, ad loc. 2 Les Evangiles Synoptiques, i. 895.

236 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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 evexev ip.ov in Matt. io39. In what is regarded as
the parallel saying in Luke 17 M — 'Whosoever shall seek
to gain his life shall lose it, but whosoever shall lose his
life shall preserve it' — it/eKev ifiov is wanting. Hence
Harnack in his restoration of Q would omit them from
this saying : he thinks Matthew has introduced them from
Mark.1 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
life and losing it (the objection runs) is said with the
utmost 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 iveicev
e/_oS in Matt. 10s9. It is quite likely that a saying which
Jesus must often have repeated, and which occurs twice
both in Matthew and Luke, was not always given in
exactly the same words. The principle might some
times be stated in its absolute generality, and sometimes
1 Spruche tt. Reden Jesu, 63.

THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 287
so as to bring out the peculiar way in which Jesus was
identified with the cause for which men were to be pre
pared 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 eveicev ifiov
was introduced into Matt, io39 by the evangelist or not.
The parallel in Luke 1 7 8S, which omits it, is certainly in
every other respect secondary and inferior to Matthew :
it is the evangelist there who is responsible for trepuirovq-
cracrdat and £_.oyo.T?cre., and who may be responsible for
the absence of e.e/cev e/_oi). In the passage in which
Mark preserves this saying, and in which Matthew and
Luke repeat it (Mark 8 85, Matt. 1626, Luke 9 s4), 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 eW/cep
ip,ov 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
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 ver. 39 when he inserted (if he did insert) kveKtv e/_oi)
in ver. 40. There is nothing theological in the attitude
of Jesus here, no filling of a role, whether it be the
Messianic or another, but there is the revelation of a
consciousness to which history presents no parallel.
Consider how great this Man is who declares that the
final destiny of men depends on whether or not they are

238 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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
antipathy 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 con
viction 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
admitted 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.
io 32"38 is a person for 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

THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 239
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
we 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
Person, we feel at once that He not only said these
things to men in Palestine, but is saying them to our
selves now ; and to feel this is to be brought face to face
with the supreme moral responsibility. It is not always
in human nature to welcome this, and the instinctive
desire of human nature to avoid responsibility so exact
ing 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 any
thing to do with such a person as Jesus here reveals
Himself to be ; and when that element in man tells
upon the criticism of the gospels, it tells as a solvent on
all that gives Jesus His peculiar place. Nevertheless,

240 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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 historical authenti
cation, the sayings of Jesus that we have just been con
sidering 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 imaginable
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 620'49). 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,
ofthe 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
matter 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-

THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 241
duce, though not found in Luke's Sermon on the Mount,
is found elsewhere in the third evangelist, and is recog
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.
(i) 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
persecute you and say all manner of evil against you
falsely for My sake' (511). In Luke it reads, 'Blessed
Q

242 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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 name1) for the Son of Man's sake}
When we remember that the words of Jesus were at
first preserved 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 reproducing 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 ad
vantage ; there is more in it for the ear and the imagina
tion ; 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, how
ever, and many others have argued that here, as at
Matt, io39, the words referring to the person of Jesus
should be omitted altogether.2 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
variant, but an idiomatic rendering of eve/cei/ ifiov ; and
it is only a mechanical repetition from the previous
1 Wellhausen thinks the Aramaic original had this meaning : D as Evan
gelium Lucae, 24.
2 See above, p. 236 : Harnack, Spruche u. Reden Jesu, 40.

THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 243
verse when some ' Western 'MSS. read ' for righteous
ness' 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 disciples were the objects as taking place on
account of something ; and if Jesus could speak of Him
self 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 which good men always
endure in a bad world — that is, suffering for righteous
ness' sake (Matt. 5 10)— becomes, where the disciples of
Jesus are concerned, definitely and specifically suffering
for His sake. That is not only their consciousness
about it, but His ; it is not only the mind of the evange
lists which we encounter in this eveKev ip.ov or iveicev rov
vlov rov dvOpcoTrov ; 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 Himself in
this extraordinary way with the cause of God and right
eousness and should, it is not enough to say claim, but
rather assume that He will obtain, that martyr devotion
to which only righteousness and God are entitled ; but
until we see this we do not see Jesus. A beatitude
combines 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
1 On the various readings and the interpretation of this passage, v. Zahn,
D as Evangelium des Matthdus, 193.

244 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
should suffer shame for His sake? We may surely say
that He is revealing Himself as the Person to whom the
only legitimate attitude is the attitude of the New Testa
ment 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. 629£ he has a parallel to that critical part of it
which is preserved in Matt. 539f-, and in ch. 627 the
peculiar and awkward expression dWd vplv \ey_. rots
aKovovo-iv (but I say unto you that hear) seems most
easily explained as due to the influence of the formula
which 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
1 See B. Weiss, Das Matthausevangelium u. seine Lucas-parallelen,
170, 174.

THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 245
undoubtedly goes back to Jesus Himself. Possibly He
did not on any one occasion accumulate all the illustra
tions of it which Matthew gathers into his sermon here,
but, as we shall see, he betrays in innumerable ways the
sense of the originality and absoluteness of the revela
tion 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 consciousness 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 legislative
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 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 re
current 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 formula of the evangelist did not
reproduce the ipsissima verba of Jesus, we should be
entitled to say that it condensed the impression which
the teaching and the attitude of Jesus made on some

246 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
one in immediate contact with Him ; and such an im
pression 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. 511, Matt. _032'33'37 — 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 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 sove-

THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 247
reign 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 13) ;
/ came not to send peace but a sword (Matt. 10 34f) ; The
Son of Man came not to be ministered unto but to
minister (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 19 n). Several of these
instances are found also in Mark, and the same formula
occurs with characteristic variations in John : / came
that they might have life (10 10) ; I came not to judge the
world ( 1 2 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 17 is in all probability genuine. That as an
expression of the real attitude and the actual achievement

248 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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
relation to the ancient revelation, alike in law and in
prophecy, 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 throughout 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
1 See article ' Law in the New Testament ' in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.

THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 249
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
Luke, who introduces at this point a saying found much
later in Matt. ( 1 2 86), 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 pro
phesied 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 account 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 Harnack1 was probably more remote from
1 Spriiche u. Reden Jesu, 52.

250 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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
(i326f). 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.
j 22 f. i 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 '¦
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 0i-r0Sear.-d.T7s ofthe
parable — as saying to them at last, I do not know you
(Luke 1326), 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

THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 251
apostolic church — as though Jesus were speaking to
them, and not to His own contemporaries in His life
time — 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 i326f), and in the more
ample and rhetorical one in which the evangelist (speak
ing in the same spirit as Paul in i Cor. 1 3 1S) strives to
bring home the moral import of them to the conscience
of the next generation — the attitude of Jesus is the same.
It is His acceptance or rejection of men on which their
final destiny depends. It is His voice by which they
are admitted to or excluded from the Kingdom of God.
Not that this is done arbitrarily ; the very purpose of
these solemn utterances is to show that there is nothing
arbitrary in it. No formal recognition of Jesus, no
casual acquaintance with Him, can be regarded as a
substitute for doing what He says (Luke 646), or doing
the will of His Father in heaven (Matt. 7 21). But in
both gospels alike, and in a source which their very
divergences at this point show to lie far behind them
both, it is He who pronounces on the value of every
human life. It is the consciousness that the Speaker is
nothing less than the final Judge of all which makes the
parable of the builders on the rock and the sand, with
which the Sermon closes, the most solemn and over
powering of all the words of Jesus.
The place of Christ as Judge, a place which He has
held in Christian faith from the beginning, is often pre
sented in another light. It is regarded as a formal piece

252 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
of theology, with no support in the mind of Jesus. When
men came to believe that Jesus was the Messiah, they
attached to Him (it is said) all the traditional Messianic
predicates, and among others this, that when He came
in His Messianic power He would come as Judge;1 but
the transference of these predicates to Jesus was a
purely formal consequence of regarding Him as the
Messiah ; it was a historical accident, due to a peculiarity
of the Messianic dogmatic ; there is nothing vital in it,
nothing which is due to Jesus Himself. There could
not possibly be a more complete misconception or mis
representation of the facts with which we have to deal
in this connexion. Whatever is formal in the New
Testament, the belief in Jesus as Judge is not. It is a
belief which may be clothed here and there in forms
which Jewish theology supplied to the imagination, but
it rests on personal experiences and on the sense of
Jesus' attitude to men. Whatever else happened to
men in the presence of Jesus, they were judged. They
knew they were. They had experiences which prompted
such utterances as Luke 5 8 : Depart from me, for I am
a sinful man, O Lord ; or John 4 29 : Come, see a man
that told me all things that ever I did. Such experiences
furnished them with irresistible evidence that this won
derful Person might be the Christ ; they were not idle
deductions from the fact that He was the Christ. It
was impossible not to generalise them, and to realise
that with everything else that Jesus might be to men, He
1 How far this is true in point of fact is rather doubtful ; in the Old
Testament it is always God who is Judge, not the Messiah, and it is not
clear that in the New Testament period the function had been transferred
from God to His Anointed. See Bousset, Die Religion des Judentums, c. xiii.

THE CENTURION'S FAITH 253
was also their Judge. He Himself, it may be said,
generalised them, or realised in His own mind all that
they involved. Not to speak meanwhile of passages in
which He tells of the coming of the Son of Man and of
the judgment attendant upon it (e.g. Matt. 1627, 25 81'46),
we have in the Sermon on the Mount, when every allow
ance has been made which historical criticism can demand,
a revelation of the mind of Jesus and of His attitude to
men, which covers all that is meant by calling Him their
final Judge. Resting as it does on the oldest of evangelic
records, the source which lies behind the first and third
gospels, and at an important point very far behind them,
this revelation brings us as close to Jesus as we can
historically be brought. It is not the witness of apostolic
faith to which it introduces us, but the witness of Jesus
to Himself. It is no exaggeration to say that it may be
summed up in the solemn words of James (4 12) : One
only is the Lawgiver and Judge, and that One He
with whom we are confronted here.
The Healing of the Centurion's Servant
(Matt. 8 5-18, Luke 7 ™, 13 28-30).
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 J 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,
1 So Harnack, Spriiche u. Reden Jesu, 54, who says it follows ' with certainty
that great parts of the Sermon stood together in Q and were followed by

254 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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
notable agreement — it virtually amounts to identity— in
their report both of the officer's 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
servant, Do this, and he doeth it ' (Matt. 8 8t- Luke 7 6ff).
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
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
this narrative.' Allen, Commentary on St. Matthew, p. 79, doubts this be
cause ofthe remarkable differences between Matthew and Luke.

THE CENTURION'S FAITH 255
never the case. The only case in the synoptics in which
Jesus speaks of men believing on Himself is Matt. 18 6
(these little ones who believe on Me), and in the parallel
passage in Mark 9 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
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

256 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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. 1 1 2"19, 21 23"32, Luke 7 18'35).
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 n27f-, Matt.
21 23ff-, Luke 20lff), 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 219, 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 257
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 — of wonderful works wrought by Jesus. For
the evangelists, these works identified Jesus as the
promised Messiah : Matthew calls them expressly (ch.
n2) '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 he 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 demonstration of
R

258 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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
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 ofthe 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,

JESUS AND THE BAPTIST 259
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
should be taken both ways, but it is to be taken literally
at least. In Matt. 1 1 2123, which with its parallel in Luke
I013f- goes back to the source we are at present depend
ing on, Jesus speaks twice of his Swa/„eis 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 ofthe
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

260 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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 ipxapevos, 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
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
applied to Him. But taking this simple sentence in its
simplicity we do not hesitate to say of it, as of Matt.
io32, 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.

JESUS AND THE BAPTIST 261
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
phecy of Malachi (3 x) : ' Behold I send My messenger
before thy face who shall prepare thy way before thee.'
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 i2, it is not Israel which is
addressed, but the Messiah (notice the change of before
Me into before thee) ; and the messenger prepares the
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.

262 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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
impossible to suppose that Jesus here thinks of the King
dom as purely transcendent, and means that whoever
finds an inheritance in it when it comes — all its future
citizens — will stand on a higher plane than John. The
lUKporepos, of whom he speaks in the passage, is only
the most typical example of the fiiKpoi, 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
1 Commentary on Matthew, ad loc.

JESUS AND THE BAPTIST 263
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. io42). The most terrible indig
nation flames out against those who lead them astray :
Whosoever 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 ofthe sea (Matt. 186). 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 most 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
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

264 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
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 (n12f),
and which Luke gives in a considerably different form in
another connexion (1616). 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 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 interpret
the difficult words 77 fiao-tkeia rcov ovpav&v /8.a£e. a. KaX
fSiao~rai aprrd^ovcrtv avrr\v ; but whether they mean that
the Kingdom comes in like a whirlwind, and that violent
men like the Zealots wish to bring it in so ; or that at
any cost of violence to themselves genuine disciples
make good their share in it ; or that it is invaded by
aggressive publicans and sinners who (as decent people
think) have no right to be there, is irrelevant to our pur
pose. What it concerns us to note is simply Jesus'
consciousness of the new age. It dates from John, but
it is not identified with him. John, if their contempo
raries will only believe it, is the promised Elijah, who is to
precede the end (Mai. 4s, Matt. n14). Who can Jesus

THE GREAT THANKSGIVING 265
be, when one no less than Elijah must come to prepare
His way ?
The passage in which Matthew (i i16 ff) and Luke (7 31 ff)
record the verdict of Jesus on His contemporaries — a
passage in which Jesus deliberately contrasts Himself and
His forerunner — is reserved till we come to consider the
title Son of Man, which occurs in both writers at this
point : meanwhile we proceed to examine what is in
some ways a critically important section in the gospels,
Matt. 1 1 a5"27 with the parallel in Luke 10 2122-
The Great Thanksgiving of Jesus
(Matt, ii26"27, Luke io21f).
This passage is not found in the same connexion in
the two evangelists, but there is no doubt that it stood
in the source common to both. Luke attaches it to the
return of the Seventy, and to their report of their success.
'In that same hour he rejoiced in the Holy Spirit' To
Luke it is an utterance of pure joy — ' uncompounded
emotion.' It may be questioned whether this does justice
to the words of Jesus. There is something more subtle
in the placing of the words by Matthew, who also intro
duces them by 'at that time.' The time in Matthew
is that at which Jesus has been sending His warning
beatitude to John, passing a scornful censure on the
childishness of his contemporaries in their dealings with
God and His messengers, and pronouncing woes on the
Galilaean cities which had seen His mighty works and
not repented. 'At that time Jesus answered and said, I
thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that
Thou didst hide these things from the wise and under-

266 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
standing, and didst reveal them unto babes. Yea,
Father, for so it was well pleasing in Thy sight.' The
eleventh chapter of Matthew as a whole might be headed
a-KavSaXov, Offence : it is engaged throughout with
people who found things in Jesus which they could not
get over, and therefore with the disappointing side of
His experience. It is a question of profound interest,
how Jesus Himself regarded such disappointments, and
the evangelist finds the answer to it in the first part
of the great thanksgiving. When Jesus reflects on His
work and its issues, disenchanting in some respects as
they are, what is uppermost in His mind is recognition
of God's fatherly providence, and unreserved and joyful
surrender to it. The words ' revealed ' and ' hidden '
show that He is thinking mainly of His teaching. It is
only the peculiarity of an Eastern language that makes
Him seem to give thanks that some have rejected it : in
our idiom He would have said, ' That while Thou hast
hidden these things from the wise and understanding,
Thou hast revealed them unto babes.' Jesus could not
have rejoiced in a revelation which was only accessible
to the wise and understanding : this would have excluded
the babes. But a revelation accessible to the babes is
accessible to all ; even the wise and understanding may
apprehend it if they are willing to lay aside their pre
tensions and become as little children. Jesus is content,
and more than content, to have it so. He acquiesces
with joy in the ordering of His life and work upon such
lines. It is the gracious will of the Father, the Sove
reign Lord of heaven and earth ; what should one who calls
God Father do but accept it with serene confidence ?

THE GREAT THANKSGIVING 267
If the words of Jesus stopped here, we might not be
able to bring them into any precise relation to our subject.
They are such words as any child of God might use who
encountered untoward experiences in doing the will of
his Father. But Jesus goes much further. The God-
ward igofioXoyrjo-ts or thanksgiving, the joyful acqui
escence in the Father's will, is followed by a manward
expression of assurance. The results of His work so
far may seem disconcerting, but they do not cast Him
down. He has an inward confidence that He is com
petent for the work the Father has given Him to do,
and that He alone is competent. This is what is repre
sented in the words of Matthew ( 1 1 27) : All things have
been delivered unto Me of My Father : and no one
knoweth the Son, save the Father; neither doth any
know the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever
the Son willeth to reveal Him. The variations in Luke
are immaterial, and before referring to what many regard
as an earlier tradition of this saying, substantially
different in import, it will be worth while to consider
what the received text means. The following points are
to be noticed.
First, the declaration ' all things have been delivered
unto Me by My Father' is to be interpreted in relation to
the context. ' ' All things ' does not refer to universal
sovereignty, as when Jesus after the resurrection says,
All power has been given unto Me in heaven and on
earth (Matt. 28 18). This is not relevant here, nor is
there any analogy to it till Jesus is glorified. Neither
does it express, as has been suggested, the Christian
confidence declared in Paul's words, 'All things are yours '

268 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
(i Cor. 3 21), or, ' We know that all things work together
for good to them that love God ' (Rom. 828). Standing
where it does, ' all things ' must mean all that is involved
in the revelation of God to man — the whole contents
and administration of this revelation. This is what is in
view both in what precedes and in what follows. In the
work of making Himself known to men, the Father has
no organ but Jesus, and in Jesus He has an adequate
organ. The word irap&odr) is supposed by many —
Wellhausen among the latest — to allude to irapaSoats, or
tradition, all religious knowledge among the Jews com
ing under this description. The tradition of the Jewish
schools, on which the wise and understanding leaned
so confidently, Jesus brushed aside ; the tradition
which He Himself represented was immediately due to
God. It is plausible rather than convincing to deduce
so much from the term Trapehodrj, but discounting the
possible associations of the word, two things are clear.
One is that Jesus strongly asserts here, as He is often
represented doing in the fourth gospel, His subordina
tion to the Father. He has nothing that He has not
received. His doctrine is not His own, but His who
sent Him. The other is that there is no limit to what
He has received. The Father loves the Son and shows
Him all things that he Himself is doing (John 5 20).
The second point that calls for notice is the correla
tion of the Father and the Son. Both the words are
used absolutely : as there is only one Person who can be
called the Father, so there is only one who can be called
the Son. The same phenomenon recurs in Mark 1332:
But of that day or hour knoweth no one, not even the

THE GREAT THANKSGIVING 269
angels in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father. It is
surely remarkable to find the credibility of this disputed.
Schmiedel, indeed, whose treatment of the words before
us will be considered presently, makes the passage in
Mark one of the five foundation pillars for a purely
historical account of Jesus, but Loisy is embarrassed by
both.1 ' Although Father and Son,' he writes, ' are not
exclusively metaphysical terms ' — in which case it would
have been easy to discard them — ' and although they
here represent God and Christ, the use of the word Son
simpliciter is extraordinary in the mouth of Jesus ; it
belongs to the language of tradition, not to that of the
Saviour ; the Christ it designates is immortal, we may
even say eternal.' He refers in a note to the fact that
the same use of Son is found again in Mark, but adds,
' there also one may think of a gloss of tradition, or of
the evangelist.' Thought is free, and one may think of
anything he likes, but surely it is arbitrary in the highest
degree to set aside the testimony of our two oldest
sources to what they evidently regarded as peculiarly
solemn and important utterances of Jesus on the ground
that the language they use belongs to tradition, not to
the Saviour. What do we know of tradition, how can
we form any idea at all of its language, except on the
basis of the evidence which is here summarily set aside ?
Of course if one has made up his mind beforehand that
no sane and pious person could ever speak of God and
himself as the Father and the son, and that therefore
such language could not have been used by Jesus, his
way is clear ; but it is clear also that he is measuring
1 Les Evangiles Synoptiques, i. 909.

270 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
Jesus, and Jesus' consciousness of God and Himself, by
antecedent convictions about men in general, and not by
the evidence in our hands regarding this wonderful Man.
If we knew nothing whatever about Jesus apart from
this utterance it might well seem staggering, but we
cannot forget as we read it all that we have already
passed in review. The mind of Jesus on His own
relations to God and to humanity is not, as we have
seen abundant reason to believe, to be judged by that
of other men ; there is in it not only something which
identifies Him with us, but something also, coming out
in innumerable ways, which profoundly differentiates
Him from us ; and that mysterious something is
conspicuous here. To sum up the whole passage,
Matt. xi. 25'30, as Loisy does1 — Cantique de sagesse
chrdtienne, fruit de I'Esprit — is to shut one's eyes to the
Jesus who is visible throughout the gospels because
one's mind is full of another Jesus who cannot be
discovered in the gospels at all.
This unqualified correlation of the Father and the
Son is the ultimate ground on which Jesus holds the
place which He does in New Testament faith, and
unless we can set aside the words in which He expresses
it we must acknowledge that that place is justified. It
is not only given, it is assumed. It answers to His own,
as well as to the Christian sense, of what is due to
Jesus : the Person on whom Christianity depends is in
His own consciousness adequate to the responsibility.
Finally, however, this is brought out with new
emphasis in the words which follow : ' No one knoweth
1 Ut supra, p. 910,

THE GREAT THANKSGIVING 271
the Son save the Father ; neither doth any know
the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the
Son willeth to reveal Him.' What stands on the very
surface here is the mutual, perfect, and exclusive
knowledge of the Father and the Son. When Jesus
says that no one knows the Son but the Father, we
cannot suppose Him to be merely saying of Himself
what is true of every one, that there is a mystery in
individuality which is open to God alone ; assuming that
He spoke the words at all, they are relevant and
consistent with the context only if they suggest a unique
and unfathomable greatness in Jesus. It is easier to
see the point of what comes after : Neither doth any
know the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever
the Son willeth to reveal Him. Jesus declares explicitly
that He alone knows God as Father, and that for that
knowledge, on which blessedness depends, all men must
become debtors to Him. It is through Him alone, and
in accordance with His sovereign and gracious will, that
the Father is revealed, and that men can be enlightened
and saved. It is possible to read the passage as it
stands in too abstract and metaphysical a sense — to
forget that Father and Son, even when used thus
absolutely, are terms full of ethical import ; but it is a
mistake to suppose that we do justice to an utterance so
striking when we have reduced it to moral commonplace.
No doubt we may say with Loisy, that no one fully
knows the Son and the devotion that binds Him to
man's redemption, except the Father who sends Him ;
and that no one knows the Father and the indulgent
goodness with which He follows His creatures, except

272 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
the Son and those who have been taught by Him ; but
as he himself allows (though he makes it an argument
that it is not really Jesus who speaks), the terms Father
and Son, in absolute correlation, as here, suggest some
thing more. The sentence as a whole tells us plainly
that Jesus is both to God and to man what no other can
be : He is the Son who alone knows the Father — to
borrow the expression of the fourth gospel, He is the
vib's povoyevrfs — and He is the Mediator through whom
alone the knowledge of the Father comes to men.
There is nothing in the New Testament which carries
us further than this, ' and nothing more is wanted to
justify completely the attitude of Christian faith to Jesus.
It is a signal instance of a question-begging term when
Loisy says that the passage translates the faith of the
Christian community. It corresponds to it, yet does not
translate it. But for words like these, and the reality
which stands behind them, the faith of the Christian
community could never have come into being, or been
able to justify itself to its own judgment.
Criticism of this passage has seldom gone to the
extreme represented by Loisy, who refuses to allow that
it has any historical connexion with Jesus whatever.
But in recent times an attempt has been made to
discount its importance by literary as opposed to
historical considerations. It was apparently current in
the second century in a somewhat different form. On
the one hand, the present tense (imytvcoa-Ket) was
replaced by the aorist (eyvot) ; and on the other, the
order of the clauses was reversed. It might then be
rendered : No one has come to know the Father but

THE GREAT THANKSGIVING 273
the Son, nor has any one come to know the Son but the
Father, and they (or he) to whomsoever the Son has
made (or, willeth to make) the revelation.1 The doc
trinal importance of these changes is supposed to be
very great, and has been strongly urged, for example,
by Schmiedel.2 The change of tense is alleged to bring
the whole utterance down from the timeless or eternal
into the historical world, and the affinity of this passage
with the fourth gospel disappears. At the time at
which Jesus speaks, He has attained to the knowledge
that God is not a Lord inaccessible to men and always
in a heat about His honour, but a loving Father. But
Jesus is the only person who has yet attained to this
insight. Having it, it is natural for Him to think of
Himself as God's Son, and so He does think of Himself;
but none of His hearers has penetrated His secret.
God alone knows, or rather has perceived — because the
spiritual history of Jesus has given Him the opportunity
of perceiving — that Jesus' attitude to Him is that of son
to father. The change of order, too, is important. In
the received text, what immediately precedes the last
clause is the assertion that no one knows the Father
1 This is the ' Western ' reading as given e.g. in Huck's Synopse on the
basis of Marcion, Justin, and the Clementine Homilies : o.oVu eyv a> ro.
irwripa, el pr) 6 vibs, Kai (oiSe) tov vlov el pf) 6 iraTrjp Kai oi. (<») av 6 vlbs
dtroKaXviffrj (/SovXijr cu airoK.aKi\jfm). Harnack in his attempted restoration of
Q (Spruche u. Reden Jesu, 94, 189 ff.) adopts the change of tense, but not
that of order. He is inclined to agree with Wellhausen that the clause 'no
one knows the Son but the Father ' is an old interpolation : the variation
of position itself makes it suspicious, and as we have seen above its relevance
is not so obvious. Harnack's text runs : _-a. ra /_ot 7rape866r) _ 7.0 tov irarpos,
Kai oidels eyva [tov vlov el pf/ 6 irarrfp oiS.J to. irarepa [rts _y. a>] el pfj 6 vlbs Kai
(a e'av /So.Xij.at 6 vlbs airoKaKinjrai. For Weiss's view, which is more
favourable to the received text, v. Die Quellen der synopt. Ueberl. 30.
2 Das vierte Evangelium, 48 ff. S

274 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
but the Son, and when it is added, ' and he to whomso
ever the Son willeth to reveal,' the object naturally
supplied is ' the Father,' or ' the true nature of God.'
But in the more ancient text, what immediately precedes
the last clause is, No one knows the Son but the Father,
and to this the natural supplement can only be, 'and
they (or he) to whom the Son reveals Himself.' It is as
if Jesus had said to His hearers, ' None of you has yet
recognised Me : I have to tell you Myself what I am.'
It is not the Father whom He reveals, but the Son.
The importance of this, allowing to the ' Western '
text any authority it can legitimately claim, is much
more apparent than real. To refer first to the difference
of order : it is certain that every one who often quotes
this utterance of Jesus quotes it with the clauses some
times in one order, sometimes in the other. Irenaeus,
who censures those who adopt the ' Western ' order as
people who want to be wiser than the apostles, some
times follows it himself; which proves, not that it stood
in his New Testament, but that, like other people in
ancient and modern times, Irenaeus could recall the
passage without attaching any significance to the order.1
Then as to the tense : is it quite certain that there is the
difference which Schmiedel supposes between the aorist
and the present? Even those who read eyva) in their
text must have felt that it included a present — a
historical if not a timeless one ; at the moment at which
the words were spoken Jesus and the Father had the
peculiar, mutual, and exclusive knowledge of each other
which is asserted also in the received text. If this is so,
1 Irensus, Adv. Haer., iv. 6. 2.

THE GREAT THANKSGIVING 275
nothing is gained for Schmiedel's interpretation by
saying that what Jesus revealed was not the Father but
Himself. He Himself was Son, and as the knowledge
of relatives is one, to reveal Himself is to reveal the
Father. It is difficult to understand why a writer who
not only accepts as certain, but presents as the very
type of certainty, the passage in Mark 1 3 82 in which
there is an absolute correlation of the Father and the
Son, should so strenuously object to it here, and argue
that Jesus cannot have called Himself Son of God in a
sense applicable to Himself alone. If He did it there,
why not here ? To avoid all misunderstanding, Schmie
del says, we must state as the import of the passage not
that Jesus was conscious of Himself as the Son of God,
but that He was conscious of Himself as a child of God.
That is, we must decline the only expression which is
known to the New Testament, and adopt an expression
of which the New Testament does not furnish a single
example. We must set the whole of the evidence aside,
and construct the consciousness of Jesus out of our own
heads. It is impossible to regard this as serious criticism.
There is one consideration which of itself is conclusive
against all minimising constructions of this passage. It
is contained in the words, All things have been delivered
unto Me by My Father. (Harnack thinks the original
was 'by the Father'; but it makes no difference.)
These words are surely not the preface to such a
rationalistic commonplace as Schmiedel evolves from
what comes after : they imply in Jesus a consciousness
of His place and vocation to which nothing but the
Christian attitude to Him does justice. It is vain to

276 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
isolate words like these about the Father and the Son,
and then to torture them into agreement with some
preconceived idea of what Jesus must have been : they
do not stand alone in our evidence, and when we
take them with utterances of Jesus such as have been
already examined they refuse to accept any but the
highest interpretation. There may be theories of man
and the universe which have antecedent antipathies
to them ; but it is no objection to them, in the eyes
of a student of history, that they furnish a historical
justification for the Christian faith in Jesus. It may not
be amiss, however, to remark that while we accept this
justification, we admit that it is idle to ask whether the
Sonship of Jesus here spoken of is Messianic or ethical
or metaphysical. We gain nothing by separating in
thought what cannot be separated in reality. That
Jesus was conscious of a unique vocation in connection
with God's Kingdom is true : in that sense He was the
Messianic Son of God, and the passage illustrates His
Messianic consciousness. But the relation to God
which this involved was not 'official'; even in His
Messianic vocation His consciousness was filial ; the
God whose kingdom He was to inaugurate was His
Father in a vital and ethical sense — One with whom He
lived in perfect mutual understanding, who was loved
and trusted by Him without reserve, and to whom He
could say in the most disconcerting situations, Even so,
Father, for so it seemed good in Thy sight. The least
serviceable, however, of all these distinctions is meta
physical. It means something when we say that Jesus
was Messianic Son of God — we can put into the

ISOLATED REVELATIONS 277
adjective all we know of His vocation in God's Kingdom.
It means something when we say He was Son of God
in the ethical sense : we can fill up the idea of Sonship
with the love, trust, and obedience which belong to the
filial life. But it does not mean anything which we can
correspondingly define if we say He was Son in the
metaphysical sense. It is only another way of saying
with emphasis that He was Son, and of suggesting that
there was something in His Sonship which goes
beyond us.
Isolated Expressions in which Jesus' Consciousness
of Himself is revealed.
Up till now we have examined passages common to
Matthew and Luke in which there was a certain con
tinuity, but it is necessary to look at others in which,
though fragmentary and isolated, there is a similar re
velation made of the mind of Jesus. It is impossible to
take them in any chronological order, but the following
are the most important.
In Matt, n20-24, Luke io13"15 we have the woes pro
nounced by Jesus on Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Caper
naum. The mighty works He has done in them are
referred to — miracles of healing, evidently, in which the
goodness of God was leading them to repentance — and
the doom of their impenitence is pronounced. It shall
be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon, more tolerable
for Sodom, in the day of judgment than for them. The
work of Jesus is connected in His own mind with the
last day. Nothing less than the final destiny of men is
determined by their attitude to it. This sense of the

278 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
absolute significance of the manifestation of God's
saving power in Him pervades many of the words of
Jesus, and is the ultimate basis of what is called faith in
His divinity.
Another significant passage is Matt, 1230, which is
found verbatim also in Luke 1 1 28 : He that is not with
Me is against Me, and he that gathereth not with Me
scattereth. This is on the same plane, even if it is not
in the same key, as ' he that loveth father or mother
more than Me is not worthy of Me.' It betrays the
consciousness in Jesus of a significance attaching to His
own personality and work such as has no parallel in
Scripture. What, in His own mind, is the Person who
thus summons men to identify themselves with Him,
and declares neutrality impossible? Every one feels
how weighty His words are if they really express the
mind of Jesus about Himself, and though for those who
remember other sayings of Jesus with which we are now
familiar there is no reason to question them, we need
not be surprised to find that they have been assailed
from various sides. Wellhausen1 thinks that, to be
relevant to the context — that is, to fit into their place
in the argument — they must be capable of being
generalised. Jesus is only taking Himself as an ex
ample of a principle : He says, He who is not with Me
is against Me, but He is not specially thinking of Him
self; what He means is that in any battle he who is
not a friend is a foe. How any one can say this of a
passage in which the standing of Jesus is the very point
at issue (notice the repeated and emphatic ey_j in Matt.
1 Das Evangelium Matthaei, ad loc.

ISOLATED REVELATIONS 279
i227"28 which immediately precedes, and the saying about
speaking against the Son of Man in Matt. 1232 which
immediately follows) it is hard to comprehend. Loisy x
does not attempt to eviscerate the words, but suggests
that they do not come from Jesus. He points to the
fact that in Mark 9 40 and Luke 9 60 we have a saying
in a somewhat similar situation — in both places exorcism
is being discussed — but of a different spirit, though an
analogous form. In Luke it reads, He that is not
against you is on your side ; in Mark, according to the
generally accepted text, though Wellhausen would make
it agree with Luke, He who is not against us is on our
side. This is more genial, more tolerant, than the
saying in Matt. 1230, Luke 11 23, and therefore maybe
assumed to be a word of Jesus. Loisy assumes that it
is the only word of Jesus on the subject, but the writer
must confess himself quite unable to follow the process
by which a rddacteur is conjured up qui aurait cru
devoir retourner la sentence: ' Qui nest pas contre vous
est pour vous, ' en: ' Qui nest pas avec moi est contre
moi.' Aurait cru devoir is good, but it does not justify
M. Loisy in laying on the conscience of an imaginary
rddacteur the responsibility of producing the reasons
which he himself owes to his readers. There is in fact
no reason whatever for this fantastic supposition, except
the reason that Jesus must not say things which indicate
that He had in His own mind the absolute significance
which He has in Christian faith. The two sayings are
quite independent — Luke, as we have seen, gives both
— and they are strictly relevant to the context in which
1 Les Evangiles Synoptiques, i. 708.

280 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
they occur. In Matt. 1230, Luke 1 1 23 Jesus is discus
sing exorcism with His enemies, who wish to arrest His
beneficent work, and He says naturally, in the tone of
warning, He that is not with Me is against Me, and he
that gathereth not with Me scattereth. In Mark 940,
Luke 950 He is discussing the same subject with His
disciples, one of whom has just told Him that he had
seen a man casting out devils in Jesus' name and for
bidden him, because he did not follow with them. Just
as naturally Jesus answers here, Forbid him not : he
who is not against you is on your side. There is no
reason to doubt either the one saying or the other, and
both belong to the oldest stratum of evangelic tradition.
The twelfth chapter of Matthew preserves other
words of Jesus in which we hear Him speak of His own
greatness. Two of these (in verses 41, 42) are found
also in Luke (11 slt) : Behold, there is more than Jonah
here ; Behold, there is more than Solomon here. A
third occurs in Matthew only (v. 6) : I say unto you,
there is something greater than the temple here. In all
these passages the words underlined are neuter : Jesus
does not say directly, I am greater than the temple or
Jonah or Solomon, but He declares that where He is a
greater cause is represented, greater responsibilities are
imposed, greater issues are at stake, than were involved
by relation to the most sacred institutions or the most
venerated personalities of former times. It is not neces
sary to ask how Jesus conceived the temple or Jonah or
Solomon to be transcended in importance by Himself:
the significant fact is that He did. It is in the same
consciousness, though in a different tone, that He speaks

ISOLATED REVELATIONS 281
in another passage preserved both in Matthew and
Luke, and therefore going back to their source, though
they give it in different connections : ' Happy are your
eyes, for they see, and (your) ears, for they hear. (For
verily) I say unto you that many prophets (and kings)
desired to see what you see and saw not, and to hear
what you hear and heard not.'1 The revelation made
in Jesus not only brings great responsibilities, but rare
blessedness. The look which Jesus here casts upon
the past is one of the most vivid and beautiful things in
the New Testament. He enters sympathetically into
the yearnings of good men in distant ages, into the
hopes that their eyes grew dim with waiting for ; and
He is conscious that their long-deferred fulfilment has
come at last with Him. Matthew inserts the words just
after the first parable of Jesus, or rather after the quota
tion from Isaiah, in which the judicial blindness of the
unbelieving people is foretold : in Luke they stand in
immediate connexion with the claim of Jesus to be the
Son who alone knows and can alone reveal the Father.
In any case, they discover the consciousness of Jesus
that in Him the absolute revelation has come : those
who know Him have the happiness which can never be
transcended. All the hopes and longings of the good
are consummated in it. He does not say, Blessed are
our eyes, for they see, and our ears, for they hear, as if
the blessedness were that of a new era in which He
shared only as His contemporaries did ; but blessed are
your eyes and your ears ; for what they saw and heard
1 This is Harnack's reconstruction of the passage : Spruche u. Reden
Jesu, 94.

282 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
was seen and heard in Him. It is He Himself — His
presence in the world, and the revelation of God He
makes in word and deed — which is the ground of His
felicitation of the disciples. And this, be it remarked
once more, is only another way in which He assumes
that the proper attitude of men to Himself is that which
is everywhere exhibited in the New Testament Church.
He has a place which is all His own as the Mediator of
the supreme blessedness for men, and to deny Him such
a place is not only to subvert historical Christianity, it
is to ignore Jesus' presentation of Himself.
We may now proceed to consider another passage
which certainly stood in the source common to Matthew
and Luke, and possibly even in that source was a quota
tion, a passage therefore of high antiquity, yet in many
respects hard to estimate. In Matthew it is given
continuously in ch. 23 34"39, and forms the climax of
the great denunciation of the Pharisees with which
Jesus' ministry in Jerusalem closes ; in Luke it occurs
much earlier, and is broken into two. The first part
(ch. 1 1 4051), as in Matthew, closes a series of woes pro
nounced upon the Pharisees, though the scene is not the
temple, but a Pharisee's table somewhere in Galilee or
Peraea ; the second (ch. 1 3 34 f) is connected with the
saying of Jesus that it is not possible that a prophet
should perish out of Jerusalem, but is not spoken in
the capital nor at the close of Jesus' ministry. More
remarkable even than differences like these, to which
the gospels present many parallels, is the manner in
which Luke introduces the words of Jesus : ' Therefore
also the Wisdom of God said, I will send unto them

ISOLATED REVELATIONS 283
prophets and apostles,' etc. There are only two things
that can be said of this. Either the evangelist, for no
reason we can see, identifies Jesus at this point with the
Wisdom of God, and then goes on to report the words
which Jesus spoke in this character ; or Jesus Himself
quotes from some book of Wisdom which has been lost
to us, making (as the evangelist understood) the words
of the Wisdom of God His own. To this we can
certainly provide no parallel, yet we may not be justified
in pronouncing it impossible. It is plausible, indeed, to
argue with Loisy and others that Matthew is right in
giving the passage unbroken, and Luke in representing
it as a citation. The point of view is that of an apoca
lyptic writer, surveying God's providential dealings with
Israel, and like all his kind renouncing hope. God has
done everything to win them, appealed to them by
messengers of every type — prophets, wise men, scribes ;
but from the beginning of the story to the end, from
Genesis to Revelation in the Hebrew Bible,1 the stream
of righteous blood has never ceased to flow ; 2 the
Wisdom of God has been scorned and trampled on in
all its representatives. At last the hour of vengeance
is at hand, but ere it strikes, the heart of Wisdom, and
1 The writer sees no need to depart from the old opinion that ' from the
blood of Abel to the blood of Zachariah (the son of Barachiah) ' is a way of
saying ' from the beginning of history to the end ' ; the reference in the case
of Zachariah being to 2 Chron. 2420f. — 2 Chron. is the last book in the
Hebrew canon. It is not certain that ' son of Barachiah ' belonged originally
to the text (it is wanting in Luke) ; but even if it did, it would only be a slip
of a perfectly natural kind. As Loisy remarks, it is not easy to see what
reason a Christian could have for putting the murder of Zachariah the son of
Baruch by the Zealots at the beginning of the siege of Jerusalem on a level
with that of Abel.
2 See Matt. 2336, eK^vvvopevov.

284 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
of God, is revealed in the thrilling apostrophe, ' O Jeru
salem, Jerusalem, which killeth the prophets and stoneth
them that are sent unto her, how often would I have
gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth
her brood under her wings, and ye would not.' This is
not (it is argued) the voice of Jesus, referring to such
visits to Jerusalem and to such attempts to win her
people as we see in the fourth gospel : it is the voice of
God ; Jerusalem, in this high poetic key, is not material —
the geographical city in which Jesus was crucified ; she
is the impersonation of Israel, the mother of the children
to whom God appeals. All this may be granted — per
haps we should rather say, All this must be granted —
yet the question remains, Is it incredible that the ap
plication of it to Jesus should have been due to Himself?
It is not necessary to enter into the minor changes by
which the evangelists adapt the tradition to their audi
ence — Luke, for example, replacing the Jewish 'wise
men and scribes ' of Matthew by Christian ' apostles ' —
the two main points are the same in both. These are
that Jesus identifies Himself with all God's action to
wards Israel, finding it continued and indeed consum
mated in Himself, and that He declares the doom of
Israel to be involved in the rejection of Himself and
His messengers. Now it is not too much to say that
these are constant elements in Jesus' consciousness of
Himself and of His significance ; the last, in particular,
has come before us again and again (v. Matt, io16, 1 1 20ff),
while the first is involved in the simple conception of
Himself as the Messiah, the person through whom God's
purpose towards Israel is to be accomplished. All that

ISOLATED REVELATIONS 285
remains then is the question, which is rather of. curious
than of serious interest, whether Jesus would have
borrowed from a book to express elements of His con
sciousness so moving and profound. Assuming that a
book is quoted, it also must have been moving and pro
found — wonderfully and divinely inspired in its apprehen
sion of God's relations to Israel. Nothing but the spirit
of Christ in the writer ( i Peter i n) could enable him to
enter with such profound sympathy into God's dealings
with Israel, and so to speak of them in words which
Jesus could afterwards make His own. Is it not
gratuitous to suppose that the authority lying behind
Matthew and Luke — an authority which we have good
reason to believe to be that of the apostle Matthew him
self — put these words into the mouth of Jesus without
ground ? If they were incongruous with what we have
already seen to be the mind of Jesus about Himself, we
might accept this supposition to explain the incongruity ;
but when there is no inherent difficulty — when the self-
revelation of Jesus here is in thorough harmony with
that which we have already seen, on the basis of Matt.
x. and xi., with their parallels in Luke, to be truly his
torical — the supposition is at least not inevitable. It
is easier to believe that whatever the circumstances —
whether in Galilee or in Jerusalem ; whether with His
death imminent or at a greater distance from it — Jesus
took these wonderful words to Himself. They open to
us the mind in which He lived and died. The presence
in the world of a Person who was able to appropriate
such words — to identify so absolutely the actions and
the cause of God with His own cause and actions — is

286 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
not confined to this passage ; it is, as we have amply
seen, the signature of the gospels as a whole. It is
the token that we have passed from the Old Testament
to the New, and that the New is founded not only on
the faith of Christians but on the mind of Christ.1
Passages in which Jesus speaks of Himself as The
Son of Man.
In view of the doubt which has been cast on the
use of this title by Jesus at all, it is worth while to refer
to its distribution in the pages of the gospels. As Dr.
Armitage Robinson has pointed out,2 it occurs in every
one of the strata of the evangelic records which criticism
has learned to distinguish. It is found in Mark, in the
non-Marcan source common to Matthew and Luke
with which we are at present concerned, in passages
peculiar to Matthew and to Luke respectively, and in
John. Be the difficulties what they may, if anything
can be established by testimony, it is established that
Jesus used this phrase as a designation of Himself. It
was indeed so characteristic of Him that no one, ap
parently, could give any account of how He spoke
without making use of it. When we look more closely
at the facts, however, it has to be admitted that the
testimony as to the occasions on which it was used is
not quite uniform. For instance, in the document with
1 The striking remark of Harnack on the discourse about the Baptist in
Matt. xi. (Spruche u. Reden Jesu, 167) is not inappropriate here : Dass aber
der ganzen Rede das ' Ich bin es ' zugrunde liegt, ist kein Grund zu Bedenken,
oder man muss den Federstrich iiber den ganzen Inhalt der Evangelien
ziehen. The admission of this sound principle would draw the pen through
an immense mass of what is regarded as historical criticism ofthe gospels.
2 The Study ofthe Gospels, p. 49.

THE SON OF MAN 287
which we are dealing, it is sometimes not quite clear
whether its presence is due to Jesus or to the evangelist.
In Luke 6 22 we have a beatitude on those who suffer ' for
the Son of Man's sake,' where the parallel in Matt. 512
has ' for My sake' ; and similarly in Luke 12 8 we have
'him will the Son of Man confess,' where Matt. 10 32
gives ' him will I confess.' Such disagreements, however,
are the exception. In the vast majority of cases, where
one evangelist has ' the Son of Man,' so has the other ;
and in view of this fact it seems an overstatement to say
with Harnack, that while it is certain that Jesus used
this title we cannot be certain that He used it on any
given occasion.1 The title is a significant one ; and if there
are occasions on which an utterance of Jesus depends
for its point on this significance, and on which the use
of the title is attested both by Matthew and Luke, and
therefore by their source, we may surely say that on
these occasions we have a certainty of it as well assured
as anything can be in history. An attempt has been
made to discredit the joint testimony of Matthew and
Luke to some striking instances of the use of this title
by arguing that it is in the strictest sense Messianic, and
that Jesus could not possibly have made public and
frequent use of it when His Messiahship was not only
not proclaimed by Himself, but not even suspected by
His most intimate disciples. It is pointed out, too, in
this connexion, that in Mark, with the exception of two
instances which are susceptible of easy explanation as
due to misapprehension by the evangelist (Mark 2 10'28),
the title is not used till after Jesus has been confessed
1 Spruche u. Reden Jesu, 169.

288 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
as the Christ at Caesarea Philippi ; and that when it is
used subsequently to this it is in the specifically eschato
logical sense. That is, it designates Jesus not as actually
the Messiah, which would be a contradiction in terms,
no actual king being possible till the Kingdom had
actually come ; but as the Person who is to be the
Messiah, and who will come in that character with the
coming of the Kingdom.
The evidence of Mark will be considered at a later
stage, but the highly problematical treatment of Mark
2 10'28, and the inferences drawn from it, are entirely
insufficient to invalidate the witness of an authority
which is at least as ancient as Mark, and had as wide a
currency in the Church. We must not be too hasty and
too precise in defining ' the Son of Man,' especially if
the result is that many of the most moving and charac
teristic sayings of the gospel are obliterated, while those
alone are left which perplex or embarrass the ordinary
mind. The title, no doubt, goes back primarily to
Dan. 7 13. There, however, it is not a title, but an
appellative ; not a proper name without meaning, but
a term with essential significance of its own. What the
seer beholds is not the Son of Man, but one like a son
of man — that is, a human form, as opposed to the brute
forms of the earlier visions. That this human form has
' the Kingdom ' given to it — that it is invested with a
final, universal, and glorious sovereignty — is true ; in
that sense the vision is eschatological. This, too, facili
tated and made appropriate in the New Testament the
use of the title Son of Man in eschatological connexions.
But that on which the main emphasis lies in Daniel is the

THE SON OF MAN 289
humanity ofthe form which is invested with this eschato
logical splendour, and though an apocalyptist might over
look this, it was not likely to be overlooked by Jesus.
We do not need to trace the process by which the
human figure of Daniel's vision, which originally stood
for Israel, ' the saints of the Most High ' (Dan. 7 18), was
identified with the Messiah, Israel's ideal representative ;
but we can be sure that in appropriating the title to
Himself, Jesus did not lose the consciousness of what
originally gave it its meaning. It was always charged
with the idea of humanity, as well as with that of final
sovereignty, or apocalyptic splendour. The most tech
nical expression would fill with finer import in the lips of
Jesus, and admitting the Messianic and eschatological
import of this title as it was currently used, we see
no reason to question that Jesus may have employed it
on occasion with an emphasis which brought out another
part of its contents. It is the more natural to think so
when we observe that the later New Testament writers
who indicate acquaintance with it, though they do not
themselves use it — Paul in 1 Cor. 15 27 f- and the Epistle
to the Hebrews 26ff- — connect it not with Daniel but
with the Eighth Psalm. Here Man in His greatness
and littleness is the Psalmist's subject, and the fortunes
of humanity, as represented by Jesus, are what engage
the minds of the Christian authors.
To turn, then, to the texts common to Matthew and
Luke, we find first, following Luke's order, that in which
Jesus contrasts Himself with the Baptist (Luke 731ff-,
Matt. n16ff). It occurs incidentally in the vivid little
parable in which Jesus pronounces His verdict on His
T

290 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
contemporaries, comparing them, in all their relations to
God, to wilful children, who will not be in earnest with
religion in any form, sombre or winsome. ' John came
neither eating nor drinking, and they say He has a devil.
The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they
say Behold a man gluttonous and a wine-bibber, a friend
of publicans and sinners.' It is not easy to understand
why Harnack thinks it ' more than doubtful ' that Jesus
used this title here. He says that in the discourse which
precedes and of which this forms part, Jesus has
clearly enough avoided any designation of Himself as
Messiah ; but He shows convincingly that the Messianic
consciousness of Jesus pervades this speech from begin
ning to end. He does not regard this as unhistorical,1
but if its historicity be admitted, why should we hesi
tate to think that the Messianic consciousness might
reveal itself in a significant or suggestive term ? It is
true that Jesus did not at this period call Himself the
Christ, and that even after the confession at Caesarea
Philippi, He forbade His disciples to tell any one that
He was so ; but for this there were reasons. The Christ
or the Messiah was a term which for the Jews was laden
with political meanings and hopes in which Jesus had no
part ; He deliberately avoided using it therefore, be
cause to use it was to excite expectations which it was
His very calling to disown. But that is no reason why
He should not have employed another title to express
His unique relation to the Kingdom of God, if such
a title could be found ; a title which was at once free
from the objectionable political associations of 'the
1 Spruche u. Reden Jesu, 167, quoted above in note on p. 286.

THE SON OF MAN 291
Christ,' and singularly appropriate to convey some ofthe
most characteristic thoughts of Jesus. The title Son of
Man lay to His hand. It implied at once humanity and
sovereignty, but while both of these ideas are essential
elements in the meaning, either might be uppermost,
while the other was more or less latent. In the passage
before us, it is the humanity which is emphasised. The
Baptist had seemed to separate himself from men— to
rise, in a sense, above the measure of common humanity.
He would not be in debt to it for anything, neither
society nor food nor clothing. He was an exalted,
austere, and solitary being ; when common sense ceased
to be frightened by his preaching, it said ' he is pos
sessed by a demon — mad.' But the person whose trans
cendent greatness as compared with John is the
presupposition of the whole discourse comes in quite
another fashion. He is not too good to take the world
as God has made it, to enter into the common life
of men, to meet them, so to speak, on their own level.
He comes ' eating and drinking.' Humanity is the very
badge and device under which he lives. This is what
the title particularly expresses, and surely a title or
descriptive designation is wanted. To put ' I ' into the
sentence instead of ' the Son of Man,' is to rob it of its
point and beauty. But something is lost also if we
ignore the latent sense of sovereignty which is always
an element in the meaning. To render the words as
O. Holtzmann does,1 Es kam das Menschenkind, is to
fail utterly to do justice to the ' I am he,' which as
Harnack says underlies the passage throughout. Its
1 In his Leben Jesu, p. 129.

292 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
interest, in relation to the purpose of this study, is that it
reveals Jesus to us making (if we may put it so) in the most
unassuming manner the most stupendous assumption —
identifying Himself with men in all that is human, shar
ing with them in the humble common order of their life
in this world, yet representing for them at that level the
supreme wisdom of God, and betraying the sense that
the final triumph of humanity — that victory of the human
over the brutal in which the Kingdom of God is an
nounced to come — is a triumph identical with his own.
It is not only in what have been regarded as properly
eschatological passages that we have to think of this last
aspect of the Son of Man : more or less it must reach
the mind everywhere. Only because the final sover
eignty and all that it involves is latent in the term can
he who says with such genial humility, The Son of Man
came eating and drinking, say at the same time, Blessed
is he whosoever shall not be offended in Me, or Whoso
shall confess Me before men, him shall the Son of Man
confess before the angels of God.
The second of our examples is found verbatim in
Matt. 8 20, Luke 9 68 : The foxes have holes and the birds
of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not
where to lay His head. This is surely a self-authenti
cating word. To replace the Son of Man by the
personal pronoun is to take the weight as well as the
beauty of the saying away. Jesusidoes not speak to repel
the person — a scribe, according to Matthew — who offered
to follow Him wherever He went, but He invites him to
count the cost. He does not speak as if such devotion
were beyond what He could claim ; on the contrary, the

THE SON OF MAN 293
immediate context in both evangelists represents Him as
demanding from an aspirant to discipleship that cruel
sacrifice of natural affection which we have already dis
cussed in principle : Follow Me, and let the dead bury
their own dead. His claims cannot be put too high.
What breaks through at this point in the use of the title
Son of Man — a title so appropriate where Jesus finds
that His humanity is literally all that He has in common
with His kind, all properties and privileges of other men
being denied Him— is this sense of the disparity be
tween His present lot and that which is destined for
Him. The pathos of His situation is not that of a poor
man, but that of a disinherited King. He is the heir of
all things, and when He calls himself the Son of Man,
He betrays that He thinks of himself in that character ;
but He sees not yet all things put under Him. How
much of the sense of this reached the mind of His
hearers — how far, for example, the scribe here addressed
felt that the coming King had an infinitely stronger
claim on the loyalty of his followers just because He was
homeless as yet in the realm which was truly His own —
we may not be able to tell. Sometimes a man, even in
speaking to others, speaks half to himself, utters his
mind heedless of whether it can all be apprehended or
appreciated at the moment, because he is sure it will be
afterwards. No one who heard this word could forget
it. There is no reason to suppose that the authority on
which Matthew and Luke are dependent made any
mistake in recording it ; and its whole meaning and
power would be disclosed as other sides of what ' the Son
of Man ' meant were revealed in the teaching of Jesus.

294 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
Passing by the occurrence of the phrase in Matt. 1 2 40,
where we have an interpretation by the evangelist of a
word of Jesus which is simply reported in Luke 1 130, we
come to the last case in which it is used both by Matthew
and Luke, a case of peculiar difficulty : Matt. 1 2 32, Luke
1210. Here blaspheming or speaking a word against
the Son of Man is contrasted, as a pardonable sin, with
blaspheming the Spirit, which is unpardonable. Such a
contrast is only intelligible if the Son of Man is a person
who suggests in the first instance the human rather than
the divine, a person therefore with regard to whom mis
apprehension, contempt, and petulance are easy to under
stand and to condone. On the other hand, it is obvious
that the title Son of Man must be significant here, and sig
nificant of something great : if it were merely a synonym
for ' I,' and if the speaker were only an ordinary person
like those to whom He spoke, what He says would be
gratuitous and even profane. Who am 'I,' to say that
whoever speaks a word against me it shall be forgiven
him, and to compare, or if it be preferred, to contrast
speaking against myself with speaking against the Holy
Spirit ? Even to contrast two things implies some
sort of proportion between them, and it is inept to
say that a sin is pardonable, unless there is a natural pre
sumption that it is in itself a grave sin. This is the
situation here. Jesus calls himself the Son of Man with
the sense of what the term involves. The Son of Man
is the destined King in the Kingdom of God, the
glorious person who is to hold the sovereignty when the
tyranny of Satan has been overthrown. It is this which
makes speaking against Him alarming. In spite of His

THE SON OF MAN 295
destined glory, however, He moves among men in
a lowly guise and in familiar relations which expose Him
to hasty and unworthy censures. It is such a censure
that we find in the petulant outburst, ' He is beside
himself ; but offensive as it is, the circumstances make
it pardonable. Nevertheless, in the very fact that Jesus
pronounces it to be pardonable, and that He names it in
the same breath with the sin against the Spirit, which
He declares to be unpardonable, we see how seriously
He regarded it, and how singularly therefore He thought
of Himself. In its combination of self-abnegation and
self-assertion, the passage is exactly parallel to that in
which Jesus disclaims knowledge of 'that day or that
hour,' while at the same time He assumes a place higher
than men or angels, the place of One who is ' the Son '
in the unqualified sense in which God is ' the Father '
(Mark 13 32). Schmiedel is probably right in holding
that this saying about the pardonableness of speaking a
word against the Son of Man is a genuine word of Jesus:
it is certainly not likely to have been invented by people
who worshipped Him. But even if he were wrong, and
Wellhausen were right in his belief that the true form of
Jesus' words is preserved in Mark, the result, so far as
our argument is concerned, would hardly be affected.
In Mark (3 28ff), there is no mention ofthe Son of Man,
but all sins are said to be pardonable to the sons of men
except that of blaspheming the Holy Spirit. Now the
sin of blaspheming the Spirit, as the context shows,
is the sin of those who look at the works of redeeming
love wrought by the Spirit of God in Jesus — for it is
by the Spirit of God he casts out demons — and ascribe

296 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
them to Beelzebub. In other words, it is by a sin com
mitted against the person and work of Jesus that men
involve themselves in unpardonable guilt. This puts
Him even more unequivocally than the form of words
common to Matthew and Luke into a place of peculiar
greatness. It identifies Him with the cause of God in
that absolute fashion of which we have already had illus
trations, and it makes the destiny of men depend for
ever on their attitude to Himself and His work.1
In the passages which have just been reviewed what
is uppermost in the title Son of Man is the suggestion
of humanity — the lowliness of Jesus, His kinship with
men, that in His aspect and circumstances which exposes
Him to depreciation and misunderstanding. The other
side of the meaning — that in which the glorious destiny
of the Son of Man is involved — can never have been
absent, though in these cases it is more or less latent.
Matthew and Luke have, however, in common another
series of passages in which the glorious destiny of the
Son of Man is the very thing which is affirmed. They
are to be found in Matt. 24 27- 37> 39' 44 ; Luke I7*-"-80,
1 2 40. To these we should perhaps add Luke 1 2 8,
though in the parallel in Matt. 10 32 the Son of Man
is wanting, and is represented by ' I.' In all these
passages the eschatological meaning is undoubted :
Jesus speaks of Himself definitely as the person in
whom the glorious prophecy of Dan. 7 13 ff- is to be
suddenly and finally fulfilled. Hence there can be no
question that Jesus Himself inspired the hope of His
Return which fills the New Testament. If He re-
1 On this paragraph, see the author's article in The Expositor, Dec. 1907.

THE SON OF MAN 297
nounced Messiahship in the political sense in which it
was popular with the Jews, He claimed it in the super
natural sense which had gathered round it since Daniel.
He identified Himself with the human form to which
' the kingdom ' was to be given. Nothing isolates more
conspicuously Jesus' sense of what He was in relation
to God and to man. Nothing marks off His conscious
ness of Himself more distinctly from every form of
prophetic consciousness than this, that whereas the
prophets looked forward to the coming of another, what
Jesus saw as the final and glorious consummation of
God's purposes was His own coming again. It is not
to the purpose to raise here the question how far the
words of Jesus are to be taken literally, or how far
they are merely symbolical — how far they have proved
substantially true, or how far we must acknowledge in
them that illusive element which is inseparable from
predictive prophecy. When we consider that every
thing else in the seventh chapter of Daniel is symbolic
— the sea, for example, and the brutal monsters which
arise out of it — it is at least plausible tp argue that
much of what is spectacular in Jesus' words about the
sudden and glorious advent of the Son of Man is
symbolical also. We are as likely to misunderstand
Him if we read in a legal or prosaic spirit, pressing the
literal meaning of every term, as if we exaggerate the
symbol till no palpable fact remains. But whatever
the true method of interpretation may be, it cannot be
questioned that in His own mind Jesus was identified
with that mysterious and transcendent Person through
whom the kingdom of God at last comes in glory. If

298 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
we knew nothing of Jesus but this, it might well seem
disconcerting : He could be represented with much
plausibility as the victim of a fanatical delusion. But
the mind of Jesus about Himself, in relation to God and
to the establishment of His kingdom, has already come
before us in a great variety of aspects, and forbids any
such conclusion. That mind, it is not too much to say,
is throughout consistent with itself, and in harmony with
the place claimed by Jesus in the prophecies of His
glorious Coming. It is not fanatical, and there is no
shadow of unreality about it ; the unique place He
assumes, the unique authority He claims to exercise,
vindicate themselves in the mind and conscience of man.
It is not only in its glorious consummation that the
kingdom is identified with Him ; it is identified with
Him all through His career. The attitude which He
requires of men is involved in this fact, and it is always
the same. When He speaks of His Advent in glory
and of the manner in which the destiny of men is then
decided for ever by their relation to Himself, He only
concentrates into one tremendous expression what is
the burden of His self-revelation from beginning to
end. So far as it has been carried, the results of our
investigation are, we venture to assert, entirely favour
able to the catholic Christian attitude to Jesus. The
investigation has been strictly limited to the oldest
accessible authorities — the source common to Matthew
and Luke, with one or two references at the outset to
Mark ; and the conclusion is all the more important.
We do not say that it vindicates any particular Chris-

THE SON OF MAN 299
tology — Arian, Athanasian, or Kenotic ; or even any
of the Christological types represented in the apostolic
writings. But it does what is infinitely more important.
It demonstrates — the word is not too strong — that Jesus
was not, in His own consciousness of Himself, merely
one man more in the world, though one who (as it
happened) knew God better than others ; He was not
simply a prophet like those who had gone before ; He
was not a Jew who like all other Jews saw the will of
God in the Old Testament, but believed Himself to
possess a better way of doing it than the other teachers
of the time ; He was not ' the ideal religious subject,'
the inspiring pattern of man's true attitude to God.
He was more than all this, and in some respects very
different from all this. ' The whole literature,' we may
say — borrowing for application to the earliest evangelic
records what Professor Cairns has observed of the New
Testament in general — ' the whole literature is inspired
by the conviction, not simply that something new has
been discovered, but that something new has happened. '1
When Christ is in the world it is another world ; there
is a Person in it to whom our attitude must be other
than it is to men in general, just because He is and
reveals Himself to be other. ' Men there have been
who felt themselves able to say " I know," and who died
like Him for their convictions. But He was able to say
" / am." I am that to which prophecy has pointed, and
was able to feel Himself worthy to be that.'2 This is
indeed the vital point of difference between the Old
1 Christianity in the Modern World, p. 147.
2 G. A. Smith, Jerusalem, ii. p. 548.

300 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
Testament and the New, the foundation on which alone
Christianity can rest as a faith specifically distinct from
that of the Old Testament. It is so far from being the
truth that the Son has no place in the gospel as it was
preached by Jesus, that the gospel, even as preached by
Jesus, is constituted by the presence of the Son in the
world, and the place given to Him in religion. There
is no Christianity except through a particular attitude of
the soul to Jesus, and that attitude of the soul to Jesus
is demanded, at every point, in every relation, and in
every mode, tacit* and explicit by Jesus. Himself.
Christianity is what it is through the ^jw^-ffice in it of
the Mediator, and it is not only in the faPpT of Christians
but in the mind of Jesus Himself that tl|e character of
Mediator is claimed. It is a character, ^rappily, which
can be recognised without raising eitherwhysical ques
tions, or metaphysical — without asking, nJt to speak of
answering, the questions to which the oreed makers and
tJH^uthors of Christologies have devoted their powers ;
but to\ecognise it means that Jesus becomes the object
of our faith. We trust in Hjm, commit ourselves to
Him, believe in God through Him, and are conscious
when we do st_ thaTw%H___ve reached the final truth of
things. /
Up to .-this point, we have examined mainly discourses
of Jesus as recorded in Q, and have based our argument
on the words of Jesus Himself. But while speech is in
some ways the most adequate expression of mind, a
man may reveal what he is, and what he conceives him
self to be, by action, which is more speaking even than
words. It has already been noticed that the second of

JESUS IN MARK'S GOSPEL 301
the early witnesses to Jesus — the Gospel according to
Mark — contains few discourses of Jesus : it is a picture
of His life rather than a record of His words. It is,
however, a very early picture, and there can be no
doubt that it circulated in the Christian churches,
whether in documentary form, or through the labours of
catechists, contemporaneously with the source we have
already scrutinised. Whether there was any closer con
nexion between the two it is perhaps impossible to
tell. Scholars have come to no convincing conclusion.
Wellhausen thinks Mark the earlier, and that where the
other source departs from Mark we see traces of the
progressive Christianising of the record — that is, of its
lapsing from the mind of Jesus, who was not a Christian
but a Jew, to the mind of the later church about Jesus ;
Weiss, after the studies of a lifetime, persists in the
belief that Mark is the later of the two, and in many
essential respects was dependent on the other.1 Whether
the theory of successive editions of Mark would enable
criticism to find a way of reconciling these contrary
opinions is a doubtful question, but hardly of importance
in this connexion. To all intents and purposes, except
those of literary criticism, Mark and Q are contemporary
witnesses to Jesus : each of them tells us what was
1 Weiss has succeeded in convincing Harnack that Mark was acquainted
with Q, though Harnack thinks this important result may have to be limited
to this intent, that Mark at least knew the circle in which Q (or great parts
of Q), before being fixed in writing, existed in a fixed oral form which was
practically the same. See note on p. 197 above. This limitation, however,
really means that Harnack is not convinced by Weiss's arguments, so as
to accept Weiss's view of the literary relations of Mark and Q ; it is
Harnack's recognition of the fact that a larger part must be given to oral
tradition, as well as to documents, in explaining the composition of our
gospels.

302 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
believed about Him in the church not far from a.d. 70,
and the only thing that is of interest is whether or not
they concur in their testimony. This will appear as we
proceed. Mark opens with a title or superscription which can
not be ignored : ' the beginning of the gospel of Jesus
Christ, Son of God.' As these words show, he has a
conception of Jesus and of the meaning of His life, death
and resurrection ; and it is in the light of this conception
that he interprets the facts. Jesus is to him the Messiah,
and the story of His life, when read out in its religious
significance, is gospel or glad tidings. It was not pos
sible for him to tell the story otherwise than he has
done, for this is the truth of Jesus as it has been appre
hended by him. No doubt a life of Jesus could have
been written by one who never became a believer — by
an agent, for example, of the Jewish or of the Roman
government — who observed Him from the outside, as it
were, without sympathy, and without being drawn into
unison with His mind and purpose ; but it would not
follow that such a life would be truer than the repre
sentation of Jesus made by a believer. On the contrary,
the very things that in a great spiritual life are most
real and most significant would baffle the supposed
impartial observer ; he would either be unconscious of
them, or they would mock his power of description and
comprehension. Only a person responsive to the kind
of influence Jesus exerted is qualified to convey a true
impression of what He was. It may be quite natural
for him, in trying to convey such an impression, to set
the facts with which he has to deal in a certain light ;

JESUS IN MARKS GOSPEL 303
but just in proportion as he reverences Jesus — just in
proportion as he believes in Him and calls Him Lord —
will it be unnatural for him to distort facts or to invent
them. Mark's History the History of the Son of God.
That the story of Mark is the story of the Christ, of
One whose consciousness from first to last is that of the
Messianic King through whom the reign of God is to
be established, is shown by the fact that like the source
already examined Mark begins with the Baptism and
the Temptation of Jesus. He has no interest in any
thing that precedes : he brings Jesus on the stage in
the hour in which His divine sonship is proclaimed, and
it is in this character that he conceives Him living and
acting all through. What the sonship to God means is
rather to be made out from the gospel — which is, so to
speak, a progressive illustration of it — than deduced
from the words. The term Christ or Messiah, though
used in the title, is not at this point used in the history.
Perhaps that is to preclude misleading inferences. As
the Son of God referred to in the ideal picture of the
second psalm, Jesus is the Anointed in and through
whom God's Kingdom is to be established ; He is the
Messiah ; but the nature of His Messiahship and ofthe
sovereignty it is to establish awaits definition in His
life. It may quite well be that the Christ of God is not
the same as the Christ of fanatical Jewish hopes. This
apart, however, there is not for the evangelist any
consciousness of himself on the part of Jesus except the
Messianic self-consciousness ; it is as Son of God that

304 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
He lives, moves, and has His being, and it is in this
character and consciousness that He is exhibited in the
gospel. It is more than daring simply to set this aside.
If we know anything at all of Jesus, we know that He
was baptized by John, and that the baptism represented
a crisis in His experience : if it did not mean what all
our authorities represent it to mean, we may as well
cease to ask questions about Him. From first to last
in the gospel, Jesus acts as one conscious of a unique
vocation, a unique endowment, a unique relation to God
and men. It is easy to decide on d priori grounds
that this is impossible, and not merely to leave the only
Christianity known to history without explanation, but
to pronounce it a complete mistake ; it is easy to do this,
but it is not writing history. If the life of Jesus reflected
itself, in minds which submitted to its influence, in the
form which we see in the gospel, then all the pro
babilities are that that form is substantially correct.
This word or that may have suffered modification in
transmission — this incident or that may have been
pointed or deflected as it was preached in this or that
environment — but the attitude of Jesus to God and to
men, and the attitude which this required on the part of
men to Jesus, cannot have been misconceived and can
not be misrepresented. It is the direct and unconscious
reflexion of an immediate impression, and the possibility
of error is excluded.
Jesus is introduced in Mark as ' calling' men to follow
Him, as preaching in the synagogues, 'as one having
authority,' and as casting out demons (Mark i 16"28). The
evangelist does not represent Him as making formal

A TYPICAL MIGHTY WORK 305
claims from the outset, or putting His consciousness of
His relation to God and man into challenging words, but
the spiritual power with which He was invested in the
baptism, and which marks Him out as the Son of God,
underlies all His words and deeds. The Messiahship is
exhibited, but not stated : this at least is how the evan
gelist understands it. That he is right in so under
standing it is clear from the words of Jesus Himself (in
Matt. 1 1 5), which we have considered above (p. 259 f).
To heal the sick and to preach the gospel to the poor,
inadequate and unsatisfactory as some onlookers might
think it, is emphatically to do ' the works of the Christ.'
We do not read the opening scenes in Mark as they
were meant to be read if we do not perceive that the
Messianic consciousness of Jesus is latent in them and is
the key to which they are all set.
A Typical .w_/u. or Mighty Work in which Jesus'
Consciousness of Himself is revealed (Mark 2 1-12).
This will become unmistakable if we examine such a
typical instance in Mark ofthe Swa/_e.s to which Jesus
appeals (Matt. n21ff)as the healing of the paralytic in
ch. 2 112. There are several points of interest in this
narrative which it is important to notice. When the man
was brought to Jesus, Jesus said to him, Child, thy sins
are forgiven. Some scribes who sat by accused Him of
blasphemy : Who can forgive sins but God only? Jesus
had His own way of dealing with the charge, but there
are moderns who clear Him at a much easier rate. His
words, they tell us, were merely declaratory : as He
looked on the face of the paralytic man, He saw that he
u

306 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
was truly penitent for his sins — presumably those which
had induced the palsy ; and knowing that under the rule
of a paternal God penitence and pardon are correlative
terms, He simply announced to the man what was true
quite independently of the announcement, that his sins
no longer stood against him in the reckoning of God.
This, however, is entirely out of keeping with what
follows. Jesus does not claim power on earth to declare
that sins are forgiven, but to forgive them (ver. io) ; and
the scribes were quite right in assuming that He exer
cised the prerogative of pardon. He Himself proceeds
to act upon their assumption. It is easy to say, Thy sins
are forgiven, but not easy to tell whether anything is
accomplished by the words. Who can tell whether the
spiritual miracle which they assume — for of all things
that we can conceive the forgiveness of sins is the most
purely supernatural — really takes place ? Who can certify
us that the load is really lifted from the bad conscience,
that despair passes away, that the gate of righteousness
opens again to the man who had shut it in his own face ?
It is an objection of this kind, an objection not to a
declaration but to what purports to be a real exercise of
the prerogative of pardon, that Jesus meets in what
follows. It is easy to say to a paralysed man, Arise,
take up thy bed and walk ; but it is hazardous, because
if nothing happens the pretensions of the would-be
healer are exposed. Jesus puts Himself to this test, and
heals the body with a word the effect of which is sensible
and indisputable, that men may believe that He has
power also to heal the soul. He works on this poor
man the comprehensive miracle of redemption, forgiving

JESUS FORGIVING SINS] 307
all his iniquities, healing all his diseases. It is not
declarations we have to do with, here or anywhere in
the gospels, but achievements. Jesus no more told the
man his sins were forgiven than He told him he was not
lame. With the same word of redemptive power He
lifted the disabling touch of sin from his soul and of
paralysis from his limbs, and in doing so revealed what
He was.
And what was He ? Plainly for such as had faith like
the paralytic and his friends He was the bearer of God's
salvation : the power of God for man's deliverance in
all his sorest troubles was present in Him. To refer
again to Matt, n 5(2) we see Him here doing 'the works
of the Christ.' And here comes in another point of in
terest in the narrative. It contains, in the lips of Jesus
Himself, what we have already seen to be a Messianic
or quasi-Messianic title — the Son of Man : ' That ye
may know that the Son of Man hath power upon earth
to forgive sins, He saith to the sick of the palsy, Arise,
take up thy bed and go to thy house.' It has come to
be taken for granted with a certain school of critics that
there must be a mistake here. The Son of Man, it is
argued, just because it is a Messianic title, could not be
used by Jesus openly and at this early stage. If we ex
cept this instance, and another in ver. 28 of this chapter,
Jesus never uses it in Mark till after Peter has confessed
Him to be the Christ at Caesarea Philippi (ch. 8 29), and
even then the disciples are commanded to keep the
Messiahship a secret. This, it is assumed, answers to
the actual course of events. Further, what logic requires
(it is said), both here and at verse 28, is not ' the Son of

308 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
Man ' but ' man ' simply. The Pharisees say, Who can
forgive sins but God only ? and Jesus is supposed to
answer, I will prove to you that not only God in heaven
but man upon earth has power to forgive. This is sup
ported by the close ofthe parallel passage in Matthew (9 s) :
They glorified God who had given such power to men —
that is, to beings of the class to which Jesus belonged.
The elimination of the Son of Man from verse 28
is equally plausible. Logic seems thoroughly satisfied
when we read, The Sabbath was made for man, not man
for the Sabbath ; wherefore man is lord also of the
Sabbath. The introduction ofthe Son of Man into these
narratives is ascribed to mistranslation. In Aramaic, the
language of Jesus, a human being was spoken of as a son
of man ; and some misapprehension of this Semitic idiom
led to the Son of Man being introduced here instead of
the generic term expressing humanity. The mistake mars
the logic of the passage, and is inconsistent with what
the evangelist elsewhere tells us of the time and circum
stances under which Jesus did speak of Himself as the
Christ, but happily we are able to correct and explain it.
In spite of the fact that this explanation and correc
tion have become almost a tradition of criticism, the
writer has no hesitation in accepting the gospel narrative
as it stands. No part of the process by which ' the Son
of Man ' is eliminated can stand scrutiny. The expres
sion is said to be due to mistranslation of an Aramaic
document in which ' son of man ' occurred in the sense
of 'human being.' To say so is surely to forget that
the contents of the gospel history did not circulate in
the Church merely in the form of one man's translation

JESUS FORGIVING SINS 309
of an Aramaic document. Granting that Mark could
make the kind of mistake which is here supposed, we
must remember that the story which we know only
through him must have been known to multitudes of
Christians before he wrote ; and if they all knew it in the
true form — which ex hypothesi they must have done, as
the mistake originated with him — it is inconceivable that
there should be no trace of the true form left, and no
indication of any attempt to correct Mark. The text of
the gospels was not sacrosanct in early times. Matthew
and Luke, who can both be shown to have used Aramaic
documents independently,1 no doubt follow Mark closely
at this point ; but even if they follow him also unthink
ingly, we are safe to say that all three tell the story in
the only form in which it could be told to the apostolic
Church, a form which had the apostolic testimony be
hind it, and which could not have been modified for the
whole Church, at an essential point, by the mistranslation
of any person whatever.
Further, the displacement of ' the Son of Man ' by
' man ' has only a superficial plausibility in logic. The
healing of the palsy by Jesus does not prove that man
generically can forgive sins. The man who does the
visible miracle in confirmation of his claim to do the
invisible is to be taken at his word : but it is no more
true that man generically can speak the word of forgive
ness with divine effect th?n that man generically can
effectively bid the lame walk. The only question raised,
and the only question settled, is one concerning the
power claimed by Jesus ; and it is settled, not by bring-
1 See Wellhausen's notes on Luke 6 M, 1 1 * l.

310 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
ing Jesus under the general category of humanity, but
by an act of Jesus Himself which was as impossible for
men in general as the forgiveness of sins. It is not any
man, but only He who has the right to think of Himself
as the Son of Man, who can forgive sins upon the earth.
This is all that is covered by the healing of the paralytic.
Mutatis mutandis, the same considerations apply to the
passage about man and the Sabbath.
But this is not all. The passage with which we are
dealing is the first in the gospel in which Jesus is
directly challenged while engaged in His vocation. He
is doing the very work which He has come to do —
revealing Himself in His proper character as the Person
in whom God has visited men for their deliverance from
sin and misery — when His authority is called in question.
He is in truth the representative of God, but the sugges
tion is made that so far from representing He blas
phemes, invading impiously a prerogative reserved for
God alone. Are not the circumstances fitted to evoke
such a kind of self-assertion as is found in the use here
of the title ' the Son of Man ' ? It is no doubt a Messi
anic or quasi-Messianic title, but it is not simply equiva
lent to the Christ. The Messiah whom it suggests is
not any Messiah — is not, for example, the Messiah of
national and political hopes — but a transcendent person
of some kind ; one through whom the Kingdom of God
is to triumph, of course, but one whose very name
emphasises humanity as opposed to brutality. It is in
keeping with the character of such a Messiah that He
should wish to forgive sins and heal diseases ; it is in
keeping with Jesus' consciousness of being such a Mes-

JESUS FORGIVING SINS 311
siah that He should have and exercise both these divine
and gracious powers. We have seen already how Jesus
employs the title Son of Man on occasions where His
humanity, in the ethical sense, is to be emphasised (see
p. 288 f.) : and it is this which in the first instance is to be
kept in view here. In spite of the fact that it is mainly
used — in agreement with its source in Daniel 713 — in escha
tological passages, it is not exclusively eschatological in
import. It is the name which describes Jesus in His voca
tion as the Person through whom the Kingdom of God is
established, and it indicates that the Kingdom of God is
at the same time the kingdom of humanity, the condition
of things in which man is redeemed from the tyranny of
brutal forces, and all humane ideals are realised. It is
relative to the Kingdom of God, just as the Son, sim
pliciter, is relative to the Father; but the Kingdom of
God to which it is relative is a kingdom of grace in
which men are forgiven all their iniquities and healed of
all their diseases. Hence Jesus frequently uses the title
Son of Man when He wishes to speak of Himself in the
light of His vocation, as the Person doing the works that
belong to the establishment of such a kingdom. ' The
Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost.'
'The Son of Man came, not to be ministered unto but to
minister, and to give His life a ransom for many.' ' The
Son of Man hath power upon earth to forgive sins.' The
name as used here is in keeping with Jesus' use of it on
these other occasions, and it is thoroughly appropriate.
But to displace it by ' man ' is to introduce what is not
only unexampled elsewhere in Scripture, but in itself
inept and untrue. Accepting, therefore, the evangelic

312 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
record of Jesus' words at this point, we find in them an
indication, belonging to the earliest period of His min
istry, that He lived and worked in the consciousness of a
relation to God and to the bringing in of His reign
among men which can have belonged to Him alone —
such a relation, in short, as makes Him not the pattern of
goodness merely, but the object of religious faith to all
who look for salvation in the coming of God's Kingdom.
Now this, as we have repeatedly seen, is the attitude of
Christian faith to Christ, and therefore we conclude once
more that such faith is justified by Jesus' consciousness
of Himself.
Before leaving this passage it is proper to remark on
the reference in it to faith. ' When He saw their faith
Jesus said to the paralytic, Child, thy sins are forgiven.'
The faith meant is that of the paralytic and his friends :
their assurance that help could be had from Jesus was
so great that they overcame every obstacle in order to
reach Him. Per omnia fides ad Christum penetrat.
The power that brings man help is, of course, in every
case ultimately the power of God, and therefore in a
true sense God is always the object of faith; but the
point here is that God's power to help is present in
Jesus; it is mediated through Him and through Him
alone, and hence He also becomes, as no other can be,
the object of faith. This is the one attitude to Him
which the New Testament discovers, and quite apart
from this or that word in which He revealed His own
expectation or demand, it is inconceivable that this
attitude should have been mistaken. It was evoked by
Jesus as the reality of what He was and did impressed

FAITH IN THE GOSPELS 313
itself on those who were in contact with Him. The
Jesus to whom the New Testament bears witness evokes
the same attitude still. But if it needed more explicit
justification, that justification would be found in the
many striking words of Jesus about faith. He says to
suppliants for help, ' Believe ye that I am able to do
this ? ' He says to the woman who was healed by
touching the hem of His garment, ' Thy faith hath
saved thee.' He says to Jairus, when news is brought
that his daughter is dead, ' Be not afraid, only believe.'
The faith that He claims in this last instance is the
utmost reach of faith which can be demanded from man.
The great enemy of faith is death. We can keep hold
of God, and hope for His help, as long as there is life;
but death seems to end all. Yet even in the presence
of death Jesus says, Fear not, only have faith. The
words have no relevance at all unless they mean that
the saving help of God which is present in Jesus is
stronger even than death, so that he who believes in
Him can defy the last enemy. A recent commentator on
Mark x says that the only thing in this narrative which
speaks to us with living and personal power is the faith
of Jesus — His confidence that the Father would go with
Him to the ruler's house and enable Him to meet
whatever emergency there was ; but surely the demand
of Jesus that in the very presence of death Jairus should
not renounce hope, but believe that the power of God
to be exercised through Him would be equal to any
extremity of need, is quite as remarkable. What Jesus
requires is not that Jairus should directly exhibit the
1 J. Weiss, Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments, i. 118 ; also p. 46.

314 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
same faith in God as He Himself did — a faith at which
the commentator referred to can only hold up his hands
in blank bewilderment — but that in His company, and
relying on what God would do through Him, he should
not despair. The help of God for the man was to be
mediated through Jesus, and through Jesus also the
faith of the man in God was to be mediated. There is
no other relation of God's help to man, or of man's faith
in God, known either to the gospels or the epistles in
the New Testament ; and we repeat, it is inconceivable
that at this vital point the convictions and experiences
evoked by Jesus should have been at variance with the
mind of Jesus Himself.

The Bridegroom and the Children of the Bride-
chamber (Mark 2 18-2°).
One of the passages in Mark which would formerly
have been pointed to without hesitation as indicating the
peculiar self-consciousness of Jesus is that in which He
answers a question about fasting. ' Why do the dis
ciples of John and the disciples ofthe Pharisees fast, but
Thy disciples fast not ? And Jesus said to them, Can
the children of the bridechamber fast while the Bride
groom is with them ? As long as they have the
Bridegroom with them they cannot fast. But days will
come when the Bridegroom shall be taken away from
them, and then shall they fast in that day ' (Mark 2 182°).
Originally, only the last verse of this was questioned.
Jesus, it was said, did not at this early period anticipate
His own death, and He certainly did not begin to speak

THE BRIDEGROOM 315
of it to His disciples till much later.1 Further, the
mention of His death is irrelevant : all that it is neces
sary to say is, ' Can the children of the bridechamber
fast as long as the Bridegroom is with them? My
disciples and I are a wedding party, and therefore
fasting is out of place.' But a more penetrating
application of this same kind of criticism carries us
further. The inventive evangelist who added verse 20
from his own resources has been severely lectured for
perverting the parabolic saying in verse 19 into allegory,
and then continuing the allegory mechanically in verse
20, on the line of the history of Jesus and His Church.
But there is something to be said for him, nevertheless.
What is the tertium comparationis which would make it
possible for Jesus to compare His disciples to guests at
a wedding, for whom fasting would be out of place ? It
neither is nor can be anything else than the conception
of Jesus Himself as the Bridegroom. But this is an
allegorical conception.2 To suppose that Jesus spoke of
Himself as a Bridegroom, or as the Bridegroom, is to
suppose that He had recourse to allegory — a supposition
which is nothing short of distressing to many honourable
men. Hence we are rather to suppose that the whole
passage is due to the productive activity of the Church.
Jesus really had no part in it. The transaction which it
perpetuates was not one which took place between John
and Jesus, but between the disciples of the two Masters.
1 The Death of Christ, p. 23 f.
2 Wellhausen, Das Evangelium Marci, p. 20 : ' Es schimmert also schon
in 2 19 der allegorische Sinn durch (auch in dem Ausdruck so lange der
Brdutigam bei ihnen ist statt wdhrend der Hochzeit), und man darf 2 M
nicht davon abschneiden.'

316 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
It has no meaning for the time to which it is said to
belong, but only for the future. After Jesus died, His
disciples departed from His practice. They took over
from John's disciples not only baptism but prayer
(Luke n a) and fasting. Jesus is here represented as
giving them permission for the fasting, though a permis
sion that only comes into effect after His death.1
All this, we have no hesitation in saying, is as dull as
it is gratuitous. No one denies that there were in the
lifetime of Jesus followers of John and Pharisees as well
as disciples of Jesus Himself. They represented dif
ferent types of religion, in spirit and observance, and
the differences between them were both reflected on by
Jesus independently, and discussed by their adherents.
There is a notable word of Jesus about fasting in the
Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 6 16ff) ; in Matt, n 219, and
in the parallel passages in Luke, Jesus expressly com
pares Himself and John as religious leaders, and points
the difference between them in the very sense of this
passage ; and He frequently came into collision with the
representatives of Pharisaism on ritual observances of an
analogous character (v. Mark 7 1 m, Matt. I5lff). It is
simply a mistake, therefore, to say with Wellhausen that
the subject has no significance for the time at which it is
introduced, but only for the future : the subject is one
of a class which was undoubtedly discussed by Jesus
oftener than once or twice. But if we recognise this, it
will not be without influence on our interpretation and
appreciation of the passage as a whole. If Jesus is the
Speaker, His words must be something else than the
1 All this is borrowed from Wellhausen as above.

THE BRIDEGROOM 317
legitimation of the practice of the early Church as to
fasting, in contrast with the practice of the disciples in
His lifetime. Nothing is less credible in the lips of
Jesus than such artificial and prosaic legalism. But the
words cease to be legal and prosaic, they become
personal and inspired, poetic and moving, above the
common measure even of the words of Jesus, provided
we admit the possibility that Jesus could speak of
Himself as the Bridegroom. And why should it be
impossible ? It is the same thought which meets us
again in the parable — with allegoric traits in it no
doubt, but why not ? — of the king who makes a marriage
for his son (Matt. 22 2). It has echoes in Eph. 5 25 ff- and
in Rev. 199, 219. It has antecedents in the Old
Testament conception of God's relation to Israel. Cer
tainly it is an extraordinary thing that Jesus should
have conceived in this way His relation to the new
people of God which was gathering round Him, but
everything in Jesus is extraordinary. After the incident
and the self- revelation of verses 1 to 12, we do not expect
platitude or commonplace here ; and the sense which
Wellhausen extracts is poorer than platitude or common
place. With the Bridegroom among them, the disciples
can fairly be compared to a marriage party in which
fasting would be incongruous ; and what can be truer to
nature than that the Bridegroom, even while he defends
their joydusness, should become sensible, in the very
disposition of those who question it, of that suspicion
and malignity toward Himself which would one day end
in murder, and turn the joy of the bridal party into a
sorrow in which fasting would be sadly spontaneous ?

318 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
The unity, the inner truth and the poetic charm of the
whole utterance are indisputable, unless we deny that
Jesus could think of Himself as the Bridegroom ; and
for such a denial there is no ground except that it
implies a consciousness on Jesus' part of Himself and
of His place in God's work which men are resolved, on
grounds with which historical criticism has nothing to
do, not to recognise. As it stands, the revelation which
it makes of Jesus is in harmony with everything which
has hitherto been presented to us in the record, and we
need have no hesitation in relying on it as true.
The Unpardonable Sin : Mark 3 28-30
(Matt. 12 2*"32, Luke 12 10).
We have already examined, in the source common to
Matthew and Luke, the words of Jesus about a sin for
which there is no forgiveness. The saying on this
subject in Mark, though it differs by not mentioning the
Son of Man, throws an equally striking light on Jesus'
consciousness of Himself. It is pronounced with a
solemn assurance of its truth. ' Verily I say unto you
that all things shall be forgiven to the sons of men, the
sins and the blasphemies wherewithsoever they have
blasphemed. But whoso shall have blasphemed against
the Holy Spirit hath not forgiveness for ever, but is
guilty of an eternal sin.' How is this sin committed?
The Holy Spirit is that divine power which is manifested
in Jesus as He casts out evil spirits ; it is not something
distinct from Him and to be contrasted with Him ; it is
simply God acting through Him for the deliverance of
men from Satan. There are cases in which God acts,

THE UNPARDONABLE SIN 319
as it were, from behind a screen, and it is possible not to
recognise Him, and to sin or blaspheme inadvertently
and therefore pardonably ; but in the case before us it is
different. The works that Jesus did were so palpably
the works of God, the operations of His holy redeeming
power, that inadvertent failure to recognise them for
what they were was impossible. The dullest spectator
was bound to say, as the magicians of Egypt did of
Moses, This is the finger of God (Ex. 8 19, Luke 1 1 20) :
nothing but the blackest malignity could whisper, He
has an unclean spirit, He casts out demons by Beelzebub.
Nothing could more convincingly show how entirely
Jesus identifies Himself with the cause of God and His
Kingdom. That absolute significance of His person and
His work to which reference has been so frequently
made already is the fundamental idea here also. The
solemnity and vehemence with which He speaks — ' hath
not forgiveness for ever,' ' is guilty of an eternal sin ' —
remind us of the words in which He pronounces woes
on the impenitent cities ('it shall be more tolerable for
Tyre and Sidon, for Sodom and Gomorrah, in the day
of judgment than for you '), or of the awful warning to
whoso shall deny Him before men ('him will I also deny
before My Father which is in heaven '). The cure of
demoniacs had a peculiar value for Jesus as a demon
stration that God's victory over Satan was actually in
process of accomplishment, that the Kingdom of God, if
one might dare to say it, was no longer a thing to be
waited for, but had come to men while as yet they did
not realise it (Matt. 12 28) ; but the victory of God and
the coming of His Kingdom are identified with Jesus

320 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
and His work. They are mediated for the world
through Him, and it is because things so great are
mediated through Him that unpardonable guilt attaches
to those who slanderously misinterpret what He does.
One may be excused if he hesitates between the forms in
which Jesus' saying has been preserved by Mark and
by the other early source, but there is no doubt that in
either form the divine power of God at work for the
redemption of men is identified with Jesus in His own
words. In His own mind — we have the most solemn
assurance of it — He had the same place as the Mediator
of God's salvation which He has always had in Christian
faith. The Messiah and the Cross (Mark 827-io45).
Such passages as those we have just examined reveal
or rather betray the consciousness of Jesus as to His
place in the world, and in the working out of God's
purposes towards men. What He is, however, cannot
be told, unless it has been in a sense discovered. The
impression which He made on those who were in close con
tact with Him — the impression produced not by explicit
words only, but by His life as a whole, and especially
by the attitude He assumed towards them and expected
from them — this impression, especially if He confirmed
it, is an important part of the revelation of what He
was. Scholars generally have agreed that in the gospel
according to Mark there is a historical sequence trace
able, in a large way, which is less evident in the later
gospels. At first Jesus works among His own people,
and at first, too, not without response. His mighty works

THE MESSIAH AND THE CROSS 321
naturally excited enthusiasm. Such as it was, this en
thusiasm seems to have reached high-water mark in the
feeding of the five thousand, and from that time forward
it ebbed. The feeding of the five thousand has greatly
exercised those who cannot believe in it, and the most
various attempts have been made to rationalise it and
get rid of the miracle. Either it is said the miracle was
a spiritual one — Jesus, to speak in the language of the
fourth gospel, fed the multitudes with the bread of life,
the word of His teaching; or He and His disciples,
sharing their scanty store of provisions with the crowd,
prompted others to follow their generous example, and
drew forth more than enough for all. Such explana
tions fail to do justice to the fact that, according to all
our records, the feeding of the five thousand produced
an immense excitement from which Jesus and the dis
ciples found it necessary but hard to make their escape.
Jesus compelled the Twelve, who no doubt shared the
popular enthusiasm, to go out to sea and face a rising
storm rather than founder in this spiritual whirlwind ;
and He Himself retired to the mountain to pray (Mark
645f).x He deliberately refused to enlist under the
1 The account given in the fourth gospel of the feeding of the multitudes
has many features which suggest that it came from an eye-witness. Incident
ally it explains the otherwise perplexing word ijvayKao-ev in Mark 646and
|| Matthew. The multitudes wanted, in the enthusiasm of the moment, to
take Jesus by force and make Him a king. The disciples, whose hopes
were still in many respects like those ofthe multitudes, were only too ready
to fall in with this revolutionary movement, and it was against their will
that Jesus compelled them to start for the other side. For Him personally
it meant the recurrence of the temptations in the wilderness : all three of
them can easily be discerned in the narrative. His own sense of this would
be marked by His withdrawal to the mountain to pray— His flight (cpevyei)
as some ancient authorities read in John 6 16. The way in which the fourth
gospel explains Mark at this point supports the accuracy of both, and

322 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
banner of Jewish expectations, and from this time for
ward the breach between Him and His countrymen
widens. A little later, apparently, there is a decisive
rupture with the recognised religious authorities about
the traditions of the elders, and He retires with the
Twelve into the country north of Galilee (Mark Jlft).
So far, it may be said, He has failed to make on the
people the impression He desired, and His interest is
henceforth concentrated on the few who have been more
intimately related to Him. Have they penetrated His
secret ? Are they able to take Him for what He is
in His own estimation, and so to continue His work in
His own sense?
This is the decisive question with which we are con
fronted at the beginning of what Wellhausen has de
scribed as the Christian section of the gospel of Mark :
' And Jesus went forth, and His disciples, into the
villages of Caesarea Philippi : and in the way He asked
His disciples, saying unto them, Who do men say that
I am? And they told Him, saying, John the Baptist;
and others, Elijah ; but others, one of the prophets.
And He asked them, But who say ye that I am ? Peter
answereth and saith unto Him, Thou art the Christ.
And He charged them that they should tell no man of
Him' (Mark 827ff). We have seen already that the
unique self-consciousness of Jesus, which is divinely
assured from the baptism onward, breaks forth at inter
vals in Mark, especially when His authority or His
makes it impossible to reduce the feeding of the five thousand to an im
provised picnic. Whether we can explain it or not, it was an extraordinary
event of some kind, agitating in its immediate circumstances for all con
cerned, and a turning-point in the history of Jesus and in His relations with
His people.

THE MESSIAH AND THE CROSS 323
work is challenged : here we see that it is an interest
to Jesus Himself, that He has reflected on what He
is, and is concerned that men should apprehend Him
truly. The question, it might almost be said, is more
significant than the answers. Jesus is not only con
scious that He is a problem to men, He assumes that
He ought to be. It is not right that people should be
indifferent to Him, should never give Him a thought,
or should dispose of Him summarily by saying that of
course He is what other people are, and that no more need
be said. To His mind, evidently, there can be nothing
so important as that men should have received a true
impression of Him, should think of Him as He thinks
of Himself, and in their attitude to Him respond to
what He knows Himself to be.
The opinions of the people are of little interest except
as showing that no one regarded Jesus as a commonplace
person. Every one recognised in Him a divine mes
senger of some kind — the Baptist returned from the
dead ; Elijah, the promised forerunner of the Messiah ;
or an ordinary prophet — one of those who appeared long
ago. These are, without exception, the opinions of
people who can hardly have known Jesus at all. No
one who had been in His company could imagine that
He was any one redivivus, any one but Himself. He
was not the reanimation of any dead past, but an ab
solutely living Person, with His hand on the present
and the future. When He turns to the Twelve, whom
He had chosen that they might be with Him (314),
and so come to know Him truly, and asks them, But
you, who do you say that I am ? He gets an answer

324 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
which does justice at least to this difference. Peter,
expressing apparently the faith or the conviction of all,
says to Him, Thou art the Christ.
We cannot tell all the thoughts and hopes which
gathered round this designation for Peter and his com
rades. At the very lowest, to call Jesus Christ was
to call Him King; it was to recognise in Him the
Person through whom God's sovereignty was to be
established, and God's promises to His people fulfilled.
But it might be used by men whose conceptions of the
nature of that sovereignty, and of the processes by
which it was to be established, were inconsistent, de
fective, or obscure. Peter might have the assurance
that he must owe to Jesus all that God was going to
do for Israel or for the human race, and in the strength
of that assurance he might call Him the Christ, while
yet he remained much mistaken as to what God was
going to do, or how it was going to be done. What
is properly implied in ascribing to Jesus the title of
' the Christ ' is a certain attitude of soul to Him, the
recognition in Him of the King through whom the
blessings of the heavenly kingdom are to be mediated
to men, the acknowledgment of His claim to absolute
loyalty and obedience ; that is all. We do not mean
that this all is little ; on the contrary, it has been and
remains the essence of the Christian faith. But it is
quite compatible with much ignorance and misconcep
tion as to the Kingdom of God ; and when we consider
the fanatical hopes which attached to the name in many
Jewish minds, we can well understand that while Jesus
welcomed in the disciples that attitude to Himself which

THE MESSIAH AND THE CROSS 325
their confession involved, He forbade them to tell any
one that He was the Christ. The truth there was in
their confession — the spiritual truth involved in their
loyalty to Jesus and their assurance that all divine
blessings would be mediated to them through Him —
is a truth which literally cannot be conveyed by telling ;
it can only be realised in the experience of intimacy
with Jesus like that through which the Twelve them
selves learned it. To go about saying to people who
did not know Jesus that Jesus was the Christ was only
to diffuse misconception. It was to draw men round
Him with passionate hopes which He knew could never
be fulfilled. What He found in the attitude and hopes
of the Twelve was rather a basis on which He could
proceed to initiate them further into the truth of His
own relation to the Kingdom. They had realised that
it was somehow identified with Him and dependent
upon Him — this is what is meant by calling Him the
Christ ; its nature and character were bound up in His ;
but they did not yet understand what its coming meant
for Him. They did not really think of its coming,
they only indulged wild fantastic hopes of it ; and it
became the task of Jesus to discipline their thoughts
to the apprehension of the stern moral realities of His
vocation, realities which for His consciousness were so
inevitable, or rather so divinely involved in His work.
It is difficult to understand how this representation
should be questioned. The gospel according to Mark,
although it is a gospel, purports also to be a historical
narrative. We have seen already the evidence which
connects it with Peter. It is admitted by unprejudiced

326 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
judges to have been written at a time at which disciples
of Jesus might well have survived., Wellhausen, who
thinks that the section with which we are dealing —
chapter 827 to chapter io45 — has been pronouncedly
' Christianised,' and to that extent rendered unhistorical,
allows that it is in favour of Mark, as contrasted with
what he regards as a later source, that the Christian
ising is limited to this section. But the fact that it is
limited to a section proves that it is not ' Christianising '
at all. ' Christianising ' means the transmutation of the
facts in the history of Jesus in such a sense that they
shall support (which of themselves they would not) the
later beliefs of Christians. But a writer who sought the
support of Jesus for the subsequent faith of the Church
would not seek it only in the last weeks or months of his
life. If he ' Christianised ' the story he would not be
able to do otherwise than Christianise it altogether.
The occurrence of the ' Christian ' phenomena in this
section of the gospel, and in this only, proves that we
have to do not with any dogmatic transmutation of the
facts, voluntary or involuntary, but with proper histori
cal tradition. This is the course of Jesus' life and teach
ing as the witnesses reported it. It is not the evangelist,
but the criticism which accuses him of ' Christianising '
his story, which is not historical but dogmatic. On
grounds quite unconnected with history, it is unable
to give to Jesus the place given to Him in the
faith of New Testament Christians, and it is precluded
therefore from admitting that Jesus can Himself have
assumed or claimed this place. But the evidence of
Mark, that after a certain crisis in his career the

THE MESSIAH AND THE CROSS 327
character of Jesus' ministry changed, is real histori
cal evidence, which cannot on grounds like these be
treated as if it did not exist. Nothing would more
surely remain in the mind of Peter than that, after the
crisis referred to and the confession of Jesus as the
Christ on that memorable day at Caesarea Philippi, his
Master had withdrawn to a large extent from teaching
in the synagogues or preaching to the multitudes on the
hill-side or by the lake shore, and had devoted Himself
more privately to the training of the Twelve. If Jesus
did act in this way, the difference would be so striking
that it would naturally impress itself on the memory,
and be reproduced in any narrative which was at all in
contact with the facts. It has been shown above that
the gospel narrative, which has the historical support
of the evangelist's testimony, has also an inner con
sistency which pleads in its favour. Admitting that
Jesus in His lifetime was connected with the Messianic
hope at all — and the superscription on the Cross is of
itself a demonstration that He was — it is thoroughly
natural that He should accept the title from the
Twelve, expressive as it was of a spiritual attitude to
Himself which He recognised as His due, that He
should forbid them to use it publicly, because it was
sure to be misunderstood, and that He should devote
Himself thenceforth to opening the minds of the Twelve
to a better comprehension of what His vocation as the
Christ involved. The outward attestation and the in
ward consistency of this are evidence of the highest
importance for its truth. To say, in spite of such evi
dence, that the characteristic ideas of Mark 8 27 to io45

328 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
do not really belong to the history of Jesus, but are
the reflection into His history of the faith of Pauline
Christians, who assumed that Jesus must have shared
and expressed their own belief in His Messiahship and
in His atoning death and resurrection, is historically
gratuitous. But it is worse than gratuitous to suggest
that the allusions at various points to the secrecy of
the teaching, or to the want of understanding on the
part of the disciples (e.g. 9 10, 9 30'32), are indications that
the writer who thus misrepresented the facts, knew what
He was doing, and felt it necessary to apologise for it.
He was aware that Jesus in His lifetime never spoke
any such words, and that no such ideas had then been
in the disciples' heads ; but he writes that Jesus did
speak the words — only secretly ; and that the disciples
did hear them — only they could not take them in.1
Surely the presumption is, to put it at the lowest, that
the evangelist was a rational and moral being, and
would act accordingly. In the connexion in which it
stands, therefore, and with the historical support which
it can claim, we do not find it necessary to dispute
Mark's representation of the mind of Jesus at this stage
in His history, because it implies a continuity between
the self- revelation of Jesus in His lifetime and the faith
of the Church in Him after His death. On the con
trary, such a continuity seems as natural in itself as it
is needful for the understanding of the Christian re
ligion, and is rather to be regarded as an indication
that the evangelist is in touch with truth. What then
is the truth in regard to Jesus and His vocation to which
1 See Wrede's Das Messiasgeheimniss in den Evangelien, passim.

THE MESSIAH AND THE CROSS 329
we are introduced in this section as present to the mind
of Jesus Himself?
Speaking broadly, it is the truth that in the Messianic
calling, as Jesus conceived it, and felt Himself bound to
fulfil it, were involved the death and resurrection of the
Messiah. On the three distinct occasions on which He
sought to initiate the Twelve into His own thoughts, these
are the constant elements in His teaching (Mark 8 S1, 9 31,
io33). He never, indeed, so far as appears, uses in these
lessons the title of ' the Christ ' ; He speaks uniformly of
the Son of Man. His intention in this may have been,
on the one hand, to avoid the term which was most
heavily loaded with political associations ; and on the
other, to employ that which, just because it was tran
scendent or supermundane, could be more easily spirit
ualised, and which in its very form suggested that no
experience of man could properly be alien to Him.
Again and again and again during these last weeks and
months He tells the disciples that the Son of Man must
die, and after three days rise again. It is not necessary
here to consider whether this or that detail in these pre
dictions of the death and resurrection of Jesus may have
been added ex eventu by Christian preachers or cate-
chists.1 It is quite conceivable that some touches in the
prophetic picture may have been introduced in this way,
but that does not affect the evangelist's testimony — and
it must be repeated that it is testimony — to the fact that
during the last period of Jesus' life His death and
resurrection were the subjects that engrossed His
thoughts.2 The resurrection, indeed, is merely men-
1 See the writer's The Death of Christ, p. 28.
2 If there is anything in the gospels which was certainly not invented, it

330 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
tioned (though the notice in ch. 910 that the disciples
questioned with one another what the rising from the
dead should be, shows that it was mentioned with a
significance which arrested attention), but the sufferings
and death are dwelt upon with extraordinary emphasis.
It is as though Jesus were saying to His disciples all
through this period, I am indeed the Messiah, the Person
through whom God's Kingdom with all its hopes and
blessings is to be realised, and you are right to recognise
Me as such. But the Kingdom is not what you think,
and as little is the vocation of the King. The Son of
Man must suffer many things, and be rejected, and be
killed. His death is divinely necessary ; it has to be
faced in the path along which the Father calls Him.
The loyalty which you rightly exhibit when you call
Me ' the Christ ' must be loyalty to one who dies in
the Christ's vocation. The coming of the Kingdom is
dependent not only on the presence of Jesus upon earth,
but on His passion ; the hopes which are fulfilled for us
through Him are fulfilled through His death. The
mention of the resurrection on every occasion on which
the death is mentioned suggests that the action of Jesus
in the Messianic character does not cease with His
death, but is continued after it on a grander scale ; the
attitude of the disciples toward Him when they made
is the story of Peter rebuking Jesus, and of Jesus turning on the chief of
the apostles with the terrible reproof, ' Get thee behind Me, Satan ; thy
mind is set not on the things of God, but on the things of men.' The
truth of this incident is all the proof we need that Jesus had spoken with
impressive earnestness of His sufferings and death as involved in His
divine vocation. The attempts to discredit it made by Wrede (Das
Messiasgeheimniss in den Evangelien, p. 115 ff.) and Loisy (Les Evangiles
Synoptiques, ii. 20 ff.) really do not call for serious criticism.

THE MESSIAH AND THE CROSS 331
the confession at Caesarea Philippi is to be maintained
through the death and beyond it. It will not be changed,
it will be intensified and made unchangeable, when those
who have felt, with whatever indefiniteness, that Jesus is
the Person through whom God's saving help must come
to them, realise that nothing less than His sufferings and
death are required in order that it may come with effect.
There is nothing in this that can properly be called
doctrine, and unless we deny that Jesus ever thought of
His death, or maintain that He could not possibly have
seen in it the cup which the Father gave Him to drink,
there is no reason why we should question the value of
the gospel record. Its importance to our present pur
pose is that it shows us the death of Jesus bulking in His
own thoughts as it did in those of the primitive Church.
Possibly the primitive Church may have made reflections
upon it which were not His, but it did not give it
another or a greater place than He. The Kingdom is
dependent on the King, and in some divinely necessary
way on a King who dies for it : this is the mind of the
primitive Church — the characteristic attitude of Christian
faith — but it is also the mind of Jesus. The Church is
not, in this characteristic attitude, yielding to an impulse
of its own which sets it at variance with its Lord ; its
sense of obligation to the death of Jesus corresponds to
the emphasis which Jesus Himself lays on His death as
involved in the Messianic calling.
It is hardly possible to assume that the sentences in
Mark which immediately follow the rebuke to Peter
stand in close historical connexion with it (ch. 8 34-9 x).
To part of them very exact parallels are found in

332 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
Matthew and Luke in two different connexions ; in
Matt. 162429 and Luke 92327, which are the counterpart
of Mark at this point, and again in Matt. io38fand
Luke 14 27, 1733. These last we have already considered
as part of the non-Marcan source common to Matthew
and Luke (see p. 234 f), and it is not necessary to examine
them again. Jesus requires in them an absolute devo
tion to the Kingdom of God, but to the Kingdom as a
cause which is indistinguishable from Himself. 'Whoso
shall lose his life for My sake and the gospel's shall save
it.' Mark is the only evangelist who introduces 'the
gospel ' in this way, and the expression may be due to
him ; but there is no reason to doubt that Jesus gave
His Person the significance here ascribed to it in relation
to the Kingdom.1 In precisely the same way, too, as
in the non-Marcan source, He appeals to what will take
place at the last day to set this significance in the
strongest light. ' Whoso shall be ashamed of Me and
My words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of
him also shall the Son of Man be ashamed when He
comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels.'
This is the only passage in the gospels in which the
word ' to be ashamed ' (iiratcrxyveo-dat) is used, but this
does not justify us in deriving it from Paul, who also uses
the word only once (Rom. 1 16) in the same connexion.
If Jesus could say the things we have already seen
about confessing and denying Him before men, He
could quite easily speak of men being ashamed of Him
and His words. A close connexion with the context
1 Loisy can say no more against it than ' II est possible que les mots " a
cause de moi " n'appartiennent pas a la sentence primitive.'

THE MESSIAH AND THE CROSS 333
is not to be forced. It is quite needless to argue that
what is in the mind of the evangelist is specifically what
Paul calls the offence of the Cross — the offence which
has just been illustrated in the case of Peter — and that
the shame in question is precisely that which Jews
would feel before their countrymen in acknowledging a
crucified Messiah ; and then to infer from this that
Jesus never used such words at all, but that an evan
gelist, steeped in the Pauline gospel, has put them into
His lips. Surely there is no want of clearness, as Loisy
would have it, in the idea that Jesus will be ashamed of
those who are ashamed of Him, and that He will be
ashamed of them in circumstances in which everything
for them depends on His recognition. The words never
fail to impress those who hear them, and this is all they
were intended to do. The evangelist may have found
them in some other connexion, or perhaps in no con
nexion at all ; but he must have conceived them to be re
levant when he introduced them here, and there is not the
slightest reason to suggest that they do not represent
the mind of Jesus. And once more we must say it is a
mind in which Jesus has the place and significance which
He has always had in the faith of the Christian Church.
Before proceeding to examine the striking reference
to the death of Jesus with which this section in Mark
closes, we may refer to the singular passage in
ch. 933"60. With the exception of ch. iv. (the parables)
and ch. xiii. (the eschatological discourse) this is the
only place in which Mark gives any considerable num
ber of Jesus' sayings. They do not seem to be chrono
logically and historically connected, but rather to be

334 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
linked to each other by some association of ideas, or
even by the recurrence of the same terms. They may
all be said to turn, in a manner, on the moral temper
proper to disciples, and several of them are distinguished
by a peculiar use of the term ' name ' in connexion with
Jesus. ' Whoso shall receive one of such children in
My name' — iirl r& 6vop.ari pov — 'receiveth Me' (ver. 37).
' We saw one casting out demons in Thy name ' — iv ra
bvop,ari crov — ' and we forbade him ' (ver. 38). ' There
is no one who shall do a mighty work in My name ' — iirl
Tw ovofiart p,ov — ' and shall be able quickly to speak evil
of Me ' (ver. 39). * Whosoever shall give you a cup of
water to drink in name that ye are Christ's ' — ev ovofiart
otl ^ptcrrov icrre — ' verily I say unto you, he shall not
lose his reward.' The recurrence of 'the name' of
Jesus here is very remarkable, and there are analogous
examples elsewhere in the gospels. Cf. Matt. 10 22
('hated by all for My name's sake — Sia to ovop,d /iov) ;
also Matt. 24 9, Mark 13 13, Luke 21 17, where Sia to
ovop,d p,ov occurs not in the ' little Apocalypse,' but in
the part of the apocalyptic discourse which is generally
admitted to come from Jesus; Luke 21 12, eveKev rov
6v6fi.ar6s fiov, where the parallel in Mark 13 9 has eveKev
ifiov, for My sake; and finally Matt. 1929, where eveKa
rov ovofiaros /_ou = for My name's sake, corresponds to
Mark io29, eveKev i/xov Kai rov ivayyekiov = for My sake
and the gospel's, and to Luke 1 8 29, elveKev rrjs /SWiXeias
rov 0eoT.=for the sake of the Kingdom of God. A
comparison of all these instances will show that the
evangelists felt at liberty to convey what they knew to
be the meaning of Jesus with a certain degree of

THE MESSIAH AND THE CROSS 335
freedom ; but it will hardly be doubted, however we try
to interpret the separate applications of it, that a unique
significance is asserted for Him, in relation to the
Kingdom of God, through all the varieties of expres
sion.1 It is their relation to Him that exposes the
disciples to universal hatred (Mark 1318); it is through
reliance on Him that the saving power of God is
bestowed on men, and they can do mighty works (9 39) ;
it is because the little ones are connected with Him that
the smallest service done them is sure of its reward
(9 41), and that any wrong inflicted on them is threatened
with the most terrible judgment (Matt. 18 6). When we
reflect how impossible it is to substitute any other name
here for the name of Jesus, or to suppose that any other
person could assume that he had that unique significance
in relation to the Kingdom of God which Jesus here
assumes for Himself, we must admit that the place
which apostolic faith assigned Him in the true religion
is no other than that which His self-revelation demands.
It does not transcend that self- revelation, it corresponds
to it, when we hear Peter declare after the resurrection
that there is none other name under heaven given
among men whereby we must be saved (Acts 4 12).
The last of the sections in Mark which deal with the
Messiah and the Cross is peculiarly important (10 32"46).
It opens with a historical reminiscence which it requires
some courage to question. ' They were in the way
going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was going before
1 Klostermann on Mark io 29 suggests that possibly eveKev epov ko.1 tov
eiayyeXiov, eveKev tov ovoparos pov, eveKev rrjs fiao-i\elas tov @eov are all
expansions of an original eveKev epov. If this were so it would rather
strengthen than weaken the argument.

336 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
them : and they were amazed ; and they that followed
were afraid.' We cannot fix the locality, but the time
meant is certainly not far from the end ; they may even
have crossed the Jordan and been moving toward
Jericho. The kind of lead which Jesus took (fjv
rrpody cav) was apparently what amazed them ; He had
never before stepped out in front of them in this
fashion, as though He were impatient to reach His
journey's end. It is probably a true remembrance of
the temper of Jesus all through this journey when Luke
tells us that ' He set His face stedfastly to go to Jeru
salem' (961), and that somewhere in the course of it,
with His eye upon the end, He exclaimed, ' I have a
baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straitened
until it is accomplished ' ( 1 2 60) ; it is in this temper that
we see Him here. He is absorbed in something which
the disciples have not taken in : He is rapt in it as He
was in the earlier work of His ministry when His
friends said He is beside Himself. ' They that followed'
do not seem to be the Twelve, but others who had
gathered about Him on the way ; their fear may only be
the sense of something unnatural in such an overstrained
mental condition, as they would think it, or it may have
been due to the feeling that Jerusalem was an unsafe
place for a person with the ideas and purposes of Jesus.
But, however we are to read the situation, it is a situa
tion so unique and so vivid that it is impossible to
regard it as unreal. The key to it is contained in
Bengel's comment on the corresponding paragraph in
Matthew : Jesus jam tum habitabat in passione sua. It
is with this preoccupation that He once more takes the

THE MESSIAH AND THE CROSS 337
Twelve apart, and begins to tell them the things that
are to befall Him. The subject is still the Son of
Man, and in detail the prediction surpasses those that
have gone before,1 but that need not make us question
the fact that in the memorable circumstances described
Jesus tried once more to initiate His disciples into His
own conception of what was involved in the Messianic
calling. He was under no illusion about what His
going to Jerusalem meant, but He set His face sted-
fastly to go, nevertheless. He was conscious that there
was a divine necessity in it to which He was called
to submit, and He sought to enlighten the disciples
concerning it. The lesson was no more successful than
those which preceded. Luke puts in the strongest
language its complete failure. 'And they understood
none of these things, and this saying was hidden from
them, and they perceived not the things which were
said' (1834). Mark (followed by Matthew) does not as
at 9 32 comment upon their want of intelligence, but he
records an incident which sets it in the strongest light.
James and John, the sons of Zebedee, come to Him
with a request that they may sit, one on His right hand
and the other on His left in His glory. This request is
one of the irrefragable proofs that Jesus was regarded,
even in His lifetime, as the Christ — that is, as the
Person through whom the Kingdom of God was to
1 It can hardly be doubted here that the event has given precision to the
prophecy. In Mark it is virtually a programme of the Passion narrative in
all its details. How unconsciously a catechist or preacher would give this
kind of definiteness to what Jesus said of 'the things that were to befall
Him' is apparent here from Matt. 20 19, who, though in other respects
dependent on Mark, introduces ' crucify ' into his version of Jesus' words
instead of ' kill.' Y

338 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
come. Luke, no doubt, omits the whole incident,
though he gives in another connexion (22 24"27) some of
the words spoken by Jesus on this occasion, but that
gives us no reason for doubting its historical character.
' Luke always spares the Twelve.' The disciples had
already begun to believe in Jesus as the Christ, and
when He resolved to go up to Jerusalem they felt that
a crisis in His fortunes (and in their own) was approach
ing. As Jerusalem drew near, many who followed
Jesus thought that the Kingdom of God was on the
point of appearing (Luke 1911). James and John
evidently shared these expectations, and it was the
intense preoccupation of their minds by them which
made them insensible to Jesus' words. It is quite
gratuitous to say that the request they make to Jesus
would be more appropriate if it were connected with a
saying like that in Matt. 1928 and Luke 22 29, in which
Jesus promises the disciples that they will one day sit
on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel,1 and that
the evangelist here has lost the true perspective. What
this means is that only the words preserved in Luke 22 24'27
can claim to be regarded as words of Jesus : the whole
conversation of Jesus with the sons of Zebedee is fiction.
Most people will find it difficult to treat such criticism
seriously ; one can imagine motives for it, but no reason,
at least none that falls within the domain of history.
The request of the two brothers is seriously made, and
it is seriously taken by Jesus, but it only reveals the
1 So Loisy ad loc, who finds in this connexion an explanation of the
word ' sit,' which he thinks otherwise inappropriate, in the request of James
and John.

THE MESSIAH AND THE CROSS 339
immense gulf between His mind and theirs. He accepts,
indeed, and this is the point we must emphasise, their
implied homage to Him as the King. He is going to
come in glory and to sit on His throne, and it will be
the supreme honour to sit at His right hand and His
left. It is not only in their consciousness but in His
own that the supreme place in the Kingdom of God
belongs to Him. But He knows as they do not the
way which leads to that glory. He has a cup to drink,
a baptism to be baptized with, before He ascends the
throne. It is through drinking that cup — the cup of
bewilderment which the Father is putting into His
hand ; through being baptized with that baptism — letting
all the waves and the billows of the agony which clouds
the future pass over Him : it is through awful experiences
like these that His triumph is to be achieved and His
Kingdom won. He knows this — how can we deny that
He knew it unless by accusing Him of an inability to
discern the signs of the times like that of which He
impeached His contemporaries ? — and He knows also
that the only way to greatness in the Kingdom of God
is that which He Himself must tread. Hence, far as
the thoughts of the disciples are from His own thoughts,
He recognises their seriousness and their loyalty when
He says : ' You know not what you ask. Are you able
to drink the cup which I drink, and to be baptized with
the baptism with which I am baptized?' There is
nothing, they feel in their hearts, that they would not do
with Him and for Him, and they answer, 'We are able.'
Appreciating their sincerity and devotion, Jesus takes
them at their word. ' The cup which I drink ye shall

340 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
drink, and with the baptism with which I am baptized
shall ye be baptized.' It is becoming common now for
critics to assume that this implies the martyrdom, in the
strict sense, of James and John,1 and the natural inference
of course is that Jesus never spoke such words. He
could not foretell the violent death of the brothers. But
it is the interpretation which is wrong. The mood in
which Jesus speaks of the things which are to befall
Him as a baptism and a cup is not one which lends
itself to such painfully prosaic treatment. It is nothing
short of absurd to say that unless James and John were
put to death — strictly speaking, it should be crucified —
the words ' Ye shall indeed drink of My cup and be
baptized with My baptism ' are meaningless or untrue.
They are full of truth and meaning in the lips of Jesus,
not because James and John were subsequently put to
death for the gospel — no one can prove this by historical
evidence — but because He saw that these brave and
simple souls, unintelligent though they were, had it in
them to follow Him to the end. When He declines to
assign them places on His right hand and His left, it is
not that He disclaims His own place as King : but the
honours claimed are not to be assigned by favour, but to
those for whom they have been prepared. On what
principle they are prepared we get a hint from what
follows.
1 So Loisy, ii. 238 : ' Pour celui qui a re'dige' cette prediction, la mort
sanglante des Ze'be'de'iides e'tait un fait acquis, appartenant au passe1, comme
la passion meme de J^sus.' Part of the attraction of this interpretation is
no doubt the fact that it supports the statement of the Papias fragment
published by De Boors (Texte u. Untersuchungen,v. ii. 166 ff.) that James
and John were killed by the Jews (presumably in Jerusalem), and that
John therefore cannot have been the author ofthe fourth gospel.

THE MESSIAH AND THE CROSS 341
James and John had apparently approached Jesus in
private, but what they^had done became known. The
other disciples, who suffered from the same misconcep
tions of the Kingdom and the same selfish ambition,
were provoked. Jesus called them to Him and gave
them all a lesson on the true nature of greatness, which
was at the same time a lesson on the Kingdom and its
King. ' Those who are accounted to rule the Gentiles
lord it over them, and their great ones deal arbitrarily
with them. But it shall not be so among you. But
whoso will become great among you shall be your
servant, and whoso will become first among you shall
be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come
to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom
for many.' What mainly concerns us here is the self-
revelation of Jesus in the last sentence. The law of
the Kingdom is illustrated supremely in the person of
the King : it is in Him we see what greatness is and
how it is attained. It is attained by service ; at its
greatest height it is attained by a service which for
lowliness and sacrifice can never be outdone. The
Speaker is the King, the Son of Man, who is to sit on
the throne of His glory : and He is consciously reflect
ing, as in other places where He speaks of having come
(Marks17; Luke 966, 1249, 19 10; Matt. 5 17, io34f), on
His vocation and the way in which it is to be fulfilled.
There could not be a more solemn utterance, and most
people will feel a natural reluctance to suppose that it
has been modified in tradition. Yet this is one of the
points at which a considerable body of criticism assails
the evangelist's testimony. The last words of the

342 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
sentence — ' and to give His life a ransom for many ' —
are denied to Jesus. Partly this is done for what may
be considered a properly critical reason. The parallel
in Luke, it is said, does not contain them. But it is a
fair question how far there is a parallel in Luke at all.
Luke, as has been noticed, omits the whole incident of
the sons of Zebedee, and the words of Jesus he reports
in 24 27 — ' For who is greater, he that sitteth at meat or
he that serveth ? is it not he that sitteth at meat ? but I
am among you as he that serveth ' — while they are akin
to what we find here, are definitely appropriate to the
supper-table at which they are spoken, and cannot be
assumed to be an earlier and truer form of Mark 10 45.
Dismissing this textual reason, then, as inadequate to
throw suspicion on the words, we turn to the other way
in which they are questioned. They represent, it is
said, the Pauline doctrine of redemption, and are not on
the same plane with the rest of the passage. When
Jesus speaks of service, He speaks of something in which
the disciples are to follow Him : 'I came not to be
ministered unto but to minister, and you must live in
the same spirit ; you must serve as I serve if you wish
to share My greatness in the Kingdom.' This, it is said,
is intelligible and ethical, in harmony with all the teach
ing of Jesus ; but with the giving of His life a ransom for
many we have a fierd/3acrts eis dXKo ye'vos x — the thought
1 This is how it is put by Wellhausen, Evangelium Marci, ad loc.
Loisy, ii. 241, says : ' L'idee de la vie donnee en rancon appartient a un autre
courant que celle du service.' The other courant is that of Pauline
theology. He refers to Rom. 1 5 3, Phil. 2 M, Gal. 1 4, 2 20, and then writes :
' Mark 10 46 parait concu d'apr&s ces passages. L'id.e du "rachat de vie"
e'tait famili&re k l'-vang.liste, 837.' Why not ' familiere k Jesus'? It is
His words which are quoted in 8 37.

THE MESSIAH AND THE CROSS 343
is transferred to another plane. This is not a service in
which the disciples can follow Jesus ; it is irrelevant and
inappropriate here ; and the inference is that it is not
due to Jesus, but is an incongruous supplement to His
words by the evangelist.
In spite of the imposing names by which it is sup
ported, this is not an argument which impresses the
writer. The idea contained in the words 'to give His
life a ransom for many' is not one which can have
been strange to Jesus. The problem of finding a
ransom or equivalent for forfeited lives is one to which
He has already alluded in ch. 8 37 : ' What shall a man
give in exchange for his soul (or life) ? ' It appears in
Old Testament passages with which He cannot but
have been familiar. ' None of them can by any means
redeem his brother, nor give to God a ransom for him :
(for the redemption of their soul is costly, and must be
let alone for ever :) that he should still live alway,
that he should not see corruption ' (Ps. 49 7ff). This
supreme need of man — this service that none can render
either to himself or his brother — is suggested also in
Job 3322ff- : 'His soul draweth near to the pit, and his
life to the destroyers. . . . Then He is gracious unto
him, and saith, Deliver him from going down to the pit,
I have found a ransom.' It pervades the fifty-third
chapter of Isaiah, where there is the same contrast as
here between one and many — the one Righteous Ser
vant and the many whom He justifies and whose sins He
bears at the cost of giving His life for them (Is. 53 10'12).
The ideas of the passage, therefore, present no ante
cedent difficulty : they are ideas which lie at the heart

344 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
of the ancient religion. Further, there is nothing incon
gruous, nothing which makes us feel that we have risen
(or sunk) to another plane of thought, when these ideas
are treated as if they were continuous with that of
service. They really are continuous ; they are naturally
regarded by the Speaker as indicative of the supreme
service which the many need and which He must render.
He served them in numberless ways, but it was not in
consistent with any of these ways, it was only carrying
service to its utmost limit, when He gave His life a
ransom for them. It is quite true that the disciples
cannot do the same service. Our lives have no such
virtue in them as His sinless life, and cannot be prized
at such a price. Nevertheless, we must follow Jesus in
doing service even to this limit : ' We also ought to lay
down our lives for the brethren ' (i John 3 1B). If, now,
there is no objection on these grounds to Jesus having
uttered the words here put into His lips, the only
ground on which they can be rejected is that they imply
a consciousness, on the part of Jesus, of His own relation
to the ideas they convey, which is inherently incredible.
The ideas, it must be admitted, were in circulation, and
the subsumption of them under the general conception
of service is entirely appropriate ; all that can be dis
puted is that Jesus made the application of them to
Himself. This, it may confidently be said, can only be main
tained against the total impression which the representa
tion of Jesus in the gospels makes upon us. Jesus is
not a prophet, He is to His own consciousness the
Messiah, the Person through whom prophecy is to be

THE MESSIAH AND THE CROSS 345
fulfilled and the Kingdom of God established. To
establish God's Kingdom is to do the supreme service to
humanity, and just as we have seen Him already declare
His sole adequacy to the task when it is conceived as
the revelation of the Father (p. 268), so here we find
him declare His adequacy to it again when it is con
ceived as the ransoming of forfeited lives by the sur
render of a life worth more than all. ' To understand
Him ' — as Dr. George Adam Smith has said in a
memorable page already quoted x — ' it is sufficient to
remember that the redemptive value of the sufferings of
the righteous, an atonement made for sin not through
material sacrifice but in the obedience and spiritual
agony of an ethical agent, was an idea familiar to
prophecy. It is enough to be sure, as we can be sure,
that He whose grasp of the truths of the Old Testament
excelled that of every one of His predecessors, did not
apply this particular truth to Himself in a vaguer way,
nor understand by it less, than they did. His people's
pardon, His people's purity — foretold as the work of a
righteous life, a perfect service of God, a willing self-
sacrifice — He now accepted as His own work, and for it
He offered His life and submitted unto death. The
ideas, as we have seen, were not new ; the new thing
was that He felt they were to be fulfilled in His Person
and through His Passion. But all this implies two
equally extraordinary and amazing facts : that He who
had a more profound sense than any other of the
spiritual issues in the history of Israel, was conscious
that all these issues were culminating to their crisis in
1 Jerusalem, ii. 547 f. See above, p. 299.

346 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
Himself; and that He who had the keenest moral
judgment ever known on earth was sure of His own
virtue for such a crisis — was sure of that perfection of
His previous service without which His self-sacrifice
would be in vain. ... It is a very singular confidence.
Men there have been who felt themselves able to say
" I know," and who died like Him for their convictions.
But He was able to say "/ am. I am that to which
prophecy has pointed," and was able to feel Himself
worthy to be that.' Nothing could be truer to the
gospel presentation of Jesus. The difference between
' I know ' and ' I am ' is the difference between the
prophet and the Saviour, between the Old Testament
and the New ; and the passage with which we are deal
ing, though a supremely important instance, is only one
instance after all of the habitual and characteristic con
sciousness of Jesus. If it stood alone, the criticism
which we have been discussing might seem more plaus
ible ; but careful scrutiny of the words in the light of
Jesus' self-revelation as a whole lifts them above the
shadow of a doubt. In regarding Jesus as Redeemer
at the cost of His life, as well as Revealer of God, the
consciousness of the New Testament Christian corre
sponds to the consciousness of the Christ Himself.
The Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem (Mark nM°).
The incident we have just examined is closely fol
lowed in Mark by another in which also we see how
Jesus thought of Himself. The circumstances of His
entrance into Jerusalem were not accidental, so far as
He was concerned. The fourth gospel, indeed, tells

THE TRIUMPHAL ENTRY 347
us that His disciples did not realise at the time what
they were doing (1216): only after the resurrection
did it occur to them that they had unconsciously been
fulfilling prophecy. But Jesus, it may be said, organised
the procession ; He sent for the ass's colt on which He
was to enter the capital in lowly state. On His part it
is a Messianic act, and reveals the consciousness of the
King. It is difficult to deny that the multitudes who
shouted ' Hosanna ' were without some perception of
this, though their ideas of the kingship may have dif
fered widely from His. They hailed Him as 'Son of
David,' or thought of the Kingdom He was to restore
as that of ' our father David ' (Mark 1 1 10), but the
humble pomp suggested rather a Prince of Peace than
the warrior king who had stretched the bounds of Israel
from Egypt to the Euphrates. In any case, however,
the triumphal entry is the act of One who identifies His
own coming with the coming of the Kingdom of God.
' Son of David ' may be a misleading description of the
Messiah, but it is with the consciousness of being the
Messiah that Jesus here passes before us.
The Wicked Husbandmen (Mark 121-12).
Of the various utterances of Jesus in Jerusalem, the
one which is first reported by Mark is not the least im
portant to our argument. It is usually called the parable
of the wicked husbandmen, but it is not really a parable,
like those which we find in the thirteenth chapter of
Matthew, but an allegory. A parable is independent
of its interpretation and application ; the parable of the
sower, for example, describes what happens in Nature

348 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
every year, whether we can discern its spiritual teaching
or not. But it is otherwise with allegory. Allegory
only comes into existence through the application which
is to be made of it : to take the case before us, no pro
prietor and no husbandmen ever really acted as the
proprietor and the husbandmen are here represented as
doing. The story has no truth of its own : it is only
the relations of God and Israel which are represented in
this artificial form. This cannot be disputed, but the
confidence with which it is inferred that the words are
not those of Jesus is more than the writer can under
stand, Julicher, for example,1 while admitting that Jesus
on exceptional occasions may have used allegory, not
parable, cannot avoid the suspicion that this ' parable ' is
due to a believer of the first generation, who, in depend
ence on Isaiah, chapter 5, and on parables of Jesus
to which he already gave an allegorical interpretation, is
seeking to justify the death of Jesus to the religious
sense. It is the last and highest proof of God's patience,
and must be immediately followed by judgment. The
whole, he thinks, shows us how the history of Israel
was regarded by the average man who had seen the
crucifixion of Jesus and yet believed in Him as Son of
God. It is a piece of early Christian apologetic in which
we see how the Christian consciousness answered, partly
to itself, partly to Jewish attacks upon it, the difficulties
presented by the death of its Messiah. In a similar line
the passage is criticised by Loisy and many others.
1 Die Gleichnisreden Jesu, ii. 385. Cf. Loisy, ii. 319 : ' Comme beaucoup
d'all.gories, celle-ci n'a qu'une valeur de conception theorique et theolo-
gique.' The theology, of course, is that of the Church, not of Jesus.

THE SERVANTS AND THE SON 349
There are, however, serious objections to this whole
mode of treatment. To begin with, there is no reason
why Jesus should not have used allegory as well as
parable. We may be quite right in thinking that it is an
inferior literary genre, but it is not used here for literary
but for practical purposes, and what was done by Isaiah,
Ezekiel, and the Psalmists, may quite well have been
done by Jesus too. Further, if this allegory had been
the work of an early Christian apologist, there are two
points in which it would almost certainly have been
different. The drastic statement in verse 9 — ' He will
come and destroy the husbandmen and give the vine
yard to others ' — would have been qualified. This
answers to Jesus' conception of the destiny of Israel or
her rulers, and of the Kingdom of God (cf. Mark 1 3 2),
but not to that which we can see from Acts prevailed
among the early Christians. They had no such sense as
He of what Israel had forfeited by rejecting Jesus, and
of what a complete breach had thus been made between
the past and the future in the history of the true religion.
This is one point : the other is that a Christian who
invented such an allegory to justify the death of the Son
would hardly have left Him dead. He would have con
trived to introduce somehow the resurrection of Jesus,
and His entrance into His inheritance in spite of the
murderers. It may be said that he does this, in such
vague fashion as his literary method admits, in the
quotation from the 11 8th Psalm — 'The stone which the
builders despised, the same has become head of the
corner ; this is the Lord's doing, and it is wonderful in
our eyes ' ; but even if this be admitted, we have still to

350 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
ask why Jesus should not have spoken thus Himself.
In point of fact, the whole plausibility of criticism like
this depends on the insulation of the passage, and on the
legitimacy of treating it as if it stood alone. But it can
not legitimately be treated thus. The Jesus who is
represented as speaking in it is the Person whose unique
consciousness of Himself and of His relation to God
and His Kingdom has already been revealed in ways that
cannot be disputed. As the destined Messianic King,
He is the Person in whom Israel's history culminates,
and it was as certain to Him as prophecy and experience
and divine insight could make it, that for Him the history
must culminate in a great tragedy. He was the Son,
coming after all the servants, but destined to drink a
more awful cup, to undergo a more tremendous baptism
than they. Not that this was the last reality in His
consciousness : the resurrection which annulled death
always lay beyond, and He lifts His head in triumph as
He points to it in the words of the Psalm. Nor can we
say that an allegory like this is a proper enough thing to
write, a good subject for private meditation, but that it
is not suitable in a concio ad populum : no one could see
its bearings. The evangelist expressly tells us that it
hit the mark when it was spoken (ver. 12).
But how extraordinary, when we take it as the utter
ance of Jesus, is that conception of Himself and of His
place in the designs of God which it reveals. All God's
earlier messengers to Israel are servants ; He is not
servant but Son. He is not a Son, but the one beloved
Son of the Father (els, dyairr)r6<s, ver. 6) ; He is the heir
— all that is the Father's is His. To send Him is

DAVID'S SON AND DAVID'S LORD 351
to make the final appeal ; to reject Him is to commit
the sin which brings Israel's doom in its train ; yet even
His rejection by Israel is not for Him final defeat. God
will yet exalt Him and put the inheritance into His
hands. In the circumstances of the moment it was
inevitable that Jesus should reflect upon God's dealings
with Israel and His own place in them ; and it is no
objection to His reflections to say that they represent
the mind of Christians generally, who knew He had
been crucified yet believed Him to be the Son of God.
He believed Himself to be the Son of God, and when
He read the history of Israel in His filial consciousness
it unfolded itself to Him as we see it in this allegory.
The stupendous thing here, in harmony though it be
with His self-revelation as a whole, is the place which
He assigns to Himself in the story. It justifies the
attitude of the New Testament towards Him, but it
is gratuitous to say that it is the product of that attitude.
The converse is the fact.
David's Son and David's Lord (Mark 12 8!37).
No critical difficulty is raised about this passage, and
the theological discussions to which it has given rise
hardly concern us. It will be universally admitted that
in the mind of Jesus ' son of David ' was at least an
inadequate description of the Messiah. David might
have many sons by natural descent, but as only one of
them could be the Messiah, it must have been something
distinct from natural descent which gave Him his title.
No doubt those who hoped for the coming of the son of

352 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
David meant by the term one who would inherit all that
David represented to a patriotic Jew — a hero king who
would restore the national independence and empire.
To Jesus this was as insufficient a title to Messiahship
as physical descent itself. Whether He repudiated the
physical descent as He repudiated the political ambitions
need not be discussed : what is clear from the passage
as a whole is that, in the mind of Jesus, Messiahship
depends not on a relation to David, but on a relation
to God. How this relation is conditioned, physically or
metaphysically, we are not told ; but the Messiah is the
person to whom God says, ' Sit on my right hand, till I
make thine enemies the footstool of thy feet.' Jesus did
not discuss questions of this kind at random : His
interest in the current ways of conceiving the Messiah
was connected with the fact that He was Himself fulfil
ling the Messianic vocation. Of all Old Testament
passages, that which is most frequently referred to in the
New is the opening verse of Psalm i io, with its mention
of the right hand of God ; and this way of representing
the exaltation of the Messiah goes back, as we see,
to Jesus Himself. The heavenly voice which spoke to
Him at the opening of His ministry in the words of one
Psalm, ' Thou art my Son,' speaks in His soul at the close
of it in the corresponding and, if possible, more exalted
words of another, ' Sit at my right hand.' This is an
immediate inference from the fact that Jesus regarded
Himself as Messiah. We cannot enter into the
elevation which these words convey. Even the resur
rection of Jesus only imperfectly illustrates them. But
they are involved in the Messianic consciousness of

THE DATE OF THE PAROUSIA 353
Jesus, and they justify all that Christians mean when
they call Him Lord.1
The Date of the Parousia (Mark 13 s2).
We have already referred elsewhere (p. 269) to the
well-known word in which Jesus declares that 'of that
day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in
heaven, nor the Son, but the Father.' It is needless to
say that it has been disputed, but it may be worth while
to indicate the purely subjective grounds on which this
is done. When Jesus was asked about the precise date
of the Messianic advent, He declared roundly, says
Loisy,2 that this was the secret of the heavenly Father :
all He could guarantee was that the Kingdom of heaven
would appear suddenly and unexpectedly ; no one would
have foreseen it, hardly any one would have given it
a thought. This is set down as the declaration of Jesus,
and then M. Loisy proceeds : ' In the form which Mark
has given it, it seems to suggest an apologetic preoccu
pation, as though there were a desire to justify the Christ
for not having indicated the date of an advent which
1 If we limited our view to Jesus' criticism of ' Son of David,' as an
adequate description of the Messiah, we might say that this passage was on
a level with those belonging to our other early source in which He speaks
of Himself as 'more than Jonah,' 'more than Solomon,' 'more than the
Temple ' (see p. 280) ; but the words in which God addresses the Messiah,
and which it is impossible to leave out of account, lift us to a far greater
height. One may say this without going as far as Dalman, who (referring
to Isaiah 49 6 Jer. 1 6)thinks it would only be natural that Jesus being 'the Son,'
as distinguished from all servants, should presuppose, not merely selection
and predestination, but also a creative act on the part of God, rendering Him
what no one, who stands in a merely natural connexion with mankind, can
ever by his own efforts become. — The Words of Jesus, p. 286.
2 Les Evangiles Synoptiques, ii. 438. Z

354 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
was clearly being delayed, by alleging that according to
Jesus Himself this was a point of which the angels were
ignorant, and of which the Messiah might well be
ignorant too.' Could arbitrariness be more wantonly
arbitrary than this ? ' The form which Mark has given '
to the utterance of Jesus is the only form in which we
know anything about it ; to assume that we know what
Jesus meant, apart from this, and on the strength of this
assumed knowledge of His meaning to criticise Mark's
record of His words, is simply unreal. There is some
thing almost naive in the assertion that in the circum
stances in which Jesus preached the gospel it ought to
have been enough (devait suffire) to declare that the date
in question was the secret of the Father ; there was no
need to say more than, No one knows but the Father.1
Things do not happen in accordance with our a priori
notions of what ought to be adequate in the circum
stances ; and the real ground on which this saying is
rejected is unambiguously given in what follows. ' The
use of the term Son, without qualification, to designate the
Saviour, does not belong to the language of Jesus nor to
that of the primitive evangelic tradition.' This assertion,
however, is as unsupported as it is peremptory. If we
do not know the language of Jesus and that of the
primitive evangelic tradition through Mark and the other
document we have examined, we do not know anything
about it, and this unqualified use of Son is common
1 It is rather curious that Dalman, who also rejects the evangelist's testi
mony here, and ultimately on the same grounds as Loisy, thinks that the
original saying ran : ' Of that day or hour not even the angels in heaven
know ' — the words referring to the Father and the Son being added after
wards.— The Words of Jesus, 194.

THE DATE OF THE PAROUSIA 355
to both (see p. 269). To eject it from both is only pos
sible if we reject the historical evidence altogether, and
proceed on a dogmatic assumption that Jesus cannot have
been conscious of such a relation to God as this use
of the term implies. But our whole study of the
gospels has brought us into contact with a Person
whose consciousness of His relation to God is nothing
if not unique ; and there is no reason, with the evidence
of the two most ancient sources in our hands, to doubt
that on occasion He expressed it in this striking way.
Nothing, as Schmiedel has insisted, was less likely to be
invented by men who worshipped Christ than the state
ment in this text about the Son. Far from serving any
apologetic purpose, it called itself for defence which
Christians were often perplexed to give.1 The circum
stance that the Son is used in it, in a sense which
did prevail in the consciousness of Christians afterwards,
is no evidence that it originated there ; it only shows
again that the consciousness of Christians is not unsup
ported by that of the Christ.
1 The writer has no doubt whatever that this is a genuine word of Jesus,
and just as little doubt that it must be taken absolutely as a disclaimer on
the part of Jesus of all knowledge whatsoever as to the time of the advent.
To say that one does not know the day or the hour when a great event will
happen is an impressive rhetorical way of saying that He does not know the
time at all ; and we can easily believe that Jesus used it in this sense. It is
hardly conceivable that He used it in any other. If it is taken, not abso
lutely, but as a qualification of the sentence that the decisive event in
question will certainly happen in the lifetime of living men, it ceases to be
impressive and becomes trivial, not to say grotesque. It is practically
incredible that Jesus should have said 'All this will happen within a genera
tion, but it is not in the power of man or angel, no nor even of the Son, to
fix the precise date.' But if Mark 13 32 is not to be taken as a qualification
of Mark 13 30, but absolutely and by itself, the probabilities are that in spite
of their juxtaposition in the Gospel they originally referred to different
things.

356 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
The Last Supper (Mark i422-25).
Nothing in the gospel, as it was understood by its
writer, reveals Jesus more clearly than the Last Supper.
But before proceeding to this involved subject, we may
refer in passing to the memorable word recorded as
spoken by Jesus at the anointing at Bethany : ' She hath
done what she could : she hath anointed My body
beforehand for the burying. And verily I say unto you,
wheresoever the gospel shall be preached throughout
the whole world, that also which this woman hath done
shall be spoken of for a memorial of her' (Mark 14 8f).
We must remember that when these words were spoken
Jesus' death was at hand. He Himself knew it, and
though probably His disciples generally were far enough
from entering into His mind, there was one person near
who had divined that they could not have Him long
with them, and whose heart overflowed in this passion
ate demonstration of affection. It is Jesus who puts the
mournful poetic interpretation upon the act of the woman
— she hath anointed My body beforehand for the burial ;
it is Jesus also, moved by a love so generous, who
solemnly rewards it with an immortality of renown. The
criticism is hardly to be envied which finds anything
here to question, yet it has become almost a common
place of criticism in a certain school that the last words
do not come from Jesus, but are the reflection of a
Christian preacher. One can understand that a Chris
tian preacher in repeating them might involuntarily
change 'the gospel' (as in Mark) into 'this gospel' (as
in Matthew) — thinking as he spoke of the message which

THE ANOINTING AT BETHANY 357
he was actually delivering — but it is not easy to under
stand how they originated in preaching. It may be that
Jesus was not ordinarily accustomed to speak of ' the
gospel ' or of ' the whole world,' but the circumstances
were not ordinary, and He must have had means of ex
pressing the ideas (cf. 1310). Anything which suddenly
and deeply moved Him seems to have opened to His
mind the vast issues of His work— the devotion of this
woman, or the faith of the centurion— which called up
the vision of the multitudes who should come from the
East and the West, and sit down with Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacobin the Kingdom of God (Matt. 810f). But
there is a more serious difficulty in the way of ascribing
this saying to a Christian preacher, and then supposing
that it has been mistakenly transferred to the lips of Jesus.
As the word of a Christian preacher it is disagreeable,
to say the least— a pompous homiletical extravagance,
having no vital relation to the circumstances ; in the lips
of Jesus and in the historical situation it is living,
natural, and sublime — a word of the Lord which needs
no attestation, but that it stands where it does, as His
word. Who could so reward such an expression of devo
tion, who could think of so rewarding it, but He who was
touched by its passion and challenged to its defence ?
The common sense, not to say the general heart, of man
may safely be appealed to here against the pedantry in
which criticism sometimes loses its way.1 The interest
of this word of Jesus for our subject is that it virtually
identifies Him — perhaps it would not be too much to say
1 A striking illustration in Loisy's remark ad loc. : En faisant dire a
Jesus que cette histoire aura sa place dans I'Evangile, Marc donne d
entendre quelle n'y a pas toujours ete. Really ?

358 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
that in particular it virtually identifies the story of His
death — with the glad tidings to be brought to all the
world. The anointing at Bethany is in Mark the
prelude to the passion ; it is as an actor in the opening
scene of the great drama of redemption that this woman
has a perpetual memorial in the Church. This is in
keeping with Mark io4B and with what we shall pre
sently find in the narrative of the Supper, but we cannot
think this agreement unfavourable to its truth. What
it does discredit is the idea that in its conception of the
gospel the Christian Church entered on lines not only
unknown to the mind of Jesus but directly opposed to it.
If the Church was conscious of being redeemed through
His passion, He was conscious that through His passion
He became its Redeemer.
The story of the Supper, so far as we are here con
cerned with it, is given in Mark i422ff-; 'And as they
were eating He took bread, and when He had blessed,
He brake it and gave to them, and said, Take ye : this
is My body. And He took a cup, and when He had
given thanks, He gave to them : and they all drank of
it. And He said unto them, This is My blood of the
covenant, which is shed for many. Verily I say unto
you, I will no more drink of the fruit of the vine, until
that day when I drink it new in the Kingdom of God.'1
A much longer volume than this would not enable one
to describe even in outline the critical treatment of these
seemingly simple words. They purport to be historical,
and it is only the most ' advanced ' criticism which has
radically questioned their character. This has been
mainly done on two grounds. First, it is said that on
1 See The Death of Christ, pp. 46 ff.

THE LAST SUPPER 359
the ground of the general character of Mark's gospel,
Pauline influence may be assumed at this point without
proof. The Pauline affinities of Mark are supposed
to be seen in his use of the term evayyektov, in expres
sions like that about the Son of Man giving His life
a ransom for many, and in the frequent comments on
the inability of the Twelve to understand the doctrine
of the Cross — the genuine gospel as Paul preached it.
In the passage before us the mention of the covenant,
in particular, is alleged to be Pauline : the distinction
of the old and the new covenant was one of which the
apostle made much in his teaching, whereas in the teach
ing of Jesus the term covenant does not occur at all.
To these considerations, jointly and severally, we can
attach but little weight. We have seen already that
there is no reason to question, in most of them, the
historical character of what is described as Pauline ; and
it is a violent hypothesis to start from, that what pur
ports to be the historical account of a solemn hour in the
intercourse of Jesus and the Twelve, only found currency
in the Church — yet did find it universally — in a form so
pervaded by Pauline ideas, repellent to the Twelve, that
its historical character may be said to be utterly lost.
As for the use of the term covenant, we must not forget
the circumstances of the hour. The Supper had some
connexion, more or less intimate, with the Passover ; and
that annual sacrifice, which commemorated and ratified
God's covenant with Israel, would naturally suggest the
term — provided the thoughts associated with it were in
Jesus' mind at the time. It is important, too, in this
connexion, not to overestimate the place of the idea in

360 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
the mind of Paul. Apart from the passage (i Cor.
1 1 w ff) in which he gives his account of this same event
— a passage in which the interpretative word ' new ' may
be his own — there is but one other in all his epistles
where the same use is found, viz. 2 Corinthians, chapter 3.
It is precarious, therefore, to argue that its presence here
is due to him ; and while there is no indication in the
New Testament that the liturgical phraseology connected
with the Lord's Supper was sacrosanct, it is nevertheless
thoroughly improbable that an influence originating with
a man like Paul, who was the centre of such violent
antipathies, should have moulded every form of it which
obtained recognition in the Church.1
The second ground on which the historical character
of this passage has been questioned is internal to itself,
yet does not exclude a reference to Paul. When it is
closely scrutinised, it is said to betray two minds — two
currents of thought — two strata of ideas — two ' perspec
tives ' — which are inconsistent with each other. The
first is that which is disclosed in ver. 25 : 'Verily I say
unto you, I will no more drink of the fruit of the vine
until that day when I drink it new in the Kingdom of
God.' Here, it is said, we have an utterance in keeping
with the situation, and entirely intelligible to those to
whom it was addressed. Jesus does not even speak
expressly in it of Himself as the Messiah ; all he has in
view is the imminent coming of the Kingdom ; it is His
adieu to the Twelve, and His rendez-vous, the scene of
the latter being the Kingdom of God ; but there is
nothing in it about His death or His resurrection. The
1 I do not forget the Didache", nor the perplexing text of Luke 22 14-20.

THE LAST SUPPER 361
words, like all the genuine words of Jesus, maintain the
perspective of the near Messianic advent, and this is the
token that they are really His.1 This is the view of
Loisy, who admits that while we can see very well how
this perspective was broken by what actually happened,
it is less possible for us to apprehend clearly the manner
in which faith, after the passion, could derive from these
eucharistic words the Christian sacrament. It is not
only less possible, but quite impossible. If Jesus did
not say a word about His death at the Supper, then an
ordinance which has its raison d'itre in the proclamation
of His death cannot by any ingenuity be derived from
His words. It could not have occurred to Paul any more
than to anybody else. Paul indeed repudiates in the
most express terms any suggestion that the ordinance
of the Lord's Supper, as he had introduced it at Corinth,
owed anything to Himself. ' I received of the Lord,'
he says, 'that which also I delivered unto you' (i Cor.
1 1 23). There has been some discussion as to what
exactly Paul means by referring to the Lord as his
authority here, but surely without much reason. M.
Loisy argues that he appeals to the Lord rather than
to the apostolic tradition, because he is conscious, un
doubtedly, that he is not merely reporting the fact of
the institution — his knowledge of which he would owe
to the tradition in question — but interpreting it at the
same time in the light which the Lord had given him.
But the tradition, in what M. Loisy regards as its
original form — the only form in which Paul could become
acquainted with it — is in no sense interpreted in i Corin-
1 Loisy, Les Avangiles Synoptiques, ii. 540.

362 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
thians 1 1 23 f- ; on M. Loisy's own showing, it is shunted,
and replaced by something which has no connexion with
it whatever. Or if we suppose that a faint echo of it
remains in 'till He come' (i Cor. n 26), this is all that
remains : the words which Paul gives as spoken by
Jesus, Jesus did not speak, and the words which Jesus
did speak, contained no suggestion of those put into His
lips by Paul. We do not get over these difficulties by
suggesting that the fusion (melange) of history and of
Pauline theology in i Corinthians 1 1 23 ffi, and thereafter
in Mark, took place spontaneously, in the subconscious
region of the soul, where dreams and visions are gener
ated ; and that the apostle presented a vision which he
had had as a reality, without troubling himself about the
circumstance that the witnesses of the Last Supper had
not attributed to Jesus the words which he now put
into His lips. The vision here, we must remark, is a
pure hypothesis, excogitated by a modern scholar for
the support of another hypothesis ; and whether it be
true or not that no one thought in those days of keeping
two registers of Christian teaching, one for souvenirs
e'vange'liques and the other for revelations de I'Esprit —
a point on which, with both gospels and epistles in our
hands, the very existence of which affirms the distinc
tion, we cannot give an unqualified assent to M. Loisy
— it is certain that there is a far simpler explanation of
Paul's reference to the Lord. It is not the only thing
of the kind in i Corinthians. The Corinthians, appar
ently, were disposed to treat Paul's authority rather
lightly, and where he can he appeals directly to Christ.
In the seventh chapter he does so as explicitly as he

THE LAST SUPPER 363
does here : ' To the married I give charge, not I but the
Lord' (ver. 10) : 'Now concerning virgins I have no
commandment of the Lord' (ver. 25). No one talks
about visions here : the Lord is referred to as known
in the apostolic tradition of His words, which, just be
cause they are His, are for Christians an authority
beyond appeal. It is the same in the account of the
Supper. The Corinthians were taking liberties with it,
perverting it into a celebration of their own, as if Paul
had instituted it of his own motion, and they might
treat it as they pleased ; and what he says is, It is not
my ordinance at all, but Christ's. It is on His authority
it rests, and in His dying words its significance is de
clared. It would be more than extraordinary if, in con
ditions like these, Paul wrote to the Corinthians in the
guise of a historical narrative something which is en
tirely destitute of historical value.1 A person who in
such circumstances could not or did not distinguish be
tween matter of fact attested by evidence and visions
generated in the subliminal self would not be a respon
sible person. We have no hesitation therefore in hold
ing that Paul reproduces the apostolic tradition at this
point, and does so in the full sense of its value as
a historical authority connecting the Supper as he
1 Ce serait meconnaitre entierement l'_tat d'esprit des premiers cro-
yants que de voir dans cette circonstance une impossibility, comme si
Paul avait du rejeter sa vision — that is, the vision imagined for Him by
M. Loisy — parceque les anciens disciples ne lui avaient pas raconte le
dernier repas en cette forme, et comme si le recit de Paul, suppose qu'il soit
venu a la connaissance de Pierre pu de quelque autre temoin, avait du
provoquer un dementi formel, qu'on se serait fait une obligation de re-
pandre dans toutes les communautes. Loisy, ii. 532 n. 1. — The Death of
Christ, 112 f.

364 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
observed it with the Lord Himself. To say that
' the perspective of the Messianic festival excludes the
memorial of the death,' is obviously to say what the
authors of the gospels did not feel, what Paul did not
feel, what readers of the New Testament have never
felt. There is no reason in the nature of things why
Jesus, when He ate the Last Supper with His disciples,
should not have had both His impending death and
His ultimate triumph present to His mind, and we need
have no difficulty in accepting the evidence that He did
think and speak of both. The references to His body
and blood do not belong to another stratum of thought,
inconsistent with that which speaks of drinking the wine
new in the Kingdom of God ; they are part of a whole
which filled His thoughts, and which He revealed in preg
nant words to His friends. No doubt they could only
grasp them imperfectly at the moment, but it is a mistake
to say that they can only be understood in the context
of Paul's theology. They could arrest, fascinate, move,
and stimulate the mind ; they were there thenceforth
with the authority of Jesus for Christian thought to
brood upon. Without discussing their authenticity
further, we have now to ask what light they cast on
Jesus' consciousness of Himself.
It is the nature of a symbol that it can be set in
different lights, and always seems to call for further
interpretation. But from the very beginning, the
symbolism of the Supper and the words which gave
the key to it spoke unambiguously to the Christian
mind. They spoke of Jesus giving Himself, in His
body and blood, in all the reality of His humanity and

THE LAST SUPPER 365
His passion, to be the meat and drink of the soul.
They spoke of a covenant based on His sacrifice of
Himself — not merely a bond in which believers realised
their brotherhood, but a new relation to God into which
they entered at the cost of His life. They spoke of a
transcendent kingdom in which all the hopes and yearn
ings of earth would be fulfilled, and in which the Master,
who was about to die, would celebrate His reunion with
His followers in a world where death and sorrow have
ceased to be. We cannot think that less than this was
in the mind of Jesus when He said, 'This is My body
— this is My covenant blood — I will drink no more of
the fruit of the vine till I drink it new with you in the
Kingdom of God.' But no Christian faith ever put
Jesus in a more central and commanding place than
this. It is not a place which can either be taken or
shared by another ; it is all His own. This unique
and extraordinary place is not only given to Him, but
taken by Him. It is not taken only when it is thrust
upon Him ; it is assumed in the words He here speaks,
and in the symbolic acts which accompany them, before
any one has seen what they involve. The experience
of the Church for two thousand years justifies the self-
assertion, or rather we should say the self-revelation,
of Jesus in the Supper, but it is not the Church's ex
perience which is reflected in the narrative. The same
wonderful Person whose incommensurable greatness has
already flashed upon us in this scene or that of the
gospel history here rises as it were to His full stature
before our eyes, and shows us the ultimate meaning of
His Presence and His work in the world. The revela-

366 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
tion is one that justifies all that Christians have ever
felt or said of their debt to Jesus, and it is one of the
services the Supper does to the Church, that it recalls
Christians periodically to the things which are funda
mental in their faith — the atoning death of Jesus, fellow
ship with God through Him, the assurance of immortality.
We do not feel it presumptuous to conceive such thoughts
or to accept them as true ; they are in the mind of Christ
before they are in our minds, and we rest on them as
realities in Him.

The Final Confession (Mark 14 62).
The trial of Jesus presents many difficulties to the
historical student, but it is an excess of scepticism which
would question the one reference to be made to it here.
As J. Weiss has remarked,1 there were ways of knowing
what took place at the meeting of the Sanhedrin. Jesus
had at least one adherent there, Joseph of Arimathea ;
and it is simply inconceivable that His friends should
not, after His death, have made the most interested
inquiries. The grounds of His condemnation must have
been discussed in Jerusalem between His older followers
and His enemies, and the evangelists certainly believed
what they have put on record. That there are dis
crepancies in their accounts is indubitable, and that Luke
in particular does not at this point follow Mark as he
usually does in narrative, but represents an independent
tradition, is also, in the opinion ofthe writer, indubitable;
but the divergencies are for our purpose immaterial,
1 Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments, 197.

THE FINAL CONFESSION 367
According to Mark, the council had considerable diffi
culty in finding a ground on which to condemn Jesus.
' They sought witness against Him to put Him to death
and did not find it' (14 56). The witnesses lied, and
were not even coherent or consistent in their lies. The
most promising were some who asserted that they had
heard Jesus say, ' I will destroy this temple made with
hands, and after three days I will build another not
made with hands ' (14 68). The Temple, as the dwelling-
place of God, was sacred, and to violate it, as Well
hausen points out, was still, as in the days of Micah
and Jeremiah, a blasphemy against God punishable with
death. But it is quite needless to argue with him that
this was the blasphemy for which Jesus was condemned,
and that the reluctance of Christians of the early days to
admit that Jesus could have said anything disrespectful
to the Temple led them to misrepresent the truth, and to
introduce as the ground of condemnation another charge
— that of claiming to be the Christ — which does not
involve blasphemy at all. It is not clear what Jesus
said about the Temple. In Mark 13 2 He predicts its
destruction in the most explicit terms ; and as both
Matthew and Luke copy them, early Christians do
not seem to have been so embarrassed as Wellhausen
supposes. But whatever He had said, the representa
tion of His words by the witnesses was so wanting in
consistency that after all it was found impossible to
proceed upon it (14 69). The council wished to maintain
the appearance of legality, and after a vain attempt to
get Jesus to compromise Himself about the Temple, the
chief priest took another line. He brought up the

368 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
Messiahship of Jesus. This implies that, though Jesus
was not in the habit of publicly declaring Himself to be
the Messiah, the idea was somehow or other associated
with His name : the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and
the excitement and significant cries which accompanied
it, are evidence that this was so. We may assume that
the chief priest, when he said to Jesus, Art thou the
Christ, the Son of the Blessed ? had in view the formu
lation of a charge on which Jesus could be arraigned
before Pilate. The Christ, however qualified, means
the King ; and it was as King of the Jews, a rival to
Caesar, that Jesus was to be delated to the governor.
In this character, too, He actually was presented and
sentenced to die, as the inscription on the Cross proves.
But His answer to the priest's appeal — or as Matthew
puts it, to his adjuration — goes far beyond a bare assent,
' Jesus said, I am, and ye shall see the Son of Man
sitting on the right hand of power, and coming with the
clouds of heaven ' (14 62). It is as though at the supreme
moment of His life Jesus fully revealed the secret of
what He was. ' I am the Christ ' means ' I am the
promised King, He through whom God's purposes are
to be fulfilled and His sovereignty established ; I am the
Christ, as the future will gloriously declare.' It is
needless to argue that for the evangelist and his readers
the Speaker and the Son of Man were one and the same ;
and the independent tradition in Luke makes it clear
that this was so also for those who were immediately
addressed (Luke 22 6670). They perceived that Jesus
was making for Himself an astounding, and what they
considered, or affected to consider, a blasphemous claim,

THE FINAL CONFESSION 369
and it was on the ground of it that their condemnation
of Him rested. It is idle to say that there was nothing
blasphemous in claiming to be the Messiah, and that
such a claim could not explain the action of the council ;
the council was not scrupulous, and this particular
Messianic claim, made by this particular person, with
such threatening assurance, might well seem to them the
very kind of insolent impiety to which the name
blasphemy belonged. It led in fact directly to His
death. In this self-assertion or self-revelation of Jesus there
is in a sense nothing new. He has said substantially
the same thing before (Mark 91, Matt. 1628, Luke 9 27).
It expresses indeed the consciousness in which He lived
and died — the sense of Himself, and of His vocation
and destiny by which the gospels are filled from begin
ning to end. All that is exhibited in the 110th Psalm
(' Sit thou on My right hand') — all that is exhibited in
the seventh chapter of Daniel (' the Son of Man,'
' coming with the clouds of heaven ')— is to be fulfilled
in Him. The sovereignty of God, which means the
sovereignty of the human, as opposed to the brutal and
unjust, is in Him to have its consummation. The form
in which this is put has often proved disconcerting ;
Jesus, it is said, has not come with the clouds of heaven ;
and if He were under a delusion about this, can we trust
His consciousness of Himself at all? Reference has
been made above to the symbolical element in all such
language — Daniel 7, for example, is symbolical through
out ; but it is permissible here to refer to the fact that
both Matthew and Luke give the words of Jesus with a
2 A

370 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
certain qualification. Matthew (26 64) has : Henceforth
(air' dpn) ye shall see the Son of Man seated ; and
Luke (22 69), But from this time (0,7.0 rov vvv) shall the
Son of Man be seated. These qualifications become
important when we consider that Luke here represents a
tradition which is independent of Mark, so that he is not
modifying Mark's record, and that there is no probability
that he knew anything of Matthew. They suggest that
from a very early period, a period antecedent to all our
evangelists, the words of Jesus were current in the
Church in a form which requires a spiritual rather than
a transcendent interpretation. It is no remote future to
which Jesus appeals ; the fulfilment of His words begins
with the moment at which they are spoken. His
enemies think they have expelled Him from the world,
but from the very moment of their triumph His victory
sets in. He filled Jerusalem from His death onward as
He had never done in His life; it was impossible to
escape His Presence or His Power ; the Council had
more to do with Him, was made more sensible of His
predominance, found His challenge more inevitable, in
the early days of Acts than in the period of the gospel
history. Possibly it is in this line, which allows for the
symbolical character of the words, rather than through a
literal rendering of them, that the meaning of Jesus is to
be sought. In any case He identifies Himself, in the
last solemn utterance of His life, with the coming of the
Kingdom of God ; the coming of that kingdom means
His own exaltation and return in glory ; and however
we may picture it — may we not say reverently, However,
in the days of His flesh, He pictured it — the certainty of

THE FINAL CONFESSION 371
it is one to Him with His very being. In speaking
as He speaks here, he puts Himself in the place which
He holds throughout the New Testament ; that place
is given to Him only because He claims it as His
own.

CONCLUSION
We have now completed our examination of the two
questions with which we started. The first was : Has
Christianity existed from the beginning only in the form
of a faith which has Jesus as its object, and not at all in
the form of a faith which has had Jesus simply as its
living pattern ? and the second : Can Christianity, as
even the New Testament exhibits it, justify itself by
appeal to Christ? To both questions the answer must
be in the affirmative. The most careful scrutiny of the
New Testament discloses no trace of a Christianity in
which Jesus has any other place than that which is
assigned Him in the faith of the historical Church.
When the fullest allowance is made for the diversities
of intellectual and even of moral interest which prevail
in the different writers and the Christian societies which
they address, there is one thing in which they are
indistinguishable — the attitude of their souls to Christ.
They all set Him in the same incomparable place.
They all acknowledge to Him the same immeasurable
debt. He determines, as no other does or can, all their
relations to God and to each other. While His true
manhood is unquestionably assumed, He is set as
unquestionably on the side of reality which we call
Divine and which confronts man ; He embodies for
373

374 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
faith that Divine love and power which work out man's
salvation. It is the place thus assigned to Christ which
gives its religious unity to the New Testament, and
which has kept the Christian religion one all through its
history. And so with regard to the second question.
When we look back from the Christian religion as the
New Testament exhibits it, and as it is still exhibited
in the Christian Church, to the historical Jesus, we see
a Person, who is not only equal to the place which
Christian faith assigns Him, but who assumes that place
naturally and spontaneously as His own. Partly the
inevitable ascendency which He exercised over those
around Him, and the unspeakable obligations under
which He laid them in their life toward God, evoked
within them the sense of what was due to Jesus ; but
partly also Jesus revealed His consciousness of what He
was, of what He was doing, and of what He claimed
from men, in startling and unparalleled words. The
resurrection of Jesus, and His consciousness of Himself
as thus revealed, are at once the guarantee and justifica
tion of the historical Christian faith.
Before proceeding to what seem the inevitable infer
ences from this, it may be worth while to refer in passing
to two objections which are sure to present themselves
to some minds. On the one hand, there are those to
whom the questions raised are in their very nature
irksome ; it seems to them absurd that religion, the
higher life of the spirit, should be in any way entangled
in such investigations, or dependent on their results. It
must, they think, live upon immediate certainties of its
own, be the answers what they may to questions of the

FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 375
kind we have been considering. This mental temper is
widely diffused. It speaks, for example, in the broad
distinction which is sometimes drawn between Faith and
Knowledge. ' In Faith,' to quote Goethe as represent
ing this view, ' everything depends on the fact of
believing ; what we believe is quite secondary. Faith is
a profound sense of security, springing from confidence
in the All-powerful, Inscrutable Being. The strength
of this confidence is the main point. But what we think
of this Being depends on other faculties, or even on
other circumstances, and is altogether indifferent.' What
we are concerned with, however, is not faith indefinitely,
faith as a profound sense of security springing from
confidence in a Being of whom we know nothing, but
faith in a specifically Christian sense — that is, faith with
characteristics or qualities or virtues which are somehow
due to Christ. It is idle to say that this is independent
of what we know of Christ. It is Christ known who
makes it what it is : we have Christian faith only as we
believe in God through Him. The same criticism is
applicable to the famous aphorism of Lessing, to which
so many have appealed as a way of shaking off the
spiritual bondage (as they think it) of subjection to
history : ' accidental truths of history can never become
the proof of necessary truths of reason.' Christianity
does not mean the recognition of necessary truths of
reason, but an attitude of the soul to God, determined
by Christ; and history is not to the religious man a
chapter of accidents, but the stage on which a Divine
purpose is achieved which could not be more ineptly
described than by calling it accidental. Religion can no

376 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
more be simplified by making it independent of history
than respiration would be simplified by soaring beyond
the atmosphere. What we have always to do, after
making such distinctions as have been illustrated from
Goethe and Lessing, is to transcend them. Our vital
convictions, the faiths by which we live, are not formed
in vacuo; they are generated in us by what has happened.
If the past is eliminated from the present, the historical
from the eternal, it is hard to say what is left. The
historical realities which we have been considering — the
Personality, the Self-consciousness, the Resurrection, the
growing Ascendency of Jesus — are anything but ' con
tingent historical truths.' Whatever we mean when we
speak of Divine necessity may be predicated of all.
Although Christianity is a historical religion, its saving
truth is not only in the past ; it is here, in the living
Christ and in the experience of Christians. It has its
foundation laid in historical facts, no doubt ; but it has
at the same time its witness in itself, for the consciences
of sinful men, needing and seeking God. It is the
combination of the historical fact in the past with its
Divine meaning and relevance in the present, in which
the whole weight of the evidence lies ; and it is the
testimony of believers, speaking in the power of the
spirit, which is used by God to make the historical
eternal — that is, to make it living, present, and divinely
strong to save.
On the other hand, there are those who on critical
grounds, or what they believe to be such, will demur to
the answer we have given to the second of our two
questions. That answer, they will hold, ascribes to our

THE TRUTH OF THE GOSPELS 377
gospels a higher historical value than they possess. The
real way to look at these documents is that which recog
nises that they mark stages in a process which began
with Jesus, but which terminates in the prologue to the
fourth gospel, or even in the Nicene Creed. This pro
cess, which we may call that of idealising Jesus, or repre
senting Him in history as acting in the role which He
fills in Christian faith, was not indeed completed when
our gospels were written, but it had gone a considerable
way. It had gone so far, in fact, that the historical
Jesus is irrecoverably lost to us ; we do not know what
He was, we only know how those who believed in Him
represented Him to their own minds. The plausibility of
such statements depends entirely upon their generality,
and as soon as we come to close quarters with Him it
disappears. In investigating our second question we
did not appeal to the gospels without criticism, but to
the two oldest documentary sources which criticism has
recognised — Mark, and a non-Marcan source used by
Matthew and Luke. These represent what was believed
and taught of Jesus in the Christian Church during the
sixties of the first century. This is a period at which
many who knew Jesus must have survived, and there
are sound reasons for believing that the two documents
named were connected with two members of the apos
tolic circle — Mark being indirectly dependent on Peter,
while the non-Marcan document was probably the work
of Matthew. Even if we admit the process of idealising
to be real, these are fair guarantees for a close connexion
with history. But the process is often exaggerated and
misconceived. If we start behind all the evidence, with

378 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
an assumed Jesus who is exactly what other men are, of
course there is an immense amount of idealising to be
allowed for ; everything, in short, is idealising — that is,
everything is imaginary and fictitious — by which Jesus is
brought into a positive connexion with the Christian
religion. Obviously this is an unsound mode of arguing.
Jesus had unquestionably a positive connexion with the
Christian religion. It owes its being to an impulse com
municated by Him. But that impulse cannot have been
alien to the phenomena which it generated ; there must
have been that in Jesus which was in some kind of
keeping with the idealisation of Him in the Church's
faith. To admit this, however, is to admit that the
Jesus exactly like ourselves who is assumed to stand
behind the gospel history, is an illegitimate assumption ;
if He had been no more than we are, the wonder of the
Christian religion and of the New Testament would
never have come to be. The necessity of maintaining
continuity between Jesus and the movement which
issued from Him, when taken in connexion with the
closeness of the witnesses to the facts, creates a pre
sumption in favour of the historical representation bf the
oldest sources which goes far to balance the idealising
process referred to. Further, as we have seen already,
there is a self-guaranteeing power in the inner life of
Jesus which assures us we are in contact with reality in
the gospels ; the spiritual truth is so unquestionable that
it carries the conviction of historical truth along with it.
The mind of Christ, as we have come in contact with it
in those two ancient authorities, does not strike us at all
as a product of idealising or theologising tendencies in

THE TRUTH OF THE GOSPELS 379
the mind of the Church. We know what theology is, we
know what poetry is, and the most significant utterances
in which Jesus reveals Himself have not the character
of either the one or the other. They are vital, indi
vidual, unparalleled. The more closely they are studied,
the more apparent it becomes that they must be taken at
their full value if we are to see what Jesus was and what
place He claimed in the relations of God and man. It
is well worth observing, too, in a matter in which some
minds are sure to be impressed by authorities, that the
two most recent and searching studies of this subject by
independent scholars have been entirely favourable to
the historical character of the gospel picture, and entirely
unfavourable to the idea that Jesus has been idealised, or
theologised, by the evangelists, past recognition. Weiss
asserts that the matter contained in Q — and Q as he
has reconstructed it contains a vastly greater proportion
of the gospel story than we have appealed to — shows no
trace whatever of being influenced by later Christo
logical ideas ; and in this he is substantially supported
by Harnack. Harnack, indeed, thinks that Q repre
sents Jesus as dominated by the sense of His Messiah-
ship, from beginning to end of the gospel story, more
strictly than the facts warrant ; but the facts, as he him
self expiscates them from Q's report of the words of
Jesus, include these : that He who even in His present
existence is more than a prophet and greater than John,
He who is the Son, will be the future King and Judge.
If this was Jesus' consciousness of Himself, as we come
into contact with it in history, there is clearly room to
look for wonderful things without discounting them as

380 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
idealising.1 It is indeed not the formal testimonies, in
which high titles are assigned to Him, which impress us
most with the sense of what Jesus is. In one place or
another these may be due to misapprehension, even
though it is admitted that He sometimes used them. It
is the informal utterance of His greatness which is so
arresting and inevitable, and no scepticism can shake
our conviction that never man spake as this man — about
Himself. He stands alone, not only in the faith of His
followers, but in His own apprehension of what He is to
God and man.
It is hardly possible to appreciate these conclusions
unless we try to show their bearing on the religious
conditions of the present. No one will deny that there
is much confusion both within the Church and outside
of it as to what the Christian religion essentially is.
Nor is it only evangelic Churches that labour under
such perplexities. As recent events have shown, even
the Church of Rome, with all the emphasis it lays
upon the principles of tradition and authority, is as
sorely embarrassed as to the proper way of dealing
with its modernist members, as any of the Protestant
communions. Such an inquiry as we have just con
cluded ought to provide both the Churches and seeking
1 B. Weiss, Die Quellen der synoptischen Ueber lief erung&g. Ein Einfluss
spaterer christologischer Vorstellungen auf die Stoffe in Q ist in keiner
Weise nachzuweisen. So also, in speaking of what he regards as an inde
pendent source — which he calls L — and which runs through Luke from
beginning to end, he says : Auch die Lukasquelle geht nirgends ueber die
urchristliche Auffassung von der Person Jesu hinaus ... 80 ; and of Luke as
a whole : Die Hauptsache ist, dass von einer irgendwie hoher entwickelten
Christologie im Lukasevangelium nicht die Rede sein kann. Cf. Harnack,
Spruche u. Reden Jesu, 169.

THE RIGHT OF EVANGELICALISM 381
souls outside the Churches with principles to steady
themselves by in the present distress.
On the one hand, the conclusions which we have
reached are entirely reassuring to those who stand in
the line of historical Christianity. Speaking of it, not
as a theological system, but as a religious life, Chris
tianity has always given to Jesus a supreme place in its
faith. Christians have lived a life, or have aimed at
least to live a life, in which all their relations both to
God and man were determined by Christ. They owed
to Him all that made their religion what it was : the
knowledge of the Father, the forgiveness of their sins,
the new life in the spirit, the assurance of immortality.
Their faith in God was in the proper sense Christian
faith, because it was in the first instance faith in Him.
Now this is the conception of Christianity which our
investigation of the New Testament has also discovered,
and it is a conception which is vindicated when we look
to Christ Himself as the oldest records disclose Him.
Those who live in the faith which has just been de
scribed live in the line of New Testament Christianity,
and ofthe mind of Christ about His own place in the
relations of men and God. They have the same religion
as those whose spiritual life is reflected in the New
Testament. Their attitude to Christ is the same, and
so is their attitude to God through Christ. This is the
point at which evangelical Christianity is right, and at
which all its protests against a broad churchism which
would give Christ another or a lower place than He has
in the New Testament faith are justified. It is the
point at which evangelical Christianity even in the

382 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
Church of Rome is justified in refusing to negotiate with
a modernism which by assuming that Christ cannot
possibly have been anything but what we are makes the
ascription to Him of His supreme place in faith impos
sible. There can be no Christianity at all, in the only
sense in which Christianity can be seen in the New
Testament, in the only sense in which it is a religion
answering to the mind of Christ about His own place
and calling, unless Christ is established in the place
which the faith of the Church has always given Him.
He must have His place because He claims it and
because it is His due.
But there is more than this to say. What Christ
claims and what is His due is a place in the faith of men
— in other words, it is an attitude of the soul to Himself
as He is presented to us in the gospel. We are bound
to Him, in that wonderful significance which He has
for the life of the soul, that unique and incommunicable
power which He has to determine all our relations to
God and man. To be true Christians, we are thus
bound to Him ; but we are not bound to anything else.
But for what He is and for what He has done, we could
not be Christians at all : but for our recognition of what
He is, but for our acceptance of what He has done, and
our sense of infinite obligation to Him as we realise the
cost at which He has done it, we could not tell what
Christianity means. But we are not bound to any man's
or to any church's rendering of what He is or has done.
We are not bound to any Christology, or to any doctrine
of the work of Christ. No intellectual construction of
what Christ's presence and work in the world mean is

THE RIGHT OF BROAD CHURCHISM 383
to be imposed beforehand as a law upon faith, or a
condition of membership in the Church. It is faith
which makes a Christian ; and when the Christian
attitude of the soul to Christ is found, it must be free to
raise its own problems and to work out its own solutions.
This is the point at which ' broad ' churchism is in the
right against an evangelical Christianity which has not
learned to distinguish between its faith — in which it is
unassailable — and inherited forms of doctrine which
have been unreflectingly identified with it. Natural as
such identification may be, and painful as it may be to
separate in thought things which have coalesced in
strong and sacred feelings, there is nothing more certain
than that the distinction must be recognised if evan
gelical Christians are to maintain their intellectual
integrity, and preach the gospel in a world which is
intellectually free. We are bound to Christ, and would \
see all men so bound ; but we must leave it to Christ to
establish His ascendency over men in His own way —
by the power of what He is and of what He has done —
and not seek to secure it beforehand by the imposition
of chains of our forging.
It is one of the most urgent needs of the Church at
the present moment to have both these truths recognised
in their full extent. There can be no Christianity to
maintain if the evangelical truth is not asserted that
Christ must have in the faith of men no less or lower
place than He has had from the beginning, or than He
Himself, as we have seen, deliberately assumed; but
there can be no hope of appealing to the world in which
we live to give Christ such a place in its faith if we

384 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
identify doing so with the acceptance beforehand of the
inherited theology or Christology of the Church. This
is not said with any indifference to theology or Chris
tology, with any feeling that Christ and His place in
the world, and especially in the relations of God and
man, are not worth thinking about. On the contrary,
there is nothing which is so much worth thinking about,
nor so certain to stimulate thought if only thought is left
free. Nor is it said on the other hand with any indiffer
ence to the place of Christ : that is assumed to be
indisputable from the outset. The problem is to find a
way of securing the two things : unreserved recognition
of the place which Christ has always held in evangelical
faith, and entire intellectual freedom in thinking out
what this implies. There is no necessary inconsistency
in the combination ; it has been realised in every
original Christian thinker, and the true teachers of the
Church are one prolonged illustration of it. Not only
great theologians, but great evangelists like Zinzendorf
and Wesley have explicitly recognised it. To refer to
the former. He was, says his biographer, indifferent to
many things to which the theologians of his time
attached supreme importance ; for he believed that all
who love the Saviour meet in a spiritual unity raised
infinitely above the barriers erected between the different
Churches by differences of rite and tradition ; and even
by their errors. ' Although,' he wrote, ' I am and mean
to remain a member of the evangelical (i.e. the Lutheran)
Church, nevertheless I do not bind Christ and His truth
to any sect ; whoever believes that he is saved by the
grace of the Lord Jesus by living faith, that is to say,

ZINZENDORF AND WESLEY 385
whoever seeks and finds in Christ wisdom, righteousness,
sanctification and redemption, is my brother ; and for
what remains, I regard it as an unprofitable task, or as
rather injurious than profitable, to examine what his
opinions are, or what his exegesis. In this sense,' he
goes on, ' I admit that it makes no difference to me that
a man is heterodox — but in this sense only.' * Similar
passages might be multiplied from Wesley. In his
Journal, under date May 18, 1788, he says: 'I sub
joined (to his sermon on "Now abideth faith, hope,
love ; these three ") a short account of Methodism, par
ticularly insisting on the circumstances, — There is no
other religious society under heaven which requires
nothing of men in order to their admission into it but a
desire to save their souls. Look all around you, you
cannot be admitted into the Church (i.e. the Church of
England), or society of the Presbyterians, Anabaptists,
Quakers, or any others, unless you hold the same
opinions with them, and adhere to the same mode of
worship. The Methodists alone do not insist on your
holding this or that opinion ; but they think and let
think.' No one will suspect Wesley of indifference to
the place which Christ must have in Christian faith, but
he was as clear as Zinzendorf that this place was one
thing, and that the theological explanations of it or
deductions from it were another. It is this distinction
between soundness in faith — a genuinely Christian
attitude of the soul to Christ, in virtue of which Christ
determines the spiritual life throughout — and soundness
1 F. Bovet, Le Comte de Zinzendorf, 146. The passage quoted is from a
letter of Zinzendorf, dated June 20, 1729.
2 B

386 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
in doctrine — the acceptance of some established intel
lectual construction of faith, on which emphasis needs
to be laid. Soundness in faith is that on which Chris
tianity and the Church depend for their very being ; but
the construction of Christian doctrine is one of the tasks
at which Christian intelligence must freely labour, re
specting, no doubt, but never bound by, the efforts or
attainments of the past.
This, it may be said, is generally admitted, and in
one sense this is true. It is admitted by individuals.
The vast majority of the members of the evangelical
churches occupy practically the position described.
They are loyal to Christ : their attitude to Him is
essentially the New Testament attitude ; they acknow
ledge that in their spiritual life it is His to determine
everything, and that they are infinitely and for ever His
debtors. But to a large extent, and to an extent which
increases as the mind realises its independence in
other regions, and cherishes ideals of what science and
freedom mean, they have lost interest in the traditional
theology. It is not that they actively disapprove of it or
dissent from it, but they do not think of it. It is not
their own, and they have a dim or a clear conviction
that anything of this kind, if it is to have interest or
value for them, must be their own. It must be their
own faith which inspires it, the action of their own
minds which is embodied in it. It cannot be simply
lifted, as an inheritance, or submitted to, as a law ; it
must be the free and spontaneous product of an intelli
gence energised by faith in Christ. Individual Christians
understand this, and that is why they sometimes seem

FAITH AND DOCTRINE 387
so indifferent to doctrine. Preachers understand it, and
try to present to their hearers not doctrines about
Christ, but Christ Himself — not doctrines about Christ,
for doctrine always challenges scepticism, and scepticism
the more searching in proportion as its claim to authority
is high ; but Christ Himself, the sight of whom is the
supreme appeal and motive to faith. But though indi
vidual Christians, and not only those who listen to the
gospel but those who preach it, are conscious of this
distinction and accept its consequences, the Churches
can hardly be said to have done so. They are Christian
organisations, yet they seem to be based on doctrinal
statements which most of their members have realised
are not the actual or the proper basis of Christian life ;
and they not only find it difficult to conceive any other
basis, but seem to suspect those who speak of another
of striking at the very heart of the faith. This want of
accord between the intellectual attitude of the Churches
acting collectively, and that of their individual members,
is the cause not only of much discomfort and misunder
standing within, but of much scandal and reproach
without. It seriously discredits the Church in the eyes
of the world to which it wishes to appeal, and it is
urgent to ask whether there is any remedy for it.
The responsibilities of a society, it must be frankly
admitted, are other than those of its individual members.
It is inevitably more conservative than they ; it has to
guard in some sense what the labours of the past have
won, and not allow the historical inheritance to be
repudiated or cast away by the juvenile petulance of
those who know neither what it means nor what it has

388 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
cost. Christian thought has been at work for centuries
on the object and the experiences of Christian faith, and
it would be more than strange if all its toil had been in
vain. There is a just and proper jealousy of an attitude
to the past which virtually denies to it the presence and
the providence of God, and assumes that where it is
concerned we have everything to teach and nothing to
learn. This is not at all the attitude which we advocate
when we urge that the intelligence of the Church in the
present must be allowed free play. It is the denial of
this freedom which more than anything else makes men
unjust to the past. Nothing creates a stronger prejudice
against a creed, especially if it is of any high degree of
elaboration, than the necessity of signing it as a con
dition of membership or of ministry in the Church. The
main fact about it in those circumstances — that which
weighs most upon the mind — is that it is imposed as a
law upon faith ; and the feelings which this infallibly
engenders are those of resentment and suspicion. It is
not paradoxical, but the simple truth, to say that the
influence of documents like the Westminster Confession,
for example, or even the Thirty-Nine Articles, in the
Churches which require their office-bearers to sign them,
would not only be more legitimate but indefinitely
greater if subscription were abolished. Men would
then apply themselves freely to these historical exposi
tions of Christianity with minds willing to be helped,
not in a suspicious temper, or in the attitude of self-
defence ; they would value them more highly and learn
far more from them ; they would not be tempted to
strain them into meaning what they were not intended

FAITH AND CHRISTIAN UNITY 389
to mean, so as to make subscription less of a burden to
conscience. To say this is not to accuse the mind of
childishness ; it is only to recognise facts which every
day's experience confirms.
In spite, however, of all their responsibilities and
obligations to the past — in spite of the duty incumbent
on them to conserve its intellectual as well as its moral
attainments — the pressure put upon the Churches, both
from without and from within, to recognise the claims
of intellectual liberty, is rapidly becoming irresistible.
Christian people, who are consciously at one in their
attitude to Christ and in their sense of obligation to
Him, see that they are kept in different communions,
and incapacitated from co-operation in work and wor
ship, because they have inherited different theological
traditions to which they are assumed to be bound.
Without entering into any discussion of what these
theological traditions — call them creeds, confessions,
testimonies, or whatever else — are worth, they feel in
their souls that they are not bound to them, and ought
not to be, with the same kind of bond which secures
their allegiance to Christ. For the sake of getting
nearer to those who share this allegiance, and co
operating with them in the service of the Lord who
holds their hearts, they contemplate with more than
equanimity the slackening or dissolution of the bonds
which attach them to the theology, or, if we prefer to
call it so, the Christian thought of the past. They will
think for themselves as they can or must, but the
primary necessity, if not the one thing needful, is the
Christian attitude of the soul to Christ, and union with

390 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
all who make that attitude their own. Internal pressure
of this kind is reinforced from without. In every
country in Christendom the nation has outgrown the
Church, or has to a large extent passed from beneath its
influence. Even of those who retain connexion with
it, frequenting its worship and formally supporting it
before the world, vast numbers are mentally in that
strained relation to it which has just been described. It
is not necessary to diagnose too narrowly the causes
which have led to the estrangement from the Church of
such masses of those who once found in it a spiritual
home, and still less to suppose that they all lie in the
region with which we are dealing ; but it is certain that
readjustments must be made here before those who
have been alienated can be won again. It is certain
also that before Christians can combine to face with
effect the problems presented by society to the spirit of
Christ they must overcome somehow the forces which
perpetuate division among themselves. The important
question is whether they can find the true principle of
union. If the conclusions which we have reached are
sound, it must be a principle which will secure the two
ends we have now before us — that is, which will bind
men to the Christian attitude to Christ, but which will
leave them, thus bound, free to assume and discharge
their intellectual and moral responsibilities with a con
science acknowledging no authority but that of the God
in whom they believe through Him.
It is very natural that the first steps toward the re
cognition of such a principle should be hesitating and
uncertain. Churches which have inherited complex and

SIMPLIFICATION OF CREEDS 391
elaborate creeds — creeds which, though they may be
called confessions of faith, are not really confessions of
faith, but more or less complete systems of theology —
are apt to think that it is in the complexity and elabora
tion of their confessions that the difficulty lies. Their
first thought is that what we need for union among
Christians is the reduction or simplification of our
elaborate creeds. Why, for example, it is asked, should
we cling to the Westminster Confession, a document
containing hundreds of sharply-defined propositions,
about many of which there is no prospect of Christians
ever agreeing ? Why should we not recognise that it is
hopeless to expect union on this basis, and go back to a
sublime and simple formula like the creed of Nicsea ?
Would not all Christians gather round that ? This has
not only been ventilated as a possibility, but has been
definitely proposed as the doctrinal basis of union be
tween the Presbyterians and Episcopalians of Australia.
Plausible as this may sound, it is plausible only to
those who have never appreciated the nature of the
difficulty which has to be dealt with. What we want as
a basis of union is not something simpler, of the same
kind as the creeds and confessions in our hands ; it is
something of a radically different kind. To simplify
merely by going back from the seventeenth century to
the fourth is certainly an easy matter, but what a con
temptuous censure it passes on the Christian thought of
the centuries between. When a man speaks of giving
up the Westminster Confession for the Nicene Creed,
one can only think that he has no true appreciation of
either. The Westminster Confession contains every-

392 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
thing that is in the Nicene Creed, but the writer has no
hesitation in saying that this is the least valuable part of
what it contains, and that which has least prospect of
permanence. The valuable parts of the Confession,
those which still appeal to the Christian conscience and
awaken a response in it, are the new parts — those
which represent the gains of the Reformation revival
and the insight into Christian truth acquired there ; they
are the parts which treat of the work of Christ and its
consequences — of justification, adoption, and sanctifica
tion ; of saving faith and repentance unto life ; of Chris
tian liberty, and liberty of conscience ; of Holy Scripture,
or the Word of God, as the supreme means of grace.
To simplify the creed by omitting everything which can
be verified in experience, and then to expect men to unite
in the purely metaphysical proposition — for whatever
religious interest it is supposed to guard, it is a purely
metaphysical proposition — that Christ is consubstantial
with the Father, is only to show that one has not
diagnosed the situation at all. Very few people can tell
what Athanasius and the Nicene bishops meant by this
term. No one knows whether all who use it now use it
in precisely the same sense ; or rather, it is as certain
as anything can be that they do not. Every one feels
that it is on something else than the understanding of
such metaphysical propositions that the life and union of
Christians depend : and it is this something else, and
not what any one regards as its metaphysical basis or
presupposition, which ought to find expression in the
common Christian confession of faith. It is their
attitude to Christ which Christians have to declare, and

FAITH AND CREED 393
Christ can only be described in their confession in the
character which justifies that attitude. He can only be
described in the simple language of religion. What for
theology or metaphysics is involved in this is a proper
subject for theological or metaphysical study ; but it
ought not to have a place, and if Christians are ever to
unite it will not have a place, in the confession of faith
in which they declare the attitude of their souls to Him.
But, it may be said, is it possible to separate in this
way the Christian attitude to Christ from definite beliefs
and convictions about Him ? Did not He Himself
raise the question of Christology when He said to His
disciples, ' Whom say ye that I am ? ' When we ask men
to believe in Him, must we not be able to tell them
things about Him which demand or justify the faith for
which we appeal ? When they ask who then the Person
is for whom so incomparable a place is claimed, must we
not be able to tell them in direct and express terms ?
And in particular, it may be said, how is the work of
Christian education to be carried on ? How are the
immature members of a Christian community to be
reared in Christian intelligence if there is not some
doctrinal system on the basis of which they can be
catechised ?
All these are fair questions, and no one Could be less
disposed than the writer to dispute their fairness. What
they rest upon, in the last resort, is the feeling that the
Christian attitude to Christ, and a certain type of con
victions about Christ, are not unrelated to each other.
There can be no such thing as a final schism in human
nature, no possibility of permanently opposing faith and

394 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
knowledge, or of permanently playing off the one against
the other. The Christian attitude to Christ, and the
Christian experiences into which men are initiated by it,
must, in proportion as they are truly apprehended in
the mind, lead to a body of Christian convictions, or a
system of Christian doctrine, in which believing men
will find themselves at one. This is not questioned in
the least. What is at issue is rather a question of order
than of antagonism : our concern is to see that we lay
at the foundation only what is fundamental, and that we
do not present to men as the indispensable presupposi
tion of faith what is one of faith's last and most difficult
achievements. When we preach, we must certainly be
able to tell men things about Christ which justify the
Christian attitude to Him. But these faith-producing
things are not dogmatic definitions of His person : they
are not doctrinal propositions, such as those of the
Nicene Creed ; nor are they less formal expressions of
essentially the same character. They are such things as
we have been in contact with all through our study of
the gospels : they are the life, the mind, the death, the
resurrection of Jesus. If the exhibition of these does
not evoke the Christian attitude of the soul to Him, the
soundest metaphysical doctrine of His person is worth
less. But if the Christian attitude is evoked by the
revelation of Jesus in the gospel, we have found that in
which all Christians can unite, and the theological
doctrine of His person may be trusted sooner or later to
come to its rights. But it must not be taken out of its
proper place and order, nor can we expect it to yield us
what can only be found in the sphere of faith. The

FAITH AND CHRISTOLOGY 395
questions raised by the Christian attitude to Jesus, and
the Christian's sense of debt to Him, may have to be
asked over and over, taking always a wider range,
penetrating always more deeply into the wonder of
what He is and does ; and with the widening and
deepening of the questions the answers too must vary
in form. That is why we cannot look to these answers,
however profound or true they may be, to furnish the
basis of union among Christians. They are always
subject to revision, not because He changes — He is the
same yesterday and to-day and for ever — but because
men change in their apprehension of Him. And in such
changes, even though they may sometimes be changes
to an inferior or less adequate conception of Him, we
must bear with each other so long as the attitude of
Christian faith in Him is maintained.
If we look to the Church of the New Testament age,
we shall find that this is essentially the situation in
which it confronts us. As has been demonstrated above,
there is one religion exhibited in every part of the New
Testament; from beginning to end, in every writer
represented in it, there is the same attitude of the soul
to Christ. In other words, there is one faith. But
though there is one faith, there is not one Christology.
All the New Testament writers, it may no doubt be
said, have a Christology of some kind. Faith always
acts as an intellectual stimulus, and it never did so more
irresistibly than in the first generation. When Christ
constrained men to assume what we have called the
Christian attitude to Himself, He constrained them at
the same time to ask who the Person was to whom such

396 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
an attitude was due. He constrained them to think
what His relations must be to God and man, and even
to the universe at large, to justify the attitude He
assumed to them. But though these questions stirred
more or less powerfully, as they must always do, the
intelligence of Christians, it is impossible for any scien
tific student of the New Testament to say that all the
early believers, or even all who were regarded in the
Church as divinely empowered witnesses to the gospel,
answered them in precisely the same way. To take
only one example, but that the most conspicuous :
Paul's attitude to Christ is exactly that of other New
Testament writers, but his Christology is his own. It
is not identical with that of Peter or John, or so far as
we can discover it, with that of Matthew or Luke ; just
as little is it identical with that ofthe Nicene Creed. It
does not follow from this that it is of no value, or of no
authority. The great thoughts about Christ inspired
by Christian faith in Him, as the New Testament illus
trates it — thoughts about His relations to God, to men,
and to the universe — always tend to reproduce them
selves in minds which share that faith ; and it must be
a singularly powerful or solitary mind which in its
Christian thoughts about Christ could own no debt to
Paul. This is the guarantee we have, in a world in
which the mind is once for all free, that the truth in
Paul's thoughts about Christ will never be lost. But
though it does not follow from what has been said that
Paul's Christology is of no value, or has no authority
for us, it does follow that neither his nor any other
Christology can be the basis of union among Christians

FAITH AND CHRISTOLOGY 397
of which the Churches are in quest. It was not
Christology in any sense in which Christians were one
from the beginning, and the Formula Concordiae which
the perplexed conscience of multitudes in all the
Churches is at present seeking, cannot be a theological
document. It must, we repeat, be a declaration which
will bind men to Christ as believers have been bound
from the beginning, but which will also leave them in
possession of the birthright of New Testament Chris
tians — the right and the power of applying their own
minds, with conscientious freedom, to search out the
truth of what Jesus is and does, and to read all things
in the light of it — the world and God, nature and his
tory, the present and the future of man.
Reserving, then, this right and power, it only remains
to ask whether we can put the religious truth about
Jesus, the significance which He has for the faith of
Christians, into words which all who adopt the Christian
attitude to Him would recognise as the expression of
their faith. Such words would not be doctrinal or
dogmatic, in the sense of the Nicene Creed, or of the
Augsburg or the Westminster Confession ; they would
not be an utterance the same in kind, but simpler in
form, and less ambitious in aim ; they would be the
immediate utterance of the Christian sense of what
faith has in Christ, not the speculative or reflective
statement — as these other documents all are in varying
degrees — of metaphysical truths concerning Christ which
must be admitted if we would justify our faith. The
truth they embody would not be itself a creed, in the
sense of a scientific or theologically defined statement ;

398 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
it would not be the substitute for a creed ; it would be
the inspiration and the standard of all Christian think
ing. Looking back to the investigations which we have
just completed, and recalling the significance which
Jesus had in His own mind, and has always had in the
minds of Christians, it is perhaps not too bold to suggest
that the symbol_ of the Church's unity might be ex
pressed thus : I believe in God through Jesus Christ
His only Son^ourJ^ord and Saviour.
A few words will explain everything in this which
requires explanation. The ultimate object of faith is
always God, but Christian faith in God is faith which is
determined by Christ, and which would not in any
respect be what it is but for Him. Hence in the most
elementary Christian confession, faith in God must be
so described as to bring out this specific character. It
must be defined as faith in God through Christ. But
how is the Person to be described who is the mediator
of this characteristically Christian faith ? If we keep
vividly before us that estimate of Him which pervades
the New Testament writings, and which, as we have
seen, can be vindicated by appeal to His own conscious
ness of Himself, we shall probably agree that this
description must cover or include two things : first,
that the Person concerned is to God what no other can

_be i. and second, that He is also what no other can be
to man. The first of these is secured when He is
described as the_only Son of God. We need not
hesitate to admit that when we speak of God the only
terms we can use are symbolic or analogical. If the
analogies suggested are real, the terms are true and

A UNITING CONFESSION 399
valuable. ' Son of God ' in ancient times was used with
great latitude of meaning, both by Jews and Gentiles ;
but what it conveys here is that Jesus' consciousness of
God was truly filial. God was to Him Father, and He
was to God Son. When we describe Him as the only
Son of God, what is signified is that in that filial
consciousness He stands alone in the world. He is not,
as He conceives Himself and as Christian faith recog
nises Him, a son of God, but the Son. He is the Son
in the same unqualified sense in which God is the
Father, and when believers are initiated into the filial
relation to God, it is in and through Him. No meta
physical solution or explanation is offered of the fact
that Christ is to God what no other is or can be ; the
fact is simply declared — and if the Christianity of the
New Testament and of the consciousness of Jesus is to
survive it must be declared — when he is called God's
only Son. The term only is the simplest, but an
entirely adequate, translation of the unicus and fiovo-
yevris of the Latin and Greek creeds. The second
requisite in the description of Christ — that He shall be
presented as being to men what no other is or can be —
is secured when He is further designated our Lord and
Saviour. The first term expresses the unique allegiance
and loyalty which all Christians acknowledge to Christ ;
the second, the unique debt which they owe Him.
Taking both together, and in combination with the
description of Jesus as the only Son of God, it is not
too much to say that they safeguard everything which is
vital to New Testament Christianity, that they include
everything which ought to have a place in a fundamental

400 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
confession of faith, and that they are the only basis of
union broad enough and solid enough for all Christians
to meet upon.
The objections which will immediately arise here in
many minds are mainly due to prepossessions or assump
tions which reflection will lead us to discount. It may
be worth while to refer to some of the chief.
It will certainly be urged, to begin with, that no
Christian confession of faith can omit mention of the
Holy Spirit. Believers have been baptized from the
earliest days in the name of the Father, the Son, and
the Holy Spirit. Especially, it may be said, if the
union of Christians is in view, must we remember that
it is dependent upon the Spirit ; there is one Body only
because there is one Spirit ; and it is the unity of the
Spirit which the New Testament exhorts us to main
tain. The facts alleged here are not disputed, and
nothing can be further from the writer's mind than to
minimise their importance. Once again it is a ques
tion not of antagonism, but of order. It is surely much
in favour of the type of confession advocated above that
the New Testament nowhere speaks of faith in the
Holy Spirit. The apostles preach Christ, and call on
men to believe on Him ; those who respond to the call
confess Christ in the character in which He is preached,
the only Son of God, the Lord and Saviour; they
believe in Him, and in God through Him ; but familiar
as it is to us through the accepted creeds of the Church,
such an expression as ' I believe in the Holy Ghost ' is
entirely foreign to the New Testament. What the
apostles asked was not, Do you believe in the Holy

THE HOLY SPIRIT 401
Spirit ? but, Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you
believed — believed, that is, in Jesus? (Acts 19 2). It
is better, in thinking of what is essential to a Christian
confession, to keep to New Testament lines. The
Spirit will have its proper place in the interpretation of
Christian experience ; but to introduce the bare term
into the primary confession, and to present the Spirit as
an object of faith co-ordinate with Christ, is both to
desert the New Testament, and to beguile ourselves
with an illusion of knowledge about the divine nature
which has no Christian value. As long as the experi
ences which come to men by believing in God through
Christ are what they have been, the explanation of them
from the divine side, as wrought by the Spirit of God,
will find its due ; but apart from this explanation, which
surely has no proper place in the creed, there is no call
to allude to the Spirit.
It is no unimportant confirmation of this view that
the historical creeds of Christendom all betrava certain
degree of embarrassment in their treatment of the
article on the Spirit which they nevertheless agree to
introduce. The most ancient, the ' Apostles' ' Creed,
has definite affirmations to make about the Father and
the Son, but when it comes to the Spirit it has not
a word to add. The Nicene Creed had originally the
same form at this point : it ended with the words, ' and
in the Holy Ghost.' The Constantinople text, which
dates from 381, ventures on expansion: '(I believe) in
the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life; who
proceedeth from the Father [and the Son]; who with
the Father and the Son together is worshipped and
2 c

402 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
glorified ; who spake by the Prophets.' The haphazard
and incongruous character of these additions needs no
comment. In reality, the proper expansion of the article
on the Spirit — that in which the meaning of ' the Spirit '
is discovered — is to be found in the latter clauses of the
Apostles' Creed : it is in the existence of the Church as
the fellowship of believers, in the consciousness of for
giveness and in the assurance of immortality, that the
Spirit is real, an object of knowledge and experience to
believers : apart from these experiences, we could not
even know there was any such thing. Even one who
has every disposition to make the most of traditional
Christian thinking, and who heartily agrees that no one
knows all that a Christian means by ' God ' unless he
includes in the term all that is meant by ' Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit,' may on grounds like these be con
vinced that every Christian interest is secured by the
simple confession suggested above. And what is also
of much importance, the one thing needful, the Christian
attitude to Christ, is not compromised by being set on
the same level with something which has not primarily
the same character at all.
Another objection, not quite unlike this in principle,
is that the confession proposed is too indefinite. Almost
any one, it will be said, might adopt it. It could be
made by an Arian as well as by an Athanasian. No
one who has assented in any degree to the argument of
this book will be puzzled by this objection. The con
fession which is here advocated as a sufficient basis for
the unity of the Church could not be made by any one ;
it could only be made by those who take up what the

ARIAN AND ATHANASIAN 403
most careful investigation has shown us to be the
Christian attitude to Christ, and it can be no part of our
intention to exclude any such from the Church. The
differences which we associate with the names Arian
and Athanasian are differences which emerge in another
region than that in which we confess our faith in Christ
— in an ulterior region ; and all such differences, where
the Christian attitude to Christ is maintained in the
sense which we have already made clear, must be dealt
with by other means than excommunication. Arianism
and Athanasianism both give answers to a question which
multitudes of genuine Christians never ask. Once it is
asked, the mind must be allowed to find the answer to
it freely. One may be convinced, as the writer is, that
the Arian answer is quite unreal, and as convinced that
the Athanasian answer explains nothing. It is not on
the answer at all that a man's Christianity depends, but
on something antecedent even to the question ; and it is
this antecedent something — the believing Christian atti
tude to Christ, and the sense of Christ's unique place as
determining all our relations to God — it is this, and not
the metaphysics of Christ's Person, which alone is
entitled to a place in the creed. If we wait for unity
in the Church till all Christians accept the same
Christology, we may as well give up the thought of
unity at once.
Many minds will regard it as a more serious objec
tion to the proposed confession that it ignores much
which it has been customary to identify with Christianity,
and which they would be inclined to affirm with
emphasis just because it is so often called in question.

404 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
Thus it makes no mention of the supernatural birth of
Christ : it has nothing corresponding to the clause in the
Apostles' Creed, ' conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of
the Virgin Mary.' The answer to this would be on the
same line as that to the objection that there is no
separate mention of the Spirit. It is not intended at all
to dispute the Virgin birth. Everything that we have
seen of Christ in the course of our study, every impres
sion that has been made on us of His solitary greatness
and of His unique relations to God and man, is
congruous with a unique presence and operation of God
at His entrance into the world, and adds to its credi
bility. No purely historical evidence will ever make
the supernatural birth of Christ credible except to a
mind which has already, on independent grounds, sur
rendered to the impression of the supernatural in His
Person. No one can deny that it is possible so to sur-
v render. All through the earliest records, as we have seen,
Christ reveals Himself to men, by word and deed and
influence, in that character and greatness which demand
and evoke faith ; He reveals Himself as the only Son of
God, the Lord and Saviour of men, and wins recogni
tion and devotion in that character ; but He does so
without making the faintest allusion anywhere to the
manner in which He came into the world. It is easy to
find reasons why He should not have done so, even
assuming that the gospel narratives of His birth are
true ; but that does not alter the fact that without
disclosing the secret of His origin at all Jesus sought
and found faith from men. It was the same after He
left the world. As has been pointed out above (p. 15),

THE RESURRECTION 405
the gospel rested on the apostolic testimony to Jesus,
and the testimony did not reach so far back as His birth.
It covered only the period within which Jesus was
manifested to Israel — ' beginning from the baptism o
John until the day when He was taken up ' (Acts i 22).
We cannot go wrong if we limit the fundamental confes
sion of faith to the character in which Jesus presented
Himself and was afterwards by His apostles presented
to the world, without introducing into it, as essential
conditions or presuppositions of faith, matters of fact
which originally had no such significance. The ques
tion which Jesus asks, and which is of vital importance,
is Who say ye that I am ? not, How think ye that I
came to be? No doubt the two questions must be
related somehow, but happily it is possible to answer the
first, by assuming the Christian attitude to Christ, while
the other remains in abeyance; and all that is urged
here is that this ought to be recognised in the confes
sion of the Church.
Other two objections, which would be serious if they
were well founded, must also be referred to. The first
is, that no mention is made of Christ's resurrection.
This is a misunderstanding. Christ's resurrection is
assumed when we confess our faith in Him as Lord.
We do not believe, in the sense of having religious faith,
except in a living person, and the term Lord expresses
our assurance that the Person in whom we believe not
only lives but reigns. This does not answer every
question raised by the resurrection; indeed there may
be many questions in this region which it is beyond our
power to answer. We may never be able to define the

406 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
relation of the crucified body of Jesus to the body of
His glory, to picture the process by which the one was
transformed into the other, to rationalise the relations of
the two modes of being. We may never even be able
to estimate with precision the meaning or the value of
the New Testament evidence at any given point. But
the soul which believes in the exaltation of Jesus as
Lord can safely be left to the free and reverent
exercise of intelligence on such points.
The other objection, which would be equally serious
if it were true, is that no mention is made of the
atonement. If by the atonement is meant the doctrine
that there is a peculiar connexion between the death of
Christ and the forgiveness of sins, then it may be noted
that in this respect the brief confession of faith which we
have in view is at one with the so-called cecumenical
creeds. There is no mention of the atonement either
in the Apostles' Creed or in that of Nicaea. But the
objection really rests on a misapprehension. When we
confess our faith in Christ as Saviour, it can only mean
that we owe to Him our reconciliation to God, the
forgiveness of sins, the power of a life like His own.
But these are the very things with which the doctrine of
atonement deals. It is an attempt to understand how
Christ achieves these blessed results for us — what He
does and suffers, and why it is necessary that He should
do and suffer so wonderfully to achieve such results. It
is an attempt to understand the cost of our salvation to
Christ, and to God in Christ. In so far as that is
summarily comprehended in His death, it is an attempt
to understand the death of Christ as something deter-

THE ATONEMENT 407
mined by and doing justice to all the relations of God
and man as these had been affected by sin. It is the
central doctrine of Christianity, the deepest, the most
vital, the most difficult ; but it is raised by the believer's
experience ; it is not, as a developed doctrine, the condi
tion of his faith. No doubt, when we think things
together, a certain experience of salvation will lead to a
certain construction of the work of Christ ; but every
thing in its own order. The Christian consciousness of
being indebted to Christ for salvation — of owing Him
what we can never repay — must find a place in every
confession of faith ; and it does so when we call Him
Saviour. The more we realise what it cost Him to
save, the stronger will be the appeal we can make for
faith ; great evangelists like Paul and Luther, Zinzen
dorf and Wesley, magnified the atonement as the very
heart of the gospel, and delivered it to sinners ' first of
all.' But every Christian interest is secured by a
confession which ascribes to Christ and to Christ alone
the salvation of men. What it cost Him to save can be
celebrated in doxologies, declared in preaching the
gospel, explored by devout Christian philosophy ; in the
Creed it is sufficient to describe Him as our Lord and
Saviour. In all this, it is needless to say, there is no idea of
rediscovering the gospel, or of disparaging theology.
But the state of mind around us, both within the Church
and without, seemed to make it necessary to point
out the bearing upon present conditions of the con
clusions to which our investigations led. The Chris
tian religion has never existed except as a religion

408 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
giving Christ a place which is all His own in its faith ;
it has never existed except as a religion in which Christ
was both to God and to man what no other could be,
and determined all their mutual relations. Moreover,
Christianity in this form is not discredited but vindi
cated when we test it by appeal to the consciousness of
Christ. It only gives Him the place which He assumes
as His own. It is the same religion, consistent with
itself and with the consciousness of Jesus, all through
the ages ; and what we need for that mutual understand
ing of Christians, which is itself so urgent in view of the
present distress, intellectual and spiritual as well as
material, is the clear perception of this truth, and of its
necessary consequences. We can all have, with a clear
intellectual conscience, the same religion — the religion
preached by the apostles, and answering to the self-
consciousness of Jesus — the religion in which Jesus
holds the place He has held from the beginning, the
only place He ever consented to hold — the religion in
which we recognise Him as the only Son of God, our
Lord and Saviour : we can all have the same religion —
provided that the intellectual questions it raises are left
for the free consideration of Christian intelligence. We
cannot lift the answers to these questions, ready made,
from any source ; not even from the New Testament.
The mind which asks them is the only one that can
answer them ; and if it cannot answer them for itself,
they remain for it unanswerable. This does not mean
that one mind cannot help another, but that every mind
is independent, and can only be helped by what recog
nises and confirms its independence. The thoughts of

CONCLUSION 409
the apostles, whose minds were first powerfully stimu
lated by their faith in Christ, will always be a help, and
the supreme help, to Christian thought ; in some sense
they will always be a standard for Christian thinking ;
but they help us by inspiring in us an intellectual
interest in the gospel answering to their own, not by
imposing their thoughts authoritatively upon us as a law
to our faith. There is no reason to fear that the frank
recognition of this — with its corollary, the abolition of
subscription to theological creeds, such as now prevails
in most churches — would imperil the gospel, or any
Christian interest. On the contrary, it would concen
trate interest where it ought to be concentrated. It
would keep the religious significance and claims of
Christianity in the forefront, and these, though in no
sense opposed to, are nevertheless distinct from, its
theological presuppositions or problems. A church, it
may be said, must always have some security that those
whom it puts in places of responsibility — those, especi
ally, whom it entrusts with the duty of teaching, or of
representing its convictions before the world — are really
in essentials at one with it. This is true enough, but
the essentials, as we have tried to show, are covered by
such a non-theological confession of faith as has just
been proposed. It is not the signing of a creed which
keeps men true to their religion, but something quite
different. The men who drew up the confessions which
we sign could not themselves sign them before they
were drawn up. The Church which set them to their
task might properly ask them to declare their loyalty to
the common faith ; but this done, they had no further

410 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL
responsibility to men. *• I, A. B.' — so each of the
Westminster divines gave his hand as he joined the
Assembly which drew up the Westminster Confession —
'do seriously promise and vow, in the presence of
Almighty God, that in this assembly whereof I am a
member, I will maintain nothing in point of doctrine but
what I believe to be most agreeable to the word of God ;
nor in point of discipline, but what may make most for
God's glory, and the peace and good of this Church.' A
solemn pledge of this kind, added to such an unreserved
recognition of Christ's place in the relations of God and
man as has been the characteristic of Christian faith
from the beginning, and as is covered by the form
suggested above, is surely all that any Church can
wisely ask from its ministers. To adopt this course
would do more than anything to meet the intellectual
crisis in the Churches. It would bring an immense
moral relief to many who are in the Church. It would
remove obstacles which keep many outside of it. It
would restore its self-respect and its honour in the eyes
of the world. It would provide the only reasonable
intellectual basis for union. And it would not imperil
the Christian relation to Christ. Faith lives on in the
world because Christ is perpetually revealed in the
character and greatness which originally commanded it.
We believe in Him as Son of God, as Lord and
Saviour, because it is so only that He manifests Himself
to us, and the consciousness that our faith raises
numberless questions which we may never be able to
answer does not shake its security or diminish its
power. It is not open or unanswered questions that

CONCLUSION 411
paralyse ; it is ambiguous or evasive answers, or
answers of which we can make no use, because we
cannot make them our own. And it is not the
acceptance of any theology or Christology, however
penetrating or profound, which keeps us Christian ; we
remain loyal to our Lord and Saviour only because He
has apprehended us, and His hand is strong.

INDEX OF NEW TESTAMENT PASSAGES

Matthew.

Matthew — continued.

PAGE

PAGE

I1

. 6l

ll20ff' . . 259,277,305

2 15> 18

. 62

ll25_f

265 ff.

313ff-

. I98

12 6

. 280
3uf-
,. I89
1227f-
• 279
317 . .
200 n.
12 28
• 3*9
41-11
208 ff.
12 29
. 310
423
• 57
12 so
278 ff.
5-7
240 ff.
1232
17
2, 279, 294
510
¦ 243
1235 f.
• 249
511
241, 246
1240
• 294
512
. 287
l241f.
. 280
5"
23°. 247. 34i
1246ff.
229
5 .iff.
• 244
l316f.
. 281
5 39 ff •
• 244
15 iff.
• 3l6
616ff.
• 3l6
16 18
. 217
7 21 ff •
249 ff.
lg24ff.
• 332
85ff-
• 253
16 25
• 237
810
• 357
16 27
227, 253
820
. 292
16 28
• 3^9
98
¦ 308
186
2;
5. 263, 335
9"
230, 247
18 10
• 263
935
• 37
1928
217, 338
10
215 ff.
1929
• 334
10"
. 221
20"
• 337
10 16
. 222
20 2S
• 247
1017f-
220, 223, 225
2123ff.
• 256
10 22
¦ 334
22 2
• 3i7
X03-... 225,22.
!, 246 f., 287, 341
23 34ff.
282 ff.
IO38
• 234, 332
24 9
• 225, 334
10 89
. 224, 236 f., 242
24 u
57
10 42
. 263
24 27, 37, 39, if
1
296
n2-19
256 ff, 316
24 36
215
ll5 .
. 3°5. 307
25 31-46
253
ll12f-
. 264
26 1S
57
11 M .
• 264
2631f-
147
H16f.
. 289
26 6i
370
413
414

JESUS AND THE GOSPEL

Matthew — continued.

Mark — continued.

PAGE

PAGE

287

148 f.

981 . .

. 329

289f-

¦ 154

9 33-5o

333 ff

28 10

. I48

9 85

217

2816«- . . i,

.8, 150, 155

939 . .

¦ 335

2818

. 267

940 . .

• 279

941
• 335
Mark
9« . .
• 255
1017
. 172
l1
57. 60
IO29
• 334
l2 . .
. 261
IO32
. 217
l2f' . .
. 60
IQ 32-45
335 ff
1*
200
10 33
• 329
19-11
198 ff.
IO45
59
112f.
208 ff.
111"1®
• 346
1 "
• 57,215
11 «
. 217
1 16 ff ¦
i77. 3°4
11 27
• 256
1 2d f£'
• i77
12 x-12
• 347
21-12
305 ff-
l235ff.
¦ 351
217 .
• 34i
132
349, 3^7
2 18 - 20
314 ff.
133ff'
. 178
228 .
• 307
139 . . .
224, 334
3 13 - 19
215 ff. 323
139"13
. 220
317 '.
. 217
1310
6*. 357
3 20 f .
229
13 13
225, 334 f-
321 .
327 . .
. 172
13 32 25, 172, 268, 25
5. 295. 353
210
149 .
61, 356
3 28 ff.
295.319
1410
. 217
3 81 ff • . '.
. 229
1417
. 217
410
. 217
1420
. 217
6 7-18
216, 219
I422-25
356 ff
611 . .
. 221
14 27 . .' 14
9. 1S1< 178
6 45 f.
• 321
1443
. 217
7 1 ff .
316, 322
1465
¦ 367
7 31 ff.
. 189
1458f.
• 3^7
g 22 ff .
. 189
i462 .' ; ;
366 ff.
827 .
• 59
1534
. 172
829 .
• 307
167 .
i5r. J78
8 29 ff .
. 178
16 8 . . .
• 149
831 ...
• 329
1612
146
8 35
837 \
8 38
827-10« . jSjS., j
• 237
1614-18
• 155
• 343
. 227
92 f., 320 ff.
Luke
91 ...
¦ 3<59
1 82 f.
67
9 10 ...
9 80 ff.
328, 33°
• 328
135f.
2 40 ff.
• 67
. 206
INDEX

415
Luke — continued.
Luke — continued.
PAGE
PAGE
310"1* . . . .189
20ia . . ¦ .256
321f-
i98ff.
21 12
224, 334
41-is
208 ff.
21 »
225, 234
4 16-80
. 68
22 24-27
338, 342
g 20-49
240 ff.
22 29
• 338
622
. 287
22 80
. 217
gS9 f.
¦ 244
22«6"70
• 368
648
249, 251
22 69
• 37°
71-IO
¦ 253
2419
• 245
7 18-35
256 ff.
24 86 ff.
• 155
7 31 ff.
. 289
24 89 ff.
144, 146
9lff- '.
. 220
2444f.
. 69
9s
. 221
2449
• 151
9 24
• 237
2452
¦ 7o
926
227
927
• 369
John
951
¦ 336
954
. 217
l1"12 .... 91
956
¦ 34i
l12
. 89
958
. 292
l_4ff.
. 88
10 1«.
. 220
I16
. 89
IQlSf.
259. 277
1U
89, 93
l021f.
265 f.
1 29
. 96
lQ23f.
. 281
3
• 97 f-
ll1
• 3J6
3 16
¦ 93
11 20
• 319
317
• 95
H21
. 210
427
¦ 95
1128
278 ff.
429
• 252
H 80
. 294
520
. 268
nsif.
. 280
521ff.
• 93
11 49-51
282 ff.
6
• 97 f-
128
2
27, 287, 296
6 15
321 «.
121°
• 294
6 53
100
1240
. 296
6 56
• 99
12 49f.
2.
17, 336. 34i
8 24
92, 228
1326f.
¦ 250..
g28
93. 228
13 28-30
• 253
8 58
. 228
l334f.
282 ff.
10 10
92, 247
14 26
. 232
10 80
• 93
14 27
• 332
1Q40
• 256
16 16
. 264
n-o
97, 100
1724,26, 30
. 296
12 16
• 347
1733
22/
, 236 f., 332
1233
. . 98
1884
¦ 337
12 *
95. 247
19 10
¦ 230, 341
13 19
• 93
19"
• 247. 338
14 9 f.
• 93
_
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INDEX

417

Galatians — continued.

Philemon
PAGE
PAGE
2-9..
.
235
Ver. 24
• 175
313
Ephesians
18, 41
y
Hebrews
45
l7
41
26f-
. 289
1 19 f.
117
5»
. 46
218
48
7 19, 22
• 45
3 20
117
8«
¦ 45
5 25 ff,
317
9 12, 14, 15
928
. 46
• 45
Philippians
10261224
. 46
• 45
2- if.
.
40
13 20
. 46
321
u
7. i43
James
Colossians
21
5°
1 and 2
34
27
• 5i
29
37
49
• 51
410
175
41257
• 253
• 5i
1
Thessalonians
5 13-16
51
l1
24, 31
i Peter
l6
*33
39
32
12,3
. 48
3 u- 12
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