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YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

THE LIBRARY OF THE
DIVINITY SCHOOL

NOTES FOR READINGS
V ON
THE LIFE OF JESUS

EDWARD C. MOORE

CAMBRIDGE
flrlnteH at the KitiereiJe flues
1906

COPYRIGHT 19C6 BY EDWARD C. MOORE

This course of short studies of the life of Christ has been prepared
by Professor Moore at the request of the Harvard University Christian
Association, and is published simultaneously with a'course on the teach
ing of Christ by Professor W. W. Fenn. These courses are intended to
fill the need for presentation of the fundamental facts and principles of
the life of Jesus in a simple but illurhinating way, and in a form suited
to the use of college students. Each course is designed to extend over
a period of eight weeks, with a study for each day.
The courses were planned primarily for use by men studying in
small groups in the dormitories, but copies for individual use may be
obtained at a nominal cost, at Phillips Brooks House.

INTRODUCTION
This series of brief suggestions concerning selected readings from
the Gospels had its origin in the request of students. These students
felt certain difficulties relating to the biography of Jesus and appre
ciated certain problems presented by the writings which constitute our
main sources for that biography. The author is aware that no such
hints may be expected to reach the need of all. He is aware that the
fact that these hints are addressed directly to those who feel the needs
alluded to, may make them less available for those who do not feel
these needs. He would reply that there seems to be an abundance of
material of excellent quality, in popular presentation and easily acces
sible, which is adapted to many other necessities. But so far as his
knowledge goes, there is not much material current which is adapted
to these particular requirements. He knows that in the University the
number of those who feel the needs which he has in mind is propor
tionately large. If these suggestions meet the requirement of any such
persons and enable them in some manner to see in their own way the
greatness of the life of Jesus, and to feel the charm and power of his
personality, the object which the writer had in mind will have been
achieved.

LITERATURE
References to but few books are offered, and these, books easily
within the students' reach. It is hoped that some at least of these ref
erences may be followed. But the main emphasis is upon the references
to the sources of the biography in the Gospels.
Bruce, Alexander. Article " Jesus," in the Encyclopedia Biblica,
1901. Sanday, W. Article " Jesus," in Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible,
1902. Farrar, F. W. Article "Jesus," in the Encyclopedia Britannica,
ninth edition, 1881.
Gilbert, G. H. Students' Life of Jesus, 1896.
Burton and Mathews. Constructive Studies in the Life of Christ,
1901. Rhees, Rush. The Life of Jesus of Nazareth, 1904.
Stevens and Burton. Harmony of the Gospels, 1894.
Stapeer. Palestine in the Time of Christ.
Mathews, Shailer. New Testament Times in Palestine.
Reville, Albert. Jesus de Nazareth, Paris, 1897.
Holtzmann, Oskar. Leben Jesu, Tubingen, 1901.
(Transl. — Bealby & Canney, London, 1904.)
Schmidt, Nathaniel. The Prophet of Nazareth, New York, 1905.

SUMMARY
Mark I : 1-8 : John i : 1-18.
A study of the life of Jesus is essential for one who aims even only
to know history. The significance of Christianity for the develop
ment of the human race is obvious. The investigation of the origin
of this religion and an acquaintance with the career of the man who
gave impulse to this faith, who indeed himself became the object of
religious faith, must be regarded as part of the task of one who desires
to understand the present age and its civilization. The recognition
that our sources are not adequate for the construction of a satisfactory
biography does not absolve us from the duty to know that which as
historians we can know and to distinguish this from much that remains
uncertain. But the Christian religion itself has a yet higher interest in the effort
to know what we may concerning the personality, the words and deeds
and fate of him from whom went out so mighty an influence upon the
minds and lives of the men of his own age and of all succeeding ages.
If we are convinced that in the long course of years his teaching has
been in any way misunderstood and his influence has failed of its true
or full effectiveness, then our recourse is in this recurrence to the earliest
impressions which are preserved concerning him. Our effort must be
to return so nearly as we may to Jesus himself that our own thoughts
and lives may come under the power of his life.

II
SOURCES
Luke i : 1-4; John 20 : 30-31; John 21 : 24-25.
Bruce. Sections 3 to 5 in article cited above.
Farrar. Section 2, in article cited.
Burton and Mathews. Chapter 1.
Rhees. Sections 20-35.
It was said above that we must return to the earliest impressions
concerning Jesus of Nazareth which are preserved for us. The testi
mony concerning Jesus was almost certainly current for some time in
the form of an oral tradition from those who had been eye witnesses,
or who stood close to the eye witnesses. Only later did that tradition
find deposit in written documents^ four of which are preserved to us
under the name of Gospels. Of these Gospels themselves the origin
is obscure, the dates are uncertain, the question of the relation of one
to another is perplexing. One of them, the Fourth Gospel, is in far
higher degree than the others an interpretation of the tradition con
cerning Jesus, a fusion of that tradition with elements from the intel
lectual life of the time. These four Gospels the church of a later age
isolated from all other documents relating to Jesus and came to hold
as of incomparable worth and sacredness. As a matter of fact, they
do contain almost all that is of primary importance that we know con
cerning Jesus.
These, then, are substantially our sources. They enshrine the earli
est image of Jesus which has been transmitted to us. They embody
the ideas and reflections of that early time concerning Jesus. They
constitute the materials for our own reflection. That they are of un
equal historical worth is certain. That men have gathered out of them
in varying degree religious stimulus is trite. But one of the main pur
poses of this course is that the students should come to know what the
sources contain.

10

Ill
HISTORICAL CONDITIONS , "!
Luke 3: 1-20.
Fairbairn. "Studies in the Life of Christ," Chapter 1.
See, also, Shailer Mathews' "New Testament Times in Pal
estine."
Burton and Mathews. Introduction and pp. 33-40.
Staffer. Palestine in the Time of Christ.
Rhees. Sections 1-19.
When Tacitus records the attempt of Nero to charge the Christians
with the burning of Rome, he says merely that this sect, infamous and
abominable, like many other things which flowed to Rome, had origi
nated with a Jew who had been put to death in the reign of Tiberius
under sentence of the Procurator Pontius Pilate. When Jesus was born
the Idumean Herod the Great was ruling in Jerusalem with some de
gree of independence. Upon Herod's death the Romans divided the
kingdom between his sons and asserted their own sovereignty in more
emphatic way. Jesus was a subject of Herod Antipas, the Tetrarch
of Galilee, at the time of his death. In Judea the military force was di
rectly under the command of the Procurator. The administration of
justice was largely in the hands of the Jews, either of the local counsels,
or of the great Sanhedrin at Jerusalem. The collection of customs was
farmed out to the Publicans. The priestly party, the Sadducees, largely
interested in form and ritual, were on fairly good terms with the Romans.
The men of real concern for religion were the Pharisees, scrupulous,
often bigoted, legalists. These developed among them the Scribes, in
terpreters of the vast mass of tradition which passed for the truth of
religion. The Zealots viewed with passionate resentment the subjection
of God's people to a foreign power and were ever ready for revolt. De
vout souls who could not go with any of these parties waited for the con
solation of Israel and interpreted the hope of the Messiah in their own
simple and spiritual way. Religious life centered ideally in the temple,
but practically in the synagogue. But the dogmatism and the hypocrisy
of some among the synagogue worthies was as proverbial as the greed
and ceremoniousness of the temple magnates. People of many races
were present in the land. Traffic with the outside world was extensive.
The poverty of the land was bitter. Demoralization was great. The
influence of Hellenism was in some places strong. But Aramaic was the
language which Jesus spoke.

IV
CHRONOLOGY
Matt, i : 18-25; Luke 3 : 23.
Farrar. Section 3, in article quoted above.
Burton and Mathews. P. 40 and p. 53.
Article Chronology, in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.
Rhees. Sections 45-57. Also Sections 106-112.
It is impossible to fix accurately the date of the birth of Jesus. It
must have been before the death of Herod the Great, that is before
March or April, B. C. 4, presumably, however, not more than two years
before this latter date. Again, the forty and six years mentioned as the
period of the building of the temple, if they are supposed to bring us to
the time when Jesus was about thirty years old, would seem also to
indicate that he was born about B. C. 4 or 5. The only census which
we certainly know of that was taken by Quirinius was in A. D. 6. Again,
all the data given in the third chapter of Luke, the year of the associa
tion of Tiberius with Augustus as Emperor, the procuratorship of
Pilate, etc., would seem to indicate that the ministry of John the
Baptist began about A. D. 25 or 26, and the ministry of Jesus not long
thereafter. The question of the length of the ministry of Jesus is one of the
oldest raised by the study of the Gospels. Three Gospels mention
but one passover and that at the end of Jesus' life. Many, therefore,
have held that the ministry of Jesus was of about one year's duration.
The Gospel according to John, on the other hand, distinctly mentions
three passovers. It connects with the first passover that cleansing of
the temple which the other Gospels associate with the last passover
placing the cleansing thus at the opening of the passion week. This
alone raises the question about the whole chronology. The interpreta
tive and idealizing character of the Fourth Gospel is admitted. But the
relation of this lengthening of the ministry, if it be such, to that ideal
izing is not clear. The material of the Fourth Gospel as it stands can
not be brought within the one-year scheme. In this uncertainty and
because one aim of this course is to familiarize the student with the
material offered by the sources, it seems arbitrary to seek some other
imagined distribution of this material, or to omit it altogether. But it
must be borne in mind that it is open to grave doubt whether the minis
try should not be limited to one year. If this is the case, all the more
wonderful is the impression which Jesus must have made.

BIRTH
Matt, i : 18-25; Luke 2 : 1-7; Luke 1 : 26-38; Matt. 1 : 18-23;
Luke 2 : 8-20.
Burton and Mathews. Chapter 2.
Rhees. Sections 58-71.
If we except the first two chapters of Matthew and of Luke, the
New Testament tells us nothing whatever of the years of Jesus' life
which preceded the ministry of John the Baptist in the wilderness.
Two Gospels begin with the beginning of Jesus' ministry. They testify
to what men had seen and heard in Jesus' manhood. The Epistles
interpret this testimony in its bearing on religious life and hope. Peter
and John and Paul convey to us their belief in Jesus as the Son of God
without once alluding to anything extraordinary in the manner of his
coming into the world.
Moreover, those Gospels whose early chapters do relate the birth
of Jesus themselves present difficulties. Those Gospels contain no
further reminiscences of these facts. Nothing prevented the mother
from doubting the mission of her son. The genealogies have little in
common the one with the other except that they both trace the line
of descent of Joseph. Common to the narratives of the birth is the sug
gestion of the miraculous conception, the assertion that the birth was
in Bethlehem, the city of prophecy, and that Nazareth was the sub
sequent residence. In further details they are quite different. Matthew
sheds a halo of glory over the birth of Jesus. Luke draws the picture
of humble circumstajices and obscurity. The idea of any miraculous
birth is in the last degree foreign to modern scientific thought. Such
an idea lay very close to the mind of the ancient world which lacked our
scientific conceptions. It is easily conceivable as the poetical interpre
tation of the moral and spiritual magnitude that Jesus was, the expres
sion in terms then current of the transcendent impression which the
character of Jesus made. It is intelligible as the interpretation in terms
of that which is outward of the mystery of the life of his great soul. It
is the moral and spiritual greatness of Jesus which even now sustains
with many the belief of this story of his birth, and not, as men often
think, the reverse.

13

VI
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH
f
Matt. 2 :i-23; Luke 2 : 21-39; 4*_5°; SI_52-
Burton and Mathews. Chapter 3.
Rhees. Sections 63-71.
The Gospel of Matthew makes Joseph with Mary and the infant
Jesus turn aside to Nazareth after the sojourn in Egypt. From Matthew
we should know nothing of any previous residence in Nazareth. From
Luke we should know nothing of the sojourn in Egypt or of the thought
of returning to Bethlehem. At all events, Nazareth is the home of
Jesus' childhood and youth. All through his manhood he was called the
Nazarene. The status of woman in Israel, the father's care of the edu
cation, and particularly of the religious education of his children, made
of the home life of a child situated as Jesus was a thing widely different
from that which often must have obtained in the ancient world. The
custom of the synagogue worship is more than once alluded to in Jesus'
later years. The synagogue represented the religious seriousness and
the holy hope of the Jew after the exile. In its simplicity, its democratic
trait, the inwardness of its worship, it was the very opposite of the temple
with its ceremonial. But to the temple also upon occasion the households
even from remote regions went up. This experience also Jesus shared.
The synagogues often had schools associated with them. But beyond
the mere rudiments of learning the main concern of these schools was
with the law of God. The greater schools, like those at Jerusalem which
were the pride of the Pharisees, Jesus never attended. A Jewish boy
almost invariably learned a trade. Jesus seems to have learned that of
his father, the trade of a carpenter. Much is conveyed to us in those
simple words — " He went down to Nazareth and was subject unto his
parents; " just as much has been implied in the attitude of the eager
boy hearing the doctors in the temple and asking them questions. The
development of Jesus in character in these years is no less real and no
less significant than his growth in body and in mind. In secret life with
God, in open love of men and nature, in study of history and prophecy,
in longing for the sway of God in himself and in the world, he advanced
in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man.

14

VII
JOHN THE BAPTIST
Mark i : 1-8; Matt. 3 : 1-12; Luke 3 : 1-18; John 1 : 19-28
Burton and Mathews. Chapter 4.
Shaeler Mathews. Pp. 159-169.
Rhees. Sections 72-84.
Concerning John the Baptist, also, Luke has a marvellous story of
his birth. Mark lets him burst upon us in the fulness of his manhood.
He is the voice of one crying in the wilderness, preaching the baptism
of repentance for the remission of sins. A dweller in the desert, an ascetic,
he was yet keenly appreciative of his people's needs and knew their sins.
A recluse in habit, he was far from being such in thought. Even his dress
suggested the old prophet of judgment upon the national infidelity.
" Now also the axe is laid unto the root of the tree and God will thoroughly
purge his floor and burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire." He
knows the right word to say to Publicans and soldiers and to some he
says — " Oh, generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from
the wrath to come ? " Yet this man is ever saying — " After me cometh
one who is preferred before me, the latchet of whose shoe I am not
worthy to unloose. He must increase, but I must decrease." And of that
other who appeared as his own rival and drew off his followers he said —
" Behold the Lamb of God." No leader of men was ever less guilty of
thought of himself. The issue of his life is obscure. He rebuked the king
for his brutal vices. He was long shut up in Machaerus. He lost heart
and sent to Jesus asking confirmation of his earlier certainty. He had
staked all upon Jesus as the Messiah, but Jesus' way of working puzzled
him. The king, in weak compliance with a vicious woman's urgency,
murdered him. Nothing finer fell from Jesus' lips than his testimony
to John the Baptist — "What went ye out into the wilderness to see, a
seeker for favor or for wealth? Among those that are born of women
there hath not arisen a greater than John the Baptist." And yet even a
child, who had learned in humility to love and to try by faith and love
to save others, was greater than he.

15

VIII
BAPTISM OF JESUS
Matt. 3 : 13-17; Mark 1 : 9-1 1; Luke 3 : 2i-23a.
Burton and Mathews. Chapter 5.
Rhees. Sections 85-90.
The place of Jesus' baptism is not certain. The tradition of both the
Greek and Latin churches locates it in the south near Jericho. More
probably it should be sought near the southern border of Galilee. John
had urgently commanded the people to repent and be baptized. He
had rebuked those whom he had suspected of insincerity. But when
Jesus comes, he feels himself in the presence of a greater nature; "I
have need to be baptized of thee." It is not certain that John had pre
viously known Jesus. It is clear that he had not up to this time recognized
him as the Messiah. There is much in the narrative which leads us to
think that Jesus himself from the time of this experience received a deep
ened sense of his own work and mission in the world. And yet both the
fact and method of that mission came into painful review in his own
soul in the experience of temptation which seems soon to have followed
this moment of consecration. Jesus' approach to John among the mul
titudes who were dedicating themselves to a life of righteousness was
most natural. His alliance with the movement which John represented
was most fitting. The movement was the revival of religion of his time.
It was on the lines of the activity of the great prophets of old. However
much Jesus in the method and spirit of his work may have transcended
this work of John, and even if he already had dim feeling that he would
transcend it, the natural starting point of his own life work was within
the movement of John and not outside of it or in opposition to it.

16

IX
TEMPTATION
Matt. 4:1-11; Mark 1 : 12-13; Luke 4 : 1-13.
Burton and Mathews. Chapter 5.
Rhees. Sections 91-96.
We interpreted the words in the narrative of Jesus' baptism as in
timating his own deepened conviction that he was called of God to
that which would surely seem to him the greatest work in his nation
or the world. It was most natural that he should seek in solitude a
chance to reckon with himself and to ponder the meaning and method
of that work. It was most natural that he should pass through a great
revulsion of feeling. Mark with his instinct for force says — " The
spirit driveth him into the wilderness." The others say — " Then was
he led up of the spirit into the wilderness." We can think of no testi
mony to what there transpired save that of Jesus himself. That which
must have been in the main an inward and spiritual experience is all
clothed, in the picturesque and symbolic narrative, in the garment of
outward fact. With marvelous insight the three temptations of which
we are told do typify three aspects of that trying of men's souls in the
moments of their decision, three phases of temptation, which, in the
inward and spiritual significance of them, must have come often to
Jesus and come now to every man. The first is the temptation to one
conscious of power to employ his life for ease, gain or luxury, for the
glorifying of the material side of existence. Then, secondly, to one who
knows that man does not live by bread alone, who dedicates himself
to ideal things, to truth and goodness, comes the subtle temptation to
take short cuts to popularity, to yield his principles for what seems a
greater gain in the end, a gain for others as well as himself, to do evil
that good may come. And last and subtlest of all the temptations, to one
who has conquered at those other points, comes the disposition to pre
sume upon God, to deem that he may set himself over the laws of nature
and of life, to absolve himself from the need of obedience to the order of
the world. Psychologically interesting is the fact that one evangelist
reverses the order of the last two temptations.

17

X
BEGINNING OF MINISTRY IN GALILEE AND
CALLING OF FIRST DISCIPLES
John i: 29-55; 2 : I_I2-
Burton and Mathews. Chapter 6.
Rhees. Sections 97-105.
Obviously the work of John the Baptist was assuming such pro
portions that the Jews sent to ask him who he was and what he had
to say of himself. Was he Elias, in the sense of the old expectation
that that prophet would come again as herald of the Messianic days?
John denied that. Jesus elsewhere said that the spirit of that prophecy
had been fulfilled in John. But, true to himself, John said that he was
not the expected one, and, in the circle of his own, at all events, he pointed
to Jesus. The question concerning Jesus must already have been occupy
ing men's minds. Two of John's maturest disciples now transferred
their allegiance to Jesus. "We have found the Messiah," they say,
"Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph." Interesting is the fact that
Nathaniel says, " Can any good come out of Nazareth ? " a little village
near his own in Galilee. It is difficult to believe in a great man who has
come up in an unpromising place and close beside ourselves. In a hu
mility and conceit which are alike unconscious, if we hold him close to
ourselves we deny his greatness. If we admit his greatness then we put
him off from ourselves, clothe him with wonders and import far fetched
explanations of his difference from ourselves. Deeply interesting, too,
is Jesus' word about Nathaniel. When Jesus spoke of him as an Israelite
indeed in whom there is no guile, Nathaniel wondered. He surely
would not have said that of himself. And yet he seems to have felt that
Jesus had recognized the thing which he wished to be, the true self within
himself. The marriage in Cana of Galilee shows Jesus among his friends
in natural social intercourse. His course is the farthest remove from
the conduct of an ascetic or rigorist of any sort. It was an attitude
toward life, even the social side of it and its pleasures, which we should
not have found in John. The turning of the water into wine involves a
question to which we come later on.

18

XI
THE KINGDOM OF GOD
Matt. Chapter 13.
Burton and Mathews. Pp. 54-55. Compare also 121 f.
Rhees. Sections 252-275.
It may be worth while to turn aside for a moment to speak at this
point of two phrases often on Jesus' lips, of conceptions which dominated
the thoughts of many in Jesus' time and had their influence in shaping
Jesus' career. The first of these is the notion of the Kingdom of God,
the Kingdom of Heaven (Matthew). Jesus began his preaching with
the declaration — " The time is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God is at hand.
Repent and believe in the Gospel." (Mark 1: 15.) The thought was
part of the great Messianic hope. The idea was that of a reign of God
set up on the earth, or rather, descending in all the fullness of its might
suddenly from the heavens. A new order of things, prepared and wait
ing in heaven was to come with great and dreadful signs, to do away
with the present order of evil, oppression and misery and sin prevailing
upon the earth. The belief had taken with the Rabbis various forms.
It had comforted the nation in the despairing moments of its subjugation.
God would come, the Messiah — one not exactly the great God, nor yet
altogether man — would come in the clouds of heaven, to make an end
of the Jews' enemies and to restore the nation to greater glory than it
had had at first. The Gentiles would be conquered. For the masses
the hope was thus mainly political. For this reason Jesus was often
judged only as an agitator. Some of the Pharisees had put the fulfilment
even beyond the end of this world order, after the conquering of the
evil angels, the raising of the dead and the judgment of all men. Jesus
laid emphasis upon the ethical side, as some of the prophets had done.
He cries repent. Even the Baptist had promised a gift of the spirit to
men. Many of Jesus' parables we interpret as expressions of the pro-
foundest insight into the moral process by which alone righteousness
can ever prevail. And for him the Kingdom is righteousness. But yet
his whole teaching — not merely at the end, but also at the beginning —
is colored also by the eschatological expectations of his people. The
faith has still with him often the form of something outward. A catastro
phe is sometimes spoken of as introducing the period of its fulfilment.

19

XII
THE SON OF MAN. GENERAL MESSIANIC EXPECTATION
Daniel 7 : 1-14; (cf. also Psalm 8 : 4; Numbers 23 : 19; Isaiah 51 : 12;
Psalm 80 : 17); Mark 8 : 31, 38; 2 : 10, 28; Matt, n : 18, 19;
Mark 10 : 42-45; 14 : 62 and John 12 : 34.
Burton and Mathews. Pp. 63-64.
Rhees. Sections 252-275.
The other expression to which we alluded is one which is also often
upon the lips of Jesus. It is the name which he most often used for
himself — "The Son of Man." The original meaning of the phrase,
according to Aramaic idiom, seems to have been a purely general one,
that of one of the children of men, a member of the race, a man. Even
in the passage, Daniel 7: 13, though the passage describes the Messianic
Kingdom, the phrase seems to mean simply man, and is used to set forth
the human character of that Kingdom in contrast with the fierce and
brutal character of those kingdoms which had preceded it. Jesus uses
this designation by preference for himself, even when he describes
himself 'as performing the distinctest of Messianic functions, as that
of the judge of the world, Mark 14 : 62. And yet it appears that the
people did not generally understand the phrase as referring to the
Messiah. For, while Jesus constantly used it of himself (the Gospels
otherwise never use it of him), yet he instructs the disciples not to tell the
people that he was the Messiah. It is as if his identification of himself
with the great ideal of his race was his own secret and that of his intimate
circle. It is as if he himself felt some awe at that identification, and
found his happiness in describing his work and equally his suffering as
part of that which united him to all the sons of men. We lay into the
phrase a modern meaning very precious to us in our full emphasis on
Jesus' humanity, just as we lay into the phrase Kingdom a modern
meaning which is related only to ethical conditions and spiritual forces
and which imagines no outward civil or social transformation of the
world save as brought about by the victory of spiritual forces. But it
is not to be denied that Jesus himself uses the phrase in connections
which are to be explained only in the light of the Jewish eschatology,
as when he speaks of the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven
or ascending up where he had been before.

20

XIII
EARLY MINISTRY IN JUDEA
John 2 : 13-3 : 21.
Burton and Mathews. Chapter 7.
Rhees. Sections 113-124.
Reference must be made to that which was said above concerning
the chronology of the ministry of Jesus and of the caution with which
material from the Fourth Gospel is to be used in framing any scheme
of the events. On the other hand, the discourses in this Gospel, however
much they may be free interpretations of the meaning of the Master,
called out by certain contrasts, or again, by certain typical occasions,
are of such worth that no presentation of our materials would be ade
quate without them. Nor does the effort to put them in some other
setting than that to which the Evangelist has assigned them give any
worthy result. After the opening of the ministry in Galilee which we
have described, the Gospel according to John records certain events
in Jerusalem and on a journey from Jerusalem to Galilee again. Those
first centre about a passover. That passover is here made the occasion
of a cleansing of the temple. Jesus made a scourge of small cords and
drove out of the temple the money changers and them that sold oxen
and sheep and doves. This event is apparently recorded in Matthew 21 :
12 f. Mark n : 15 and Luke 19 : 45 in connection with the last pass-
over of Jesus' life. It is hardly likely that the event took place twice.
It is more likely that it took place at the end of Jesus' career than at the
beginning. The comparison of his body to the temple and the prophecy
of his own death which is appended to this event is much more likely
thus to have found place at the end than at the beginning of his ministry.
But apparently in Jerusalem took place a conversation of Jesus
with a ruler of the Jews, Nicodemus, which is one of the most striking
of the discourses preserved to us at all. Nicodemus came by night,
fearing the Jews. He is mentioned in two other places in the Fourth
Gospel (not at all in the Synoptics); once in gentle protest against
judging Jesus unheard: and once as joining Joseph in the burial of
Jesus. He represented the class whose confidence in its own privileges
was invincible and whose social and public position made the following
of new convictions difficult. That he was a type of man who heard Jesus
gladly we may well believe. But they followed him from far. Quite
fittingly the note of this discourse is of the new life principle which
must enter into a man. The figurative language is but the thinnest vail
for a truth which may easily be illustrated from all deeper relations of life.
21

XIV
THE GOSPEL IN SYCHAR
John 4 : 4-42.
Burton and Mathews. Chapter 8.
As if to avoid even apparent competition with John the Baptist, Jesus
is represented in the Fourth Gospel as withdrawing from Judea. He
will go to Galilee, but must needs pass through Samaria. The synoptic
account, on the other hand, dates Jesus' Galilean ministry from the
imprisonment of John. The Samaritans were spurned as a people of
impure blood and mixed religion. The hatred of them came down from
the days of Ezra when the zealous Jews refused to allow any intercourse
with the inhabitants of Samaria. The Samaritans returned the hatred
of the Jews in kind. Excluded from the temple of the Jews, they built
their own temple on Mount Gerizim and established a rival religious
centre and worship. They had their own version of the Pentateuch.
They, too, looked forward to the coming tof a Messiah who, according
to the notion of this benighted woman, would, at all events, settle the
question, whether her own ancestors had been right or wrong in this
long controversy with the Jews. This poor creature whose whole thought
of the service of God is limited apparently to a question concerning the
place and manner of performing rites, is yet, after the manner of this
Gospel, made the recipient of the great word of Jesus about the time
coming, and now come, when neither in Gerizim, nor in Jerusalem, but
everywhere and in every way, with their lives, men would worship^the
God, who is spirit, in spirit and in truth. One wonders how much she
understood of all this. Even Jesus is made to say — " If thou knewest
the gift of God! " That she later gathered more of his meaning we may
believe. But even now, ignorant as she is, she brings the men of the city
so far to believe her report that they seek contact with Jesus for them
selves. After that contact they say — " Now we believe, not because
of thy word, for we have seen him ourselves and do know that he is the
Christ, the Saviour of the world." They illustrate thus the transition
from knowledge by hearsay to that deeper and truer knowledge which
is by experience. How far this narrative, however, is from the point of
view of the other Gospels is revealed in this, that whereas Jesus says
here "I that speak unto thee am he (the Messiah)" the others put the
public acknowledgment of his Messiahship almost at the end of his life.

XV
GALILEE AND THE SEA
Cana, John 4 : 46-54; Nazareth, Luke 4 : 16-30; Capernaum, Mark 1 :
21-34; Luke 4 : 31-41.
Burton and Mathews. Chapter 9.
Rhees. Sections 125-149.
It is with the imprisonment of John the Baptist that the synoptists
begin the public ministry of Jesus. Galilee, the region bounded roughly
by the Jordan, Samaria and Phoenicia, had remained largely in the hands
of the heathen from the fall of the northern kingdom until the time of
the Maccabees. From that time onward many Jews took up their abode
there, though the non- Jewish element was considerable. The country
was very fertile and densely populated. The hill country was very
beautiful. The little Sea of Galilee, nearly seven hundred feet below
the level of the ocean, is surrounded by a basin which has an almost
tropical climate. Its waters are supplied by Jordan and abound in fish.
There were at least nine flourishing towns upon its borders in Jesus'
time. It was among the fisher population of this region that Jesus'
earliest and, in some senses, his best work was done. From these circles
he gathered most of his intimate disciples. Nothing could be more
interesting and suggestive than is the account in Luke of the return
of Jesus in the power of the spirit into Galilee. " And he came to Naza
reth where he had been brought up, and as his custom was, he went
into the synagogue on the Sabbath day and stood up for to read." All
the power of the associations of the years of the making of his life is
upon him as he opens the book of the Prophet Isaiah to the place where
it says — "The spirit of the Lord is upon me," and then quietly declares:
" This day is the Scripture fulfilled in your ears." No more wonderful
illustration could be given of the meaning of the habit and practice of
worship, of the significance of observances, of the power of sacred as
sociations. "And all bare witness to the gracious words which pro
ceeded out of his mouth." But exactly the familiarity of it all made
his fellow-villagers repel him. They would have killed him in their
wrath. They cried — "Is not this Joseph's son?"

23

XVI
THE CALL OF THE FOUR
Matt 4 : 18-22; Mark 1 : 16-20; Luke 5 : 1-11; cf. John 1 : 35-42-
FIRST PREACHING TOUR IN GALILEE
Luke 4 : 42-44; 5 : 12-16; Mark 1 : 35-45; Matt. 8 : 2-4.
Burton and Mathews. Chapter 7.
Rhees. Sections 125-149.
From Nazareth Jesus went to Capernaum, a place far better fitted
to be the centre of the evangelistic work which he planned. Soon after
ward he called four of the men, Simon Peter, and Andrew, with James
and John, who were to be the closest companions of his work. Surely
this was their first calling and is the same event with that to which the
passage above cited from the Fourth Gospel refers. Presumably with
these four of his disciples, and probably with others, he set out on his
first preaching tour through Galilee. It is said of him that he taught
them as having authority, and not as the Scribes. The immediate ex
perience of the truth upon his own part, and his simple appeal to the
sense of truth on the part of others, was something very different from
the Scribes' constant citing of opinions and availing themselves of the
names of the ancient and the great. All the evangelists agree that Jesus
performed wonders in restoring the sick to health, especially in delivering
those unfortunates who were possessed of the hallucination that they were
under the personal power of the Devil. The demoniacs, so called, are
not all described in the New Testament in a way that would lead us to
think of them all as ordinary cases of insanity, epilepsy, etc., although
many of them are doubtless thus to be identified. Among us since in
sanity is apprehended simply as a disease, and all notion of possession,
witchcraft, charm, evil eye, has absolutely faded away, it is difficult to
think what horrors these superstitions added to any morbid condition
and what abberations they occasioned. Part of the disease was in the poor
patient's mental attitude. That attitude is for us gone. Therefore cer
tain aspects of such diseases are gone, too. Even now, and within the
area of one of the most interesting departments of modern study, there
occur cases of persons passing under the influence, or supposed influence,
of others in an amazing way. The chief difference between ourselves
and the men of former time is not either in the denial of such facts nor
yet in the assertion that we perfectly understand them, but simply in
the assumption that they are perfectly capable of being understood.
24

There is a law of the existence of such facts and a cause of their cure.
The men of ancient time attributed such phenomena in the most gen
eral way to the possession of the Devil. There is no evidence but that
Jesus in all simplicity, and naturalness shared this apprehension. On the
other hand, there is no reason to doubt the testimony that by his char
acter and spiritual force, his quietness, his trust, his love, the whole
effect of his personality, he exerted extraordinary influence upon some
of these unfortunates, delivering them from their miseries and restoring
them to their friends in their right mind.

25

XVII
THE CALL OF MATTHEW
Matt. 9 : 9-13; Mark 2 : 13-17; Luke 5 : 27-32.
RITES AND CEREMONIES
Matt. 9 : 14-17; Mark 2 : 18-22; Luke 5 : 33-39.
Burton and Mathews, 88.
Rhees. Sections 125-149.
In the choice of the disciples thus far named Jesus had drawn de
vout men from the self-respecting fisher class, not poor men exactly,
though not rich of course, men pure in their conduct and sensitive to
every high appeal. Now in the person of Matthew, the publican, he
received into his little company a man whose life had been, presum
ably, of a very different sort. The publican was a collector of taxes
under the most vicious possible system of taxation, that by which the
gatherer paid a contract price for his privilege and then kept for him
self so much as he was able to gather in excess. He would have been
despised and hated as the representative of the foreign government
in any case. But there can be little doubt that as a class the men were
corrupt and cruel. It is not for naught that their names are so frequently
associated with those of the abandoned of every sort, both men and
women. But here is one whom Jesus calls and who, when called, un
hesitatingly responds. One wonders almost that those Scribes, who made
it the chief business of the saint to keep away from sinful people, could
draw even so near to Matthew's feast as to voice their objection. But
they gave thus the opportunity for Jesus to say one of his memorable
words and declare one of the great principles of his life. "I came not to
call the righteous" — if there are any such — " but sinners to repent
ance." He seems to have taken the occasion to declare his principle
concerning rites and observances. These are good if they express some
thing. They are evil if they have no meaning. One fasts if one is really
sad at heart. One holds himself to a reasonable abstemiousness to pre
vent the lower side of life from dominating the better. But to imagine
that by emaciation one ingratiates himself with God, as he wins the
gaping wonder of men, is absurd if not hypocritical. Elsewhere he says
— "When thou fastest anoint thy head and wash thy face that thou
appear not unto men to fast." No one ever knew more truly the mean
ing of the habits and practices of the religious life than did Jesus. But
no man was ever less a man of the mere outwardness of such practices.
Between his view and that of the Pharisees there was hardly so much
as a point of contact. No man putteth new wine into old bottles. The
new spirit must make habits and practices for itself.
26

XVIII
THE SABBATH OBSERVANCE, ETC.
Matt. 12 : 1-8; Mark 2 : 23-28; Luke 6 : 1-5; v. also Matt. 12 : 9-14;
Mark 3 : 1-6; Luke 6: 6-n; v. also John 5 : 1-19.
Burton and Mathews, 89-95.
Rhees. Sections 150-165.
In like manner, when his disciples, as they went through the fields
on the Sabbath day, brought reproach of the Pharisees upon them
selves by rubbing the ears of grain and eating them, Jesus took occa
sion to put forth his maxim — " The Sabbath was made for man and
not man for the Sabbath." His attitude toward the matter of the
Sabbath was one of the points of constant friction between himself and
the bigoted legalists of his time. That which they made an onerous duty
he deemed a privilege. That which they made a senseless bondage he
looked at as a source of freshness and joy and construed as a freedom.
The absurd punctiliousness of these men, and even the neglect of com
mon humanity which it involved, all seems far away from us. Jesus
seems the great liberator, the one who speaks the word of reasonableness
and freedom. But we do well to note how all aspects of Jesus' teaching
are conditioned in the antitheses and antagonisms in which he stood.
He placed his emphasis where, in his time, the emphasis needed to be
placed. As one drinks more deeply of his glad and yet profoundly
serious spirit, one realizes that were he with us to-day both his words and
his deeds might get another emphasis. In all these matters of obser
vances, Sabbath and the rest, our danger is just the opposite of that
which beset the men of Jesus' time. There is a pharisaism of the neglect
of these things just as truly as of their observance. The incident of the
man at the Pool of Bethesda has much the same bearing, though it is
impossible to say where, chronologically, it belongs. Jesus' assertion
that his Father never interrupts his beneficent activity calls out one of
those fierce debates so characteristic of the Fourth Gospel. And they
were, to be sure, for obvious reasons, more bitter in Jerusalem than
elsewhere. In them comes out all the irreconcilable difference between
two interpretations of the language which Jesus used. Along with Jesus'
immense popularity, we have to note the ever deepening embitterment
between him and the magnates of the Jews, a hostility which never
rested until it had compassed his destruction.

27

XIX
MIRACLES OF HEALING. MIRACLES IN GENERAL
v. also Mark 2 : 1-12; Matt. 9 : 2-8; Luke 5 : 17-26.
Burton and Mathews. Chapter 10.
Rhees. Sections 150-165.
There are many of the miracles attributed to our Lord, healings of
the sick, evidences of mastery over nature, which occasion greater
difficulty, as we think of them, than do those examples of relief to the
spirits of the morbid and self-tortured which we alluded to above.
Once for all, we do well to remember that the ancient man had not
the thought of the order of nature, of the reign of law, of the sequence
of cause and effect, which we have. Interruptions in that order were
more thinkable to him than they are to us. Nature was not to him
the revelation of the will and power of God which it is to us. That
which he naively describes as something transpiring outside the order
of nature, we should often unhesitatingly interpret as having happened
in accordance with laws known to us. And of any event which we could
possibly meet with, even one isolated and wholly mysterious, we should
yet assume that it has a law within the heart of nature which we may
yet come to know. God is the spirit of all those laws and the power of
all those events. The evangelists were at the opposite pole from our
selves in all of this. It is far too simple to say that facts, such as some
of these which they narrate, can never have happened. The point is
that we have in their narrative not the facts themselves, but only the
narrators' own impressions concerning the facts. These are such im
pressions as such narrators would naturally in that age have. It is
often not possible for us to get through the veil of their unconscious
interpretation of the facts to the facts themselves. But suppose that
we could say exactly how much of a given story reflects the mind of the
author and how much remains as the thing itself with which we have
to deal; suppose that we can neither deny nor explain that thing in itself;
yet we have an invincible conviction, or rather an invincible conviction
has us, that every fact is explicable, every fact is the witness to some
part of the great and inviolable order of the world, the secret of which
order is God. It has been fatuous to believe, as men have so sincerely
and ardently believed, that the only witness for God is what men termed
the intervention in nature. It is surely true that for many minds it is
not the miracle which sustains the credibility of the Gospels, or conveys
the sense of the transcendent greatness of Christ. It is the immediate
impression which the moral and spiritual greatness of Jesus makes
upon us which sustains the wonders related in the Gospel, in so far as
these can be sustained. 28

XX
SPREADING FAME. SUCCESS
Matt. 4 : 23-25; 12 : 15-21; Mark 3 : 7-12; Luke 6 : 17-19.
CALL OF THE TWELVE
' Mark 3 : _3-_9a; Luke 6 : 13-16.
Burton and Mathews, 97-99.
Rhees. Sections 150-165.
These verses indicate how widely at this period the work of Jesus
had attracted attention. The throng is so great that he has to ask the
disciples who are with him to procure a boat that he may make his
way along the shore in that, and as occasion offers teach and preach
from that. His plan had been, at first, merely to deliver his message
that the Kingdom of God was at hand. In a deeper sense we can see that
he set about establishing that kingdom in the shape of a little fraternity
of disciples -who would manifest in all the relations of their lives his
purer spirit. Gradually the numbers grew. The synagogues of Galilee
could not contain the crowds which came to hear him. He must teach
and work in the fields or on the shores near Capernaum. The records
of the great revivals such as that under the Wesleys in England, in the
middle of the eighteenth century, present some parallel to this in the
wonderful movement of men, the suspension of all other interests, the
concentration of thought, the stirring of feeling, the new consecration
of many lives.
It is most natural that exactly in these circumstances Jesus should
think of the enlargement of the immediate circle of his helpers. Luke
says he appointed twelve, "that they might be with him." They were
to constitute the inner circle of the brotherhood, the nucleus of the
kingdom. And he planned to send them out from time to time to preach
and work. One only of them all was a Judean and he proved the traitor.
But Jesus must have chosen him with hope and expectation. As if in
preparation of mind for this momentous choosing of the Twelve, Jesus
had gone apart into the hills and continued all night in prayer. He de
nounced the hypocrites, who, for pretence, made long prayers, standing
on the street corners. Yet he himself had days and nights of the need of
God if he was to satisfy the needs of men. We hardly wonder that he
meets the urgency even of his own mother and brethren, who perhaps
also thought he was beside himself, with the word — " And who is my
mother? He that doeth the will of God, the same is my brother and
sister and mother." God and his work have claimed him. He cannot go
to them. They may come to him if they also will let themselves be thus
claimed. 29

XXI
SERMON ON THE MOUNT
Matt. Chapters 5, 6, 7; Luke 6 : 20-49.
Burton and Mathews, 99-108. Analysis p. 99.
Rhees. Pp. 127-129.
Characteristic of this period of Jesus' ministry is that great collection
of sayings which occupy the 5th, 6th and 7th chapters of the First Gos
pel, and which are known under the name of the Sermon on the Mount.
Whether this discourse was delivered all at one time and place, or
whether the discourse as we have it is made up of sayings which may,
some of them, have been uttered many times, and in other places, can
not be known. The discourse is in quite different form as it occurs in
the Gospel according to Luke. In neither form can it be said to have
great unity or progression. This aphoristic form of utterance was com
mon in the Orient, and particularly well fitted to the kind of truth
which Jesus sought to convey. It was in such form that the sayings of
Jesus were most easily carried forward in the oral tradition which was
finally embodied in the Synoptics. This is distinctly an address spoken
to those who were already in some measure familiar with Jesus' teaching.
It opens with words of congratulation for those who, characterized by
qualities often despised, were yet heirs of God's Kingdom. The thought
then passes to the responsibility of such heirs of the kingdom for the
help of a needy world. Then, since Jesus might have seemed indifferent
to the older religion of his people, he carefully explains that he came
not to set aside the old, but to realize the spiritual good for which it
had stood. He establishes a more exacting standard of righteousness.
That more exacting righteousness Jesus illustrates by a series of restate
ments of the older law, and then by a group of criticisms of current
religious practice. The righteousness required by this new law is un
speakably worthier than the old, being more simply manifested in com
mon life, and demanding more inwardness and fellowship with God.
There is an exhortation to the children of God to lead a trustful life,
since the Heavenly Father knows all and cares for all. And then with
the warning against censorious judgment of others there is a recurrence
to the great thought that religion must be shown forth in men's lives.
With all the seriousness of the discourse there is something serene about
it, as become those early and successful months. There is not the pe
culiar note of impending judgment which is felt in so much that Jesus
says in the later months of his life.

3°

XXII
THE CENTURION'S SERVANT
Matt. 8 : 5-13; Luke 7 : 1-10.
Burton and Mathews. P. 109.
An officer in the Roman army of occupation in a province like Syria
had an opportunity to imitate in a petty way the tyranny of his superiors
and to take part in the corruption of the government. All the more
noteworthy is it that often in the Gospels these men, centurions and
others, are spoken of as men who commanded the respect of those
about them and who showed themselves sensitive to the truth which
Jesus spoke and to the goodness which he manifested. This man's
regard for a faithful servant commends him. And he stands on such
footing with the representatives of the Jewish community that he can
request them to bring his message to Jesus. They do so in somewhat
patronizing fashion. They pronounce him worthy that Jesus should do
something for him: — "He loveth our nation," they say. The con
tempt of the Jew and the misunderstanding of his traits was wide spread
in the ancient world. And on the other hand, the pride and resentment
of the Jew made him hate the representative of the foreign oppression.
It is not necessary to suppose that the man was a proselyte of Judaism.
Many men of that time were turning, despite the repulsion which Juda
ism had for them, to the seriousness and optimism of that faith as con
trasted with the levity, the superstition and demoralization which pre
vailed under their own. This man does not deem himself worthy that
Jesus should come under his roof. He asks him only to say the word.
Jesus is profoundly impressed by the contrast of all this with the arro
gance which he so often met among the Jews, their violent taking of
the kingdom by storm, as he once put it, in their confidence in their
own rights and privileges, and their attitude of superciliousness and
suspicion toward himself. He takes the occasion of his episode to an
nounce the universal character of his gospel and meaning of his mission.
He speaks with bitterness of the surprise which will be felt by some who
have deemed themselves without doubt the children of the kingdom
when they find themselves shut out, while meek souls from the east
and from the west shall enter in.

31

XXIII
MESSAGE OF JOHN THE BAPTIST
Matt, n : 2-19; Luke 7 : 18-35.
Burton and Mathews, 110-113.
Rhees. Section 134.
How different was Jesus' course and his conception of his mission
from the current notion concerning the Messiah, comes out in the
fact that even John the Baptist, languishing in prison, as he heard of
Jesus' activity, came to call the whole thing, for the time, at least,
in question. He sent an anxious message to Jesus — " Art thou he
that should come, or do we look for another?" He who had once re
nounced his own leadership in such noble spirit, who had deemed
that his whole function was to turn people to Jesus, must have suffered
much before he sent messengers to ask if Jesus, after all, were the
promised one, or had he made a great mistake? Jesus had done so
much that promised a fulfilment of the Messianic hope and yet left so
much undone, he so avoided demonstration, seemed so absorbed, John
may have thought, in little, inward and inconspicuous things, took ,
such a different course from John's own with reference to sin and sin
ners, that he was bewildered. And as so often, Jesus' answer, given in
all reverence and sympathy, is but to emphasize the very things which
raised the question. But when the messengers are gone, he utters all
his admiration for the Baptist. He voices his indignation at the rabble
who had once run after John just as they were now running after Jesus,
and who had then abandoned him utterly as they might one day abandon
Jesus, too. What did you expect to see? A man who would fall in with
your every whim ? What did you expect to see ? A man grasping riches
for himself and ready to distribute them to you ? And yet John had lived
in the thought of judgment for the past, and not in that of hope and
love and inspiration, of inward redemption of the sinful, for the future.
Even a child in this new atmosphere might be greater than the greatest
man in the old. With scorn, as he contrasts his own serener method with
the sterner one of John, he points out that the one was as much unavail
ing with these narrow minds and hard hearts as the other. John cut
himself off from larger contacts with the breadth and richness of man's
life. And you said he had a devil. I live that life among you, striving
only for a pure spirit and a helpful influence in all, and you say I am a
glutton and a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners. How can
one do good to those who do not seriously wish the good?

32

XXIV
THE ANOINTING IN THE HOUSE OF SIMON,
THE PHARISEE
Luke 7 : 36-50.
Burton and Mathews, 113.
The invitation to the house of Simon shows that the breach between
Jesus and the Pharisees was not yet complete. But certainly this event
was calculated to contribute to that breach. The episode has been
confounded with that in Matt. 26 : 6-13. But the whole point of that
taleis different from this. The reference of Jesus to his burial shows
that that event belongs near the end of Jesus' life. There is good reason
to suppose that the woman in the later case was Mary, the sister of
Martha and Lazarus (John 11 -.2). The woman of our passage has been,
not without arbitrariness, identified with Mary of Magdala, mentioned in
Luke 8:2. And finally the confusion is made complete when in the
legend of the Middle Age the two Marys are identified. The openness
of an oriental house and the custom of reclining at meals must be recalled.
But even so, the woman's impulse to show her gratitude to Jesus must
have been strong to overcome the knowledge of the attitude of a man
like Simon to a woman of her class. We cannot but surmise that Jesus
had spoken a word of forgiveness and of hope to her and put her on the
way of redemption of her own character. Jesus' sureness of himself
comes out in the fact that he is not even so much as embarrassed in the
eyes of this censorious Pharisee by the conduct of this woman, which
surely was extraordinary. And Simon limits his censure of Jesus to the
destruction of his own theory that Jesus was a prophet. For if he were a
prophet he would surely have known what kind of a woman this was,
and if he were a good man he surely would never have permitted her
to defile him with her touch. The Pharisee is the man who is content
if he himself is not made conventionally, ceremonially, impure. Jesus
is the man who is seeking in every fearless way to make others morally
pure, and whom thus nothing can contaminate. He knows that her
reverent love of himself is the pathway of her purification. She loves
because she has been forgiven. And he might turn the proposition about
and say that she was forgiven because of the reverent love with which
she met one who was pure. But all of that is lost on a mean, loveless
nature like that of Simon. One wonders, however, whether the parable
about the debt, though it wrung from Simon a concession, yet touched
the deeper places of his mind. One doubts if Simon's debt really was
less than that of the woman. 33

XXV
DEEPENING ENMITY. DENUNCIATION OF SCRIBES AND
PHARISEES
Matt. 12 : 22-45; Mark 3 : 19-30; Luke 11 : 14-36.
Burton and Mathews, 116-118.
Rhees. Sections 128 and 152.
These passages were chosen to bring out the deepening antagonism
to Jesus on the part of the religious representatives of his people. We
speak often of Pharisees and Sadducees, of Scribes and priests, in some
confusion, as, taken altogether, the enemies of Jesus. More careful
reading shows a great distinction. It was the Pharisees who badgered
Jesus through life. But it was the Sadducees who compassed his death.
Even the Scribes were sometimes deeply impressed by him. The priests,
so far as we know, never were. The Pharisees debated passionately
with Jesus in every synagogue. The priests were silent. The Pharisees
were the exponents of a system of morality about which, mistaken
though it was, many of them were fanatically sincere. The Sadducees
were often cynical opportunists, office holders under a half-ecclesiastical
regime. The Pharisees sincerely hated the Romans. The Sadducees,
if they did so in their hearts, concealed the fact and comfortably took
preferment. The Pharisee wished the end of this state of things. He
worshipped the past and dwelt raptly upon the future. The Sadducees
fattened upon the present state of things and sneered at the future.
The Sadducees were willing, therefore, that the debate about insig
nificant matters like morality should go on, and were glad when Jesus
occasionally put down the Pharisees. But when this Nazarene substituted
the universal fatherhood of God for the privileged hierarchy of men,
that was a different matter. But these were not the men to raise the
dust of controversy. They were the men, still, crafty and unscrupulous,
to make an end of their opponent and let who would discuss the issue
afterward. The Pharisees were strong in Galilee. And, while there was
here most noise, yet here Jesus' best work was done and he himself was
comparatively safe. In Judea the priests were omnipotent. Jesus' entry
into Jerusalem was almost the signal for his doom. The passages here
offered bring out in dramatic way the traits of the Pharisees as a class,
and the conflict between them and Jesus which was inevitable, so soon
as they saw that they could not bend to their own will the man whom
they had once hailed as the fulfilment of their hope.

34

XXVI
TEACHING IN PARABLES BY THE SEASIDE
Matt. 13 : 1-53; Mark 4 : 1-34; Luke 8 : 4-18.
Burton and Mathews, 118-123.
Bruce. Parabolic Teaching of our Lord.
Rhees. Section 138.
No feature of Jesus' teaching is more salient than his use of para
bles. The oriental mind prefers the concrete to the abstract. Its teachers
have always made large use of illustration. Jesus stands unique not at
all in that he uses parables, but in the variety, the simplicity and effective
beauty of many which he has used. It seems sometimes as if he chose of
purpose a form of parable which was enigmatical even to his disciples
and could but be still more puzzling to hearers who had no sympathy with
his message. The veiling of his truth might have exactly the effect of
exciting the attention of those near to him and inciting them to more
painstaking reflection. It might have also the effect of putting off those
who came merely to catch him in his words and to make trouble for him
if they could. But by far the larger part of his parables seem to have been
spoken with the simplest of intention to help the simple folk whom he
addressed to understand. Many of Jesus' parables are the most perfect
of little pictures or little poems hardly lacking the form of verse. Their
hold upon children and the childhood of those races to which the Gospels
have been often the first and long the only book of their education, shows
how near to nature was the master Teacher who made choice of this
method of teaching. Their permanent hold upon the minds of the most
mature, the quality they have of revealing something new even to those
who have known them of old, enforces afresh the observation that the
imaginative and poetical is the most perfect way of communicating cer
tain kinds of truth. These parables, in illustration of the kingdom, may
be taken for an example. No one of them conveys the idea of the king
dom in its entirety. Many of them are addressed to but one aspect of that
idea and leave all else on one side. But it would hardly have been possible
for Jesus in so few words to have conveyed his meaning, or so unmistak
ably to have marked some main traits of the great conception which occu
pied his thought.

35

XXVII
MIRACLES IN GALILEE
Matt. 9 : 18-35; Mark 5 : 21-43; Luke 8 : 40-56.
JESUS' FORBIDDING MEN TO MAKE HIM KNOWN
Burton and Mathews. 125-129.
Rhees. 141.
The request which Jesus often makes, that those upon whom he has
conferred signal benefits, such as are recited in these passages, shall not
make him known, is worthy of our notice. The common apprehension
of his wonders is that these things were done of him in attestation of his
claims. This was not Jesus' attitude. Such things as he may have done
he seems to have desired often to keep secret. Such notoriety as came to
him he seems to have regarded as a hindrance. Some, of whom he said
that they came to him merely for bread or to see signs, he did everything
to disappoint and turn away. These are interesting traits of a narrative
which bears indisputable evidence of the temper of the early Christian
community in its wondering remembrance of the great Galilean, and of
its desire to make him appear wonderful. They have forgotten that the
great Galilean himself used with singular reserve, and viewed quite differ
ently, a power which he also probably fully believed that he possessed.
We should say that any wonders which Jesus ever did were the absolutely
natural consequences of the wonder in character and spirit which he was.
He in his humility attributed those wonders to God. And were they not
of God? Did not God fill his soul? The unexampled things which he
thus all naturally wrought, his contemporaries would inevitably appre
hend according to the idea of the miracle current in their time. That
Jesus himself thus apprehended his own works is clear.
It was hardly possible for him to proclaim himself Messiah and then
avoid the mob who were ready to take him by force and make him a king.
It was hardly possible to make clear to them that he meant to be a very
different kind of Messiah and not at once put himself beyond the pos
sibility of doing them any good. It was hardly possible to have the repute
of being a wonder-worker without being rushed upon by the crowds who
were merely greedy, curious or superstitious. All of which difficulties,
instead of putting him upon the arts of a charlatan, made him content to
go his own way in quietness, to give himself to the only thing which he
cared for, the raising of men out of the death of sin, the opening of
the eyes of men in error, the quickening of their hearts to trust in God,
to love of men, to joy in duty. But none the less, the day would come
when at last he must stand up in magnificent self-assertion on behalf of
his truth and meet the death which would interpret him to his fellows
and to the ages far more perfectly than his life had done.
36

XXVIII
NAZARETH AGAIN. SENDING OUT OF TWELVE. DEATH
OF JOHN THE BAPTIST
Matt. 13 : 54-58; Mark 6 : 1-6. Matt. 9 : 36-1 1 : 1; Mark 6 : 7-13.
Matt. 14 : 1-12; Mark 6 : 14-29.
Burton and Mathews. Chapter 15.
The return again to Nazareth brought him only grief. As he journeyed
up and down the country it would have been unnatural had he always
avoided the place. But the old incredulity persisted. Many were aston
ished at him and many were offended. When he spoke in their synagogue
they said, whence hath this man these things ? Is not this the carpenter ?
Are not his brothers and sisters here with us ? Even Jesus, with all of
his experience, marvelled at their unbelief.
Part of the purpose of choosing the Twelve had been that they
should be sent forth by him to prepare, in one place and another, for his
coming, to bear his message, to bring men to him and in all ways to
spread the influence of his work. We have now the first mention of
a formal fulfilment of that plan. Later it is said that when he looked
upon the thronging multitudes which followed him, he was moved
with compassion toward them because they were as sheep not having a
shepherd. Something of the same sort must have been in his mind as
he sent out these Twelve to do, so nearly as they could, what they
thought he would do were he in their place. The instructions which
he gave them about the simplicity of their life, about avoiding all ap
pearance of making gain of what they were doing, or of seeking com
fort or luxury for themselves by going from house to house, went back
to a state of things not uncommon, we judge, in the ancient world and
witnessed to in the literature of the early church. The wandering Chris
tian teacher became sometimes almost as much of a scandal and offence
as was often the dirty pagan philosopher of the period or the dissolute
mendicant friar at the end of the Middle Age. About this time, also,
seems to have come to Jesus the news brought by John's own disciples
of the death of the Baptist. The death was worthy of him. But it throws
light upon the concessions of authority which the Roman provincial
administration saw fit sometimes to make to native rulers. And it gives
us the measure of the man whom John had so fearlessly condemned.
Herod's course toward Jesus, when the latter was brought before him
in the progress of his trial, gives us no different impression of the man.

37

XXIX
THE FEEDING OF THE FIVE THOUSAND
Matt. 14 : 13-23; Mark 6 : 30-46; Luke 9 : 10-17; John 6 : 1-15.
DISCOURSE ON THE BREAD OF LIFE
John 6 : 22-71
Burton and Mathews. 136-141 p.
1 Rhees. Sections 146-147.
When the Twelve returned to him to give an account of all that they
had taught and done, it seems to have been Jesus' design that they,
with him, should have enjoyed a moment's respite from their labors. But
the crowd, conscious only of its own need and oblivious of any deeper
needs of those who served them, would not permit that. When the tired
men came to land with their boat they found the multitude there before
them. The story of the feeding of the thousands there in that desert place,
however we are to understand it, is, at all events, the symbol of the feeding
of their souls out of the inmost resources of Jesus' own rich life. Just
when those resources had run so low that it must have seemed as if he had
nothing to give, when his own strength and freshness were exhausted
and it seemed impossible that he should bestow — then, none the less,
comes the demand, the great human need crying to him and to God. He
gives of himself, mind, heart, love, freely as he had always given, and lo,
the wonder has been accomplished. There remains over more resource
within himself than he had at the first. And yet all those men and women,
hungering for what he had to give them, had been fed. We are wont to
take such a parallel as that which has just been written as a parable, and
the story of the actual loaves and fishes as the literal fact. For us in the
life which we lead the relation is reversed. The actual loaves and fishes
of the Gospel are to us but a parable of the thing which men are constantly
doing, which we must do, which will never fail to be done, when men
give out of themselves that bread of God which he gave for the life of
the world. These words carry us over into the great discourse, John
6: 22-71. That discourse is appended to a story of a feeding of multitudes
by the sea. Whether this is the same one or another we cannot say.
The discourse advances from a mystical interpretation of the bread on
Jesus' part to an embittered debate between him and those Jews who
would take all things literally. They scoff — " How can this man give
us his flesh to eat ? " The discourse is very characteristic, one of those
acute contrasts between light and darkness, good and evil, life and death,
38

which the fourth Evangelist so loves. So great was the offence which
the argument gave that many fell away from him. Such was the defection
that he turned even to his own little circle and said to his intimate fol
lowers — "Will ye also go away?" These men may be puzzled when
they are with him. But they find nothing to live by when they are sepa
rated from him.

39

XXX
WASHING OF HANDS
Matt. 15 : 1-20; Mark 7 : 1-23.
THE SYROPHCENICIAN WOMAN
Matt. 15 : 21-28; Mark 7 : 24-30.
Burton and Mathews. Chapter 17.
Rhees. Sections 150-153.
Not too much emphasis is to be placed upon the order in which two
sections in one of our Gospels may fall. We know how our Gospels
came together. Often the same sections stand in different order in some
other Gospel. But the contrast of these two portions of the chapter
in Matthew is suggestive. In the first of them certain more advanced
students of the Jewish religion are represented coming to Jesus, asking
his opinion concerning certain matters of rite and ceremony. Jesus calls
them hypocrites to their faces and holds up to ridicule some of their fine
distinctions, as for example that a man may give to God so much that he
is no more under obligation to care for his helpless father or mother. But
when he had dismissed them, he recurs to the subject in conversation
with his own disciples and explains to them his real thought concerning
all such matters of rite and ceremony. It is the familiar position which is
summed in the verse — " Out of the heart are the issues of life." He
pillories with like mercilessness the man who makes a kind of forlorn
and ugly religiosity out of having no observances, and as well the man
who makes a very pretentious one of having nothing but observances.
But while these maturer disciples are thus calmly discussing a mat
ter interesting to them, all the time there has been drawing near a poor,
benighted woman, representative of a foreign race, who wants nothing
but the restoration of a lunatic daughter. These good men say • — " Send
her away, she cryeth after us." He was helping them. She begs — " Lord,
help me." Even Jesus seems to hesitate. But it is not from the point
of view from which the disciples had wished her repelled. In his mind
seems to lie again the wonderful reserve which we have spoken of. It
was the thing, which despite the universal meaning of his gospel, kept
him working his few months, or years, among the Jews. The gospel was
for all. But all were not prepared for the gospel. This pagan woman
had no notion of the largeness of the thing he has to give her. He had
almost rather not give to her the thing she asks than to have her seize
that and sink back into the world of those whom he never saw before
40

and would never see again, and who cared nothing for all that he stood
for and longed to confer. And yet the human need is imperious. The
woman's reasoning is compelling. He does the thing she asks. And
who knows how long afterward, or how far removed from him in her
wanderings, this, the larger meaning, may have come to her.

4i

XXXI
PETER'S CONFESSION AT C/ESAREA PHILIPPI
Matt. 16 : 13-20; Mark 8 : 27-30; Luke 9 : 18-21.
Burton and Mathews. P. 152.
Rhees. Section 155.
Despite the reserve which Jesus manifested, he could not be indiffer
ent to the public opinion concerning himself. He asks within the circle
of his own disciples, "Whom do men say that I, the Son of Man am?"
They answered him that some were saying that he was John the Baptist.
It was the opinion of Herod that Jesus was John the Baptist risen from
the dead. Others said he was Elijah, according to the prophecy that
Elijah would come again before the Messianic time. Some said Jeremiah,
whom also one of the Books of Maccabees connected with the expectation.
Still others said, one of the old prophets was risen or a new one had been
sent before the Messiah. The disciples do not quote anyone as cherish
ing the belief that Jesus was himself the Messiah. Then Jesus asks —
"But whom say ye that I am?" Was it possible that the thought which
seems to have been with him from the first had just now taken full pos
session of their minds? Had they until now understood his forbidding
them to say that he was the Messiah to be equivalent to his own declara
tion that he was not ? But Jesus' ardent word, " Blessed art thou, Simon.
Flesh and blood hath not revealed this truth to thee, but my Father
which is in heaven," seems to mean that he himself recognized how
hard would be for any Jew the identification of himself, in his lowli
ness, with one whom they had always thought of as coming in such
pomp and power, and how difficult for them was his own ethical and
spiritual interpretation of the kingdom. From God himself comes
such conviction of the meaning of the moral and spiritual, even as
Jesus felt that he had his own conviction concerning himself from
God. As so often, Peter is the spokesman for the rest. So, also, the
prediction which Jesus, deeply stirred, makes for them all and for the
community which they shall gather, centres upon Peter. He shall be
as a rock of foundation. For this is the key truth of the life of the world.
This truth itself is the key to the Kingdom of Heaven, whether on this
earth or after it. The things of the spirit are supreme. The ethical dis
tinctions can never be escaped. The good man is the Lord and Master.
And the Lord and Master whom they and all the world were looking for
is the good man. But even after revelation of his inmost secret, he bids
them not yet to tell it to all the world.

42

XXXII
JESUS FORETELLS HIS DEATH
Matt. 16 : 21-28; Mark 8 : 31-9 : 1; Luke 9 : 22-27.
Burton -and Mathews, 155, ff.
Rhees. Sections 157-159.
In natural revulsion after this time of exaltation, he speaks out the
first definite forecast of the end- which awaits him. The time of the
first enthusiasm of the people for him had gone by. The fickle popu
lace had been disappointed in him. By their accepted religious leaders
they had been warned against him as a deceiver. The hostility of those
leaders grew more bitter every day. After the controversy with the Je
rusalem Scribes concerning rites and ceremonies, he had undertaken
this little excursion beyond Jewish territory. It had not been successful.
The prediction to Peter showed that his thought was going on beyond
his own life. Even the fact that Peter and some others had penetrated
to his fundamental conception still did not carry with it that they forth
with divested themselves of the visions of success they were indulging.
Their confession of Jesus as the Messiah still did not involve that they
no longer thought in terms of Messianic glories and the like. He must
familiarize them with the thought that the good must suffer. He must
tell them plainly that he, their Master, is not going to escape that law.
They are not going to escape it. If they would escape it, they cannot be
his disciples. How much of the language of this passage, the words about
the actual course of the trial and the cross, Jesus then used, and how far
the precise form of it is a reminiscence after the fact, we cannot be sure.
There is nothing here which was beyond the range of insight. In the
word about the rising on the third day he has appropriated a familiar
phrase for the conviction that his death would not end all. So plain did
he make his meaning that the man whom he had just caused to feel that
God had spoken to him, takes it upon himself to soothe Jesus and to
rebuke him for such views. Quick as a flash Jesus turns on him. The
man whom he had lifted up he puts down. He reminds him that the
spirit of that which is false may possess for a moment others than those
reputed to be possessed. But the "word of the cross" remains. He
repeats it in form which has become immortal and belongs to the pro-
foundest interpretations of existence, " Whosoever will save his life shall
lose it, whosoever will lose his life shall find it. And what shall a man
be profited if hegain the whole world and lose the real life of himself ? "

43

XXXIII
THE TRANSFIGURATION
Matt. 17 : 1-13; Mark 9 : 2-13; Luke 9 : 28-36.
THE DEMONIAC BOY
Matt. 17 : 14-20; Mark 9 : 14-29; Luke 9 : 37-43.
Burton and Mathews, 158-162.
Rhees. Sections 146-147.
It seems natural to connect this event, the transfiguration, with
Jesus' habit of going apart for prayer and reflection. It was in the iso
lation which a mountain offered that he spent the night in prayer before
the choice of the Twelve. The same three intimate friends attend him
here whom we shall see him take apart from the others in Gethsemane.
It is the same matter, the death which he should accomplish at Jeru
salem, which he had spoken of in our last passage, which he has here
on his mind. At least, it is of this that the prophets are represented
speaking. It is the relation of his work to the ancient covenant and the
history of his people which is suggested by the presence of these two,
the impersonations, so to say, the one of the law and the other of the
prophets. And that relation, also, we know that he had often on his mind.
The word which is reported as coming from the clouds, "This is my
beloved Son," plays on what we know was once, and we surmise was
often, a matter of deep and agonizing question in his pure soul. Had he
the right, he, the carpenter of Nazareth, to put himself forth as the Mes
siah, to use all the great words about the Son of God, to be so sure of
what salvation meant, that he could say there dwelt in him the spirit
that would save the world ? That message from the heavens plays, also,
as we know, on the question of the disciples, not all laid aside by their
confession — Was he the Messiah ? They slept with their question, as
they did also on another occasion. But he prayed. As he prayed, the
fashion of his countenance was changed. The veil of what is picturesque
and poetic in the narrative is so- thin that the facts for his soul and ours
seem unmistakable. With the crisis of his life fast coming on, he wrestled
as a man may, to be sure both of what he has claimed in the past and
of what he has yet to do and bear. The sureness came. And the very
first result of this high, calmed spirit in himself was this, that when he
came down to the plain he was able to calm the poor tortured spirit of an
epileptic boy to whom the others had ministered in vain. If the sudden
ness of the transition from that time of exaltation to this painful task
44

startled any, that immediacy of relation is yet a permanent image of our
life. The plain with its pitiful and even petty necessities lies always about
the foot of the mountain of transfiguration. And Jesus said that there
are things on the plain to be done which no man ever does who has not
at some time risen above his plain.

45

XXXIV
JESUS CHRIST AND THE LITTLE CHILD
Matt. Chapter 18; Mark 9 : 33-50; Luke 9 : 46-50.
Burton and Mathews, 163-167.
It seems strange that the men who stood closest to Jesus should have
tried his patience and brought him grief by this recurrent contrasting
themselves one with another and wrangling in petty fashion as to which
of them should be greatest in a kingdom, the very entrance to which,
he had often told them, was that men should be humble and meek. The
whole drift of the religiosity of his nation and of his time had been to the
emphasizing of certain more or less ambitious works which a man must
do, to the magnifying of the things which a man must understand, before
he could be rated as very religious. The antagonism of Jesus to both
of these views has been often misunderstood. It is not as if, with his
praise of the child, he depreciated the maturest labor of a man upon his
own character and the problem of the world, or as if he deemed that a
man was in the way of being particularly good because he was wilfully
ignorant. The quality of Jesus' own performance, whether we think of
his deeds, or of his addition to the world's stock of ideas, ought to rid
us of such misconception. But what he means to say is that while works
and thoughts may be among the fruits of religion, they are not the root
of religion. Religion is at root an attitude of mind. It is an attitude of
mind which has been often beautifully illustrated by some who have
done little of the world's great work and none at all of what the Pharisee
and the ecclesiastic would have called religious works. It is an attitude
of mind which has often been beautifully illustrated by simple people
who knew little of anything and nothing at all of the abstractions of so
called religious knowledge. It is an attitude of mind which in some re
spects resembles that of a child. It is trust and receptivity and expectation.
It is an attitude of hope and of obedience and of love. Jesus must have
known children well enough to know that they have their own faults
like the rest of us. And certainly he to whom religion was the highest
life of man can never have commended it as a form of childishness. But
after all, a child, at his best, is the eternal symbol of something which
in many aspects of it we should all like to be, and of something which
when we are older and hardened, sophisticated, selfish, stained and
loveless, we find it very hard to become.

46

XXXV
JESUS AT THE FEAST OF TABERNACLES
John 7 : 1-52.
Burton and Mathews. Pp. 169-171.
Rhees. Section 162.
We have seen that the tension of the situation had grown great in
Galilee. Jesus had already been moved for a brief time to go outside
its confines into the Syrophcenician country. Now the Synoptists make
him leave Galilee altogether. Mark describes him as going to the coasts
of Judea on the farther side of the Jordan. He devotes but one chapter
to this ministry. Luke, on the other hand, has ten long chapters con
cerning it. The Perean ministry occupies thus more than one-third of his
Gospel, and only at the end of this does the writer join with the other Synop
tists in bringing Jesus to Bethany and Jerusalem. Meanwhile the Fourth
Gospel offers new material relating exclusively to activity in Jerusalem.
This material is in two portions which deal with events grouped about
two feasts, the Feast of the Tabernacles and the Feast of the Dedication.
It cannot easily be assigned to the last days of Jesus' life. It seems best
to introduce this material thus before the Perean ministry, although this
is done with the frankest confession that the chronology presents insuper7
able difficulties. If work had been difficult for Jesus in Galilee, here it
is said that in Jewry they were prepared to kill him. Despite all that,
his brethren urge him to go up to Jerusalem and show himself at the feast.
There is the air of challenge and of disbelief in their whole manner. And
yet they state a truth when they say that no man could do what he was
doing and not bring his matter to an issue in the centre of the nation's
faith and life. He answers merely that his time is not yet come. When
they were gone up to the feast he followed them, going not openly, as they
had urged, but appearing suddenly in the temple, teaching, and then
disappearing again in a way that is dramatic. The plot of the officials
is not ripe against him. The state of the public mind is still such that
they dare not set themselves against it. Jesus is at the height of his influ
ence, in some ways, for the people say, "When Christ cometh shall
he do more miracles than these which this man hath done ? " The officers
say, "Never man spake like this man." The embitterment of the re
ligious leaders deepens. The puzzle that he came out of Galilee besets
them. They completely misunderstood what he said, that he came from
God. Only once, at the very end of the feast, does he rise above all the
fierce wrangling and speak forth with his own clear note and in his truest
element when he cries — " If any man thirst, let him come unto me and
drink." " This he spake," says the Evangelist, " of the Spirit which they
that believed in him should receive." 47

XXXVI
THE WOMAN TAKEN IN ADULTERY
John 7 : 53-8 : 11.
Rhees. Section 163.
This little passage has a curious history which is suggestive of the
manner of growth of our Gospels and the preservation of some scraps
of the tradition. In a large number of manuscripts it is missing alto
gether. In some it stands after the formal conclusion of the Fourth
Gospel as if merely attached to a document in which men did not know
where to place it. In some it stands after the 21st chapter of Luke. It has
even been suggested that it belongs in Mark, chapter 12, between verses
17 and 18. And yet, despite this uncertainty, men seem to have felt that
it was a narrative so much in the spirit and method of Jesus that they
did not like to let it fall. The scene is laid in the temple. That fact alone
may have led ancient copyists to place it here. No one can deny that in
it the characteristic attitude of the Pharisees is once more displayed,
and, as well, Jesus' astuteness in avoiding the dilemma which they had
prepared for him. In searching fashion he brings home their own sins
to those who thus arrogated judgment. When left alone with the woman,
in sublime confidence in what must have been his insight of her purpose
of amendment, he says, "Neither do I condemn thee. Go and sin no
more." Two discourses which follow, one on the light of the world, and one
on the nature of freedom, have no marks by which we can tell the time
or place to which they belong. The antithesis is to the Pharisees and the
discourses are not spoken as if in immediate anticipation of the end of
his life. But themes on which he must have spoken once and again
are here wrought out in a manner which grows almost to be expected
by us in these Johannine dialogues. The contrasts are sharp, the con
flict of the opposing forces of light and darkness, freedom and bondage,
are intense. The darkness is only the deeper because the men deem that
they see and the enslavement only the more fatal because the men are
always harping on their liberty. The passage is a classic one for Jesus'
great idea that so surely is a man made for the good and the true and
these made for man, that he never is really set free save in the mastery
of truth and goodness over him. Or, to put it differently, no man is ever
perfect master of himself until the true and the good has mastered him.

48

XXXVII
THE MAN BORN BLIND
John. Chapter 9.
THE RAISING OF LAZARUS
John, n : 1-46.
Burton and Mathews. Chapter 22 and 25.
Rhees. Sections 171-173.
There is no means of knowing whether the passage about the healing
of the man born blind belongs in the connection of the Feast of Taber
nacles, or in that of the Feast of the Dedication. The whole passage
has its reminder of chapter 5. There, as here, Jesus heals on the Sab
bath day, and the Jews argue that a good man would not thus break
the Sabbath. The others reply that certainly no evil man could do such
works as these. But here Jesus places himself squarely against a notion
with which men have tormented themselves and cruelly misjudged others
even to this day. It is the notion that every misfortune is a divine punish
ment. Of course, the book of Job had been written to offer a noble refu
tation of that notion. All that we can securely say is that the misfortune
gives occasion for the showing forth of the power of God in men's lives,
and not alone in the lives of those who suffer, but in the lives of others
dedicated to the relief of suffering and in the bringing into the world
something which only suffering brings. The passage seems to be elabo
rated to bring out the plain man's directness — " One thing I know, that
whereas I was blind now I see " — in strong contrast with the indirect
ness, the wilful misapprehension and passionate misrepresentation in
dulged in by the religious leaders. We may believe that the fear in which
the man's parents stood and the fate which befell the man himself in his
excommunication, present two traits of the ever deepening opposition
which the work of Jesus met.
The passage about the raising of Lazarus is elaborated in detail far
beyond the story of the raising of the daughter of Jairus, or of that of
the son of the widow of Nain. In the first of these Jesus himself had
said, " The maid is not dead but sleepeth." Here every circumstance
is so related as to exclude apparently all possibility of escape from the
meaning which possessed the author and carried with it his own mani
fest and full conviction. One can say only that it represents the full
flowering of the belief which may itself have originated in some sim
plest and most natural fashion, the belief that the power of the Master
49

knew not even this one last limit which had seemed set to the powers
of all. With our thoughts upon the few parts of the narrative which
deal merely with the idea of the continued life of the spirit, we make
all the rest symbolical. Fairness compels us to say that the author
never intended the story to be taken in that way.

So

XXXVIII
DEPARTURE FROM GALILEE
Matt. 19 : 1-2; Mark 10 : 1; Luke 9 : 51-62.
MISSION OF THE SEVENTY
Matt. 11 : 20-30; Luke 10 : 1-24.
Burton and Mathews. Chapter 21.
Rhees, 166-171.
In the Fourth Gospel the profound impression made by the raising
of Lazarus brings the chief priests and Pharisees together to take counsel
and to determine what they will do concerning Jesus. " If we let him
alone," they say, " the Romans will come and take away both our place
and nation." One of the priests, Caiaphas, in the most cynical manner,
plays upon a mysterious detail of the Messianic expectation, and de
clares that it is expedient that one man should die for the people and not
that the whole nation should perish. " Therefore Jesus walked no more
openly among the Jews, but went thence into a country near to the wil
derness into a city called Ephraim."
We recall that at the point at which we broke off with the synoptic
narrative Jesus was taking his departure for the country east of the
Jordan, because it was no longer possible for him to work even in Gal
ilee. We may therefore take up the thread of the synoptic narrative again
without any attempt at harmonizing that narrative with the events to
which we have just referred. Nor does the passage in Luke's Gospel,
with which we have now for a time mainly to do, give us assurance as to
the order of events. But the single verse at the beginning (Luke 9:5) —
"And it came to pass that when the time was come that he should be
received up, he steadfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem " — gives the
whole long episode the aspect, not of a mere retreat from difficulties, and
not of a mere selection of a new field since the old ones were shut against
him, but rather of a slow fulfilment of a purpose which henceforth actu
ates all his life. He will go to Jerusalem, will bring his cause to an issue
and will meet what may be in store for him. He approaches one town
of the Samaritans and the inhabitants would not receive him, because his
face was as if he would go to Jerusalem. He sends out seventy of his
disciples, two and two, to every village whither he himself would come.
Where these towns were Luke does not say. The instructions given to
his missionaries are not unlike those given earlier to the Twelve. By and
by as the Seventy return to him they tell him of all they have been able
5i

to achieve. Jesus, contrasting their simplicity and devotion with the
attitude toward him of so many of the wise and of those whose high
station made them calculating, bursts out with the observation, so often
verified, that deep things are often hidden from some whom you would
confidently expect to have perceived them, while, on the other hand, they
are obvious to the veriest child.

52

XXXIX
PARABLE OF THE GOOD SAMARITAN
Luke 10 : 25-37.
IN BETHANY
Luke 10 : 38-42.
Burton and Mathews. Pp. 179-181.
To the question which, in one form or another, seems often to have
met him, namely, which was the great commandment of the law, such
that if a man obeyed it he should have the right to eternal life, Jesus
gathered all of the divine requirement into the two injunctions of the
love of God and of the love of man. Nothing could have been more
characteristic of the legalist than this assumption that all goodness
could be reduced to rule. To the man who obeyed that rule the attain
ment of the felicities appended was the merest matter of right. No
thing could be more characteristic of Jesus than the transfer of the whole
problem from the realm of calculating conduct, to the realm of the devout
and generous affections from which noble conduct flows. The happiness
is not appended as reward to that state of mind. It is that state of mind, or
rather, that state of mind is the heavenly reward-. The lawyer would still
shield himself from the too wide demand to love his neighbor, by ask
ing for a definition. Jesus would show that no man may pretend to love
who does not do the works of love. And real love is called out by need
and not limited by definitions. It is not without significance that the
two worthies who are represented as hurrying by, leaving the wounded
man to his fate while they go to their devotions, are a priest and a Levite.
The man who has mercy on him is a despised Samaritan. To men of
that former class Jesus said, "The publicans and harlots go into the
kingdom of God before you." At the end of the parable, he most adroitly
puts the lawyer's question in a different shape. He has not made a
number of the earth's miserable ones to pass before the lawyer that he
may decide whom he will deign to befriend. He has made a number
of men like the lawyer to pass before one miserable man. He asks,
"Which now was the friend?"
If the passage Luke 10 : 38-42, were in the right place one would
need to infer that Jesus' journey had brought him at this time almost
to Jerusalem. It is more probable that the story is but a reminiscence
of one of many visits which Jesus made at this house in Bethany, but
that all nearer recollection of this time and circumstance is lost. It is
S3

the emphasis upon the inward life which Jesus offers. But certainly
something far different is meant from that preference of the contempla
tive life over the active, the monastic over the secular, which the Middle
Ages often argued from this clause.

54

XL
PRAYER
Luke ii : 1-13.
PARALLELS OF SERMON ON THE MOUNT
Luke n : 14-12 : 59.
Burton and Mathews. Chapter 23.
If the events noted in the last lesson and the teachings which they
called forth from Jesus had laid stress upon conduct as the evidence
of one's purpose and the fruit of love, the request of the disciples at
the beginning of this nth chapter leads us back into the deepest things
of the spirit again. As he was praying, when he had ceased, one of his
disciples said unto him, " Lord, teach us to pray." The Lord's Prayer,
which follows, is one of the treasures of the tradition concerning Jesus.
The questioners must have been asking for a form of prayer which they
could repeat. Praying was no new thing to them, then first to be taught.
But we know how lightly Jesus would have held to any formulary or
had them hold to it. We know how surely his effort would have been to
give them an example, one simple and fitting expression of the spirit
which should animate all prayer. But the very comments which he here
makes show how wide a meaning he attaches to prayer as the whole
attitude of life, the whole direction given to one's spirit. It is communion
with God, whether the expression of that fellowship be in words or in an
endeavor which leaves us little time for words, or again, in our submis-
siveness when the loved task has been taken out of the hands. Spon
taneity and sincerity are the very life of the thing. And yet no one knew
better than did Jesus that in this, as in all else that is great in life, routine,
habit, practice is the secret of our real entrance into the meaning of that
which we do.
No one can read these chapters, the nth and the 12th, without seeing
how much of what Matthew has given us as the Sermon on the Mount,
Luke has embodied in quite different order, and sometimes with quite
different turn of meaning in one or several addresses given in the east
Jordan land. And again, there are places in these chapters where his
divergence from the Pharisees reaches almost the point of bitterness
which we have witnessed in the discourses in the Gospel according to
John. The whole contrast of this free, reasonable, human spirit, with
its joy in man's life and its trustful intuition concerning God, is brought
out as against the narrowness, the bondage to the letter, the inhumanity
along with the fanaticism and fear, of those men who yet passed for the
representatives of all that was best in the religion of their day.
55

XLI
THE PHARISEES AND HEROD
Luke 13 : 1-35.
Burton and Mathews. Chapter 23.
That the class of men of whom we have just been speaking are re
jecting the counsel of God concerning themselves, Jesus seeks to make
clear through the parables of the fig tree, Luke 13 : 6, and through that
of the supper, Luke 14 : 16 f. The men of whom everything was to be
expected disappointed that expectation. Their very opportunities but
confirmed them in their conceit and indolence. Their attitude toward
those outside of their own nation and faith, and even toward those who
did not chance to share their own interpretation of that faith, was one
of arrogance and insolence. Meantime, those concerning whom, in their
view, there was no hope and who could hardly have been induced to
believe that there was any hope for themselves, possessed in their humil
ity and their willingness the secret of the mind upon which the blessing
of God could be conferred. Pharisees come and say to him, " Get thee
out and depart hence for Herod will kill thee." We have not been accus
tomed to thinking of the Pharisees as charging themselves much with
the safety of Jesus. They may have been seeking merely to occasion
him fear and discomfort. Jesus' answer betrays that he himself did
not regard his mission in that part of the world as of long duration.
He uses the proverbial expression, the third day, to mean presently.
"Go tell that fox, behold, I cast out devils and do cures to-day and
to-morrow and the third day I shall be perfected." His insight teaches
him that there is no fear of his perishing by the way. The religious
centre of his nation is calling him in this strange way, just as he, the
central religious figure of his time, has been always in his inmost heart
calling to Jerusalem. "It is not possible that a prophet should perish
out of Jerusalem." All the patriotism and the holy hope of his life-time
break out in that cry. " Oh, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets
and stonest them that are sent unto thee, how often would I have gath
ered thy children together." He quotes a verse of the n 8th Psalm which
may have lain in his mind as meaning that Jerusalem would some day
in her grief be compelled to recognize him, the Messiah, in his triumph.
Strangely enough the Evangelists make that very same verse to be
shouted by the multitudes at the beginning of the passion week: —
"Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord."

56.

XLII
AT SIMON'S TABLE
Luke 14 : 1-24.
SEEKING THE LOST
Luke. Chapter 15.
DIVES AND LAZARUS
Luke 16 : 19-31.
Burton and Mathews. Chapter 24.
The gathering of the publicans and sinners to hear Jesus called forth,
as it had often done before, the carping objection of the Pharisee : —
"This man receiveth sinners and eateth with them." This is the kind
of man, whom Jesus described as a whited sepulchre, who is yet so un
conscious of his own true state that he would have deemed himself much
defiled had he by any chance come in contact with one of these outcasts
of society, no matter how contrite or aspiring. That he should deliberately
seek the society of such was inconceivable. Intent on saving himself,
he cared nothing for others. If he sought society, it would have been
of those only who were assuredly saving themselves in his own Pharisaic
fashion. To all of which Jesus replies with three parables arranged here
in most artistic fashion to express the idea that the divine thing in life
is to be the means of saving others. The very thing which constitutes
the challenge to God and to God's servants, is a man's need of being
saved. A shepherd has an hundred sheep. A woman has ten pieces of
silver. A father has two sons. And because one is lost, all attention is
concentrated on that one. Perhaps Jesus has not anywhere expressed
so perfectly his interpretation of his own life, and his sense that in spend
ing his life as he did he was at one with God. Certainly he has nowhere
else expressed so perfectly his idea of the real relation of man and God
and of the meaning of being lost and saved.
In the parable of Dives and Lazarus, the disposition of Luke to
sharpen the antithesis between the rich and the poor and to assert too
simply the relation between riches and badness, on the one hand, and
poverty and goodness, on the other, is manifest. To Dives in his pain
it is retorted, "Son, remember that thou in thy life time receivedst thy
good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things. Now he is comforted
and thou art tormented." The whole vision of the lower world is of the
57.

form familiar in the late Jewish Apocalyptic. The Evangelist's own acute
sense of social differences is here in the foreground as over against the
profound moral sense of Jesus which recognized that a rich man, even
in the midst of all his riches, may be as pitiable an object as a poor man.
Even he is not shut out from the love of God. On the other hand, the
poor man is not saved by his poverty, but rather by the moral qualities
which he must gain and keep in the midst of that poverty.

58

XLIII
TEN LEPERS CLEANSED
Luke 17 : n-19.
COMING OF THE KINGDOM
Luke 17 : 20-18 : 8.
Burton and Mathews. Chapter 26. .
Again it is said of Jesus, Luke 17 : n, that as he went to Jerusalem
he passed through Samaria and Galilee. Never from this whole period
is wanting this forward look. He is completing the circuit of his country.
He is using his time to best advantage. But it is always as if he were
but waiting for the call to go up to the city where all things concerning
him were to be fulfilled. He enters into a certain Samaritan or Galilean
village and cleanses ten lepers, presumably not all of them aliens,
although the common misery of their lot and the hostility of society had
brought them close together. But again the old contrast comes out.
They seize what he has given them as if it was their own right. Only
one shows receptivity in larger measure and sees greater things which
Jesus might still give him, a cleansing in his moral nature of which the
healing of his body was but type. And he is described as " this stranger "
— Samaritan again in all probability, outcast of Galilee at the most.
The question of the Pharisees as to when the Kingdom of God should
come, and by what signs they should know its coming, gave him the
chance to say a most characteristic thing: — "The Kingdom of God
cometh not with observation. Neither shall men say lo here, lo there,
the Kingdom of God is within you." How far the men of Jesus' time
entered into the full meaning of that might be difficult to say. How far
Jesus himself, with all of his emphasis upon the ethical and spiritual,
yet held the old Messianic expectation in some form of culmination,
definite ending of an old dispensation and beginning of a new, might be
very difficult to say. It is certain that the Evangelists themselves do not
come entirely into the clear as between these two thoughts. The result
is that whole discourses out of this time in Jesus' life bear the apocalyptic
cast. This material occupies parts of but two chapters here in Luke.
But in Matthew material of this sort is scattered through six chapters,
and not a little of it is given as uttered at Jerusalem. It is often puzzling
to us because the two sets of ideas alluded to are not clearly distin
guished. And much of the Jewish imagery, so familiar and intelligible to
Jesus' hearers, seems remote and strange to us. It cannot be made out
with certainty how much of this material may have received the form
in which it has come down after the destruction of Jerusalem.
59

XLIV
THE RICH YOUNG RULER
Matt. 19 : 16-20 : 16; Mark 10 : 17-31.
AMBITION OF JAMES AND JOHN
Mark 10,: 35-43; Matt. 20 : 20-28.
Burton and Mathews. Pp. 209, ff.
When we think of the general tenor of the Gospel, it is impossible for
us to believe that Jesus meant, in this counsel given to the rich young
ruler, to lay down a universal principle of the renunciation of property,
or to set the devotion to himself in direct contradiction with the fulfil
ment of the function which naturally would fall to such a man in the
civil, the social or the economic world. The principle that the Gospel
is a spirit for the permeation of the whole life of man, that the follower
of Jesus has his mission in the world, that the civil, social and economic
life of mankind is to share in the hallowing which the Gospel brings, this
all is too well established that we should draw such sweeping inference
from one word. The crisis in Jesus' own affairs at that moment or,
perhaps, something in the character and condition of that man, may
have made this the true counsel to be given then to him. Nor does it
follow that Jesus makes a less demand of us, even if it be clear that
ordinarily he makes a different demand. Always the peril which riches
and power may constitute, the way in which these things may prevent a
man's giving himself to the highest things in life, the demoralizing effect
of ease, the certainty that a man who sets his heart on these things will
not have heart enough for some other things — these truths are every
day made plain to us.
The passage in Mark's Gospel (10 : 32 ff.) is almost dramatic in its
intensity. The disciples were in the way with him going up to Jerusalem
and they were amazed, and as they followed after him they were afraid.
The shadow of coming events was upon him. In his high resolve, it
must have been more than usually painful that the old petty wrangle
about being great should have broken out again. He takes occasion
once more, with sublime patience, to explain to them the meaning of
greatness as he conceived it, the greatness of service. In the realm of
which he thought' nothing was to be given away after the manner of
Oriental despots in their favoritism. Everything was to be earned. But
nothing could prevent the man who was the greatest servant of men
from being the greatest man in the sight of God. Even the Son of Man
came not to be ministered unto but to minister and to give his life a
ransom for many. 60

XLV
THE BLIND MAN NEAR JERICHO. ZACCH_EUS
Matt. 20 : 29-34; Mark 10 : 46-52; Luke 18 : 35-43; Luke 19 : 1-10.
PARABLE OF THE POUNDS
Luke 19 : 11-28.
ANOINTING IN BETHANY
Matt. 26 : 6-13; Mark 14 : 3-9; John 12 : 1-9.
Burton and Mathews. P. 212 and chapter 28.
Rhees. Sections 174-176.
With the approach to Jericho Jesus and his companions may be said
to be entering upon the last stage of his prolonged journey to Jerusalem.
Jericho is in the Jordan valley, five miles west of the river and north of
the Dead Sea, about 500 feet above the level of that sea.
Once more it is a publican from whom Jesus sees fit to accept the
restitution, four-fold, of that part of his fortune which he had gained
dishonestly and the dedication of the half of the remainder to charity,
as an index of a repentant mind. Once be believes in the man's turning
away from his evil courses, Jesus is not disturbed by the man's previous
ill repute or by the self-righteous attitude of those who would have barred
the way to him. He declares that the secret of the recovery of his char
acter and the reconstruction of his life is already with Zacchaeus.
Luke introduces the parable of the pounds with the explanation that
because Jesus was near to Jerusalem some thought that the Kingdom
of God would immediately appear. The gist of the parable is an admoni
tion to faithfulness, each man in his own place and way, even if the
coming of the kingdom should be delayed. The parable is quite in
Jesus' manner and urges diligence in the routine of daily life as opposed
to the excited expectation and neglect of duty into which too ardent
people tended to fall, especially when they misunderstood what the
coming of the kingdom meant. It is possible that the parable is the
same with that of the talents which Matthew places even nearer to the
end of Jesus' life.
So also, there are elements of resemblance in this story of the anointing
of Jesus at the hands of Mary in the house in Bethany, to that of the
anointing in the house of Simon, to which allusion was made in a previ
ous paragraph. These cause us to wonder if two events so similar did
61

occur in Jesus' life. Yet differences in the two tales are manifest. The
identification of this woman with Mary of Bethany in the Fourth Gospel
is positive. The cupidity of Judas was excited and his hypocrisy is dis
played. It is a new light of Jesus, his accepting homage thus. Yet we
admit his contention that even in the midst of a world of pain an act of
transcendent devotion to the ideal elements of life may have its place.
This was a house which was blessed, as perhaps no other had been, by
Jesus' frequent presence in it. Jerusalem is barely out of sight of Bethany
on the way from Jericho. Bethany is fittingly the last resting-place before
his triumph and his trial began.

62

XLVI
PALM SUNDAY
THE ENTRANCE INTO JERUSALEM
Matt. 21 : i-n ; Mark n : i-n ; Luke 19 : 29-44 ; John 12 : 12-19.
Burton and Mathews. Chapter 29.
Rhees. Sections 177-179.
We have assumed that Jesus, up to this point, refrained from public
announcement of himself as the Messiah. The time has now come when
he deems that he must throw off all disguise. He goes up on one of the
feast days from Bethany to Jerusalem where the crowds were already
beginning to assemble for the passover. The religious enthusiasm was
at its height. All three of the Synoptists credit him with explicit arrange
ments for the fulfilment in his own procedure of a most conspicuous
Messianic prophecy. It was the prophecy of Zachariah about the King
coming meek and riding upon an ass. Jesus could indeed thus empha
size the peaceful nature of the sovereignty he claimed. But the act could
not be interpreted otherwise than as a claim of sovereignty. Even the
disciples themselves seem to have regarded the act as the concession to
them that they might now at last proclaim him the Messiah. They put
their garments on the ass and set him upon these. The multitudes
spread their garments in the way. They cut down branches of the trees
and strewed them in the way. This was the manner in which one did
homage to a royal personage. And when presently the disciples began
to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice and say — " Blessed is the
Kingdom that cometh, the Kingdom of our Father David" — they seem,
for the moment, to have swept the whole multitude with them. It was
a public proclamation of that which had been his own inmost thought,
such as Jesus never had permitted to himself or others. When the
Pharisees bid him rebuke his disciples, instead of rebuking them, he
accepts all that they have said and declares that if these should hold
their peace the very stones would cry out.
We cannot make it real to ourselves that Jesus, who had shown such
amazing poise and such sound judgment, indulged, at this moment, the
hallucination that all the length and breadth of his divergence from the
popular notion of the Messiah would, then and there, be accepted, that
his interpretation of the kingdom would be approved, or that he thought
• that he had but to show himself in this fashion to have the pure hearted
gather to him in masses and aid him in the fulfilment of his plans. The
Third Gospel makes him, in this very moment, as he drew near the
63

city, weep over it, and cry out in passionate grief and yearning — " If
thou hadst known, even thou in this thy day, the things which belong
unto peace." Then he indulges in a most remarkable forecast of the
destruction which the enemies of the city will bring upon it. If we really
believed that in this Palm Sunday episode Jesus had intended to win
men by spectacle and, so to say, to carry them by storm, we should have
to think of him as abandoning the principle of inwardness and spiritual
conquest, of moral triumphs, for which all his life he had stood. He
fully expects to die. But he is not willing to be dragged to death an
unwilling victim, an insignificant offender. He is not willing to go to
death concealing that which thus far he has concealed in order that
he might have a little time to live and work. He will bring the thing
to the most open issue, and then he will abide what comes. We have
before expressed the opinion that the episode of the cleansing of the
temple belongs here in the place to which the Synoptists assign it rather
than at the beginning of the ministry as John records.

64

XL VII
A DAY OF TEACHING AND OF DISPUTE IN THE
TEMPLE. POPULARITY
JESUS' AUTHORITY CHALLENGED
Matt. 21 : 23-27 ; Mark n : 27-33 '¦> Luke 20 : 1-8.
PARABLES OF WARNING
Matt. 21 : 28-22 : 46.
Burton and Mathews. Chapter 30.
Rhees. Sections 180-188.
It is not certain to what days we are to assign the events of this last
week of Jesus' life. It is not sure that the entrance to Jerusalem took
place on the first day of the week, the Christian Sunday, but that seems
probable. The cleansing of the temple would then perhaps be assigned
to Monday, after Jesus had spent the night in Bethany. The night after
the cleansing of the temple, Monday to Tuesday, he would seem to
have spent, not in Bethany, but in the open air in the seclusion of the
Mount of Olives. The long series of disputes and discourses may belong
to both Monday and Tuesday. They may even be extended to Wednes
day. Or we may think the day Wednesday as one of inactivity and seclu
sion. It seems clear that the last supper falls on Thursday evening.
After that supper and the parting words of Jesus to his disciples, he had
intended to go out into the Mount of Olives and spend this night also in
the garden there. Before daylight, Friday, he seems to have been arrested
and brought before the high priest.
After the triumphal entry and the temple cleansing, we are not sur
prised that the chief priests came unto him as he was teaching and said
unto him — "By what authority doest thou these things?" He replies
by asking them a question concerning John. The multitude, at that
moment, was so thoroughly with Jesus that the priests did-riot dare to
provoke the people by answering as otherwise they might have done.
In all the teaching of these next few days, while he beards his enemies
in their very stronghold, he yet counts upon the people and is safe in their
support. The three parables which he seems to have uttered to the very
faces of the dignitaries, that of the son who promised to go and work
in his father's vineyard and went not, that of the husbandman who killed
the heir, and that of the marriage feast which the invited guests treated
with indifference and contempt, have no meaning save to make clear
.65

to the representatives of the nation their rejection of God's purpose.
The Pharisees ask him the question about paying tribute to Caesar, the
Sadducees the one about the law of levirate marriage. There is no
meaning in either question except the desire to get ground of accusation
against Jesus before the government, or to let loose upon him the mob
in its fanaticism. Jesus evades their cunning. His real answer is a
denunciation in such bitterness as has rarely fallen from human lips.
As he passed out from the temple, on one of these days, he called
attention of his disciples to its massive foundations and uttered the
prophecy that the time was coming when not one stone should be left
upon another. In the midst of the long discourse on the end of the
world which follows, occurs that passage of extraordinary originality,
Jesus' Vision of Judgment, in which he makes the judgment to turn,
not upon monstrous crimes as in Homer or Dante, but upon the things
which men do or leave undone, without being conscious of them. These
are the things which reveal what men are. " Inasmuch as ye did it not
unto one the least of these, ye did it not unto me."

66

XLVIII
THE CONSPIRACY BETWEEN THE CHIEF PRIESTS AND
JUDAS
Matt. 26 : 1-5, 14-16 ; Mark 14 : 1-2 ; 10-n ; Luke 22 : 1-6.
Burton and Mathews. P. 241.
Luke says, at the end of the narrative of the discourses on the destruc
tion, that, every day, Jesus had been in the temple. Every night he
went out and lodged on the mount that is called the Mount of Olives.
All the people came early in the morning to hear him. What we have
described, therefore, must have been the occupation of some days. Of
Wednesday we seem to have no record whatever. But at some time not
far from the end of these three days, the chief priests and scribes entered
into their conspiracy with Judas Iscariot, one of the Twelve.
They, on their part, had been anxiously debating how they might
put a stop to this teaching of Jesus which was becoming intolerable
to them. The sting of what Jesus had said concerning themselves was
bitter. Jerusalem was crowded at this season with that element of the
people which was most zealous for the fulfilment of the Messianic hope.
There was no knowing what might happen if Jesus were to lend himself
to the leadership of this crowd. On the other hand, there was no knowing
what might happen if in the priests' effort to get rid of Jesus the populace
should rise up in his defence. With what surprise, or, at all events, with
what relief in their perplexity, must it have come to them that one of
Jesus' intimate circle was only waiting for an opportunity to betray his
Master into their hands.
Judas, on his part, had undergone a revulsion from his former loyalty
of which we cannot know the secret. Jesus must have chosen this man
with high hope of him. The man must have entered Jesus' service with
a high intent. How long he had been now in hidden treason is concealed.
That he was covetous we know. But thirty pieces of silver appears so
despicably small a price. Was the price only a blind ? Was the real intent
that of a mistaken but still faithful man who would force his Master to
play the Messiah's r61e at last ? That seems too artificial. Was he merely
like a great many other Jews? He had come to Jesus believing in an
obscure way that Jesus was the Messiah. Jesus had never been able
to win him over to his own sublime ethical and spiritual notion of what
being Messiah meant. Judas still clung to the dreams of the magnifi
cence in which Messiah's best friends would share. The selfishness
with which, after all, he had come to Jesus was disappointed. He grew
bitter and revengeful in his disappointment. All the unworldly qualities
67

which the Master showed seemed to this worldling hateful. The good in
Jesus was the ruin of Judas exactly as it was the salvation of the rest.
Be this as it may. Here was a man who showed to the Jews that the
circle of Jesus was broken. Who could tell how many more of his fol
lowers might be in defection from him? Judas gave the priests the
courage of their task.

68

XLIX
THE FOOT-WASHING. THE FAREWELL DISCOURSES
John. Chapters 13, 14, 15, 16, 17.
Burton and Mathews. Chapter 33.
Rhees. Sections 189-195.
It seems not to admit of doubt that Jesus died on Friday, the 14th of
Nisan, before the hour of the killing of the paschal lamb, and before
the participation of the Jews in the solemn feast. Not only is this the
clear testimony of the Fourth Gospel. It is the incidental testimony
of the Synoptists themselves. Speaking of the evening of the burial,
Mark says that " it was the preparation, that is the day before the Sab
bath." And Luke, telling of Joseph's laying the body of Jesus in the
tomb, says that "it was the day of the preparation and the Sabbath
drew on." Had Jesus really eaten the Jewish Feast of the Passover
as the Synoptists imply, then the priests would have broken the Sabbath
by their own sitting in judgment of Jesus on the Sabbath. They would
be represented as clamoring that Pilate should desecrate that holiest
of all Sabbaths by ordering a public execution on that day and them
selves attending that execution. Their narrative is thus not at one with
itself. We have uniformly followed the data of the Synoptics in questions
of this sort. It is with some surprise that we convince ourselves that, on
this point, the Fourth Gospel has preserved the true statement of the case.
It was "before the feast of the Passover," therefore, as John says,
that Jesus, knowing that he came from God and went to God, gathered
together his disciples, partook of an evening meal with them, and gave
in the symbolic act of the foot-washing, the last perfect illustration of
his principle of greatness by service. The Synoptists, on the other hand,
describe the institution of the Lord's Supper after the paschal meal.
They append to the Passover apparently the new memorial of Christ's
body broken and of his blood shed for the remission of men's sins.
John has not this account of the institution of the Supper. To the story
of the Supper which preceded the foot-washing, John appends those
marvellous chapters, beginning, "Let not your heart be troubled," the
passage in which Jesus has expressed in such perfectness the intuition of
immortality and which ends with the only longer prayer of Jesus which
has been preserved to us. No more perfect symbol could be imagined
of the life which he himself had led than that which Jesus here, in
washing his disciples' feet, has given. No more perfect illustration could
be given of the spirit in which he would have them live their lives. The
Synoptists describe the Lord's Supper and interpret the custom which
69

grew out of it as the sacrament of the community of life between God
and man, of God's life given to man. This Johannine sacrament sets
forth that which a man may do with the life which he has from God,
namely, live it out in simplest service of men. At the end of the record of
this discourse and prayer, the Fourth Gospel makes Jesus to go out
over the brook Kedron into the garden precisely as after the Lord's
Supper the Synoptists lead him to Gethsemane.

7°

THE LAST SUPPER
Matt. 26 : 17-35; Mark 14 : 12-31; Luke 22 : 7-38.
Burton and Mathews. Chapter ^^-
Rhees. Sections 193-195.
We felt obliged to conclude that Jesus did not eat the Passover meal
with his disciples. We must interpret certain traits of the synoptic nar
rative as having found place in it after this confusion had arisen. Yet
it is clear that this synoptic narrative has enshrined the recollection
of a last solemn meal which Jesus did eat with his disciples on the night
before he suffered. Whether or not he still thought that he might live
through the morrow, at all events the whole meaning of the nation's
festival would inevitably be present to his mind. The symbolic inter
pretation of that festival in the light of his own meaning would lie very
near at hand. The Johannine narrative makes Judas to have been
present at the foot-washing, and to have gone out immediately there
after. Only after he is gone does Jesus open his soul in the discourse
of the 14th and following chapters. So also in the narrative of the
Synoptists, Jesus declares to the whole circle of the disciples that one
of their number shall betray him. Overwhelmed, they ask, one and
another, "Lord, is it I?" Even Judas has the hardihood to say,
"Rabbi, is it I?" Jesus answers, "Thou hast said." There was no
more place for Judas in that company.
Then first may have come to Jesus the full certainty that Judas'
purpose would be fulfilled that very night. Both what he said and what
he did would receive a new aspect from that moment. The conduct of
Judas has shaken him so deeply that he is put upon warning one other
of his disciples, the confident, truly loving Peter, lest he, too, in the
dark hour coming, may be tempted to do something in its way like
that which Judas has done. To the man's asseveration that he is ready
to go with him to death, the Master answers, " The cock shall not crow
until thou shalt have denied me thrice." But even so, the man's faith
and love will hold. God's love will hold him.
The broken bread suggests his own broken body. The wine, a little
of it deliberately spilt on the ground before friends drank together, is
made a vivid image of the blood he is prepared to shed. And these two
simple things, ready to hand, the commonest elements when men come
together to a friendly meal, are made the symbols of his suffering, and
of their deliverance by his suffering, for their sakes. He plays upon the
thought of a new covenant of God with them in some way parallel to
7i

the old covenant with their fathers, and the deliverance out of Egypt
which the Passover called to mind. Paul, in a letter older than any of our
Gospels, makes it clear that at the time of his writing Christians were
wont thus to interpret the oft-repeated act, " As oft as ye eat this bread
and drink this cup ye do show forth the Lord's death till he come."

72

LI
GETHSEMANE AND THE ARREST
Matt. 26 : 30-57; Mark 14 : 26-52; Luke 22 : 39-53.
Burton and Mathews. Chapter 34.
Rhees. Sections 196-199.
When they had sung a hymn they went out into the Mount of Olives.
Jesus had said to Judas, "That thou doest do quickly." So here, there
is no delaying, no effort to escape. He goes to the old familiar places
in the garden where Judas can easily find him. It is not certain that
if Jesus had fled his enemies would have pursued him. Such a flight
would have put an end to Jesus' pretensions and ruined his reputation.
But it would have saved his foes much embarrassment. It is probable
that they, blackening his name with scorn, would have counted the
affair well ended. But he never harbored the thought. " For this cause
came I to this hour," he says. Yet he does not escape human anguish.
It was not fear of death which possessed him, but the sense of a work
undone, of his followers whom he must leave alone. It is that the people
over whom he has yearned treat him like a common criminal. It is the
momentary sense of defeat. It comes to be almost the feeling of being
deserted of God. He prays — " If it be possible let this cup pass from
me. Yet, not as I will, but as thou wilt." The one prayer is as true as
the other. He stands on a footing with God where he may say the first.
But his God knows that his real meaning finds utterance in the second.
Only less painful than betrayal was the fact that the three whom he loved
could sleep while he strove.
It seems to have been only a rough band whom the priests had sent
after him, temple police or something of that sort. But they were armed
and in some numbers. It was possible, of course, that Jesus' adherents
would fight or that the populace in the streets might try to rescue him.
But of resistance there appears to have been practically no thought
among Jesus' followers. There seems to have been no difficulty in Judas'
approach to Jesus to bestow the kiss upon the Master which he had
made the sign. There was no effort to arrest any of Jesus' followers.
Jesus himself requested that they should be let go. Almost as if they
had been children, they forsook him and fled. Jesus was led away to
the house of the High Priest Caiaphas. Every indication is of haste.
The business must be. finished before sundown, or else it must go over
until after the feast days were passed. The priestly party could not
view this latter course without concern. Yet with all of their haste,
they seem to have been anxious that the forms of law should be preserved.
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So only could the fury of the populace be avoided. They must later have
thought that they had over-rated the popular leaning to Jesus' side.
Pilate, the Procurator, was present in the city, prepared, no doubt, for
any slightest sign of tumult. They even went through the empty formality
of bringing Jesus, first of all, before Annas, the deposed high priest,
Caiaphas' father-in-law. The devoutest Jews said a high priest could
not be deposed. Annas had performed no priestly function for years.
The son-in-law was the last man to regret that. But the pious fiction
must be maintained.

74

LII
THE EXAMINATION BEFORE THE HIGH PRIEST
Matt. 26 : 57-27 : 10; Mark 14 : 53-72; Luke 22 : 54-71; John 18:
12-27.
Burton and Mathews. P. 259, f.
Rhees. Section 199.
The Sanhedrin seems to have come together before day. It is possible
that the mandate for its assembling went out at the very time of Judas'
departure with the guard to make the arrest. But the members do not
seem fully to have determined what accusation they were going to bring
against Jesus. That he had assailed the traditional religion both in its
dogmas and in its practices could not be doubted. It was the Sanhedrin's
function to pass upon such matters. But to prove some specific thing
which, then, they could present before the Procurator in such fashion
as to gain from him a sentence of death, was the task. It would not be
easy to prove that Jesus had committed any crime. That he had com
mitted some sin against their religion would not be likely to interest
Pilate. He knew very well what frenzied differences of opinion existed
among them. If he were called to take sides, Pilate might only too easily
take the side of the people against the priests whom he despised.
Once again, as at the beginning of the machinations against Jesus,
it is Caiaphas who has a clear purpose. If he cannot find anything
incriminating against Jesus, he will make him incriminate himself.
He will force Jesus himself to speak the word, which if he will speak,
all the rest will be plain. The high priest stands forth, and in all the
majesty of his office he cries, " I adjure thee by the living God that thou
tell us plainly whether thou be the Christ or no." He must have known
beyond peradventure that Jesus would not deny it. But if he, this
despised Galilean, this friend of sinners and breaker of Sabbaths, should
proclaim to the face of God's high priest that he was that half-divine
being whose coming in inconceivable glory the nation hoped, was not
this the most appalling blasphemy ? And would it not be easy to bring -
this claim of Jesus before Pilate in such fashion as to make him feel
that the claim to Messianic kingship involved a danger to the Roman
state? This was precisely what happened. Jesus' answer, "Thou
sayest," was the signal for an outburst of fury among these ecclesiastics.
" What need have we of further testimony ? What think ye ? " cried the
priest, as he rent his clothes. " He is worthy of death," the mob declared.
Blasphemy was a capital offense under the Mosaic law. Stoning was
the punishment. In the old days, there would have been no long delay
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about its execution. Now, however, the Procurator had to intervene.
Power of life and death Rome reserved to herself.
Meantime, and before the high priest's decision had been reached,
we may assume, the disciple whom Jesus loved had found his way into
the palace. Peter had followed him not far off. He stood warming him
self by the fire. He believed himself unknown. In a few brief moments,
at the bantering word of a serving maid, all that his Lord had warned
him of, all that he had so strenuously declared impossible, befell him.
" Then began he to curse and swear, I know not the man." Yet it is not
for nothing that this man is, of all Christ's disciples, the one best known
to us, best loved of us, and from whom men, both the best and the worst,
have gathered hope.

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LIII
THE TRIAL BEFORE PILATE
Matt. 27 : n-31; Mark 15 : 1-20; Luke 23 : 1-25; John 18 : 28-
19 : 16a.
Burton and Mathews, 262 f. esp. 263.
The next step was obvious. Jesus must be brought before the gov
ernor. The priestly party must ask that Pilate will order the carrying
out of the sentence they had passed. Jesus must have been led across
almost the whole breadth of the fortified portion of the city to the palace.
It was still early in the day. There is every probability in the declaration
of John's Gospel that in anticipation of the feast the priests would not
go into the palace. The hearing seems to have taken place in an enclosed
court, from which, more than once, Pilate is represented coming out
to speak to the waiting accusers and the multitude. It might well be
doubted whether the Roman would feel himself called upon to take sides
in a fierce dispute of Jewish parties concerning a religious matter, or to
lend himself and the majesty of the state to the carrying out of the will
of the ecclesiastics who happened to have the upper hand. It must be
made to appear to the Procurator that Jesus' arrogating to himself the
name and function of the Messianic king contained the possibilities of
an uprising and implied intentions upon Jesus' part which Pilate would
be untrue to the government he represented if he ignored. There is
something sinister in the representation of these priests that they were
so jealous for the majesty of Rome. When one reflects how surely Jesus
would have won favor with some of ; them had he played the part of an
agitator and held out to them earthly hopes, there is something amazing
in their zeal to win Pilate to the belief that Jesus was politically danger
ous. But in the last analysis, the setting up of the Kingdom of God to
which Jesus looked did involve the vanishing of the whole present order
of the world of which the Roman empire was a part. So much Jesus
himself, had he been questioned, would hardly have denied. Pressed
to say if he was a king, Jesus answered with the utmost directness that
he was. Pilate seems to have felt no political significance in that which
Jesus said. He seems also to have realized that Jesus was no common
fanatic. He knew that for envy the Jews had delivered him. He said
over and over again that he found no fault in him. He was inclined to
let him go. Then the annual occasion for the setting free of some prisoner
at the feast seemed to offer a way out. If the people, whom he supposed
to be on the side of Jesus, should ask Jesus' release, then nothing could
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be simpler. But the rabble did not demand Jesus. They had their minds
on one Barabbas, a popular leader who, in insurrection, had committed
murder. One of the Evangelists says that the priests did their good part
in persuading the multitude to continue to demand Barabbas and not
to yield to the suggestion of the governor to free Jesus in his stead. And
so it comes to pass. Between this shifty Procurator crying "What shall
I do with him?" and the priests shouting, "If thou let this man go thou
art not Cassar's friend," and the mob clamoring for their Barabbas, the
thing is done. Pilate lends the might of the empire to the execution of
a man concerning whom he himself said to the end that he had done no
wrong.

78

LIV
THE CRUCIFIXION
Matt. 27 : 32-56; Mark 15 : 21-41; Luke 23 : 26-49; Jonn x9 : l6
(b)-37-
Burton and Mathews, 266, ff.
Rhees. Sections 201-208.
A centurion with a few soldiers from the garrison was detailed to
carry out the sentence. Executions of the sort were evidently not uncom
mon. Two robbers were led out at the same time. The place bearing
the name " The place of a skull " seems to have been some little distance
from the palace, and, of course, without the city wall. The man to be
crucified seems often to have been obliged to bear on his own shoulders
the great beam on which he was to suffer. After a time, Jesus' strength
seems to have failed him. Some chance Jew, a Cyrenian who was passing
by, was compelled to put his shoulder to the load. The details of this
barbarous method of punishment were probably not made the subject
of definite regulation at all times and in all places in which the punish
ment was used. Materials for illustration drawn from other sources are
not conclusive. The Gospels leave much in uncertainty that we should
like to know. Even the precise shape of the cross is only a tradition. '
The method of suspending the victim on it is only in part to be made
out with certainty. The torment and humiliation of this manner of death
are but too plain.
It seems to have been customary to make some indication of the
offence which the sufferer had committed. Pilate gave the ostensible
ground of Jesus' death with admirable brevity when he ordered posted
the two words " King of the Jews." There may have been also bitter
scorn of the people of this troublesome nation in his thus writing. At
all events, he scornfully refused to change the inscription so as to make
it read, "He said he was the king of the Jews." The mob of the curi
ous was probably always great. But here the rabble was augmented
by the presence of some of highest station in Judaism, glorying over the
downfall of their enemy. There is no evidence of popular sympathy.
Even the thieves taunted him. Of his own followers mainly women are
noticed as having been near him. The cry of his anguish, in which he
quoted the 22d Psalm — "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken
me?" — is too well authenticated to admit of question. But surely no
man ever went to death who had foreseen his death more clearly, or had
been more truly reconciled to dying as a part of his life's work. Six other
words of Jesus from the cross are recorded by one and another of the
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evangelists. We cannot be sure of their order, nor in all cases of the
value of the tradition. The prayer for his executioners, the words to the
repentant thief, and those to his mother portray three sure traits of
Jesus' character.
If at the first his soul seems to pass through deep shadows, yet in the
end he is clear that he has not been mistaken and his life work has not
failed. The rough soldiers gambled for his garments. Some spectators
returned saying — " Surely, this was a just man." The centurion is
represented saying — "This was the Son of God." We should need
to know more than we do know of him to judge just what he meant.
By three o'clock all was over. Sometimes these scenes lasted for days.
Haste may now be made with the burial. Joseph of Arimathea begged
the body and put it in his own new tomb. One tradition has it that he
did not embalm the body. This was the origin of the intention of the
women to embalm the body so soon as the first day of the week should
come. Another tradition has it that Joseph performed this act of defer
ence as well.

80

LV
THE RESURRECTION. APPEARANCE IN JERUSALEM
Matt. 28 : 1-15; Mark 16 : 1-14; Luke 23 : 56; 24 : 43; John 20 :
1-18 and 19-29.
Burton and Mathews. Chapter 35.
Rhees. Sections 209-222.
Ordinarily, the biography of an historical personage ceases with his
death. Even the Christian doctrine of immortality gives to one who
delineates the earthly life of a hero no material. The effect of personality
upon after ages may be one of the indices of greatness. The distinction
between the passing and the permanent elements of a man's life work
may first set that life and work in its true light. But all this is by way
of appendix to the proper biography.
Men whose effect upon after ages has been great have sometimes
been believed by their followers to have lived again. By still later ages
that belief has generally been discarded. It has been deemed to be but
the picturesque and ideal form given to the sense of their abiding influ
ence. In the case of Jesus, however, the belief that he rose from the
dead did not thus slowly grow up upon the basis of the fact of his con
tinued influence. From the very beginning the enthusiastic declaration
that he was thus risen was the great basis of the spread of that influence.
That influence is now, after two thousand years, assuredly greater than
it ever was before. And the most of those who believe in him at all
believe that in some way the history of Jesus is the guarantee to us of
the continued life in the spirit. But the substance of that belief that he
was risen is not necessarily identical with the form in which that belief
has been held.
Beyond question, Jesus had often coupled his announcement of his
death with the declaration to his disciples that that death would not end
all, that he would rise again. The disciples believed that the Messiah
would abide forever. Jesus' prophecy that he would die surprised them.
His declaration that he would live again would not. The disciples, when
they began to recover from the shock of the crucifixion, would expect
some witness that he still lived. Our earliest account of the event of the
Resurrection is in I Corinthians 15 : 3-8. The oldest record in the Gos
pels is probably Mark 16 : 1-8. The statement which we owe to Paul
is in general terms. In Mark, it is related that the three women went
early, after the Sabbath, to the tomb. They found the stone rolled away,
and looking in they saw that the place where the body of Jesus lay was
empty. A youth in white garments told them that Jesus had risen and
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would appear to them in Galilee. All four of the Gospels relate appear
ances of Jesus in the neighborhood of Jerusalem. Three have reminis
cences of what seems to have been the original tradition that Jesus
appeared in Galilee.
The disciples' expectation of the continued life of the Messiah did
not involve their expectation that they would find an empty grave.
But the finding of an empty grave would in startling fashion confirm
their expectation of the continued life of the Messiah. That they did
find the grave empty seems clear. That the body was removed by the
disciples themselves, who thus became deceivers, is in the last degree
improbable. Had the body of Jesus been in the hands of Joseph or of
the Jerusalem Jews, that would have been no proof against the Christian
preaching of the continued life of Jesus. Paul in the very chapter in
which he declares his faith in the appearance to him of the risen Lord
Says that " flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God." Had
the body of Jesus remained in the tomb, its presence there would have
been no hindrance to the Christian preaching of the continued life of the
Messiah. The fact that the bodies of our friends remain in their tombs
and are resolved into the elements, is no hindrance to our belief in
immortality. But as we were saying, the fact that the women did find
the tomb empty confirmed in startling fashion their belief in the con
tinued life of the Messiah. It gave specific form to their belief in his
resurrection, as also it has to some extent given form to much Christian
belief in that resurrection ever since.

82

LVI
RESURRECTION. APPEARANCES IN GALILEE.
ASCENSION
John 21 : 1-24; Matt. 28 : 16-20; Mark 16 : 15-20; Luke 24 : 44-53;
John 20 : 30-31; 21 : 25; Acts 1 : 1-4.
Burton and Mathews, 286, ff.
Rhees. Sections 209-222.
That form was the belief in the reappearance of the actual crucified
body of Jesus. This appearance is made in some measure, at least, the
condition of Jesus' manifestation to men for a brief period, after which
even these unique manifestations cease. Upon the very face of the Gos
pel narrative, it was only in a measure that Jesus' body and presence
were after his resurrection what these had been before. He did not
manifest himself exactly as he had done before. He entered a room, the-
doors being shut. Yet he bade the men touch his hands and side. He
partook of food. He walked with two on the road to Emmaus and was
not recognized. He broke bread with them in the inn and vanished
away. It is not said that any saw him except those who already believed
in him. The disciples' intercourse with him in those forty days, as
recorded for us, has some of the traits of their converse with Jesus in
the previous years. It has some of the traits of that eternal fellowship
in the spirit which they themselves enjoyed in subsequent years, and
which has been open to all men and to us. And finally, on their own show
ing, just such as he had been with them in those forty days, he was
parted from them upon Olivet and taken up into heaven. Just so, it
was promised, he shall return again from heaven.
Paul, long years afterward, tells thrice over the tale of the appearance
of Jesus to him, but never twice in the same way, and never once in a
way that seems to us to make that manifestation in form identical with
the form found here in the Evangelists. Yet he does not hesitate for a
moment to place this manifestation of the risen Lord to him on the
same footing with that vouchsafed to James and Cephas and the rest.
That manifestation is the point of departure of his own new religious
experience, the source of his gospel. If ever a man believed with his
whole soul in the resurrection of Jesus, and so also of Jesus' followers,
that man was Paul. We cannot escape the conviction that the Evange
lists in these narratives have endeavored to say what can never perfectly
be said. They have not distinguished between what is picturesque and
poetical, and what belongs to the psychological and spiritual truth.
They have not known laws of nature which we can never forget. There-
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with is not said but that there was vouchsafed to them a vision of the
supreme spiritual truth of the continued life. Therewith is not said but
that that truth was made as clear to them as were some other truths
made clear in Jesus which were dark before, and which but for the
shining of his light have been dark ever since.
It must not, however, be overlooked that the form of expression of
their faith in the manifestation to them of the immortal life was con
sonant with their mode of interpretation of all other experiences. It
raised no issue with the other elements of their intellectual life. But that
same form of interpretation of the experience raises for many among
us such serious issue with all other elements of the intellectual life as
to render difficult the credence of the truth which the Evangelists pro
claim. Because the form in which men did once cherish the faith of
immortality is sometimes put forth as the only form in which that faith
can be cherished, men are bewildered. That must be here repeated
which we have said before, that we have not in the Gospels the actual
facts concerning the manifestation of Jesus. We have testimony to those
facts, and interpretation of those testimonies. It can hardly be denied
that it is for many in our day the great faith in the immortal life which
enables us, in some measure, to understand this narrative of the bodily
resurrection in which the Evangelists have clothed that faith. It is not
that the narrative creates or maintains for us that faith.

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