Library of the
jpale 2>ivinirg Scbool

The Books of
jfratiR Cbamberlaln porter
Winkley Professor of
Biblical Theology

Wvn'i'iWiTi'i'iT.'ivivi'iTTTiTi'ivi'i  r.TiT.MrrrorriTrTTrrmiT'i''vft

ELEMENTS OF THE TEACHING
OF JESUS

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
LONDON BOMBAY ¦ CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO

SOME ELEMENTSOF THE
RELIGIOUS TEACHING
OF JESUS
ACCORDING TO THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS
BEING THE JOWETT LECTURES FOR 1910
BY
C. G. MONTEFIORE

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

TO THE MEMORY
OF
BENJAMIN JOWETT
(master of balliol)
THESE LECTURES
ARE GRATEFULLY DEDICATED
BY HIS PUPIL, THE AUTHOR

PREFACE
The six Lectures of which this little book
is composed were delivered at the Pass-
more Edwards Settlement in November and
December 1909. They formed the Jowett
Lectures for 19 10, which, to suit the con
venience of the Lecturer, were held a few
months before the usual time. They were
repeated, by request, in the spring of this
year at Manchester College, Oxford.
The Lectures are here printed almost
word for word as they were delivered. If
any attempt had been made at expansion or
revision before publication, one would not
have known where to begin or to end, and
the character of the Lectures would soon
have been completely changed.
I should like to add that the Lectures
were written in September 1909, prior to the
issue of my Commentary upon the Synoptic
Gospels. My reason for mentioning this

viii THE TEACHING OF JESUS
fact is that the Lectures do not refer to,
or take note of, the many criticisms (mostly
kindly and all useful) which that work has
received from both Jewish and Christian
hands. Though these criticisms have not,
so far, made me disbelieve in the main
views and conclusions which are expressed
in the Commentary, they have yet pointed
out to me several errors in detail. The
substance of most of the Jewish, and of a few
of the Christian, criticisms could have been
predicted. Indeed, I might say that because
I was sure that they would come, I took the
trouble to write my book. They seem to me
to prove its need. If a few of these Jewish
and Christian reviews were printed in parallel
columns, they would provide somewhat quaint
and interesting reading. Meanwhile I can
only express my gratitude to all my critics,
whether Jewish or Christian. I have learnt
something, I trust, from them all.
The tiny scale of the present Lectures
made it necessary to omit many things,
and to deal very roughly and inadequately
with all things. I trust, however, that
extreme brevity may not have led to
obscurity. In many cases where I should

PREFACE ix
have liked to add more qualifications and
reserves, the reader may probably feel an
added gratitude to the limitation of time
and space which has caused their omission.
Perhaps some who read the Lectures may
be inclined to dip into the Commentary,
where the views here set forth are put
forward in greater fullness, though in a less
connected form.
In conclusion, I desire to express my
gratitude to the Committee of the Jowett
Lectureship for having done me the great
honour of electing me as a "Jowett Lecturer."
I am very sensible that in scholarship and
capacity I make but a poor show as compared
with my predecessors. The novel point of
view from which I of necessity had to treat
the subject assigned to me was doubtless the
main reason which led to my election. I
can but hope that this novel point of view
is not represented and supported too feebly
and inadequately in the Lectures which are
here given to the public at large.
C. G. M.
May 1 910.

CONTENTS LECTURE I
PAGE
Jesus as Prophet i
LECTURE II
Jesus and the Law . 30
LECTURE III
The Kingdom of God 59
LECTURE IV
The Nature of God and His Relation to Man 84
LECTURE V
The Views of Jesus respecting himself and
his Mission no

xii THE TEACHING OF JESUS
LECTURE VI
PAGE
Expansions and Modifications of the Authen
tic Teaching of Jesus which are found in
the Synoptic Gospels 137
NOTES 167

I
JESUS AS PROPHET
It is with the greatest diffidence and hesitation
that I venture to address you. To speak
on so important and difficult a subject ought
to be enough to alarm a man much more
capable and learned than I am. Moreover,
to speak after men who are real scholars is a
desperate task for one who cannot claim to be
a scholar at all. Lastly, to give lectures
connected with a name so distinguished and
revered as that of Benjamin Jowett, a man
to whom I myself owe so much, and look
up to so greatly, adds to my deep sense of
anxious responsibility.
But we all know that excuses and apologies
are dull things. There shall then be no more
of them ; only I must indicate to you what
I have to offer, and why, with the keen
consciousness of many limitations, I am
nevertheless opening my mouth.
I am unable — and indeed I am not sup-
B

2 THE TEACHING OF JESUS i
posed even by the kind and broad-minded
persons who have invited me — to give you
any new results of my own learning and
scholarship. There are many men who have
devoted a lifetime to the investigation of the
New Testament and the Origins of Chris
tianity. Some of them have told you the
results of their researches in previous years.
To them, like yourselves, I have gone, and
from their works I have quarried ; I have been
at school with them, and I have sat at their
feet, or, if I may put it so, at the feet of their
books. But I am not one of their company.
Yet I am here to-day to speak about the hero
of the first three Gospels and of his teaching,
because, in the first place, I am not one of
his professed followers — I am not, in other
words, a Christian — and because, in the
second place, I belong to the race from which
he sprang and to the religion in which he
was born — in other words, I am a Jew.
There are advantages and disadvantages
for such a person in his study of the Gospels.
But from the point of view of this audience,
the disadvantages as well as the advantages
have this one peculiar excellence — they are
new. And that is really why I am here, and
it is enough, at all events, to keep me uncon-
ceited, if also to increase my sense of responsi
bility. For a hundred books which you
may have read, and for a hundred lectures

i JESUS AS PROPHET 3
you may have heard, about Jesus and his
teaching from Christians or men of Christian
faith, you will hardly have heard or read one
from a Jew. From that point of view I have
probably had — so far as you are concerned —
no predecessors or competitors.
To be a complete outsider ought to make
one impartial. I sometimes wonder if we
might not get an ideal history of Christianity
and of its origins from the pen of a learned
Buddhist or from some disciple of Confucius.
Just as our Western scholars produce histories
of Buddhism and Confucianism which appear
models of learning and impartiality, why
should not some of their adherents return the
compliment ?
How would the Synoptic Gospels impress
a man who read them in a detached way,
sympathetically indeed — as works of genius
and about genius, and of gigantic importance
in the history of religion and civilisation —
but yet as an outsider, critically, impartially,
without prepossession of environment, educa
tion, belief ? How would they impress such
a man who read them perhaps for the first
time after he was grown up ?
One sees the advantages of such a position,
which is only partially my own ; but one also
sees the disadvantages. For, first, to be an
outsider does not necessarily mean to be a
model of all the virtues. The outsider too

4 THE TEACHING OF JESUS i
has his own prepossessions. His own re
ligious belief may make him unconsciously
prejudiced against the other religion he is
going to study. He may be incapable, with
the best will in the world, of doing it justice,
or even of fully understanding it. I bring
this charge against many Christian scholars
who write about Judaism, and I am only too
conscious that they in their turn may have
very good reasons for bringing it against
me. And, then, there is something else. It
seems to me that in one true sense one can
only know a religion from within. Its true
secret or secrets, its own joyous and special
intimacies, do not reveal themselves to the
outsider. He never learns or knows them.
Study will not do it. One needs inside
familiarity. And, on the other hand, he who
leaves a religion, usually forgets its secrets.
He who, with whatever honesty or purity of
heart, and with whatever enthusiasm of soul
and mind, abandons one religion for another,
is usually no good judge of the religion he
has left. The joyous intimacies vanish from
his ken and from his memory. The Pro
testant convert to Catholicism is usually a
bad critic of Protestantism ; the Catholic
who abandons Catholicism is not the man to
whom we should go for the fairest estimate
of Catholicism.

i JESUS AS PROPHET 5
The secrets of a religion are not to be
learned from its mere literature. Indeed the
literature may lead one greatly astray. It
may lead one to put the stress upon wrong
places, to expect consistency where there is
the inconsistency of life, to make false deduc
tions and wrong inferences. The best excel
lences of a faith, its joys, its loving intimacies,
are only for those who are within. But if
the insider leaves — if he passes the gate — he
can usually remember the aroma no more.
He describes a skeleton, and is surprised that
it has no life and is all dry bones.
Perhaps, then, no adequate account of any
religion can ever be written. If you are
within, you cannot be impartial ; if you are
without, you cannot know.
Both advantages and disadvantages are in
creased, and, as it were, sharpened and made
peculiar, when it is a case of a Christian
writing about Judaism, or of a Jew writing
about Christianity. The very fact that the
two religions have so much in common, and
are so closely related to each other, makes
the estimate of the elements wherein they
differ so difficult for both Christian and Jew.
And then there is the special difficulty
that the differences represent conflicts. By
this I mean that Christianity, for example,
may differ from Buddhism, but there have
been no fights and troubles and sorenesses

6 THE TEACHING OF JESUS i
between the two religions in the points where
they differ. But in the case of Judaism and
Christianity the differences have called forth
persecutions, heartburnings, alienations. For
the doctrines wherein the Jew has differed
from the Christian, he has suffered and died
at Christian hands ; the doctrines wherein the
Christian has differed from the Jew, he has
specially regarded as the crown and flower of
his faith. Moreover, just where the two
religions differ do the intimacies begin. The
Cross of Christ, with all which it implies, is
a proverbial stumbling - block to the Jew ;
but no less is the Law with its delights a
stumbling-block to the Christian.
But can we not separate the teaching of
Jesus from Christianity as a whole, and more
especially that teaching as it is represented to
us in the Synoptic Gospels ? That is what I
have attempted to do in these lectures — if
only on a very minute scale — and for such
a study the stumbling - blocks may be less
perilous, inasmuch as a good deal of that
teaching moves, as the Jew, at any rate, will
usually hold, within a Jewish framework,
and is in harmony with some fundamental
doctrines of Judaism and with doctrines
enunciated by Jewish teachers and seers.
And if it comes to an impartial estimate
of that teaching, the Jew has the advantage
that he has not to assume that, in some sense

i JESUS AS PROPHET 7
or other, Jesus is always right and his oppo
nents are always wrong. He can realise
better than the average Christian that even
the Synoptics were compiled by writers un
friendly to Judaism and to the opponents of
their hero. He can perceive more readily
than average Christians that they make the
darkness greater in order to increase the light.
On the other hand, he has a special pitfall of
his own to avoid — the pitfall of undue depre
ciation. It is not to be wondered at — it is, at
any rate, easily explicable — why such a pitfall
exists for him. At first sight it might seem
as if a fairly enlightened Jewish critic would
be only too glad to join in the general lauda
tion of the teaching of one who was himself
a Jew. But then this Jew was the founder
of the new, the rival, and very soon the perse
cuting, creed. The Jew has been told over
and over again of the immense superiority of
the teaching of the New Testament over the
Old. The Gospel has been contrasted with
the Law ; the preparation with the fulfilment ;
the imperfect with the perfect. And so the
determined effort has been made by the Jew
to show that these assumptions of vast superi
orities are erroneous and unjustified. The
teaching of Jesus has often been regarded less
as a whole than as a congeries of isolated
texts. Parallels have been sought for those
texts, both in the Old Testament and the

8 THE TEACHING OF JESUS i
Talmud, and parallels have readily been found.
The results have been, as I venture to think,
often ingenious and telling ; but, upon the
whole, the pitfall to which I have alluded has
not been avoided. We too often, I fancy,
find an estimate of the Gospel teaching which
may be summed up in the dictum : " What
ever is new in the teaching of Jesus is not
true, and whatever is true is not new." Such
a result we may, at the very outset, regard as
the probable product of prejudice. It can
hardly account satisfactorily for the very
existence of Christianity.
On the other hand, the Jew is likely to do
better justice to the Synoptic Gospels and to
their teaching than to either the Fourth
Gospel or the Epistles of Paul. For in the
Synoptic Gospels the hostility to Judaism
is not pushed to any theoretic extremity.
Moreover, the whole point of view is
not too widely removed from that of
Judaism — at all events, from that of Prophetic
Judaism. The Jewish reader or critic moves
amid a milieu and an environment which is
not wholly unfamiliar to him. The plane of
thought is not another. He may realise that
he is hearing about the teachings and the life
of a would-be reformer of his own faith, and
perchance he may hold that — as all religions
have their occasional corruptions and sore
places — so this reformer too, at least on occa-

i JESUS AS PROPHET 9
sion, put his finger upon them. He may even
claim (as he could never possibly do for the
Jesus of the Fourth Gospel or for Paul) that
the historic Jesus, if the founder of a new
religion, belongs also to the older faith — that
Judaism, as well as Christianity, may, in a
certain sense, regard him as its own.
I hope that these few preliminary observa
tions may show you where, as I think, the
advantages of a Jewish estimate of the Gospel
may lie, and where, on the other hand, lie its
dangers and its difficulties. But you obviously
do not come here to learn from me the final
truth, and therefore you will not be dis
appointed. You come from a certain curiosity
to hear what a Jew, with all his prejudices and
prepossessions, may, nevertheless, have to say.
Perhaps you also think that I may have
sources of illustrative information at my com
mand which are not available to Christian
writers. I fancy that a really learned Jew,
well familiar with the vast Rabbinical litera
ture, might be of interest to you from that
point of view. And I have one or two great
scholars behind me, so to speak, upon whose
help I can rely, men who do not, as most
Christian writers do, speak from second hand,
or from compilations, but who are minutely
acquainted with the whole huge mass of the
Talmuds and the Midrashim — men who know
their spirit as well as their letter, their inner

10 THE TEACHING OF JESUS i
as well as their outer meaning and value.
But we have to remember that, for our special
purpose here, the greatest caution is necessary
in using the Rabbinic literature to illustrate —
whether by way of contrast or parallel — the
statements and teaching, in the Synoptic
Gospels. And this for two main reasons.
First, because only a very small proportion of
that literature tells about the men and the
circumstances of the first century of the
Christian era. The great mass is later. So
both for good as well as for evil, the greatest
care must be taken in using the Rabbinic
literature to illustrate the Gospels. You can
hardly count up the number of rules about
the Sabbath in the Mishnah and say, This is
what the average Jew of Galilee in a.d. 29
was expected to observe. Nor perhaps can
you legitimately quote a hundred passages
from the Talmud, showing what joy and de
light Sabbath observance was to the writers
or speakers, and say, This is how the average
Jew of Galilee in a.d. 29 felt about the
Sabbath. It needs delicate tact and great
caution in order to know what inferences of
this kind it is right to make, and what infer
ences would be wrong. Then, secondly, the
problems of the Rabbinic literature are many,
and even at this day enough studies have not
been made, or adequate monographs written,
on several disputed and difficult points. There

i JESUS AS PROPHET n
are at least two questions intimately connected
with the Gospel story — one concerning ritual
purity, one concerning the religious condition
of the masses of the people — about which
controversy among scholars is still acute, and
as to which it may possibly happen that the
ordinary assumptions of the Christian com
mentaries and text-books may have to undergo
serious and far-reaching modification.1
He who is to speak about the teaching of
Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels should, I pre
sume, first of all make a long preface dealing
with the sources of these Gospels, their
measure of credibility and authenticity, their
character and qualities. He should then
speak of the way in which they have been
edited and of the peculiarities of the editors.
He would have to explain how it has come
to be almost universally acknowledged that
Mark is the oldest of the Gospels as a whole,
and the reasons upon which this judgment is
based. He would then have to push the
inquiry farther back, and discuss not merely
when Mark was written, but its antecedents
and sources. Were these only oral, or were
they also written — literary sources which have
now perished ? Has our Mark grown out
of an Urmarcus ? Next, he would have to
deal with Matthew and Luke. What are
their sources for all that they contain over
and above what they adopted and adapted

12 THE TEACHING OF JESUS i
from Mark ? He would have to speak at
some length about that literary source, common
to both of them, from which many of the
most important sayings of Jesus appear to be
taken — the source which is sometimes called
the Logia, but which is now so often spoken
about as Q. — the first letter of the German
word Quelle, or source. He would have to
discuss the important and complicated question
whether Q. was known to, and therefore older
than, Mark, and if so, in what form or edition ?
He would have to discuss the date and origin
and character of the supposed special extra
source of Luke. Only after such discussions,
adequately carried through, could he then
ask, How far can we trust Mark for what
Jesus is reported to have done and for that
which is reported to have befallen him ? How
far can we trust Matthew and Luke for what
Jesus is reported to have said ?
But I, for various reasons, cannot touch
upon any of these points, though a study of
them, for me, as for any other speaker about
Jesus, must form the basis of what I am about
to say. For all this study of the sources, you
must go, as I have gone, to the same autho
rities, first of all to the sources themselves —
the three short documents which together
would not fill more than a few columns of
the Times ; and, secondly, to the great scholars
and critics whose prolonged and minute in-

i JESUS AS PROPHET 13
vestigation has been productive of many gener
ally accepted results.
Then, after all this description and criticism
of the sources was finished, and after the
Jesus of Matthew had been, for example,
compared with the Jesus of Luke, both with
the Jesus of Mark, and all three with the
Jesus of their sources — the lecturer, before he
attempted to picture and delineate the final
Jesus of history — i.e. Jesus as he, the speaker,
thinks that he really was and lived and taught
— should, I suppose, intercalate a long chapter
upon the inner and outer circumstances of the
time. What was the religion — or should we
perhaps say, what were the various religious
ideas — among the Jews when Jesus lived and
died ? What was the social and moral con
dition of Galilee and Judasa ? Who were its
teachers, and what did they attempt to teach ?
And so on. But here, again, I must almost
wholly omit so necessary and all-important a
chapter. For one thing, there is no time ;
for another, there is not enough material.
The two statements seem to exclude each
other, but they do not do so in reality. For
where the material is scanty conjectures begin.
And with conjectures come necessarily lengthy
disputes and interminable arguments. Thus,
instead of first describing the environment of
the hero before beginning to talk about him,
I must mix up the very little that I can say

i4 THE TEACHING OF JESUS i
about environment with the not much that
I am able to say about the hero.
What single word best describes the sort
of man that Jesus of Nazareth really was?
According to Matthew, when Jesus entered
Jerusalem all the city was excited, saying,
" Who is this ? " And the reply was, " This
is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee."
And when, according to Luke, Jesus, after he
had risen from the tomb, met two of the
disciples near Emmaus, and asked them about
what they had been talking, they replied,
" About Jesus of Nazareth, who was a pro
phet, mighty in deed and word before God
and all the people." In these sentences we
find, I think, the one word, if one word be
asked for, which best befits and describes the
hero of the Gospels. He was a prophet, even
as Mark too repeats that some had said of him,
" He is a prophet, like one of the prophets."
He was the sort of man — under other circum
stances and environment — such as seven and
six hundred years before him had been Amos,
Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel — yes, also Ezekiel,
though some of you doubtless would have
preferred me to exclude him. To these men
Jesus was spiritually and religiously akin.
Perhaps some one might say, May we not
use a more modern word about Jesus ? May
we not more rightly call him a reformer ?
Was he not a reformer, preaching against

i JESUS AS PROPHET 15
the evils of his age, preaching a higher reli
gion and a higher morality than his contem
poraries knew ? Doubtless the single word
reformer expresses his activities and objects
to some extent, but I fancy that the single
word prophet expresses them better and more
fully. Let me start with the special cause for his
appearance as teacher and preacher in which
cause, as in other respects, he resembles the
Prophets. For the Prophets did not feel
impelled to speak, simply because there were
social or religious evils around them ; they
opened their mouths because, in their opinion
and belief, something was going to happen.
It was going to happen because of human
wickedness. There was danger ahead — special
danger to the sinner and the unrepentant.
There was, indeed, redemption ahead too —
doom, in fact, was threatened to the wicked,
deliverance was promised to the suffering
good. Given this impulse to speak — the
conviction that something big was going to
happen, which they foresaw and foretold —
the Prophets became teachers and reformers,
sometimes also consolers and comforters,
always and in every aspect of their work con
vinced of divine inspiration, conscious of a
message to deliver, and unresting till they had
delivered it.2
Jesus too believed that something was

1 6 THE TEACHING OF JESUS i
going to happen — a big something which
would certainly change the face of the world,
and this something was going to happen soon.
The Kingdom of God, he said and he believed,
was at hand ; the Kingdom of God was coming
nearer and yet more near, and this Kingdom
of God meant, with much else, a great
denouement and change. It meant the doom
of the wicked and the unrepentant ; it meant
the salvation and redemption of the humble,
the righteous, the repentant. It meant the
beginning of a new world, and when this
new world had fully come, there would be, for
those who were permitted to see it and to
share it, no more sorrow and sighing and sin.
The form and the details of the doom and
the deliverance predicted by the Prophets no
longer greatly appeal to us. They thought
that the end of sin and the triumph of
righteousness were coming suddenly, quickly,
once and for all. The essence of their hope — ¦
the doom of wickedness, the victory of good
— is not affected by their errors. Nor is its
value. So too may it not be said of Jesus,
both as regards the error of form and the
abiding value of essence ? Just as the general'
religious and moral teaching of the Prophets
is largely independent of their erroneous fore-
shortenings, so too with Jesus. The end,
the denouement, which he predicted would
surely come within the lifetime of his hearers,

i JESUS AS PROPHET 17
has not come yet after nigh nineteen hundred
years. Nevertheless, in his teaching how men
were to prepare themselves for that great cata
strophe, for that imminent denouement, which
should be to them good or evil, accord
ing as they were good or evil when it met
them — in his teaching as to what was their
right relation to God, what was God's rela
tion to them, or what were their duties to each
other — the greatness and originality of Jesus
found their expression, and (as in the parallel
case of the Prophets) much of permanent
worth remained for all subsequent time.
If we ask why or how Jesus came to
believe that the Kingdom, with all its vast
changes, was so near at hand, we draw near
to a mystery of personality which in his case
is perhaps peculiarly difficult to solve. Yet
we may not be wholly wrong if we surmise
that his reasons were, at any rate, partly akin
to the reasons which had affected John the
Baptist (from whom, perhaps, Jesus had been
finally led to the conviction that the Kingdom
was soon to be made manifest), and therefore
partly akin to the reasons which had impelled
to a parallel belief the Prophets of old. There
was the oppression of the poor by the rich,
the misery caused by the exactions of the tax-
collector and the Romans, the unequal distri
bution of happiness and desert. There was
sin, on the one hand, which needed judgment ;
c

1 8 THE TEACHING OF JESUS i
there was sorrow, upon the other hand, which
needed deliverance. The proud must be
abased ; the poor must be exalted. There was
a pretence of goodness (here we strike, I think,
a new note) which needed unmasking ; there
was hidden goodness which needed bringing
to light. God would visit His people, and
render unto each as his heart, rather than his
outward appearance, might deserve.
If, then, the Judgment and the Kingdom
were at hand, it was because the inward moral
and religious condition of Israel was not what
it should be, as well as because of outward
oppression and consequent unhappiness. The
two things, though not, perhaps, to the mind
of Jesus causally connected in the same way
as to most of his contemporaries, were never
theless not without reciprocal relation to each
other. The Prophets of old had also been stirred
to speak because of similar reasons. They
too denounced Israel's sins ; and they too
were strongly moved by the unhappiness and
misery which were caused by oppression.
And roughly we may say that such oppres
sion was brought about both by the native
and the foreigner. To the oldest prophets
the special oppression was that of Israelite
upon Israelite ; to later prophets there was
superadded the oppression of Israel's task
masters and its foreign rulers.

i JESUS AS PROPHET 19
Both these oppressions again existed in the
age of Jesus. There can be no doubt that
the oppression of Jew by Jew, of the poor by
the rich, so far as it occurred in Galilee and
Judsea, moved the sympathy and stirred the
anger of Jesus. It is another question — and
a far more difficult and delicate one — how
far he was moved by the oppression of the
foreigner, by the exactions of the Romans.
A few of the Prophets may almost be called
politicians. Though the word seems wholly
inappropriate as applied to Jesus, yet the rela
tion of his teaching and of his own position
to the Roman power, raises complicated
problems. We may, at any rate, in so far
also assimilate and liken him to the Prophets
as to say that the condition of his "people, the
ferment of the time, partly produced by the
Roman dominion, were not without their
effect upon his own appearance, — in other
words, they formed one of the causes of his
public mission and activity. Moreover, in
the great change which he foresaw and pre
dicted, the power and domination of the
Romans would disappear for ever.3
But if Jesus resembled the Prophets in the
cause and occasion of his preaching, still more
did he resemble them in his temper of mind,
and therefore in one great feature and charac
teristic of his teaching. The prophetical
temper of mind may be said partly to consist

20 THE TEACHING OF JESUS i
in a vivid sense for realities, in a keenness
of moral and religious vision which pierces
through externalities and forms, and sees right
through to what is beneath them. The
Prophets' tests of goodness and religion are
inward tests. They do not care for the out
side of religion, they care for its inward
essence. It is unnecessary for me to labour
this point, which all who have read the pro
phetical writings even cursorily, can amplify
for themselves. From Amos, who cried out,
" I hate, I despise your feasts, I take no delight
in your solemn assemblies. Let justice roll
down as waters, and righteousness as an ever
lasting stream " ; from Hosea, who declared,
" I desire mercy and not sacrifice," right down
through Isaiah and Jeremiah and Zechariah,
right on to Joel — perhaps the latest of the
band — with his "Rend your heart and not
your garments," — all, or nearly all, of the
Prophets speak predominantly the same mes
sage. The inwardness of Jesus, the intense
spirituality of his teaching, need not be in
sisted on here. I only emphasise it now to
show his connection and kinship with the
Prophets. He takes up and renews their
message. Again, the Prophets were convinced of
divine inspiration. They spoke in the name
of God, and were positively assured that they
were delivering a divine message. They did

i JESUS AS PROPHET 21
not interpret a Book or a Law : they spoke
with an immediate authority, which was in
one sense within them, for it depended upon
no written code or human master ; in one
sense without them, for it was believed to
have its source in God. To disbelieve their
message was to disbelieve God, to accept it was
to rally to God's side. Herein, too, did Jesus
in his teaching and bearing resemble them.
Once more, the Prophets with their keen
ness of vision and their intensity of feeling
tended to see everything big. Or shall we
rather say that they could see more, and see
more clearly, than the ordinary run of man
kind ? And was it not the same with Jesus ?
On the one hand, he could perceive pos
sibilities of good existing within one man
whose outward behaviour was, so far, any
thing but meritorious ; on the other hand, the
evil in another man seemed to him something
larger and more terrible than it seemed to
ordinary eyes. He emphasises and intensifies.
What is worth while is intensely worth while,
what is good is intensely good, what is bad is
intensely bad. Like all the Prophets, he
exaggerates. " There is not one just or
truthful person in Jerusalem," said Jeremiah ;
" There is no truth or mercy or knowledge of
God in the land," said Hosea. We take these
broad statements with a grain of salt. The
same sort of qualifications we shall have, I

22 THE TEACHING OF JESUS i
believe, to make in the denunciations — so far
as these may be authentic — of Jesus. If he
cries, " Woe upon Scribes and Pharisees," we
shall interpret this historically to mean that
there were then living some very bad Scribes
and some very bad Pharisees. The tendency
of all preachers and social reformers, as well
as of all prophets, to exaggerate, is indeed
proverbial. This statement would hardly
need making were it not, in the case of Jesus
and his opponents, so constantly forgotten.
In any case, however, the sins and the
sinners of Israel constituted one of the main
reasons for the message and the teaching
which Jesus was to deliver. And here a
crucial point can be expressed in a question.
Was the scheme of Jewish religion and morality
wrong, according to Jesus, or was it merely
the sinners ? Was it the system or merely
the individuals ?
Let me explain what I mean by an illustra
tion. There existed — did there not ? — in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries many pious
and excellent Roman Catholics who denounced
the wickedness of priests and monks and
popes, who spoke of the abuse of that which,
in its own place and time, was seasonable and
good, who declared that the secondary was
wrongly made primary, and the primary
wrongly made secondary. And, on the other
hand, there were men, like Luther and Calvin

i JESUS AS PROPHET 23
and Knox, who went farther — some more
slowly, some more fast — and who said that
the whole scheme of religion was bad and
false, and that it must necessarily tend to
produce hypocrisy, externalism, self-righteous
ness, and sin. We may also observe that
some reformers who began by denouncing the
individuals ended by denouncing the system.
From taking the line that what was essentially
holy and divine had been corrupted and abused
by man, they ended by denying the divine
element in such matters altogether. What
was hitherto supposed to be of God was in
truth not of God at all.
We have, then, to ask about Jesus : Was
he a reformer in the one sense or in the other,
or did he take up a line which lay between,
and was peculiar to himself?
The religious system which existed in the
age of Jesus in Judasa and Galilee is known
as legalism — a religious system of which many
hard things have been, and constantly still are
said. We cannot understand or appreciate a
great part of the teaching of Jesus, and of his
conflict with the religious authorities of his
time, without first understanding and appre
ciating the legal religion in which he was born
and reared. Yet to understand this legal
religion aright a whole lecture or more than
one lecture would be required.

24 THE TEACHING OF JESUS i
I therefore can say only a few words
where many are necessary.
Let us, then, call to mind, first of all, that
the written basis of the legal religion of the
Jews was the so-called Law of Moses — the
document which we still possess exactly in
the same form as it was possessed by the
Jews of the first century, namely, the code of
the Pentateuch.
Now, what were the universally accepted
beliefs about this Law Book? The uni
versally accepted beliefs were that it was per
fect, Mosaic, immutable and divine. There
was no suspicion that it had grown up at
different times, no attempt to distinguish
between human and divine elements, no
' modernisms,' in fact, of any shape or
kind. The Law was taken at its own valua
tion ; it was sincerely, even passionately,
believed to be the absolute Word of God.
This Law is, as we know, an amalgam of
ritual and morality. It contains the injunc
tion, " Thou shalt love thy neighbour as
thyself," while immediately following that
injunction comes the precept, "A garment
of two kinds of stuff mingled together shall
not come upon thee." Both laws were
regarded as equally divine. The Code does
not give the smallest indication that one set of
laws — the moral laws — was intended for all
time, while another set was intended for a

i JESUS AS PROPHET 25
period only. On the contrary, for the ritual
laws, quite as much as for the moral laws, it
urges that they are to be observed throughout
all the generations of Israel, that is, in
perpetuity. You cannot take too strictly the word
" divine " as applied to the Law. And what
does " divine " imply ? It implies that just
as God Himself is perfectly wise and good,
so is all His Law. Not this injunction or
that, but all injunctions, not the moral laws
only and not the ritual laws, but all the laws,
both moral and ritual, all, without exception,
are good and perfect and divine.
Nowhere is the faintest indication given
in the Law that any prophet or teacher
is to come who shall have the power or
authority to criticise or subvert or alter any
single injunction in the Law. The last word
of prophecy was, " Remember the Law of
Moses." Such then was the universal belief — be it
wise, be it foolish, be it strange, be it simple
— about the Law.
But in addition to the written Law there
already existed a quantity of other laws.
These laws were interpretations of the written
Law ; sometimes they interpreted the written
Law in such a way as to increase its scope
and multiply its application ; sometimes they
interpreted it (as in the case of the lex talionis)

26 THE TEACHING OF JESUS i
in a more modern and civilised spirit.4 All
these interpretations were, however, made in
the genuine belief that they did not in any
way diminish the absolute validity and divine-
ness of the written Law. Some of the older
of these laws — all of which, in the age of
Jesus, were still oral, that is, they had not
yet been written down and codified — were
themselves regarded as genuine traditions of
extreme antiquity, stretching back even to
the Mosaic era.
A divine Law accepted by the whole people
as divine. Next remember that this divine
Law was regarded as a great glory and dis
tinction. It constituted the nation's pride —
its holiest and grandest possession. For the
Law the people of Israel were ever ready to
die, and for the Law in their thousands they
have died.
But it may perhaps be said : Even though
the people were proud of their divine Law
in their relations with the outsider and the
foreigner, and even though, when this national
palladium was attacked, or when they were
bidden by others to violate its enactments,
they were willing to die in its defence, may
they not within their own homes have found
the Law a burden too great to fulfil ? What
you defend and champion over against the
outsider, you may nevertheless neglect or
dislike in private. One can imagine a

i JESUS AS PROPHET 27
religion which, just because it was intensely
national and had become the mark of nation
ality, was passionately defended when attacked,
but was not greatly observed or beloved in
seasons of peace. A man might die — we
remember the great poem of Sir Alfred Lyall
— rather than verbally renounce Christianity
who, nevertheless, neither in faith nor practice
could legitimately be called a Christian. If
the Law was the symbol of Jewish life
and nationality, it might conceivably be de
fended by thousands who themselves hardly
knew what it contained and often violated its
provisions. It can then legitimately be asked : Is
there any evidence to show that the people
did observe the Law and that they liked
observing it ?
The question is of extreme importance,
but I am unable to discuss it here. All I
can now do is to put "before you some of the
current misconceptions or errors about the
Law — that is, of course, as they appear to me
— and for the sake of brevity and clearness I
will put these misconceptions before you in a
crude, glaring, and exaggerated form.
The first misconception or error, then, is
that the Law, so far as observance is con
cerned, was not a popular Law, that it was
fulfilled and observed by the rich, comfort
able and well-to-do classes rather than by

28 THE TEACHING OF JESUS i
the poor. The masses of the people were
ignorant of the Law and violated its precepts.
Hence these masses were despised by the
well-to-do observers and by all the profes
sional teachers — the Rabbis and Scribes.
The Law was so burdensome that, unless you
had leisure and a competence, you were un
able to observe it. The masses who neglected
it were contemned by the professional teachers
and by the well-to-do observers. Being
neglected and despised, they were either un
happy and despairing — with the uncomfort
able feeling that they were outcasts in the
sight of God and man, and yet unable to
regain respectability and divine approval —
or they sank lower and lower in the moral
scale, violating the Law and indifferent to
its violation. The neglect of ritual laws,
and the social ostracism involved, led to the
neglect of moral laws as well. Over against
the masses who neglected the Law — some
indifferent, some despairing — there stood out
the professional teachers and their well-to-do
friends, proud of their observance and with
all the disagreeable faults of an exclusive and
predominant class. What they tended to
observe were those very ritual and ceremonial
enactments which were neglected by the
masses. This observance naturally led on
to self-righteousness, formalism, and selfish
ness. It naturally led on to faults still

i JESUS AS PROPHET 29
graver — to a neglect of justice, compassion,
humility, and love. Thus the minority who
observed the Law, or at any rate the ritual
and ceremonial laws, were proud and bad
and rich ; the majority who neglected it were
poor, unhappy, and despised.
Such, put in crude language and in an
extreme form, are the current misconceptions
about the Law. The further discussion of
the subject I must leave to the next lecture.

II
JESUS AND THE LAW
I mentioned in my first lecture how in the
age of Jesus the belief in a Divine Law was
accepted on all hands in the fullest possible
sense of the word Divine. I went on to
indicate certain misconceptions about that
Law, which are still widely current to-day.
I cannot prove my counter theory that these
misconceptions are misconceptions and not
dry statements of actual fact. That would
need too much time, and, moreover, many of
the proofs would be technical and elaborate ;
very unsuited for lectures. Suffice it to
assert that, beyond the New Testament,
there is no clear evidence that outside the
observers of the Law stood what one great
American scholar likes to call the " disin
herited masses." 5 On the contrary, the masses
were the champions of the Law, and the Law
was their inheritance ; while sprung from the
masses, their friends and spokesmen, were the
3°

n JESUS AND THE LAW 31
great majority of the Rabbis. Nor again is
there good and clear evidence, beyond the
New Testament, that the Law, either to
those who observed it, or who sought to
observe it, was regarded, not as a distinction
and a privilege, but as a grievance, an oppres
sion and a burden. When the early Christian
community contrasted the Law of Christ with
the Law of Moses, and found freedom in the
one and servitude in the other, the ease and
comfort and repose of the New Law was un
favourably compared with the burden and
anxiety of the Old. But we remember the
rule that those who are outside a religion
know not its intimacies, and those who have
left it forget them. To those within there
was no bondage, but freedom. The Rabbis
said, " There is no liberty except through
the Torah."
I believe, then, that the final result of
scholarly investigation will be to confirm
my own opinion, or, shall I say, my own
prepossessions, namely, that the Law was not
merely cared for, or championed, when its
sovereignty was endangered by the foreigner,
that it was not merely observed by the
leisured classes or the well-to-do, but that,
upon the whole, it was a popular Law,
observed and cared for by the nation at
large. The theory has been brought forward that

32 THE TEACHING OF JESUS n
the view which I have here indicated is true
for the Judaism of, say, a.d. 600, but false
for the year 30. In 600 the Law was indeed
a delight to all Jews, rich and poor alike ; in
600 all sought to observe it, and most did.
But in 30 things were different. Then the
Law had not yet become the people's Law :
the Rabbis were mostly proud and bad ; the
people unhappy and ill at ease. The Law was
not yet a delightsome glory ; it was to many
but a burden.6 Now it may indeed be that
the percentage of bad Rabbis in 30 was greater
than the percentage of bad Rabbis in 600.
There is some evidence for this, though not
very much. But, as a whole, the theory —
invented, I cannot help thinking, to save the
accuracy of some of the sweeping statements
in the Gospels — breaks down. And please
remember this, that the additions of the
Oral Law were much greater, more fully
worked out and more universally accepted
in 600 than in 30. If, on account of its bulk
and the number of its enactments, the Law
was a burden in 30, much more should it
have been a burden in 600. If on account
of its legalism, the Jewish religion in 30
possessed the various supposed evils which
I mentioned last time, much more should it
have possessed them in 600. For if the
religion was legal in 30, still more was it
legal — intensely legal — in 600. You cannot

ii JESUS AND THE LAW 33
therefore have it both ways. If the Law, as
such, produced evils in 30,. much more should
it have produced them in 600. But if there
were evils in 30 which did not exist in 600,
these evils can hardly have been the direct
outcome of the Law. The new theory, it
may be observed in passing, seems to save
the accuracy of certain judgments attributed
to Jesus by throwing over a leading doctrine
of Paul. Next, one word as to the number of enact
ments. The life of the ordinary peasant, day
labourer, artisan, was chiefly interfered with,
if I may use the word, by the Law in two
ways : first, by the laws about food ; secondly,
by the laws about the Sabbath. Now the
laws about food, for people who lived among
themselves and did not travel, were easily
understood and afforded no great practical
difficulties. To abstain from hares and rabbits
and pigs and lobsters had doubtless become
as easy and obvious as for us to abstain from
dogs and cats and horses. Then again, that
the oxen, sheep, and goats have to be killed
in a particular way is no trouble to those who
eat the flesh which they buy. Lastly, even if
the laws about milk and meat were already in
full force in 30, so long as people living to
gether all do the same thing, there is really
no very great trouble in not eating milk,
butter, or cheese with meat or poultry. There

34 THE TEACHING OF JESUS n
is some trouble for the women, but even
for them the rules are easily learned and are
not very difficult to obey. And in the East,
you have to remember how many days there
are in which the family lives entirely on a
simple, vegetarian diet.
The Laws about the Sabbath were already
minute, but nevertheless there is reason to
believe that to most Jews the Sabbath in 30
was rapidly becoming what it undoubtedly
was in 600 — a day of delight. After all, to
get a full twenty-four hours off all possible
labour is no small boon. The Rabbis dis
cussed with delight — I do not defend this
form of mental gymnastics and casuistry —
all the endless petty things and details which
might or might not be performed upon the
Sabbath, but as the result of their discussions
and determinations filtered down among the
people, they were, I fancy, gradually absorbed
without very great or agitating difficulties.
I do not say that the rules about Sabbath
observance, even so far as they had been
worked out in 30, would not be irksome to
you or me, — we might fret over them, perhaps
disobey them, and then with seared consciences
feel that we had transgressed the divine Law,
— but I much doubt whether for the great
majority of the people in Israel in 30 this
was in any sensible degree the case. There
were too few exceptions to make the burden

ii JESUS AND THE LAW 35
felt, and there were too many compensations
upon the other side which tended to make
the Sabbath day a privilege and a pleasure —
no work and better food being two among
the number.
Do you say, But what about the laws of
ritual purity ? Was not every good Jew
always trying not to become unclean ? And
was not the very fact that so many persons
could not help becoming unclean the reason
why there was a cleavage between the few
rich people, or the professionals who could
keep clean, and the masses who had to become
unclean ? Once unclean, did they not, more
or less to their own despair, fall out of
the legal ranks, and become despised and
avoided by the keen ritual purists ? Here we
have the theory of the orthodox few and the
degraded outside many turning up again
under a new form. This new form, however,
— though the matter is still not wholly
determined — is probably not much truer than
the old form. The matter is desperately
difficult and complicated, and I cannot pos
sibly enter upon its discussion here ; indeed
I personally am not qualified to enter upon
its discussion anywhere. But so far as I can
ascertain, ritual or Levitical purity did not
greatly affect the lives of the ordinary peasant
or artisan — that is to say, he had not to be
in constant anxiety not to become-ritually or

3 6 THE TEACHING OF JESUS n
Levitically unclean. He might become un
clean. He had not to trouble himself if he
touched a dead mouse. Ritual purity was the
special concern and trouble of the priests and
of a few rigorists who voluntarily determined
to live as priests ; it was also necessary for
the layman to be ritually clean upon the
few occasions when he visited the Temple in
Jerusalem. The great mass of the people,
including most of the Rabbis, had not to
concern themselves practically with such
questions for at least nineteen-twentieths of
their lives. It is true that the habit of
washing the hands before a meal was coming
in, but it can hardly be said that this custom,
or precept as it gradually became, was a very
considerable burden. Most of us keep it up
even at the present day, and do not think
ourselves slaves in bondage for doing so.
But the worst of a wrong polemical theory
is that it tends to make those who oppose
it exaggerate in their turn. We must not
forget two things — one general and one par
ticular. The particular thing is that, both in
Judaea and in Galilee, there must have been
many religious and moral evils in a.d. 30 —
a great deal, that is, for a reformer and a
prophet to denounce and to lament. What
society has ever been without them? And
the general thing is that there is no religion
which has not the defects of its qualities.

n JESUS AND THE LAW 37
There is none which has not its own peculiar
evils, its own peculiar dangers. Jewish legalism
is no exception to the rule. First of all
comes the obvious danger of putting the
ceremonial above the moral. It is easy to
be strict about food and drink and cooking,
and washing one's hands ; it is harder to be
humble and loving and sweet-tempered.
Again, there is the danger of self-righteous
ness and formalism ; many laws are negative ;
it is comparatively easy to keep them. A
man may have observed many laws, and in
his pride may think that he has observed the
whole Law ; it may be but a poor, negative,
formal, limited, and outward sort of morality
and religion to which he has attained, and
yet he may thank God for his own excellence
and that he is not as other men. The picture
of the Pharisee in Luke's parable — a ludicrous
caricature of the average Pharisee, a monstrous
caricature of the Pharisaic ideal — may yet be
true enough of one particular perversion of
the Pharisaic religion. And why should
there not have been several living examples
of such a perversion in the days of Jesus?
All that I beg of you to remember is that
you can have (and still do have in many
Jewish circles) a combination of the purest
and most saintly piety with the most careful
and minute observance of every detail of the
ceremonial law.

3 8 THE TEACHING OF JESUS n
Lastly, among the dangers of legalism may
sometimes be— though here the ground is
more delicate and difficult — a certain occa
sional hopelessness and unhappiness. The Law
was a popular Law : it was the people's Law
rather than the aristocrats'. Nevertheless there
probably existed a submerged tenth who, both
for moral and ritual reasons, violated the
Law, and were despised and avoided because
of their violation. There may also have
been a few who would have wished to obey
or to return to their obedience, but who,
whether from their occupation (such as tax-
collecting), or because they received no en
couragement, were yet unable to do so. The
gulf between them and respectability had
become too wide to be bridged over. And
once they had fallen out of the ranks, it may
well be that none of the respectables was
willing to hold out to them a hand.
I must not anticipate, but you will easily
realise what this remark is to lead up to. It
was the distinction and the original greatness
of the teacher of Nazareth that he did want
to hold out a hand, and that he did actually
hold it out — the hand of sympathy, of en
couragement, of redemption.
We have also to remember that among the
sores of the age, quite apart from the defects
of religious legalism, we have surely to reckon
a certain amount of oppression of the poor by

n JESUS AND THE LAW 39
the rich, such as existed so much more promi
nently and widely in the days of Isaiah and
Jeremiah. Like the great majority of the
Rabbis, who, be it understood, received no
payment for their studies or teaching, and
were mainly drawn from the poorer classes,
Jesus too was a man of the people. Like
the great majority of the Rabbis, he stood for
the poor against the rich, and a certain, almost
prejudiced, opposition to the rich and well-to-
do as such which we can discern in the Gospels
was, in all probability, a characteristic of the
historic Jesus. But the rich are not to be
identified with the legalists ; on the contrary,
a good proportion of those who were outside
the Law were rather rich than poor. Yet it
is easy to see how, in view of after events,
and through the opposition of the Synagogue
to the primitive Church, all those whom Jesus
reprimanded and all those who opposed him
soon became supposed to be without exception
supporters and champions of the Law.
The temperament of Jesus, his " prophetic "
temperament, if I may call it so, led him, then,
to attack, just as Amos and Isaiah attacked,
oppression and hypocrisy. Cruelty and
formalism were an abomination to him ;
these were the sins for which the Judgment
was soon to come. To him, as to Micah,
what the Lord required was to do justly and
to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God.

40 THE TEACHING OF JESUS n
Here I will recall to you the question I
put last time. Did Jesus attack the sinners,
or also the scheme of religion which produced
them? Did he attack the individuals, or
also the system ?
The truth seems to be that the attack
upon individuals, or upon certain results of
the system which seemed to him wrong and
improper, led him on half-unconsciously to
an attack, or at all events to an implied
attack, upon the system itself. Here, at all
events, just at this point, there came the
struggle and the conflict — the inward conflict
(which we may perhaps infer, though we are
not allowed to see it) and the outward con
flict, which Mark and the other Synoptists
are only too anxious to put before us.
When Amos and Hosea and Isaiah spoke,
there was no universally recognised Divine
and Mosaic Law. When Jesus spoke, there
was. Hosea said, in God's name, " I desire
lovingkindness and not sacrifices." There
was no possible retort — " But in the Law of
God, which you, like everybody else, acknow
ledge to be perfect, immutable, and divine,
sacrifices are required in large numbers." In
the age of Jesus it is true that the words
of the prophet were still supposed to be
authoritative and divine, but they had to be
interpreted or explained away (as they are to
this day) in the light of a still more authori-

n JESUS AND THE LAW 41
tative and still diviner document, the Penta-
teuchal Law.
Jesus takes up the prophetic message
under conditions which did not exist when
the greatest of the Prophets declaimed their
most specifically prophetic doctrine. The
conflict — both the inward and the outward
conflict — was therefore almost inevitable. In
the face of the Law which makes no clear
distinction between morality and cere
monialism, but demands them both with
equal insistence and equal authority, how
could a new teacher enunciate afresh the
doctrines of the Prophets, in direct applica
tion to the conditions and life of his time,
without coming at least very near to a con
flict with the letter of the Law ?
In the days of Jesus in Galilee there was
indeed no question of sacrifices ; these were
only offered in the distant Temple at
Jerusalem, whither people only made occa
sional pilgrimages. In everyday life sacrifices
were replaced by the laws about the Sabbath,
or the laws about food. It was in connection
with these sections of the Law — very impor
tant sections, moreover, as we have already
observed — that the conflict started and grew
sore. It began with the Sabbath.
Jesus, with his pure prophetic intensity,
was indignant that any ritual law should stand
in the way of executing immediately — directly

42 THE TEACHING OF JESUS n
the occasion offered — the higher law of com
passion and lovingkindness. The rule of the
Rabbis was that, except when there was danger
to life, no healing operation might be con
ducted upon the Sabbath. They said, like
Jesus — at least, one of them did — "The
Sabbath was made for man, and not man for
the Sabbath," but they strictly limited the
application of that principle. Supipose a
person was paralysed, and you felt you could
cure him. It would not matter, argued the
Rabbis, if he were paralysed one more day.
It was not a question of life and death. It
will do just as well if you heal him on Sunday
instead of on Saturday. Jesus, on the other
hand, was filled with indignation at such an
argument. The law of love was higher than
the ritual law, and must immediately be
fulfilled. We can, I think, see that dialectically the
Rabbis were in the right. The examples
given by Jesus in the Gospels do not prove
his point, for they involve the question of life
and death, or, at any rate, excessive cruelty
to animals, a point on which the Rabbis were
extremely sensitive. But we can also perceive
that Jesus was in the right too, and that his
right was higher and more permanent than
the dialectical right of the Rabbis. Jesus
seems fighting for a principle which he can
hardly enunciate or formulate : either, that

ii JESUS AND THE LAW 43
deeds of love and charity must never be put
off for the sake of ritual enactments ; or,
perhaps, that the rule and rest of the Sabbath
must be interpreted by its spirit, and by the
higher law of righteousness and compassion.
It is also possible that Jesus, in his con
flicts with the Rabbis about the Sabbath, may
have said, " I recognise that the Pentateuchal
Law of the Sabbath is divine, but what I
deny is the authority and divineness of your
interpretations and additions. To heal is not
to work ; to crush or pick ears of corn is
not to work ! " That is to say, Jesus would
have upheld, or rather would not have
touched, the validity of the written Penta
teuchal Law ; what he would have attacked
was the interpretation put upon the Law of
God by human commentators and casuists.
It is, indeed, likely enough that the con
flict against the Law began here. Jesus
probably realised the absurdity of many of
the regulations about the Sabbath into which
the Rabbis, in their mistaken zeal and too
eager legalism, had unfortunately been led.
There is some evidence that this was the
case ; Jesus may have feared that the very
spirit and object of the Sabbath were likely
to be crushed out by such casuistical details.
Rules would destroy principles.
But the conflict went farther than the
Sabbath, and farther than the additional enact-

44 THE TEACHING OF JESUS n
ments of the Rabbis. Jesus was compelled to
take up a certain attitude towards the Mosaic
Law itself, and this attitude was novel and
even revolutionary. In other words, Jesus
was driven on, by the inner necessities of his
prophetic temperament, and by the condi
tions and facts which he saw around him, to
advance half- unconsciously from an attack
upon persons and upon certain things which
they did, to an attack upon the system, or upon
certain parts of the system, on the basis or
authority of which those things were done.
We hear of three matters over which, besides
the Sabbath, keen conflicts arose, but one of
these three is too difficult, doubtful, and
intricate to be alluded to here.7 Of the
remaining two the first concerns divorce.
The originality of Jesus seems strikingly
shown in his treatment of women. We
know that women were among the most
devoted of his supporters, and from this and
other evidence we may infer that Jesus
appears to have rebelled against that more
Oriental view of women which is indicated or
expressed in certain passages of the Law.
He also rebelled against that false form of
chastity which spurns and crushes the sinner
instead of only spurning and crushing the
sin. A noble feature in his character was his
desire to redeem and convert, and he did
not leave outside of his redeeming activities

n JESUS AND THE LAW 45
the adulteress and the harlot. His champion
ship of womanhood and her rights led him
to ponder over that great sore of Oriental
life, the law of divorce. According to the
Pentateuchal Law, a man can put away his
wife, but a woman cannot put away her
husband. Moreover, the somewhat indistinct
language of the 24th chapter in Deutero
nomy, in which the rule about divorce
occurs, allowed and made room for the in
terpretation — too greatly in accordance with
prevailing views of many Eastern peoples —
that the woman could be divorced for a
variety of reasons over and above direct in
fidelity. There is a conflict of evidence and
opinion as to the exact line which Jesus took
up on the question. Some think that, like
Rabbi Shammai, his predecessor, he declared
that divorce must be limited to adultery. A
man must not send his wife away, unless she
had been unfaithful to him. It is, however,
also possible, and, perhaps, more probable,
that he went farther, and declared himself
against all divorce whatever and on whatever
ground. In any case he was apparently rebuked by
the Rabbis for running counter to a Mosaic
Law. For the divine Mosaic Law permits
divorce, or even, it might be said, under
certain circumstances, ordains it. According
to Mark, Jesus was induced by stress of con-

46 THE TEACHING OF JESUS 11
flict between his own ideal morality and the
letter of the Law to utter the striking prin
ciple, " For the hardness of your heart Moses
wrote you this commandment." Here again
we see that from one point of view the Rabbis
were right and Jesus was wrong, but that
from another and higher point of view Jesus
was once more right — prophetically right in
both senses of the word " prophetic."
There is nothing in the Law to indicate
that any law is a concession ; nothing to in
dicate that each law is not what it declares
itself to be, absolute in itself, and in itself,
even as its Author, changeless, perfect, and
divine. And yet we know, first, that the
Mosaic law of divorce was really a limita
tion, if not a concession ; and, secondly, that
the Law was, in considerable portions of it, a
sort of compromise with old, popular customs
of heathen origin. Thus here again we see
Jesus taking a modern, and also a prophetic,
view about the Law ; he is right from a
world-historic and universal standpoint, even
though from a narrower and literal stand
point his opponents too had their temporary
justification. Neither could understand the
other ; perhaps Jesus in a certain sense could
hardly understand himself. The Law was
divine ; he did not dream of disputing this
theoretically. But there was something still
more divine — the inspiration of his thoughts

ii JESUS AND THE LAW 47
and words as, in the stress and strain of the
moment, the Divine Spirit seemed to suggest
them to his mind.
Even a further step in contradiction to
the Law was Jesus constrained to go. This
further step concerned the very important
question of food. For there was no point on
which the Rabbis laid more emphasis, and
none in which the Law touched everyday life
more directly, than the regulations about food,
what one might eat and what one must avoid.
The Gospel gives no very clear record of the
conflict between Jesus and the Rabbis on
this grave subject, and what it does say
apparently contains editorial additions. Yet
it seems the more probable that here too, in
the stress and heat of conflict, Jesus — the
spiritual descendant and successor of Amos
and Isaiah — uttered a principle which was, on
the one hand, as most of us would agree
to-day, superbly true, and, on the other hand,
was in direct violation of the letter and the
implication of the Law. The conflict, we are
told, arose on the question of washing the
hands before meals. Jesus, as I have already
mentioned, did not observe this compara
tively recent regulation. He went on, how
ever, in justifying his neglect, to lay down a
principle of much greater range and sweep.
The conflict started with a new Rabbinical
regulation ; the principle included a whole

48 THE TEACHING OF JESUS n
number of ordinances in the Mosaic Law.
Jesus said : " Nothing outside a man, entering
into him, can make him unclean ; only the
things which come out of a man — these are
what make him unclean." Whether Jesus
had directly in view the distinction of foods
mentioned in Leviticus is uncertain. It is
improbable that he deliberately meant to say
(as the compiler of Mark supposes), " I
formally abrogate the Mosaic ordinances
about food ; all you, my disciples, may freely
eat pig and lobster and hare." 8 But the acute
and trained Rabbis could easily see the signi
ficance and implication of the utterance.
The Law had ordered that Israelites were not
to defile themselves by eating certain animals,
which are, it said, unclean to them, and an
abomination. This was a matter over and
above merely priestly or Levitical purity.
Every Israelite for all time was to avoid eat
ing rabbits and pigs, lobster, and hares ;
to eat them defiled in a totally different
sense from the touching of a dead mouse,
which only affected the priest. To eat
forbidden food was a direct violation of
God's Law, and the defilement it caused
affected all men alike, both priest and lay
man, at every season and in every place.
But if Jesus's principle was true, then the Law
was wrong. There was no material thing
which was unclean, or which could make a

ii JESUS AND THE LAW 49
man unclean, in any religious sense. In the
religious sense there was no uncleanness
except sin. Nothing could defile a man
religiously except his own consciously com
mitted sin.
It was a noble, a liberating utterance.
When we remember the immense burden
which material conceptions of clean and un
clean had imposed upon humanity in earlier
primitive religions ; when we think of these
conceptions in their relation not merely to
food, but to the sexual life, or to intercourse
between the members of one faith and race
and the members of another ; or when we
bear in mind the many troubles of the priest
hoods and all the vanities of priestly purity —
can we laud too highly, can we appreciate too
gratefully, the grand and prophetic principle
that only that which comes out of a man
can make him unclean ? Things cannot defile
persons. The spiritual personality can only
be spiritually defiled.
Yet highly as we may rate the religious
excellence of the saying, entirely as we may
sympathise with the doctrine, it is impossible
not to realise that, given the divinity and
perfection of the Law, the utterance of Jesus
could not be regarded as either true or inspired.
In some of its enactments the Law embodies
and rests upon that very primordial conception
of material religious uncleanness from which
E

50 THE TEACHING OF JESUS n
the principle laid down by Jesus so triumph
antly sets men free. If the principle is right,
the Law is wrong. If the Law is right, the
principle is wrong. Assume, as all the Rabbis
did, that God Himself was the author of the
Law, and its inerrancy follows as a matter of
course. Jesus, therefore, from this point of
view, was wrong, his principle was wrong,
and to lay down such a principle was pre
sumptuous and improper. Once again we
see that both parties were right, and that
neither could understand the other. Logic
ally and consistently, the right was on the side
of the Rabbis ; universally, ultimately, and
religiously, the right was on the side of Jesus.
Let me here utter a warning against an
easily acquired misconception. You are not
to understand that the Rabbis did not realise
that the moral laws were more important
than the ceremonial laws. In spite of the
fact that the Law often seems to put the two
sets of laws upon a level, they realised this
quite well. On this point or principle there
would have been no real difference of opinion.
Jesus, we may suppose, if we please, stated
the case more cogently and brilliantly than
his predecessors or contemporaries, but in the
principle itself there was nothing revolutionary.
When, for instance, Jesus said, " On the two
commandments, ' Thou shalt love the Lord
thy God with all thy heart,' and ' Thou shalt

n JESUS AND THE LAW 51
love thy neighbour as thyself,' hang the whole
Law and the Prophets," he was saying nothing
which the Rabbis would have disapproved of.
Or, again, though the positive form of the
Golden Rule may be much superior to the
negative form, still, when Jesus uttered it, he
uttered nothing which would have produced
conflict, irritation, or dissent. There is a
famous passage in the Talmud, for instance,
which is quoted again and again, how Moses
gave 613 precepts to Israel, and how succes
sive teachers and prophets reduced the 613
to fewer and fewer commands till, finally,
Amos (as one form has it), or Habakkuk (as
another form has it), reduced them to one.
But no practical deductions were made from
such statements in the direction of abandoning
one single ceremonial enactment. However
much the good sense and the religious feeling
of the Rabbis may have led them to realise
that to " love mercy " was more important
than to abstain from eating rabbits, it would
not have entered their heads to argue that so
long as you were merciful and loving you
might be allowed to eat them. The cere
monial laws, no less than the moral laws, were
the command of the all-wise and perfect God ;
they, too, like their author were perfect and
beautiful, and no sentence is more frequently
on the lips of the Rabbis than this that in
the multiplicity of the laws which He has

52 THE TEACHING OF JESUS n
given unto the Israelites, God has shown them
His goodness and crowned them with honour.
The Rabbis would have agreed with that
other saying of Jesus, which is perhaps of
doubtful authenticity, that while the moral
enactments are to be obeyed, as the weightier
matters of the Law, first and foremost, the
others, the ceremonial enactments, are also by
no means " to be left undone." Any utter
ance, still more any action, on the part of
Jesus, which seemed to indicate that the
smallest enactment of Leviticus need not be
faithfully obeyed, or carried out to the letter,
was bound to produce conflict, contradiction,
and scorn.
I have said that every religion has the
defects of its qualities, and to the defects of
legalism Jesus seems to have been peculiarly
sensitive, for these defects were just such as
would have aroused the wrath of the Prophets,
whose temper and point of view Jesus so
vividly reproduced. Indeed, the sins which
Jesus specially denounced (whether connected
or not connected with legalism) were often
substantially the same sins which Amos and
Isaiah had themselves reproved. But, as I
have already observed, Jesus did not merely
content himself with reproving and denounc
ing, though for certain persons and for certain
sins — cruelty, formalism, and hypocrisy — he
does seem to have had little else than denuncia-

ii JESUS AND THE LAW 53
tion. He called to repentance, and he called
to repentance not merely by announcing
doom and condemning sinners and their
sin, but by means more personal, novel, and
conciliatory. I do not think that he was always con
sistent. He urged his disciples to love their
enemies, but so far as we can judge he showed
little love to those who opposed him. He
urged that the lost sheep should be actively
sought out ; but except in the way of sheer
abuse and bitter vituperation, he did nothing
to win over to his own conception of religion
the Pharisees and Rabbis who ventured to
criticise and dislike him. To the hardest
excellence of all even Jesus could not attain.
For it was far easier for him to care for the
outcast than to care for his opponent, especi
ally when the outcast was ready to acknow
ledge that he was sent and inspired by God,
and the opponent took the liberty of denying
it. Thus the outcast was a "little one"
whom God sought to save ; the opponent
was an offspring of vipers and a child of
perdition. For it is only God, the Father of
us all, who has no opponents ; even the best
of His messengers, inspired though they be,
ever remain within their human limitations,
far removed from the perfection of the
Divine. And here too, in this human weak
ness and limitation, Jesus again resembles the

54 THE TEACHING OF JESUS n
Prophets ; the Jewish critic recalls Jeremiah,
and can cast no stone at the teacher from
Nazareth. But nevertheless we are bound to
note that of those whom he denounced many,
in all probability, did not deserve his censure.
So far, however, as others were guilty of sin,
it was the self-righteous formalist, the proud
and sanctimonious observers of the ceremonial
enactments of the Law, who either neglected,
or but formally and negatively obeyed its moral
commandments, ' that found no mercy at his
hands. To them, except in the way of stern
rebuke and vigorous vituperation, he was no
physician. For these special failures of legal
ism he had no pity ; he forgot that they too,
however sinful, were created, like himself, in
the image of God ; that they too, like him
self, were sons of the same divine Father, and
that the same sun shone upon them as upon
himself. But what reformer or prophet, in
the intensity of his zeal, is consistent ? We
must not expect consistency from Jesus, and
we must not be surprised that in his language
towards his opponents — if its authenticity be
assumed — we can convict him of inconsistency
out of his own mouth.9
But there were other sinners and unfortun
ates besides the formalist, the oppressor, and
the hypocrite. There were the men and the
women whom Rabbis and Jesus alike would
have agreed to call sinners ; there were,

ii JESUS AND THE LAW 55
perhaps, as we have seen, a few others, though
this is more doubtful, who were sinners in the
eyes of the Rabbis, but not in their own, or
sinners both in the eyes of the Rabbis and in
their own, but who yet were not sinners in the
eyes of Jesus. Jesus was not merely the
" collective " prophet, if I may use such a
term, like Amos or Hosea. He was also the
individualist prophet — the seeker of souls —
like Ezekiel. He was the prophet, the
teacher, for the afflicted and the unhappy.
"I will seek" — such was one side of his
mission — " I will seek," as Ezekiel had said of
God, " that which is lost, and will bring again
that which is driven away, and will bind up
that which is broken, and will strengthen that
which is sick."
This redeeming activity was, I believe, a
new thing — at all events as practised with the
methods and the intensity of Jesus. Just
because he was himself not a sinner, he did
not keep himself to himself and avoid contact
with those who sinned. The tax-collector
and the harlot on the one side, the leper and
the possessed upon the other, those whose
professions or bodily states bore the hall-mark
of their sins, he was ready to encourage and
to heal. He was moved towards them by a
divine compassion, as tender as it was efficaci
ous. I do not think that one or two passages
of dubious import are enough to make us

56 THE TEACHING OF JESUS n
hold that he did not share the common view
that demoniac possession (in which Jesus, like
his contemporaries, in this inferior to the
prophets, firmly believed), or leprosy, or
paralysis, was not the result of previous sin ;
but in any case he felt sure that those afflicted
with these calamities could not only, by the
power which God had given him, be freed
from their affliction (and his healings were
undoubtedly many and startling), but that
they could be induced and encouraged to live
better and purer lives. God was ready,
through His messenger, to pardon their sins,
to release them from the punishment' — that is,
the affliction — which those sins had received,
and to help them by His grace and goodness,
to receive a place in the coming Kingdom of
Heaven.10 Nothing seems to have produced greater
murmuring and scorn among his opponents
than the attitude of Jesus towards sinners,
though we are left to conjecture in most
cases who exactly these sinners were. They
saw him actually sitting at table, — and a
meal still retained something of a sacred
character, — actually eating and drinking with
" tax-collectors and sinners." He did not
mind being touched by a harlot, prophet
though he was. He knew that his own
purity could not be defiled. The harlot's
touch produced in him no evil desire ; he did

n JESUS AND THE LAW 57
not hate her sin the less because he longed to
heal the sinner. He sought for the outcast
and the afflicted ; such people were not afraid
to consort with him ; they were drawn to him
by his sympathy, but drawn to him not to
continue, but to abandon their sin. He was
the " friend of sinners." Surely Jesus has
received no grander or more glorious title to
fame than these words, coined in mockery and
opprobrium, which recoiled upon the heads of
those who framed them.
The Rabbis attached no less value to re
pentance than Jesus. They sang its praises
and its efficacy in a thousand tones. They,
too, urged that God cared more for the re
pentant than for the just who had never yielded
to sin. They, too, welcomed the sinner in his
repentance. But to seek out the sinner, and,
instead of avoiding the bad companion, to
choose him as your friend in order to work
his moral redemption, this was, I fancy, some
thing new in the religious history of Israel.
The methods which Jesus sometimes adopted
for the cure of sin were original and startling.
It does not follow that in a lesser man these
methods would be either justified or successful.
It is not every one who can imitate Jesus, and
without harm to himself and with benefit to
his companions become the friend of sinners.
Jesus seems (upon the slender evidence we
have) to have perceived the good lurking

58 THE TEACHING OF JESUS n
under the evil. He could quench the evil
and quicken the good by giving to the sinner
somebody to admire and to love. He asked
for service, and put it in the place of sin.
The hatefulness of his past life was brought
vividly to the mind of the sinner as the anti
thesis of his new affection and of his loving
gratitude. It was, doubtless, often a daring
method ; even with Jesus it may not always
have been successful. But it inaugurated a
new idea : the idea of redemption, the idea of
giving a fresh object of love and interest to
the sinner, and so freeing him from his sin.
The rescue and deliverance of the sinner
through pity and love and personal service —
the work and the method seem both alike due
to the teacher of Nazareth.

Ill
THE KINGDOM OF GOD
I spoke in my last lecture of Jesus in his
capacity as comforter and healer. Perhaps
we may say that Jesus was the more eager to
help and save all who were willing to listen
to his words, because of the shortness of the
time which was left, because of the immensity
of the difference of the lot which was so soon
to separate the saved from the lost, the chosen
from the rejected. Both when he comforts,
and when he denounces, he does so with the
more or less conscious background in his mind
of the great coming change. The end of the
old order is imminent. A new order is at
hand. When this change has taken place,
when the intervening period has passed by,
those who will then be living upon a renovated
earth will be living in the Kingdom of God.
The intervening period will be one of terror
and alarm ; a sifting and a judgment will
occupy its most crucial stage ; and, as the
59

60 THE TEACHING OF JESUS in
result of these, some will enter permanent
happiness, while others will be condemned
to annihilation or abiding gloom.
The conceptions which Jesus held of the
Judgment and of the Kingdom of God have
been the subject of interminable debate. In
these lectures, however, I propose to speak of
them very briefly. I must not give a false
picture of the teaching of Jesus as a whole
by exaggerating or unduly emphasising some
particular features of it, but, if I avoid this
danger, I may, I think, not unjustifiably dwell
mainly upon such features as seem to me both
new and good in themselves, and still valuable
for us to-day, rather than on those which do
not so clearly possess these characteristics.
So far as the Judgment and the Kingdom are
concerned, while the doctrine itself is central
and gravely significant, the form in which it
was held is of very secondary importance.
Moreover the doctrine, however central and
significant, was, nevertheless, though pressed
and emphasised by Jesus, yet not created by
him or even considerably changed.
I range myself with those for whom the
Kingdom of God, as Jesus used it, meant
almost invariably, if not always, something
eschatological ; something which was about
to happen, which indeed, from one point of
view, one might describe as beginning or
having begun, but something which, in its

iii THE KINGDOM OF GOD 61
fullness and completion, was not already
there. The Kingdom, as Jesus used the
term, was not something within a man ;
it was without him ; it was a condition of
the world, a state, of which his own beati
tude would indeed form a part, but which
was primarily something given, something
striven for, something social and general,
rather than something purely individualistic
and personal.11 Where the Kingdom seems
identified with an existing community, or
where, if anywhere, it seems that it must
mean a process or state within the soul,
there I hold that the historic Jesus is no
longer speaking to us his own words.
What was the Jewish conception in the
days of Jesus of the Messianic Kingdom or
the Kingdom of God ? It almost seems
absurd to put so large and complicated a
question in order to answer it in a few
general sentences, but I must try my best.
Putting the person of the Messiah entirely
on one side, I think we may say that the
Jewish conception included what we may
loosely call a national and material element,
and a religious and spiritual element, and
that these two elements were closely welded
and united together. It is only we who
separate them in our analysis. In the King
dom of God the Jews would be emancipated
from their foreign overlords and oppressors ;

62 THE TEACHING OF JESUS in
they would be happy and prosperous for ever
more. This does not sound a very religious
conception, and it is often regarded and
stigmatised as material and political and par
ticularistic and national, with many other dis
agreeable adjectives. But it was never held
by any decent teacher in this sort of artificial
isolation. Happiness and prosperity, yes —
these would indeed be marks of the Kingdom,
but not these alone ; we must add to them
peace and justice and righteousness and the
knowledge of God. These additions surely
make a vast difference to the picture.
Two other points must be briefly alluded
to. First of all, are those who are to live in
the Kingdom, or under the rule of God, just
ordinary human beings of flesh and blood,
and will they always continue so ? Here the
conceptions were still floating ; some persons
supposed that the Messianic Kingdom would
last long, but nevertheless end. Only at its
close would come the resurrection of the dead
and the final Judgment, and after that another
and eternal Kingdom of a more spiritual kind.
Others, again, combined the two Kingdoms
together, and conceived of an existence half
material, half spiritual. There might indeed
be eating and drinking, but there would and
need be no marriage or bearing of children,
for men and women would be immortal.
This was the more general and widely spread

in THE KINGDOM OF GOD 63
view. But with these conceptions, and
confused with them, there was the more in
dividualistic conception of " Heaven." Im
mediately after death the righteous would go
to a place of happiness, and enjoy beatitude.
How they fared at the coming of the King
dom, how they joined their righteous brethren
upon the renovated world, whether they and
their environment descended from above to
form a new and less material earth — all these
are questions to which different answers can
be picked out from the apocalyptic and rab
binic literature, but which, as it seems to me,
though huge books have been written about
them, have little interest or value for us to
day. They are but dreams and visions ; vain
and vague pictures of an unknowable to be.
All that we need concern ourselves to
remember is that the Messianic age — the
world to come — meant prosperity and happi
ness ; righteousness and peace ; the knowledge
of God, and his realised presence within the
saintly and joyful community.
Secondly, we must remember that the
doctrine of the Messianic age meant an in
domitable optimism and a quenchless faith in
the goodness and supremacy of God. The
Golden Age was not put in the past ; it was
projected into the future. To the higher
minds it also meant spirituality, and it meant
this very much more since the new doctrine

64 THE TEACHING OF JESUS m
of the resurrection had become the generally
accepted dogma of the synagogue. For
though the risen dead are to live upon the
earth, it is a new earth with new conditions
upon which they live. Among the higher
minds the stress was laid, not upon the
outward and the material, but upon the in
ward and the spiritual. Righteousness and
peace and the knowledge of God became
more important elements in the felicity of
the Golden Age than flocks and herds and
territory and dominion.
Again, the doctrine of the Kingdom of
the Messianic age, as Father Tyrrell has so
strikingly explained in his last posthumous
book, meant something other than a mere
belief in gradual progress. It meant a regular
break and cleavage from the conditions of the
present. It meant a belief in a transcendent
world, in a world where there will be no pro
gress because the end has been attained — for
it stood, as Father Tyrrell has said, ' ' for an
order of transcendental experience, in which
sorrow, pain, temptation, and sin shall be
done away." 12 It meant a belief that God
could and would suddenly, and one might
almost say violently, create a new world, not
through human co-operation, not through
human achievement, but by His own power,
His own will, His own goodness, and for His
own sake and glory as much as for the sake

iii THE KINGDOM OF GOD 65
and glory of Israel. Many of these things for
which the doctrine stood were due not merely
to the doctrine itself, but to the fact that the
doctrine was now combined with the other
doctrines, not originally native to it, of the
resurrection of the dead and of spiritual im
mortality. The Messianic age before these
doctrines arose was something much more
earthly and material than it was afterwards.
It then became more religious, more spiritual,
more transcendent.
But, lastly, how about the non-Jews ? How
about the Romans and the Empire ? Far be
it from me to deny that the particularistic
note predominates. Judaism never com
pletely broke through its nationalist limita
tions. I do not for a moment suppose, if
you had asked any respectable Rabbi of the
age of Jesus, that he would have said that
in the Kingdom of God the heathen would
be ruled over by the Jews in the same way
as the Jews were then ruled over by the
heathen. But he might have said that an
enormous proportion of the heathen would
be annihilated at the Judgment, and that the
rest would acknowledge the truth and sov
ereignty of the God of Israel. The heathen
would become converted to the true God —
allies, perhaps tributaries, of the chosen people.
The universalistic predictions of the old Pro
phets were not forgotten ; but some teachers F

66 THE TEACHING OF JESUS in
dwelt upon them more, and others dwelt upon
them less. There was no general agreement.
Thus the Jewish conception of the King
dom in the days of Jesus was still a floating
one. Undoubtedly, however, it did include
a strong nationalistic element.
" Who shall blame,
When the slaves enslave, the oppressed ones o'er
The oppressor triumph for evermore ! "
Your turn in this world, our turn in the
next. I do not deny that there has always
been, up to modern times, a good deal of
this. But there has also always been the
conviction that many gentiles will come to
the knowledge of the true God and will be
gathered under the wings of the Shechinah.
The righteous of all nations shall have a share
in the world to come ; this, too, is a Rabbinic
doctrine which, though doubtless more often
quoted to-day than in antiquity, was never
entirely ignored.
The religious danger of the nationalist
element in the conception was not, however,
confined to its particularism. The danger
lay in the confident expectation that because
of their mere race and genealogy all Israelites,
except a few outrageous sinners and apostates,
would assuredly find their places in the
world to come. It was this danger against
which John the Baptist protested. " Say

iii THE KINGDOM OF GOD 67
not within yourselves we have Abraham for
our father." It was against this false and
irreligious confidence, which could so easily
lead to careless living and odious sins, far
more than against any theoretic particularism,
that Jesus directed his protest. It was here
that he took up again the part of Amos and
the Prophets.
It is natural to ask whether the teaching
of Jesus brought many other changes into the
Jewish conceptions of the Kingdom. I do
not think that it did, or at any rate that we
can say so with any certainty. To Jesus too,
as to his contemporaries, the scene, the locale,
of the Kingdom appears to be a renovated
earth, and though the members of the King
dom do not marry or beget children and bear
them, they yet, as Loisy has pointed out, have
bodies of flesh and bones, nor is it a mere
metaphor that they are conceived as assem
bling at a banquet and drinking of a new
and purer wine.13
More important is the question whether
Jesus thought that those who would be ad
mitted into the Kingdom would be many or
few. The evidence is a little conflicting, but
we have no reason to believe that Jesus
shrank back, as most of us would shrink
back to-day, from the awful conception that
a very large number of those living upon the
earth when the Judgment, which ushered in

68 THE TEACHING OF JESUS in
the Kingdom, arrived, and a very large
number of those who rose from the dead,
would be permanently excluded from the
beatitudes of the New Order. " Broad is the
way that leads to destruction : many there
be that enter in thereby : strait the way
which leads to life : few they be that find
it." This passage, and others like it, are not
exotic growths upon the teaching of Jesus ;
they are, I fear, part of its genuine structure.
Moreover — and this is a very important
point — repentance was only possible before
death and before the Judgment ; the beautiful
modern conception of a moral progress after
death, the merciful mediaeval conception of
purgatory, were both unknown to him and
to his contemporaries. Hence the gigantic
importance of repentance while there was still
time. It is another question whether he
supposed that those excluded from the King
dom would be annihilated, or kept in a
constant condition for all time of painful con
scious existence, whether material, or mental,
or both. Was Jesus, like many of his con
temporaries, able to reconcile — such is the
amazing plasticity of the human mind — the
dread doctrine of eternal punishment with a
passionate belief in the infinite goodness of
God? The great scholars are divided in
their opinion. Prof. Bacon writes : " Jesus
leaves the whole question of the fate of the

iii THE KINGDOM OF GOD 69
wicked absolutely open." Here the wish
seems to me the father of the thought.
Loisy more cautiously observes : " Perhaps
the thought of Jesus on a subject, where no
experience facilitates precision, was tolerably
floating." 14 But though the eternity of pain
ful punishment may be left a moot question
so far as Jesus is concerned, and though we
must remember that the time-perspectives of
his age were not on our scale, so that in the
Book of Enoch " aeonian," or everlasting,
life is defined as a life which lasts for five
hundred years, it seems difficult to hold
either that Gehenna did not fill an important
place in his thoughts and teaching, or that
there is any real evidence to show that he
believed that if you once got into Gehenna,
there was any chance of your passing out of
it into Heaven. On this gravely important
matter it is no good attempting to minimize
the chasm which separates his teaching from
that of the modern universalist, or its incon
sistency, as it would seem to such a univer
salist, with the dogma of the justice and the
goodness of God. Nor can we deny that the
fear of Gehenna as a motive was employed by
him. " Fear Him who is able to destroy
both soul and body in Gehenna." But the
motive was not original to Jesus ; therefore
its consideration need no longer detain us.
More important is the question about the

70 THE TEACHING OF JESUS in
relation of Jew to Gentile in the Judgment
and the New World, though here, too, no
certainty can be arrived at. But of one
point there is no doubt. Jesus, as the suc
cessor of the prophets, was emphatic that race
was no protection for sin. The Jew, as such,
from the mere fact of his descent, would
have no claim or right to admission to the
Kingdom. The test for admission was a
certain temper of mind, a humble faith, a
righteous life — but not genealogy or blood.
Jesus would have re-echoed and approved
those amazing words of Amos : " Tou only
have I known of all the inhabitants of the
earth : therefore will I visit upon you all
your iniquities." There would be plenty of
Israelite sinners among those excluded from
the Kingdom of God.
But if the test of admission is character, is
the Kingdom universal ? Would there be no
longer any barriers of race in the new order,
and were Jew and Gentile to stand on an
equal footing before God? The inference,
to us obvious, must not be hastily drawn.
The evidence is conflicting. Jesus did not
preach a consciously universalist Kingdom,
just as he did not conceive himself sent, or
send his disciples, to the Gentiles and the
heathen. Not Jesus, but Paul, gave to the
problem a conscious and universalist solution.
Yet there is good reason to believe that, like

iii THE KINGDOM OF GOD 71
the prophets before him, Jesus thought that
the place of many excluded Jewish sinners in
the new Kingdom would be filled by many
Gentile believers. Gentiles from north and
east and west and south would sit down, on
equal terms, and in full citizenship, with the
true descendants of Abraham at the heavenly
banquet. And in another point Jesus appears to
transcend, or perhaps one should rather say
to ignore, the customary Jewish particularism
or nationalism. So far as we can gather
from the fragmentary, and, we must also
admit, prejudiced and interested records, he
did not conceive the Kingdom as a sort of
righteous Jewish Empire. The domination
of the Romans would indeed be broken, the
rule of the heathen Emperor would come to
an end, but there is no trace in the records
that the rule of another Emperor — only this
time of Jewish descent — would be substituted,
who would reign like David over a large
and prosperous Palestine, with a great fringe
of vassal and tributary states. The political
aspect of the Kingdom seems of no interest
to Jesus : it fades completely away, and has
no place in his more spiritual hopes and
anticipations. The Kingdom is not merely
individualist ; it is a society, a community ;
I think, we may even add, there is a King ;
but the governmental or ruling aspect of the

72 THE TEACHING OF JESUS m
society is entirely ignored. There is no
triumph of Jew over Gentile, of the oppressed
over the oppressor. We may, indeed, say
that there are no differences of political status
in Jesus's Kingdom : you are either wholly in
it or wholly excluded. There is no ruling
caste, no vassals or tributaries ; and within
the Kingdom, if there are differences of worth
and of degree, these are dominated and con
trolled by the loftier and guiding principle
that higher greatness in rank is to be allotted
and recognised for higher greatness in service.
Two other points we must notice about
Jesus's conception of the Kingdom, which are
of great interest for us to-day. The prophet
Ezekiel had urged those who listened to him
to make and get them a new heart and a new
spirit. But almost in the same breath he had
promised that God, of His own grace, and in
the accomplishment of His holy purpose,
would give them a new heart and put a new
spirit within them. What is now demanded as
a voluntary effort of man is now promised as a
voluntary gift of God. Just in the same way,
Jesus urges his disciples and those who listen
to his preaching to strive to gain the Kingdom
with every effort of mind and will, and he
also represents it, without any inconsistency,
or at least without any sense of inconsistency,
as the gracious gift of God. Though the
dualism of the Fourth Gospel is foreign to the

iii THE KINGDOM OF GOD 73
Synoptics and still more to the historic Jesus,
though the world is not divided into men of
darkness and men of light, there are never
theless unsystematic anticipations of this hard
and fast division. In the good pleasure of
God the Kingdom shall be the glorious destiny
and heritage of a certain number of persons ;
but no one can know precisely — such we may
suppose to be the thought of Jesus — whether
he will himself form one of that number, and
in any case he must never cease to do his best
to qualify for admission. When all is done
that man can do, the beatitude of the Kingdom
is far greater than his deserts. In a double
sense the Kingdom is a gift. First, because
man can never deserve it ; and, secondly,
because it is God who helps him to attain it.
The demands which Jesus made upon his
disciples, or would-be disciples, relative to the
acquisition of the Kingdom varied apparently
to some extent, as was only natural, in differ
ent stages of his career. They tended to
increase as the denouement grew nearer and
the tension became more strained. Perhaps
also they varied with his mood, and with the
particular person to whom he was speaking.
We are not surely to imagine that he
usually believed that the ordinary average
citizen who kept the commandments, and
was humble, chaste, just and kind, up to a
very decent standard, would be excluded

74 THE TEACHING OF JESUS in
from the beatitudes of the Kingdom. On
some occasions the special beauty of trust,
of the sense of dependence upon God and
of that quality which the Germans call
Anspruchslosigkeit, came over him very
strongly ; perhaps also the objectionableness
of their opposites. It was on such occasions,
and in such moods, perchance, that he would
say that unless men and women were like
little children — in disposition of mind and
soul — they would not be allowed to receive
the Kingdom of God. On other occasions
— perhaps at a distinct period of his career —
he seems to have demanded for every seeker
and candidate for the Kingdom a full and
complete renouncement of earthly possessions
and earthly ties. To obtain this highest
conceivable prize and gift it is necessary, as it
were, to make a clean sweep of everything
which could deflect your mind, your heart,
and your actions, from being bent exclusively
upon the glorious goal. " All for all " must
be the watchword.
And here we seem to perceive a certain
new individualism in Jesus, which needs our
attention. It is, I believe, often said that
the doctrine or injunction, " Die to live," is
of the very essence of Christianity. In its
earliest use and meaning this injunction had
a definitely eschatological application. Who
ever would save his life must be prepared to

iii THE KINGDOM OF GOD 75
lose it, and he that has so lost it shall find it.
Jesus, when he uttered these sayings and
others like them, was primarily thinking of
the life before the Kingdom and the life
within it — or, as we should say, of the life
upon earth and the life beyond the grave.
To be received into that life — with its
beatitudes and its nearness to God — is worth
any sacrifice in this life, or rather it is worth
the sacrifice of this life altogether. What
can it profit a man to gain the whole world
and to forfeit his life — his life, that is, in the
true and permanent sense, his eternal life
within the Kingdom ?
Given the assumptions of Jesus, his argu
ment seems strictly sound. But some have
thought and think that the doctrine, while it
gave rise to all kinds of heroism and great
ness, has also been the ultimate origin of much
dubious morality and of some positive evil.
We often observe of doctrines and prin
ciples that they can be exaggerated towards
evil, and that they have the defects of their
qualities. Jewish critics often bring com
plaints about New Testament teaching in
this connection. First, they say it has en
gendered a false other-worldliness. Secondly,
it has engendered a certain individualistic
selfishness. It has induced the temper of
mind and the belief which made, for instance,
Tertullian say — I quote from Seeck's remark-

76 THE TEACHING OF JESUS in
able, if strongly biassed, chapter on Christian
ity in his striking History of the Fall of the
Ancient World — " I am my own end. I care
for nothing except to have no care. One
can find a much better life in solitude than in
society. Do you blame me as lazy ? Do
you say one must live for one's city, for the
empire, for society ? These views prevailed
formerly. But no one was born for others,
seeing that every one has to die for himself."
Such sentiments, say the Jewish critics, with
all that has followed them, are the direct
result of the teaching of Jesus. There is
undoubtedly, I think, some element of truth
in these criticisms ; nevertheless they, in
their turn, have produced harmful exaggera
tions. For modern Jews have sometimes
tended to underestimate the place of other-
worldliness or of individualism in their own
religion, just because they have deprecated its
supposed exaggeration in the religion of their
neighbours. To speak of this would, however,
lead me too far afield. As to the criticism
itself, I think it hardly applies to Jesus and
to his own utterances. For we have to re
member that to Jesus there was no question
of a long continuance of ordinary earthly
conditions for endless ages. There was to
be a great catastrophe : the end of one order,
the beginning of another and a final order.
It was soon no longer to be a question of

iii THE KINGDOM OF GOD 77
obtaining the other life, the world to come :
the other life would be there ; it was already
at the door ; and in that other life there
would be no progress and no change. The
good, on the one side, in the Kingdom,
enjoying its beatitudes : the evil, on the
other side, excluded for ever. No more
chances whether for evil or for good. The
lot of every man would be soon determined
once and for all. Much of the moral teach
ing of the gospel is relative to that one
overmastering idea, even when the idea itself
is not definitely expressed. Hence Jesus
could not say : Do not neglect your earthly
duties in your zeal to obtain the Kingdom,
or do not forget the generations to come after
you upon earth in your eagerness to receive
the heavenly guerdon. Nor need we, I
think, make the perhaps somewhat captious
criticism that a healthy person is not always,
and should not be always, thinking about his
own salvation ; that salvation, like happiness,
is probably best found when least thought
of; that a man should do his duty to his
family, his city, and his country, and leave
God to look after his destiny in the world
to come ; or that the best preparation for
another life is to think as little about it as
possible, but rather to do the utmost good
in this life, and leave your tiny corner of
earth a little better than you found it.

78 THE TEACHING OF JESUS in
It still remains true that the idea of the
one essential thing in life, the one ultimate
good, for which all else must be sacrificed and
to which all else must give way, is a necessary
feature of every lofty and stirring morality.
Here, as in other points, we notice, and in
noticing appreciate, the heroic element in the
teaching of Jesus ; and we shall, I think, con
clude that to keep even ordinary life sweet
and clean, to prevent every-day morality
becoming commonplace, and commonplace
morality degenerating into Philistinism, we
need, besides and beyond the more equable,
balanced, and sensible type of religious teach
ing, that provocative, paradoxical, and heroic
type which is characteristic of the Gospels
and of Jesus.
Moreover, it must never be forgotten
that the repeated and eager injunction to
obtain the true and eternal life by sacrificing
the temporary and false life does not mean a
sacrifice, so to speak, in vacuo. If it can be
represented as a sacrifice of self for self, it
can also be represented as a sacrifice of self
for the sake of the cause. "For my sake
and the Gospel's," says Jesus. The exact
words need not be pressed, but the idea is
surely genuine.15 Jesus does not conceive of
every individual as existing in a sort of isolated,
water-tight compartment, and then hermit
like, despoiling himself of his possessions and

iii THE KINGDOM OF GOD 79
thus acquiring eternal life. The sacrifice is
made indeed in one's own interest, but it is
also, we might even say it is still more, made for
the sake of the community. It is in service,
voluntary and humble service for the com
munity, for the little ones, in the seeking out
and bringing in the strayed sheep, and in
helping them too to enter the Kingdom, that
one's own chance of entering it is most
efficiently and properly secured. Though,
in some passages in the Synoptics, Jesus seems
to speak of the few who find the gate and of
the many that miss it with strange and even
painful equanimity, in other places he is re
ported as showing an ardent desire that as
many should be saved as he and his disciples
could possibly bring in. And to save others
is the best way of saving oneself. Jesus him
self was to be imitated, and he declares that
he came to serve, to serve those little ones
of whom it was not the will of the heavenly
Father that one of them should perish.
It was, then, upon the basis, with the
incentive, and from the background, of his
doctrine of the Kingdom, that Jesus developed
his general teaching about God and man and
the relations of one to the other. Because a
great something was going to happen, there
fore Jesus, like the prophets of old, himself
in his own eyes a prophet even as they, opens
his mouth and speaks the words of warning

80 THE TEACHING OF JESUS in
and of enlightenment. As M. Loisy has
rightly said, he did not come as the founder
of a new religion, hardly even as the conscious
and deliberate reformer of the existing and
traditional religion. He came to accomplish
the great hope, or rather, perhaps, to play his
own predestined part in its accomplishment.16
It is even doubtful whether, except perhaps
in cases or moments of stress and conflict, he
sought or desired or intended to put his own
teaching in direct contrast with, or substitu
tion for, the teaching of those around him,
or the teaching of the Law. I have already
spoken of his conflict with the letter of the
Law in certain individual cases. The Sermon
on the Mount makes him take up a theoretic
attitude towards the Law as a whole, and
that too — here most clearly unhistorically —
at an early period in his career. Jesus is
reported to have said that he has not come to
destroy the Law or the Prophets, but (as most
commentators render) to fulfil them. Into
the meaning of this famous phrase, about
which so much ink has been expended, I will
not now enter. It would take too long.
Its authenticity is not above dispute ; its
meaning, if it be authentic, somewhat doubt
ful. More clear, and in some ways more im
portant, are the definite and even vehement
contrasts between old and new, the Law and
himself, as expressed in the six times repeated

iii THE KINGDOM OF GOD 81
antithesis, "Ye have heard that it was said,
but I say unto you." It may be noted that
there is no exact parallel to the phrase out
side Matthew or even outside the Sermon on
the Mount. Its meaning is not made more
certain because, in one of the six cases, Jesus
is made to quote as an injunction of the Law
a statement which is not to be found there.
I of course refer to the point, to which Jewish
critics have called attention again and again,
that Jesus is reported to have stated, "Ye
have heard that it was said, Thou shalt love
thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy." Now
it does say in the Pentateuch, " Thou shalt
love thy neighbour as thyself." It does say
in the Pentateuch, "Thou shalt love the
stranger as the homeborn," but it nowhere
says, " Thou shalt hate thine enemy." On
the contrary, it says, "Thou shalt not take
vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the
children of thy people. Thou shalt not
hate thy brother in thy heart." It scarcely
seems likely that Jesus would have been
guilty of so grave an inaccuracy, or of one
about which he could so easily have been
contradicted. The phrase is also made the
more startling because, three times out of the
six, Jesus is alluding to laws contained in the
Decalogue. And, generally, while the per
sonal note, the sense of personal importance
and personal authority, of which we have yet

82 THE TEACHING OF JESUS hi
to speak, was an undoubted characteristic of
Jesus — and a characteristic, moreover, in
which he differs from his prophetic pre
decessors, Amos, Isaiah, or Ezekiel — yet this
especial emphasis of " I say " as contrasted
with what the Law says — the Law which
Jesus too held to be divine — seems somewhat
doubtful and difficult. At least worth men
tioning is the hypothesis of one of the greatest
Rabbinic scholars now living, Dr. Schechter,
that the phrase is a Greek equivalent of a
Hebrew idiom, which would mean " You
might understand such and such a law to
mean, or to mean only, so and so ; therefore
I desire to point out to you that it means
also so and so." 17 However this may be,
we cannot safely use the antitheses of the
Sermon on the Mount as a convincing argu
ment to prove that Jesus desired to put for
ward his own teaching in habitual contrast
with, and in direct substitution for, the teach
ing of the Law.
On the other hand, it would, I think, be
going too far to say that Jesus did not feel,
or was not conscious, that he had any new
doctrines, or new applications of old doc
trines, to lay before his people. At any rate,
as even Dr. Schechter's interpretation of the
famous, " I say unto you," would imply, he
did feel that there were implications of old
doctrines which he desired to unfold and to

iii THE KINGDOM OF GOD 83
insist upon. And the relation of such new
implications to his own person — 'the new note
of authority in his teaching as a whole — must
also be borne in mind. It is to these matters
that I shall call your attention in the two
following lectures.

IV
THE NATURE OF GOD AND HIS
RELATION TO MAN
I spoke in the last lecture concerning the
conception which Jesus had formed about the
Kingdom of God, and I pointed out how this
conception constituted the setting or frame
work for much of his religious and ethical
teaching, although nevertheless much of that
teaching is still applicable and valuable for
those to whom the conception of the Kingdom,
as Jesus held it, has become distant and un
real. I then went on to say a few words
about the individualistic element in the teach
ing of Jesus, and about the relation of his
teaching as a whole, in his own mind, to the
teaching of the Law. Here would be the
point at which I ought to consider the entire
religious and ethical teaching of Jesus in all
its bearings and branches, both where it is old
and where it is new. I have, however, already
indicated that so large and comprehensive a
84

iv THE NATURE OF GOD 85
task is beyond the scope of the present short
course of lectures, as it is also beyond the
power of the present lecturer.
I only propose in the present lecture to
deal, rather unsystematically, with one or
two important features and elements in the
religious and ethical teaching of Jesus, as we
may gather them from the Synoptics.
But before I enter upon this much more
limited, yet sufficiently arduous task, may I
start the subject by two or three general re
marks upon the originality of the teaching of
Jesus as a whole ? I am inclined to believe
that both Jews and Christians have sometimes
been a little unfair as regards this question,
the former in unduly depreciating the origin
ality of Jesus, the latter in unduly exalting it.
As against Jewish critics it is only right to
remember that most of the parallels which
the industry of scholars has culled from the
Rabbinical literature were undoubtedly spoken,
as well as written down, after Jesus and not
before him. Priority is therefore his. But a
far more important point is that the teaching
of Jesus must be regarded as a whole, both
in what he says and in what he does not say.
Its originality is not only to be found in its
separate sentences and teachings, but in its -
general character, its spirit, its atmosphere.
Some would add that its originality is in that •*
very note of authority, of which we have to ,

86 THE TEACHING OF JESUS iv
speak by and by, in the fact that Jesus follows,
as has been said, " the impulsion of his own
nature and of the spirit which is in him," and
that he " opposes the voice of his own con
science to the tradition of the Scribes. ' ' 18 Such
a judgment does, I think, convey something
which answers not only to the first impression
which the documents that contain the records
of his teaching make upon the reader, but
which also answers to the facts when thoroughly
questioned and investigated. In any case the
teaching of Jesus is more than its disjecta
membra : it is a whole ; it is a spirit. To
this spirit it is easy to do less than justice
through cold analysis and dissection. An
atomistic treatment of the Gospel, as indeed
of their own Rabbinical literature, is a not
unfrequent error of Jewish critics.
On the other hand, just as the teaching of
Jesus must be taken as a whole, and as its
spirit must be brought into account as well
as its letter, so must it be with the Talmudic
and Rabbinical literature. If there is to be
comparison — we know comparisons are usually
odious — then the spirit of the one must be
compared with the spirit of the other. Still
more must that be the case if the Jewish
religion as a whole is compared and contrasted
with the religion of Jesus or the religion of
the Synoptics. Then you must, to some
extent, trust the person who has been brought

iv THE NATURE OF GOD 87
up in, and is still a member of, the Jewish
religion. To some extent you must trust his
instinct. He may not be able to produce
chapter and verse when he tells you that that
bit of teaching or that particular conception
seems familiar to him and obvious, while that
other bit of teaching or that other conception
seems strange, or new, or original. Yet I am
inclined to think that, to some extent at least,
you must trust his instinct. At all events it
is, I fear, that instinct, rather than any adequate
knowledge, that I shall make use of, and ask
you to bear with, in the present lecture. Its
results will, perhaps, contradict general verdicts
upon some important points, but in others it
may confirm them.
I will begin with what one great theologian
has of recent years pressed upon our attention
as the central and most important feature of
the teaching of Jesus, namely, his conception
of God.19 CH-tw^.^Jv °! o^+^r-
In itself that conception seems to me
extremely simple. We may, I should imagine,
be fairly sure that Jesus never pondered over
the na,ture of God except as regards God's
relation to man. What God is in Himself
would be a problem which never crossed his
mind, or which to him, at any rate, was not
a problem at all.
Jesus was a man of the intensest, but also
the simplest, religious faith. He was not a

88 THE TEACHING OF JESUS iv
philosopher. He was not a philosopher even
in that untechnical sense of the word in which
we might predicate it of the author of the
: 139th Psalm. The theoretic conception of
God to which the author of that Psalm is
straining is much more philosophic, I take it,
'. than anything which we meet with in the
genuine words of Jesus. The Psalmist medi
tates upon God's wonderful omnipresence,
and upon His nearness to every worshipper.
| God's nearness was felt by Jesus directly with
\ a vivid intensity unsurpassed by any man, but
I doubt whether the divine omnipresence in
any theoretic sense ever presented itself to his
mind. It is the custom nowadays to pour a good
deal of contempt upon the conception of a
mere outside God. The supposed transcen
dental, outside, distant God of Judaism comes
in sometimes for a fair amount of attention
and of scorn. Now it may well be that an
outside God is not a philosophic or true
conception, or that for us to-day, or for those
persons who despise the idea, an outside God
would mean a distant God. But because an
outside God is unphilosophic, or because for
us He would be meaningless or distant, that
is no reason whatever why to other people
now living, and still less why to other people
in the past, an outside God should not be,
or have been, intensely near. Nothing is

iv THE NATURE OF GOD 89
more certain, on the one hand, than that
to Jesus God was vividly near — near, as the
Talmud says of God with all kinds of near
ness — but, on the other hand, nothing seems,
to me at least, more certain than that the
God of Jesus, like the God of Isaiah, was an
outside God. To the author of the 139th
Psalm the expression, " Our Father who art
in Heaven," was probably a metaphor, a figure
of speech, just as it is to you and to me ; I
very much doubt whether it was wholly a
figure of speech to Jesus. To him at any
rate God was a distinct separate person, whose
holy spirit doubtless might be communicated
to man, but who Himself was no part of man,
just as man was no part of Him. I lay stress
upon this simple transcendence and outside-
ness of the God of Jesus, because, if I am
right, it proves by a signal instance how such
a simple conception can be easily combined
with a most intense conviction of the Divine
nearness. For my part I believe that it has
been so combined by millions of simple
believers in the past, and I have a very shrewd
suspicion that, in spite of Goethe and the
popular oratory of the moment, it is still so
combined by thousands of simple believers
to-day. Upon the theoretic side, then, of the con
ception of God there seems to me nothing
novel or original in the teaching of Jesus.

90 THE TEACHING OF JESUS iv
It seems to me familiar, Jewish, and nothing
more. The Rabbis tell me also that God is a
person, that He is outside me, but that He is
intensely near. In that fundamental respect
I find, and am sensible of, no change what
ever. I was brought up upon such teaching.
It is quite Jewish and orthodox.
Then we come to God's relations with
man. Is there novelty here? You will
think at once of that description or name
of God which Jesus delighted to use and
to dwell upon, " Our Father who art in
Heaven." God as a Father, man as His
child. Have we not here something central,
characteristic, and new ? Let me premise at
once that there is much sensitiveness upon
this question both among Jews and Christians.
And if there is sensitiveness, there is prejudice.
Hence, what I have to say you must regard
with just suspicion, but if, for the reasons
given, you are to suspect what is said to you
by me, the pygmy, I make bold to assert
that there is no less reason to suspect what is
said to you by Harnack, the giant. On the
score of prejudice, it is probably six of one
and half a dozen of the other.
I do not read or hear so much to-day as
I used to hear and read twenty and thirty
years ago of the antitheses that Judaism
taught a God of justice, and Christianity
teaches a God of love, or that the Law was

iv THE NATURE OF GOD 91
sternly severe, while the Gospel is gently
pitying. In view of the " narrow gate,"
the " offspring of vipers," the " gnashing of
teeth," the " sheep and the goats," and many
other Gospel conceptions, upon the one hand,
in view of the numerous passages about God's
pity and loving-kindness and forgiveness in
the Old Testament, upon the other hand,
these old antitheses have been tacitly dropped.
But, in the place of them, another has become
somewhat common. To the Jews, God is a
King ; to Jesus and his disciples, God is a
Father. To the Jews, men are God's sub
jects and slaves ; to Jesus and his disciples,
they are His children and sons.
There can be no doubt that Jesus
habitually thought of God as his Father and
the Father of other men, but I do not think
that he would therefore have rejected, or
refused to make use of the metaphor of
ruler and subject. There is no doubt that
Jewish Rabbis, from the days of Jesus to our
own time, habitually spoke of God as their
King, but they did not on that account
ignore, on the contrary they constantly made
use of the metaphor, of father and son.
They often combined the two, and to this
day " Our Father and King " remains for all
Jews a most familiar invocation of God.
It is sometimes said that if the Rabbis and
the Jews did occasionally call God their

9 2 THE TEACHING OF JESUS iv
father, he was only regarded as the father of
the race, and not as the father of every in
dividual Jew, and still less as the father of all
mankind, whereas to Jesus it was not in virtue
of his blood that God was his father, it was
in virtue of his humanity. My reply is as
follows. That by the Rabbis God was not
\ felt as the father of every individual Jew is
j undoubtedly false ; but that his fatherhood
, was largely limited to Israel is true. Only
it must not be supposed that therefore the
fatherhood was not truly and purely felt,
within the limitation, among those and by
' those to whom it applied. The inconsistency
was not felt ; it was ignored. Even to us to
day, with all our philosophy, it is not always
easy to draw the practical application of the
dogma that God is the equal father of the
black man and the white. To Jesus, on the
other hand, it is true that God was his father,
and the father of those to whom he spoke and
among whom he lived, in virtue of a common
humanity. The element of race and nationality
seemed to fade away. When the contrast was
not directly presented to him, as when he
journeyed outside Galilee in the north, he
did not think of his auditors and of himself
as Israelites, but just simply, and more uni
versally, as men. Hence, though he made
and drew no theoretic deductions about all
men being the children of God, it was easy

iv THE NATURE OF GOD 93
for those who came after him to do so.
The elements for such universalism lay in his
teaching, and in his habitual manner of speech
and thought, all ready to their hand. Yet
there lay ready to their hand another element
also. For some men were not children of
God, but children of the devil, and if Jesus
did not think so, his immediate disciples or
editors certainly did.
Such seems to me the truth about this
vexed question. Jesus felt and realised God
to be his father, himself to be His son, with
vivid intensity. And if God was the father
of Jesus, so was He, so did He desire Himself
to be felt, the father of other men. He was
the father of the unjust and the sinner, as He
was the father of the righteous and the just ;
and though Jesus did not always draw the
full consequences of such a doctrine — or he
would not have condemned his opponents to
an eternal divine condemnation — he yet drew
them so far as to urge (as we have seen)
that those sinners (who were not also his
opponents) should be loved and sought oul
and converted by man, even as their repent
ance was desired and rejoiced over by God.
What the Jewish reader feels in reading !
the Gospels is no new doctrine as regards the
divine fatherhood, but an old familiar doctrine j
in (very frequently, not always) a high degree '
of purity, warmth, and concentration. It is

94 THE TEACHING OF JESUS iv
noticeable that the Sermon on the Mount
does not dream of making up a seventh
antithesis to the effect that, " ye have heard
that it was said to the men of old time, God
is your King, but I say unto you, God is your
Father." Nor does Jesus hesitate in a parable,
which bears many marks of authenticity, to
bid his disciples say, " We are slaves. We
have merely done that which it was our duty
to do." 20
The fatherhood of God implies, then, to
Jesus that God cares for man, and is always
near him, even as a father cares for and is
near his human children. It implies that
man must trust God always, even as a little
child will trust his father. It implies also
that man must put his petitions and needs
before God with perfect frankness, confidence,
and freedom, but it also implies that God
knows what is best for us even before we
speak to Him. It implies that man must love
God with his whole heart, ever conscious
that that love is also returned. It has its
implications for us in our sinfulness, as it has
its implications when we do right. For the
erring child is still a child, both to its human
and to the divine father. God desires the
return of the prodigal ; He welcomes and
draws him back to his true home. All this
is thoroughly Jewish and Rabbinic, when
Judaism and Rabbinism are not " at their

iv THE NATURE OF GOD 95
most unfamiliar," if I may so express myself,
though certainly when they are " at their
best." But what are man's duties to God, and
how does God act towards him in relation to
his virtue and his sin ? Here we approach a
highly important, disputed and complicated
question. Once more come in the Law and
Legalism with their results.
It is said that the Law made the Jews
think about the relation of God to man only
and exclusively as the dispenser of reward
and of punishment. For so many command
ments observed, so much reward ; for so many
commandments violated, so much punish
ment. Or, again, from so much prosperity,
you can infer so much goodness ; from so
much misery, you can infer so much sin.
God dispenses to every one according to his
work. For the tale of good bricks, so many
pence of reward ; for the tale of bad bricks,
so many pence of punishment. Not what
you are, but what you do, is what God looks
to ; not to the heart, but to the outward
action. The motive is nothing ; the deed
is all. And the deeds, good and bad alike,
are merely the deeds of the law. A rabbit
eaten, so much sin ; so many prayers and
washings, so much virtue. The one principle
of the divine action is measure for measure,
or put more colloquially, tit for tat.

96 THE TEACHING OF JESUS iv
Now this is hardly a caricature of what
many text-books say, but it is a caricature of
what Rabbinic Judaism was and is. I cannot,
however, prove my assertion. There is no
time. And we have to do with Jesus and not
with the Rabbis. Yet two things must be
borne in mind before we pass on to him.
First, that between the Old Testament and
Jesus there lies the introduction of the belief
in a future life of happiness or of misery. By
the introduction of this doctrine, as Gunkel
has so rightly said, a huge cleavage was made
between what lies on one side of it and what
lies on the other.21 The proportions of all
things were changed. No inference can,
therefore, be made from the doctrine, say, of
Deuteronomy about rewards and punishments
to the doctrines of the Rabbis.
Secondly, although the position of the
Rabbis and of Judaism as to this question
as I stated it a moment ago was a caricature,
this does not mean that there is no truth in it
at all. A half-truth may be difficult to deal
with, but it is not wholly false. There was
a good deal of retribution doctrine, and of
punishment and reward, and of measure for
measure, in the Judaism of the age of Jesus.
Undoubtedly it is one of the defects of
legalism that it does tend to emphasise and
exaggerate these conceptions. No practical
Theism, I venture to think, can ever do

iv THE NATURE OF GOD 97
without them, and most assuredly they were
not done without in the Theism of Jesus.
But he did limit them, as we are now about
to see. It never entered the mind of Jesus that
God would not reward the righteous and
punish the wicked. As we have seen, the
righteous and the repentant enter the King
dom, while the wicked and the stubborn are
excluded from it for ever. And we may
rejoice to think that, in spite of a few germs
of a more malignant doctrine, the excluded
were the wicked, and not merely those who
happened not to believe in a dogma, or who
refused to allow that the Messiah had arrived
upon the earth. We may rejoice to think
that, upon the whole, it is for actual deeds of
wickedness done, and not because they are
predestined children of darkness and un
believers, that the wicked are despatched to
Gehenna. There is something far worse than
the strictest measure for measure, and that is
predestination or reprobation for belief and
not for deed.
But though God punishes and rewards, his
rewards are rather to be regarded as gifts
than as guerdons. Man has no claim upon
God. " Merit lives from man to man, and
not from man, O Lord, to thee." The
Kingdom itself, as we have seen, is not so
much a reward as a grace. Do what he
H

98 THE TEACHING OF JESUS iv
will, man never deserves it ; do his duty
as much as he may, man has no claim for
special recognition and reward. The King
dom, when it comes, will be far greater and
more glorious than man can have merited.
It is not the product of calculating justice
and retribution ; it is the outflow of God's
free and exuberant love.
I do not think that these few statements
go beyond what Jesus actually says in the
Synoptic Gospels, and <I am also inclined
to think that, though they are not without
their parallels in the Rabbinic literature, they
nevertheless may correctly be regarded as
comparatively new and original.
Again, the scene of real reward, so far as
it can be called reward, is, as we should now
say, in heaven and not upon earth, or accord
ing to the language and thought of Jesus, it
is in the Kingdom, in the new era, in the life
of the resurrection. Moreover there can be no
more idea of reward or recompense in this life
and this order, for this life and this order are
soon to close.
The Rabbis also believed that the true
reward of the righteous would be in the world
to come, but — and here was one of the defects
of their teaching — they still taught a far too
close and crude correspondence between
earthly well-being and desert. More especi
ally did they hold that those who were

iv THE NATURE OF GOD 99
stricken by sudden calamity or strange disease,
together with those who in popular belief
were possessed by demons, had fallen under
the displeasure of God, and were suffering
because of some known or secret sin. In
spite of the new doctrine of the resurrection
and the life after death, the old errors of Job's
friends had not yet been eradicated. It is
not easy to say how far Jesus partially shared,
and how far he would wholly have repudiated,
these errors. Those who think he denied
the doctrine that suffering betokened guilt
rely greatly upon one single passage in Luke,
which, however, may only mean that certain
persons who had recently died in a terrible
and startling way were, though sinners, yet
not more sinful than others who, so far, had
escaped. Still, even so interpreted, it may,
and probably does, if only incidentally, set
some limit to an exaggerated application of
the doctrine of divine retribution.22 And
where Jesus says that God lets the sun shine
upon the good and the bad, and is kind
towards the unthankful and the evil, he does
seem to mean that, so far as earth is con
cerned, and until the coming of the Judg
ment, God by no means deals with man on
earth upon a strict scheme of proportionate
retribution. He does not always reward
the good, for on earth the good are often
miserable ; He does not always punish the

ioo THE TEACHING OF JESUS iv
wicked, for on earth He is long-suffering
and compassionate. Nevertheless, in view
of the fate which is ultimately to befall the
good, and the fate which, if he continue un
repentant, is ultimately to befall the wicked,
the one may be congratulated upon his pre
sent wretchedness, the other may be com
miserated for his present prosperity.
Again, if God proceeded upon principles
of strict retribution, He should presumably
give a greater reward to those who have
always tried to do His will than to those who,
by a tardy, if sincere, repentance, have sought
to compensate for a long life of rebellion and
iniquity. Yet Jesus insists that the reward
of both shall be the same, and that God
rejoices more over one sinner that repents
than over ninety-and-nine righteous persons
who need no repentance. But here it must
be noticed that his teaching is Rabbinic, for
wherever repentance is concerned, the Rabbis
throw the dogma of proportionate retribution
to the winds. For example, a story is told
of a hardened and odious sinner who is
suddenly moved to intense repentance ; in
the vehemence of his contrition he dies, and
a heavenly voice is heard to say that he has
entered the Kingdom of Heaven. A Rabbi
hears and sighs, but he does not question
God's justice ; he only says, and the saying
is frequently repeated in the vast Rabbinical

iv THE NATURE OF GOD 101
literature, " There are some who attain to the
Kingdom in many years ; there are others
who achieve it in an hour." 23 G-**-B-A*-k-"Z_o
Perhaps the most striking of the frequent
attacks in the Gospels upon a too mechanical
application of the doctrine of retribution in
the dealings of God with man, is the parable
in Matthew of the Labourers in the Vineyard.
Each labourer, unequal as his toil has been,
receives the same reward. A good deal seems
implied. From unequal opportunities God
does not demand equal results ; a little in
man's eyes may be much in God's eyes.
What God gives is His own ; He gives it in
full measure, not as a bargain or as a sale,
but freely, and of His own grace and goodness.
Outward inequality of service may nevertheless
justify in God's eyes an equivalence of reward.
All this seems contained in the parable, which
is surely one of the most original, as it is one
of the most suggestive, in the whole Synoptic
series. Of measure for measure as a principle,
sometimes right and sometimes wrong, in
the dealings of man with man, I will say a
word or two in another connection. Here
let me again observe that Jesus maintains his
character as a prophet by the pure inwardness
of his ethical and religious teaching. The
prophetical religion could be summed up in
this : the knowledge and worship of the one

102 THE TEACHING OF JESUS iv
true God, justice and compassion rather than
sacrifices and outward ceremonial. Jesus had
no longer to inveigh against idolatry. The
one God was acknowledged on all hands,
but there was still (as the defect of the
legal system) some outwardness or formalism.
Against this defect Jesus protested with all
his might, and it was this protest which led
him, as we have seen, into a conflict, rather
incidental than intentional, with the letter of
the Mosaic Law.
In his definitions of the true fast, the true
prayer, and the true alms, as recorded in the
| Sermon on the Mount, Jesus proceeds upon
[ genuine prophetic lines. So too, we may
add (without entering into details), in his
remarks about anger, about adultery, about
oaths. Everywhere Jesus seems to penetrate
the letter to find the spirit, and to look for
principles and motives rather than for out
ward and isolated deeds. Goodness is not
the fulfilment of so many separate com
mandments ; sin is not the infraction of so
many precepts. Jesus looks to the character
as a whole. Where an exclusive regard for
the mere outward letter would coarsen and
cheapen, Jesus, looking within, and filled with
the spirit, broadens and clarifies. His right
eousness is not only deeper than ordinary,
outside, customary morality, but it is also
sweeter, more gracious, and more pure. It

iv THE NATURE OF GOD 103
has a more choice and elusive aroma, just as
also, to use another metaphor, it is cast in a
sterner and more heroic mould. Yet if it be
asked, " Is it not then, if it be all this, original
and new, as compared with the religious and
moral teaching of the Rabbis ? " the answer is
by no means easy. Its inwardness, at any rate,
fine as it is, does not strike me as off the line,
or as very unfamiliar. It seems to me like
the Rabbis at their best, for they too, in one
sense, though passionate adherents of the Law,
are yet able, where necessary, to rise above
the letter of the Law, and to preach, upon
occasion, a noble spirituality. The teaching
of Jesus in this respect seems to me strong,
concentrated, prophetic, but yet not anti-
Rabbinic where Rabbinism is at its best, and
still less, anti-Jewish. For my own part, I
believe that we can find room and place for
them all — for the Law and for the Prophets,
for Jesus and for the Rabbis. They supple
ment and complement, sometimes even they
correct, one another.
Just now I used the word " heroic " in re
lation to the teaching of Jesus. That heroic
element seems to show itself in a certain
grand largeness of view and in a certain grand
simplicity. Taken as a whole, this heroic
element is full of genius and inspiration. We
must not always take it literally, and squeeze
out of it too literal an application. The letter

io4 THE TEACHING OF JESUS iv
of even this prophet's teaching may kill ;
here too we must sometimes look only to
the spirit.
Take, in illustration, first of all, his doctrine
of faith. How large and simple and fresh it
is, how child -like, how buoyant, how pro
found. It is quite untechnical ; it is not
opposed to works ; we might almost as well
call it trust instead of faith — unbounded
trust in the constant goodness of God. It is
not hampered by any conflict with laws of
nature ; yet it is complete in itself and needs
no outward signs. As Jesus possesses this
trust himself, as it is ready to his call, and
rarely or never (I omit the question of his
death) plays him false, so he demands it
from others. As he asks and needs from
God no sign, so he reprimands those who
demand it from him, God's messenger. It
was not wonderful, filled as he was with the
conviction that he was sent by God upon a
divine mission, that his demand from others
for faith in his divine Father should run over
into a demand for faith in himself. The
greater to him included the less. His
opponents were not unjustified in distinguish
ing carefully between God and the Teacher.
And hence once more arose the inevitable
conflict. Again we notice the heroic element in the
paradoxes of the Sermon on the Mount.

iv THE NATURE OF GOD 105
Rejoice when you are persecuted ; be glad
when you are miserable. Or again, in the
rebuttal of the lex talionis, and in the demand
for perfection ; love your enemies, do good
to them that injure you ; at all hazards and
at all costs, no rejoinder of evil, no retaliation
in wrong-doing ; no anger in heart, and no
angry deed, because of another's sin, even
though you are the sufferer and the wronged ;
no measure for measure in evil, though
more than measure for measure in good.
Of course such principles cannot be literally
applied ; in the hard facts of the world's
everyday life they need, as it were, correc
tion and adaptation. They are not, and
never could be, the laws of a state ; but,
nevertheless, they remain the principles of
a hero, which heroes every now and then
can put in practice, and which, as ideals
and as spirit, are still fresh and valid and
true. Once more, we notice the heroic element
in the unconditional demand for self-sacrifice
— self-sacrifice for others, self-sacrifice for
oneself. " All for all," as we have already
seen. The renouncement and abandonment
of the earthly for the heavenly, of Now for
Then, of this world for the next. The soul
must be quite simple, filled, as the true hero's
soul is filled, with one overmastering purpose,
with one constant and steady desire. If there

106 THE TEACHING OF JESUS iv
comes a temptation athwart that purpose, it
must relentlessly be suppressed. If hand and
eye might prove a stumbling - block, away
with them. Count the cost, but the quest
once begun, no hesitation, no drawing back,
no bargaining in means. All for all.
There seems some reason to believe that
Jesus, like many of the Prophets, had a
certain antipathy to wealth. His sympathy
for the poor flowed over into a certain
antagonism to the rich. In his character
there was no gloom ; on the contrary, it was,
so far as we can gather, naturally cheerful and
serene, ready and willing to enjoy the simple
gifts of nature and of God. Nevertheless,
the ascetic touch, which is discernible in the
Gospel of Luke, does not seem to be unhis-
toric. At some point, or during some stage,
in his career, Jesus does seem to have demanded
from those who would be his followers and
disciples, perhaps even from those who desired
to make themselves sure of a place in the
coming Kingdom, a complete renouncement of
all earthly goods, as also a complete abandon
ment of all earthly ties . They who would follow
him must lose all to gain all ; perhaps even
to find life eternal they must be ready to
endure the martyr's doom. " If any man
would come after me, let him deny himself."
Who can measure the effect of these striking
words ? Self-denial was not unknown before

iv THE NATURE OF GOD 107
Jesus spoke. Yet this clear enunciation of
the principle, this vivid conception of the
ideal, were surely new and original contribu
tions to the history of religion and morality.
Upon their applications and developments it
is unnecessary to dwell.
Here it is where Jesus, though not by any
means un- Jewish, yet seems to strike a new,
a hitherto unheard-of, note. And one does
seem to find in certain aspects of Christian
self-sacrifice, though not always wisely applied,
original manifestations of high moral capacity,
which go back to, and proceed from, the
trumpet-call of the founder of the Christian
faith. Active renunciation, full self-sacrifice
for the sake of the Master, and in the cause
of truth, of succour, of compassion. This
sort of heroic well-doing and heroic self-
sacrifice does seem to me characteristic of
some Christian morality, even as the injunc
tion and the ideal from which it springs were
originally due to the teacher of Nazareth.
In one respect, however, the ideal of re
nouncement laid down by Jesus does seem
un- Jewish and not merely original. I cannot
imagine that any Rabbi would have actually
condemned the doctrine so far as I have at
present spoken of it, even though, for example,
he might have suggested that the right use of
money was better than a complete abandon
ment of it, with any other similar qualification.

108 THE TEACHING OF JESUS iv
But one feature of the doctrine he would un
doubtedly have viewed with grave mistrust. I
mean the attitude of Jesus towards the family
and its ties. Each instance as it comes can
be explained away, but the effect of all the in
stances taken together goes markedly against
the Jewish grain. " Whosoever shall do the
will of God, he is my brother and sister and
mother." "Leave the dead to bury their
own dead." " He that loveth father or
mother more than me is not worthy of me."
" If any man come to me, and hate not his
father and mother and wife and children and
brothers and sisters, he cannot be my dis
ciple." "There be eunuchs who have made
themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of
Heaven's sake." The effect of all these
sentences is to some extent cumulative. It is
true that in the old blessing of Moses, Levi
is praised because he " said of his father, and
of his mother, I have not seen him ; neither
did he acknowledge his brethren, nor knew
he his own children." But these words had
little effect upon Jewish morality. The words
of Jesus, though perhaps not meant to be
charged with greater meaning, have had
momentous issues for evil as well as for
good. Perhaps, then, by their fruits one
must judge them.
\ With this one very important exception,
the great doctrine of renunciation remains

iv THE NATURE OF GOD 109
pure and high ; and though it is an im
practicable ideal for most of us, are not
impracticable ideals still necessary even for
commonplace lives ?
" Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for ? "

THE VIEWS OF JESUS RESPECTING
HIMSELF AND HIS MISSION
I have not attempted in the previous lectures
to estimate the value of the religious teaching
of Jesus as a whole, or to compare it with that
of the Old Testament or of Rabbinism. Such
a general estimate would be too ambitious a
venture. It will probably be found that the
originality and the greatness of the teaching
do not depend so much upon the details of
the particular things said as upon the manner
in which they are said, and still more upon
their effect as a whole. To each individual
striking utterance of Jesus it is likely enough
that a good parallel can be found in the
Rabbinic literature, but when Jewish scholars
adopt this method of disproving the origin
ality of the Gospel, they forget (quite apart
from questions of date) the size of the Talmud
and the Midrashim. The teaching of Jesus
is contained in three little books, which do

v THE VIEWS OF JESUS in
not fill more than sixty-eight double column
pages of tolerably small print. The teaching
belongs, or is attributed, to one man, and
constitutes, in large measure, a consistent and
harmonious whole. It is not a combina
tion of a thousand different occasional and
disconnected sayings of a hundred different
Rabbis. Again, as a famous German scholar
rather bitingly said, the greatness of the
Synoptics, as compared with the greatness of
the Talmud, must be measured by what is
not there as well as by what is.24 We
have not to neglect a vast quantity of
third- and fourth-rate material, and seek for
occasional pearls amid a mass of negligible
trivialities. And, lastly, we must take into
consideration, as I started by observing, not
only what Jesus said, but how he said it.
The beauty, the distinction, in a word, the
genius of the form, must surely be taken into
account as well as the excellence of the matter.
At the same time we must not be led away
by the genius of the form too far, and be
guilty of unfairness upon the other side. In
many points of his teaching Jesus simply sums
up what, from the later Rabbinic literature,
we may safely assume to have been the best
current doctrine among the Rabbis either of
his own day or of the next half-dozen genera
tions. It is not necessary for me to prove this
in detail, nor do such proofs carry conviction

112 THE TEACHING OF JESUS v
to those who are outside. You have either to
know the Rabbinical literature very thoroughly,
or to have a certain instinct — an instinct which
is naturally only possessed by those who are
within. One must know when to accept
parallels and when not to be deceived by
them. One may, however, state in brief
general terms that the teaching of Jesus about,
let me say, repentance, or charity, or humility,
or lust, and about several other moral and
religious subjects, is quite in accordance with,
and does not go beyond the limits of, the best
doctrine of the Rabbis.
Even when we have to deal with so famous
and characteristic an element of the teaching
as the love of enemies, we must be careful
to hold the scales with judicial impartiality.
Jewish critics usually take the line that in
the command, " Love your enemies," there is
indeed an original feature, but that the feature,
though it sounds well, is impracticable and
therefore undesirable or harmful. Jewish
ethics, they will tell you, say, " Help, and
do good to, your enemy whenever occasion
offers." This can be done, and therefore is
done. Christian ethics say, " Love your
enemy." This cannot be done, and is there
fore always neglected, as, for instance, the
history of the Jews for eighteen hundred years
has so conspicuously proved.
It would take a long while to go into

v THE VIEWS OF JESUS 113
this criticism fully and fairly, as regards
what it asserts both of Jewish teaching on
the one hand, and of Christian teaching upon
the other. We should have also to estimate
the value of the Greek verb which we trans
late " love " in this particular connection, and
decide how far there is a precise equivalence
between the two. For all this there is no
time. It would perhaps be found that the
teaching of Jesus is here too on the lines of a
few highest Rabbinic utterances, but that it
goes beyond them in a sort of intense inward
ness, in emotional fervour, and in the eager
passion of genius. Here too the stress would
perhaps have to be laid, to some extent at
least, upon the way in which the teaching
is expressed, as well as upon its actual subject-
matter. The mention of this stress leads on natur
ally to what we have now to speak of. For
when we talk of the way in which the teach
ing was expressed, we come near to the
personality of the speaker. "And they were
amazed at his teaching, for he taught them as
one having authority, and not as the scribes."
I will not stop to discuss the precise meaning of
the word " authority " in this familiar passage.
But at least it means that in the teaching of
Jesus there seemed nothing between him and
God. He did not quote, or depend upon,
his predecessors; he did not say, " My teacher

ii4 THE TEACHING OF JESUS v
was wont to say this or that." He occasion
ally used, but did not base his words upon,
either the Law or the Prophets ; he just
depended upon the inspiration of the moment.
He spoke the message, he gave voice to the
teaching, which the holy spirit of God had
placed in his mouth. It is this authoritative
character of his teaching which partly explains
the impression which it makes upon us, as
well as the impression which it made upon
his auditors. Its touch of personal authority
is an element in its originality.
So far I have said nothing about Jesus
himself, of his character, his personal claims,
intentions, and objects. Something has been
said of his teaching, but nothing of his life.
Obviously this is a great omission. The
Synoptic Gospels tell not only of the teaching,
but also of the ministry, and to that extent of
the life. Indeed, to Mark, the oldest of the
Gospels, the life, if that life be taken to
include the death and the resurrection, is
more important than the teaching. And
would not this judgment of Mark be adopted
by many Christians even to-day ? Do we not
often hear that the teaching, great as it is, is
shorn of its most especial feature and excel
lence, if looked at in an abstract sort of way,
apart from the life ? The life in the teaching,
and the teaching in the life : we are, at any
rate, only to separate them for purposes of

v THE VIEWS OF JESUS 115
convenience. They form a whole, and the
true greatness, or the true reality, consists of
the whole, and not of parts which never
existed by themselves, and were, in fact, in
conscious relation to each other.
However much there may be of exaggera
tion in these assertions — and into this I shall
not inquire — there is also, it can hardly be
denied, a certain measure of truth.
Herein we may at once observe that Jesus
differs from, or, as some would say, goes
beyond the prophets : " More than a prophet
is here." Of very few of the prophets —
Jeremiah is a conspicuous exception — can we
even speak of their characters. We know
nothing about them one way or the other.
We have their words, mingled with additions
by their editors (as with Jesus), and nothing
more. In any case they make no personal
claim, except the big claim that they are the
messengers or spokesmen of God. There is
no question with them of forming a com
munity within the community, of raising a
special band of disciples, united by special ties
of relationship to one head, of obtaining
through miracles and other means a personal
influence over a number of followers and
admirers. To this rule Isaiah is hardly an
exception. None of them ask for renuncia
tion or sacrifice " for my sake." The personal
note, the personal touch, are wanting. But

116 THE TEACHING OF JESUS v
all these things are predicated of Jesus, and
some of them, or all of them, may be historic.
Not long ago I received a letter from one of
the greatest Jewish scholars of Germany, in
which he differentiates, to the disadvantage of
Jesus, between him and the prophets on this
very ground that the prophets are so grandly
impersonal ; they think and speak of God and
Israel and never of themselves.
It is obvious that I shall be unable to
enter properly upon the difficult problems
which are thus opened up to our view. Even
the character of Jesus I must refrain from
, speaking of. That character is a sort of
I sanctuary to every Christian, whether Trini
tarian or Unitarian, and even to thousands of
persons who are now neither the one nor the
other, but who were reared in Christian homes.
It ill becomes one who stands outside to speak,
except with great hesitation and reserve, about
the sanctuary of others. If a Christian were
1 addressing an audience of orthodox Jews about
\ the Law, he would, I hope, be actuated by
similar feelings, and be sensible of similar
restraints. For their beloved Law occupies
to orthodox Jews something of the same
position as Jesus Christ occupies to Christians,
and though I myself stand in different ways
outside both sanctuaries, I have lived so much
among those who are within both that I can
appreciate their feelings.

v THE VIEWS OF JESUS 117
But in addition to this difficulty there is
another, due, as I think, to the subject itself
and in no wise to the audience. How little
we know of the life of Jesus, and how meagre
and unsatisfactory is the material upon which
we have to rely in order to estimate his
character. Perhaps those inside the Christian
sanctuary hardly realise often enough that, as
Jowett has said, " An ideal necessarily mingles
with all conceptions of Christ," or, again, that
it is, " an ideal which we have to place before
uj intimately connected with practical life —
nothing, if not a life — which may be con
veniently spoken of as the life of Christ." 25
What we know of the life of the historic
Jesus is contained in Mark. And how little
that is, and how often dubious, or even
legendary. It is set in a hazy background
of miracle and eulogy. The biographer is
no impartial historian. He is a devotee, a
worshipper, intent upon proving his theses
that Jesus was the Messiah, and the Son of
God. The light falls strongly upon the hero;
shadows fall upon his opponents and upon
those only. Of the short life of Jesus we are
told a few events which belong to the last
eighteen months of his earthly career. Of
what went before them we know nothing.
Yet even with all these qualifications we
seem to see, through the mists of eulogy and
legend, the sure outlines of a noble person-

118 THE TEACHING OF JESUS v
ality. Here we have a deeply religious nature,
filled, as perhaps few before or after have
been filled, with the love of God and the
consciousness of His presence. A character
naturally serene and sunny, but with the most
vivid appreciation of, and pity for, the
wretched, the unfortunate, the degraded. A
teacher stands before us who is not only
teacher, but hero, strong, sometimes even
passionate, fervent, devoted, brave. He has
a burning hatred of shams and hypocrisies,
and also of formalisms and externalities where
the spirit is wanting or has departed. He is
filled with a true Jewish idealism, for there
is no more idealistic race than that of Israel.
He is gifted with a deep insight into essentials,
a love of the inward, the spiritual, the real.
He has no ambition except one ; to do the
will of his Father in Heaven, and to serve
the people to whom he has been sent. He is
convinced of his own inspiration and of his
mission, but in every other sense he is filled
with a ' true humility. For his cause, which
is the cause of God, and for all those who
will believe in him, and whose servant and
leader he is, he is determined to fashion his
life, and is ready to sacrifice it. For them
and for the cause he will bravely live, and he
will bravely die.
These things, and such as these, may be
surely and safely said, and perhaps it is well

v THE VIEWS OF JESUS 119
for me, in reserve and restraint, to leave the
subject there.
But the character of Jesus is merely the
fringe of the matter which I have, as it were,
to deal with or to neglect. A more important
point for us to-day is not so much the
character as the claim. Was not Jesus filled
with a deep sense of his own personality ?
Was it not this which gave to his teaching
that touch of authority which differentiated it
not merely from the teaching of the Scribes,
but even from the teaching of the Prophets?
He does not say : " Thus saith the Lord,"
but " I say unto you." It may perhaps be
doubted whether this insistence upon himself,
so far as it is historic, was at first anything
more than the prophetic conviction of inspira
tion. If he used the words " I say unto you,"
he may have used them in the sense that he
spoke as the messenger or delegate of God.
" I say unto you " may be, where it is historic,
no more than the felt equivalent of, " Thus
saith the Lord." If we compare Mark with
Matthew and Luke, or, still better, if we
compare the oldest with the latest passages of
the three synoptics, we shall find that the
personal claim in the oldest portions is, upon
the whole, less emphasised, or it is brought
into relation with the Messianic consciousness
and the Messianic claim. We may perhaps,
therefore, say that the personal claim was, in

120 THE TEACHING OF JESUS v
truth, partly prophetic — belonging to Jesus
as a prophet — but partly, and still more,
Messianic, belonging to him in virtue of his
belief that he was or would be the Messiah.
It is, of course, quite possible to argue that it
was partly this original sense of personal power,
authority and inspiration which drove him on
to think that he could be none other than
that predicted One of whom the Prophets had
spoken in the days of old. So then we are,
in either case, brought face to face with that
central question, which can be split up into
many subsidiary questions, but which starts
from, and comes back to, the main and funda
mental question : Did Jesus think himself to
be the Messiah ? Supplementary and de
pendent questions are : Did he call himself
Son of Man, and what did he mean by the
appellation ? Did he regard himself as the
Son of God in some unique special sense which
could be applied to none other than himself?
Had God entrusted him with powers such as
He had entrusted to none before him upon
earth and such as He would entrust to none
after him again ? And had he these powers
given him because he was not only human,
but divine ? These are the questions about
Jesus which must be answered before we can
obtain a sure and full estimate of his person
ality, his teaching, or his career.
Even these questions, numerous and

v THE VIEWS OF JESUS 121
puzzling as they are, do not exhaust the list.
It is, for instance, not merely a question
whether he thought himself to be the Messiah
or no, but also, supposing that he did, what
sort of Messiah did he conceive himself to
be ? So with the other terms, Son of Man,
Son of God ; what did these mean to Jesus
if he used them of himself? And lastly,
what did he set out to do when he started his
ministry ? Did his intentions and objects
undergo any modification during the brief
months of his public career ? He left Galilee ;
he went to Jerusalem, and there he was put
to death. Did he go to Jerusalem with the
foreknowledge of that death, and with the
object of undergoing it ? Was his death the
conscious crown, or the disappointment, of
his hopes, or was it, in some third intermediate
sense, neither quite the one nor quite the other ?
The string of questions is lengthy, and
just as they are easy to put, so are they diffi
cult, or even perhaps impossible, to answer.
Hence we have the fact that between those
who, in devout and humble faith, take the
Gospels exactly as they find them, and those
who, with exaggerated scepticism, deny that
Jesus of Nazareth was an historical character
at all, the investigators of the life of Jesus
have suggested and adopted every sort of
answer and solution. He thought himself
the Messiah ; he did not think himself the

122 THE TEACHING OF JESUS v
Messiah ; he thought himself a Messiah in a
special spiritual sense ; he believed he was
the Messiah from the Baptism ; he only
gradually believed himself to be the Messiah ;
he called himself the Son of Man in this sense,
in that sense, in a third, fourth, or fifth
sense ; he did not call himself the Son of
Man at all. Because he thought himself the
Messiah, he felt himself to be the Son of
God. Because he felt himself to be the Son
of God, he thought himself to be the Messiah.
He emphasised the conviction that he was
mere man ; he believed himself to be divine.
He went to Jerusalem to conquer and in
augurate the Kingdom ; he went to Jerusalem
to die ; he was unsure whether he would
live or die ; he was prepared for death as a
possible, but unlikely contingency.
How is it possible that all these hypo
theses or assertions have been made ? Doubt
less the personal prepossessions, desires, and
antipathies of the scholars and theologians
themselves account for a good deal of the
diversity, but they by no means account for
it all. What accounts for most of it is that
the sources are so fragmentary, so uncertain,
and even so conflicting. For every main
view, for every modification even of the main
views, some passages of the Gospels can be
used in support. Press some things, neglect
others ; urge the historical character of this

v THE VIEWS OF JESUS 123
and that, deny the historical character of the
one and the other ; and you can fairly easily
construct a picture of the life and death of
Jesus, based upon what you, in all honesty,
suppose to be the essential and historical
elements in the Gospels themselves. No
one can escape this method or rise superior
to it. For the Gospels themselves, when
properly and scientifically examined, are shown
not to answer the questions I have enumer
ated with a single voice and in one particular
way. The Gospels, when rightly tested,
are inconsistent. Everybody must pick and
choose ; everybody must accept or reject ;
everybody, moreover, must even press or
interpret. On account of the particular point of view
of these lectures, it will happily be unnecessary
for me to attempt to answer all the fearful
list of questions and puzzles which it has
nevertheless been right to mention. Some
of them — for example, the acutely difficult
problem of the Son of Man — I propose to
leave wholly untouched.
The fixed point in the midst of the tangle
— and thus the starting-point for any inquiry
— would seem to be the conviction in the
mind of Jesus that the Kingdom of God was
about to appear and to be inaugurated. As
to this conviction, and the ardour with which
it was held, there can surely be no possibility

124 THE TEACHING OF JESUS v
of doubt. It may even be that what we do doubt
and discuss and distress ourselves about is due
to this : that Jesus himself was far more clear
and convinced that the Kingdom would soon
come than he was as to the exact nature of his
own relation to it, and of his own position in
it, or of what would exactly befall him before
the complete inauguration arrived. Yet I
would myself venture towards a further point
of at least comparative certainty, and contend
that, at some period in his brief ministry,
Jesus formed and continued to hold the belief
that to the Kingdom, which was imminent,
he himself stood, or would stand, in some
important personal relation. He was not the
mere herald or prophet of the Kingdom, such
as John. He was more than a prophet, and
would occupy some office or post in the
Kingdom of great significance and worth. A
deduction of this kind from the Synoptic
records does not appear to be unwarranted.
But if we may go as far as that from the
words attributed to Jesus and from the in
cidents of his life, must not the manner of his
death induce us to go still further ? It can
hardly be denied that Jesus was put to death
by the Romans on the charge of claiming
the Kingship of the Jews. Whether he
claimed to be the Messiah or no, the Romans
crucified him — or agreed to his crucifixion —
because they were told, falsely or truly, that

v THE VIEWS OF JESUS 125
he had made the claim, and had acted in
accordance with it.
Combining these fixed points together, the
inference seems to me to have preponderat
ing weight that the relation in which Jesus
believed that he stood, or would stand, to
the Kingdom was that of its Chief or Head.
The Chief of a Kingdom is its King. And
the King of the Kingdom of God was the
Messiah. For my part, then, I range myself
with those scholars who, differing in many
things, yet agree in this, that Jesus claimed
the Messiahship, and believed himself to be
the Messiah.
This opinion by no means solves all diffi
culties. One can easily say, " If Jesus believed
himself to be the Messiah, why " — and then
there can follow a whole string of puzzling
questions and problems. Nevertheless, the
problems and the questions which can be
started upon the hypothesis that Jesus never
claimed or believed himself to be the Messiah
seem to me harder and more far-reaching
than those which the other hypothesis enables
us to raise, and with this comparative advan
tage we must, I fancy, be content.
At what point in his career Jesus came
to the belief, and, above all, what sort of
Messiah he supposed himself to be, and when,
and how, and in what sort of way, he would
enter upon his Messianic functions are, how-

126 THE TEACHING OF JESUS v
ever, all matters which the mere acceptance
of the primary hypothesis leaves wholly un
decided. In truth, the settlement of these
secondary and dependent questions is almost
or quite as difficult and perplexing as the
settlement of the main question itself. In
fact, some of the sorts of Messiah which have
been suggested are so unlike the prevailing
Jewish conceptions as to leave of the Messiah-
ship little more than the name.
Thus the range of opinion as regards the
nature of the Messianic consciousness of Jesus,
and as to his own special conception of the
Messiahship, is extremely wide. On the
one hand, it has been contended that his
conception of the Messiah was closely similar
to the prevailing Jewish conception ; on the
other hand, it has been contended that it was
widely different.
Perhaps I ought here to intercalate a
few words as to what this Jewish conception
actually was. Even this, which seems to be
so easy, is not so easy as it seems. The Jewish
conception of the Messiah in the days of Jesus
was not quite the same as the conception
which we find in Isaiah, and, on the other
hand, there is evidence to show that, after the
first century, through opposition to Christ
ianity, the conception was again modified in
the direction of Isaiah.
The base of the conception, its central

v THE VIEWS OF JESUS 127
figure, was still doubtless that of the eleventh
chapter of Isaiah — and this even in the days
of Jesus. There you have the figure of a
righteous monarch, filled with the divine
spirit, which expresses itself in wisdom and
power and the knowledge and fear of God,
but yet a figure purely human, neither God
nor demi-God. I hardly think that this
description of him is in any way invalidated
by certain dubious expressions in the ninth
chapter, also relating to the figure of the
Messiah. But, by the age of Jesus there is some
evidence to show that, in some quarters and
in some minds, the conception of the purely
human Messiah had been, to some extent,
transcended. Though less than and distinct
from God, he was conceived by some as more
divine than the ordinary man. If Israel was
God's first-born son, the Messiah was — in a
special sense, as the representative of Israel —
God's first-born son as well, and the vagrant
thought of apocalyptic dreamers sometimes
tried to picture him as already existent, ready
to descend from heaven and from his place
near the divine throne, to fulfil his allotted
task upon earth, when the fated moment
should arrive. Moreover, the doctrine of
the resurrection, which had spiritualised and
exalted the Messianic Kingdom, exalted also
the figure of the Messiah. He became more

128 THE TEACHING OF JESUS v
superhuman ; less a creature of ordinary flesh
and blood, more concerned with a new and
transcendent world, and therefore himself less
clothed with the usual features of common
mortality. It is impossible to say how far Jesus, in
his youth and early manhood, was cognizant
of these conceptions, or how far he shared
them, even before he in any way connected
the Messiahship with himself. Nor can we
say — I, at any rate, will not enter upon that
vexed question — at what point in his career
his Messianic consciousness and claim exactly
began. His spiritual conviction that God
was his divine Father, and that he was His
child — not because he was more than man,
but just because he was man — this spiritual
conviction may have strengthened a growing
assurance that he was to become, or already
was, the Messiah, and may even have helped to
cause it. The idea of the spiritual, and the
idea of the theocratic, sonship may have acted
and reacted upon each other, and though
the former did not imply any already
existing superhuman nature, the latter may
have implied that such a nature would ulti
mately be acquired. When the latent or
nascent Messiahship became actual, when the
Kingdom was fully established and revealed
— either before his death or as the result of
it — then he would be invested with the full

v THE VIEWS OF JESUS 129
Messiahship of office and the full Messiahship
of nature, with all the change from his present
human nature which this completed Messiah-
ship might imply.
It is obvious that I have here only touched
the fringe of the question, and that in a very
superficial way. Returning now to the rela
tion of Jesus's conception of the Messiah to
the conception of the Messiah as held by his
Jewish contemporaries, I have first to point
out that there is a great objection on the part
of many modern Christian theologians to allow
that Jesus thought himself to be the Messiah
in any " Jewish " sense of the word. The
Jewish Messiah is called theocratic, political,
national ; he is pictured as a sort of more
permanently successful Napoleon, whose office
it was to deliver the Jews from their enemies
and their subjection, to found a huge World-
Empire, in which the Jews should be rich and
prosperous, and all other people (so far as
they were left alive) should be their vassals
and their slaves. Of that World-Empire the
Messiah would be the monarch, and would
reign in pomp and glory for evermore. It is
an unattractive picture, and it can easily be
shown to have been alien to the character and
convictions of Jesus. His Kingdom and his
Kingship, we are told, were to be purely
spiritual. He changed a material view into a
spiritual view, translating material into ethical
K

130 THE TEACHING OF JESUS v
terms. " As destined by a Divine vocation
to inaugurate a reign of righteousness, a king
ship of God over men's hearts and consciences,
He felt Himself to be the true, because the
spiritual, Messiah." 26 There was nothing
national, material, political, or ' outward in
his conception of the Messiahship. Truth
and falsehood, exegesis and caricature, seem
blended together in assertions such as these.
To begin with the caricature. For the
supposed purely political Messiah of the Jews
is nothing less. This conception presses
features which are incidental, and omits
features which are essential. It presses the
outward prosperity, the World-Empire, the
warrior-king, the vassalage of the nations ; it
omits the righteous ruler, the righteous judge,
the peace, the goodness, the knowledge of
God, the conversion of the heathen to the
true religion. Moreover, since the days of
Isaiah there had been an undoubted tendency
to take the destruction or the forces which
should oppose the establishment of the earthly
Kingdom of Heaven out of the hands of the
Messiah, and to leave it to God. God would
introduce the Kingdom ; He would punish the
guilty and reward the good, and over the
good and the repentant and the converted the
Messiah, God's Vice-regent, would reign. If
we so regard it, and if we remember that the
conversion of the nations, or a great part of

v THE VIEWS OF JESUS 131
them, is a standing feature of the Messianic
age in the best Jewish conceptions, I see
nothing so very unworthy of Jesus even if he
did believe that he was destined to be the
theocratic ruler and lord of the Jews in that
Messianic Kingdom which was so soon to be
ushered in by God.
Yet we may well suppose that, though Jesus
believed himself to be the predestined theo
cratic chief of the coming Kingdom, the
political elements of the conception were still
further softened down by him or ignored.
One has, however, to be careful and cautious,
remembering that the Gospel records are pre
vailingly anti-Jewish, and, even in a certain
sense, pro-Roman, and that, in view of later
events and the relation of nascent Christianity
to Judaism, the editing of the tradition would
have been in the direction of denationalising
its content and its character. Subject to this
caution, we may perhaps safely press those
noble sentences in which Jesus declares that
true rule is true service, and perhaps we may
find here the most original feature of his
conception. We may add to this that, so far
as the imperfect and edited records allow us
to gather, Jesus was so profoundly concerned
with morality and religion in their inward
essence that questions of outward prosperity,
or political constitution, or the political rela
tions of the Jews to other races, were of no

1 32 THE TEACHING OF JESUS v
interest to him. They apparently did not
present themselves to his mind ; they cer
tainly formed no feature of his teaching. He
would indeed be the chief of the Kingdom,
but its true chief was its true servant. In what
he did, and would do, for all who should form
the citizens of that Kingdom would lie the
essence and kernel of his Kingship. It is
possible that with the conception of the
Messiah, as the prophets and tradition had
framed it, there mingled in his mind and
heart that other prophetic conception of the
Servant of the Lord, who was only to pass
through humiliation and lowliness and sacrifice
to his throne and his glory. It was, at any
rate, rather from their sins and moral dis
tresses that Jesus would save his people than
from their outward troubles or their political
subjection. If, then, we now ask, " What new feature
did his conception of himself as Messiah
add to his teaching as a whole ? " may we not
answer that it seems to give to that teaching
a special added touch of fervour and enthu
siasm ? We have now brought in the personal
note. We have the chief in relation to his
followers, the master to his disciples, the
servants to their lord. " Do this for my
sake," be good for my sake, take this painful
resolve, go through with this hard task,
achieve this sacrifice, for my sake. Here was

v THE VIEWS OF JESUS 133
a new motive, which has been of tremendous
power and effect in the religious history of
the world. Even if, in the sentences where
they occur, the words " for my sake " are
not always genuine, yet the thought and
the motive assuredly go back to the historic
Jesus. The devotion of the leader to his men
and to his cause — Jesus shared it. The devo
tion of the led to their leader — Jesus inspired
it. He kindled a flame which was to burn
more brightly after his death than ever before
it in his lifetime. " For the sake of Jesus."
Of what fine lives and deaths has not this
motive been the spring and the sustainment !
This must be freely and fairly acknow
ledged by all those who stand outside the
Christian sanctuary and are not called by the
name of Christ. They must fully and gladly
acknowledge the mighty effects of this motive,
" for my sake," " for Jesus' sake," even
though they hold and claim that they can and
ought to do no less for the sake of God.
Yet the immense power of the motive
" for my sake " has been historically due not
so much to the life of Jesus as to his death.
That he died a horrible death of agony upon
the cross — this has quickened the motive
" for my sake " to fever heat. This has kept
it keen and strong throughout the ages.
Because the leader died and sacrificed himself
for the led, therefore — so has run the invoca-

134 THE TEACHING OF JESUS v
tion — let all disciples obey the summons to
sacrifice throughout every generation.
We ask : was this death intentional ? Did
Jesus foresee and realise that God intended
only to bring the Kingdom after his death ?
Did he realise that his death was the required
and precedent condition before the Kingdom
could be established ? Did he therefore go
to Jerusalem deliberately intending to die for
the sake of the cause ?
I think that we must be here content to
say that no certainty can ever be arrived at.
The fragmentary, but, above all, the edited
and highly coloured, condition of the docu
ments on this very point makes certainty
impossible. We can only deal in probabili
ties ; this view is somewhat more likely ; that
view somewhat less.
Upon the whole, I should at present be
inclined to side with those scholars, such as
Loisy, who hold that Jesus went to Jerusalem
with the hope and the expectation of inaugu
rating the Kingdom, or of witnessing its
inauguration, in his lifetime. God would
bring about the crisis and the denouement
soon after he had reached the capital, and
then he, Jesus, would be installed upon his
Messianic throne. Nevertheless, the enter
prise — bearding the Sadducean priesthood
and the antagonistic high authorities in their
very den — was obviously full of danger, and

v THE VIEWS OF JESUS 135
possibilities of temporary defeat and death
may well have crossed his mind. Yet the risk
must be run ; for the moment had arrived.
God had called. So, whatever the risk, Jesus
would answer to the call. One thing was
certain and sure, whatever the risk to him
self. The Kingdom would surely come ; the
promises of God would be fulfilled. It is
true that the conception of a Messiah who
should die, and rise, and only assume his
Kingdom, and receive his glory, after his
death and resurrection, was, so far as we
know, as yet unheard of and unframed ; yet,
as Loisy has pointed out, if Jesus realised
or thought that he might possibly be arrested
and killed in Jerusalem, he couid only have
admitted the possibility of such a contingency
to his mind, if with it he also conceived and
assumed, at the very same time, and as a
consequence, his speedy resurrection, in order
to take his place, and fulfil his part, in that
Kingdom which was so soon and so surely to
arrive. If he contemplated his own death as
a possibility, the very conditions of the case
— namely, his undauntable conviction of the
imminent Kingdom, and of his own connec
tion with it — must have driven him on to
postulate his resurrection.27
In any case, there must be no flinching
and no shrinking. He had set his hand to
the plough ; he had counted the cost. He

136 THE TEACHING OF JESUS v
would never look back. In this sense, then,
we may truly say that he was ready to die,
and that he consciously died, for the cause ;
that the leader died for the sake of the led,
the master for his disciples, the shepherd for
his flock.
Upon this feature of his death, as of his
life, men's minds fastened. He had come to
minister and to serve, and he crowned his
voluntary service in life with a voluntary
service in death. The greater men thought
that he was and knew himself to be, the more
wonderful this service seemed to them, till,
when at last they thought that he was and
knew himself to be God, there could be
nothing more passing strange and wonderful
in all earth and heaven.
Let me conclude by resting upon that one
great word " service," for this is the special
feature of his own conception of the Messiah-
ship, and still more of that conception of it
which has moved the world. His idea of
Kingship was that of Plato ; he only is the
true King whose life is given for his people.
Kingship is service.

VI

EXPANSIONS AND MODIFICATIONS OF
THE AUTHENTIC TEACHING OF
JESUS WHICH ARE FOUND IN THE
SYNOPTIC GOSPELS
In the preceding lecture I have sought to
speak about the historic Jesus — about his
teaching and its relation to the religion of
his contemporaries, about his own conception
of his mission, his office, and his destiny. All
that I have said has been based upon the
Synoptic Gospels, and, like every other per
son who speaks about Jesus from the modern
or critical point of view, I have made use of
just those portions of the Gospels which seem
to me most likely to be authentic records
either of what Jesus said or of what he did.
But the Gospels do not merely contain these
supposed or assumed authentic passages.
They contain much more. Moreover, they
are wholes. It is in their entirety that they
137

138 THE TEACHING OF JESUS vi
have had large effects for good and some
effects for evil.
The crimes, the cruelties, and the sins of
Christianity and of Christendom, as well as
its virtues, heroisms, and nobilities, must
be taken into account, and the responsi
bility of the Gospels and of their hero for
the one as for the other must be coldly
analysed and calmly ascertained. The Gos
pels still exist for us to-day as wholes, and it
is as wholes that they also, and still, have to
be considered. Their total teaching, in its
relation to the Judaism of the past and the
Judaism of the present, has ultimately to be
estimated and appraised. Not merely the
portions and pieces which even the best and
sanest criticism may hold to comprise the
genuine teaching of the historic Jesus, but
the whole contents of the three Synoptic
Gospels should be discussed. The contribu
tions of the editors, or of the compilers of
the sources which the editors used, and the
additions and accretions of the oral tradition
before the first written sources were put to
gether — all these form part of the actual
Gospels as we have them now, and of the
Gospels as for eighteen hundred years they
have existed, and influenced the lives of men.
Needless to say that such a complex task
cannot be undertaken in a single lecture. It
could not be undertaken by me at all. All

vi EXPANSIONS OF TEACHING 139
that I here propose to do is to touch upon a
few points in which, as I venture to think,
we may trace, even within the Gospels,
developments of the teaching of Jesus, some
times for good and for truth, sometimes for
falsehood and for evil. Needless to remark
that when I speak of developments for good
and evil, for falsehood and for truth, my
tests are purely personal and subjective. It
is merely what the present lecturer, a modern
and unorthodox Jew, happens to think good
and true, or what he happens to think false
and evil.
We speak of the authentic or genuine
portions of the Gospel records, and we speak
of the additions of the editors or compilers,
or of the tradition. How, it may be asked,
do we distinguish the one from the other ?
Are the tests here, too, purely subjective ?
That a subjective element enters in cannot be
denied ; we find theologians of equal critical
vigour strongly upholding and strongly deny
ing the authenticity of particular sayings or
parables. Yet over and above this margin of
difference there is a good deal of agreement,
and certain tests of authenticity are widely
accepted. For instance, it is agreed by almost
everybody that Mark is the oldest of the
Gospels as a whole, and that for the inci
dents of the life of Jesus he is always, or
almost always, the best and most trustworthy

i4o THE TEACHING OF JESUS vi
authority. Again, though controversy still
rages as to the document known to the critics
and theologians as Q. — the document, namely,
which was undoubtedly used by both Matthew
and Luke, and which is the source of much,
though not necessarily of all, which they have
in common with each other, over and above
what they also have in common with Mark —
yet all scholars are agreed that the value of
Q. material is considerable, though some
would vote it higher than others. Again,
sayings which, apparently, are what have been
called " doubly attested," that is, which not
only appear in more than one Gospel, but
which seemingly go back to more than one
independent and original source, are justly
regarded as of high authentic probability.
Or, finally, sayings which only appear in the
less good and less ancient MSS. are held to
be, more probably, later unauthentic accre
tions, especially if they interrupt the context
or are otherwise unsuitable.
And here one passes by natural transition
from these tests of sources to tests in the
subject-matter itself. It is here, doubtless,
that the subjective and personal element may
most largely enter in. Still the presence of
such danger must only make the critic more
careful. He must not, because of the danger,
eschew his task. He has, then, to argue that
such and such passages and utterances seem

vi EXPANSIONS OF TEACHING 141
to him to reflect later situations, later beliefs,
and are therefore probably not authentic.
Still more delicate becomes the task when
he has to argue that such and such passages
or sayings are inconsistent with others, or
inconsistent with the supposed character and
teaching of Jesus as a whole.
One such argument I should like specially
to notice here, because it is, I venture to
think, though often used, of doubtful validity
— at least when employed too largely. It is
argued that Jesus was immeasurably greater
and more original than his reporters, dis
ciples, editors. Hence we get the following
test. Whatever is most noble, beautiful,
original, in the Gospel — whatever is least like
the contemporary teaching of the Rabbis —
that is most probably genuine and authentic.
Whatever is inconsistent with these most
excellent portions and elements — whatever,
in fine, is least good, least original, least
pleasing, that is probably to be set down as
editorial accretion. That there is a measure
of truth in this argument is, I think, certain.
But it seems to me dangerous when pushed,
as it often appears to be pushed, too far.
For first, Jesus, like every other great teacher,
was not always consistent. Nor was he
always at his highest level. The circum
stances of the moment, the antagonism of his
opponents, moved him perchance to say in

1 42 THE TEACHING OF JESUS vi
hot blood what he would not have said
in times of less excitement and agitation.
Secondly, in moments of lofty inspiration he
may have uttered, and probably did utter,
opinions of daring novelty inconsistent with
his own recorded utterances at other times of
less strain and conflict. This would be the case
in regard to anti-legal sayings as compared
with pro-legal sayings found in other con
texts. Thirdly, we must not always apply
our modern tests of excellence to the teaching
of Jesus. It does not follow that what seems
best and most important to us seemed neces
sarily best and most important to him. But,
lastly, we must not necessarily assume that
the editors — even though lesser men — were
not, now and then, able to think on Jesus'
lines and carry forward even the very best
features of his thought. The great German
theologian, Wellhausen, to whose all too
brief commentary upon, and introduction to,
the Gospels, I, like many another, am so
deeply indebted, bids us observe this caution.
He is probably disposed to press the so-called
literary test too exclusively. Whatever is
not in Mark is for him suspect. Neverthe
less, that sentence of his, " Die Wahrheit
bezeugt nur sich selber, und nicht ihren
Autor," " Truth testifies only to itself and
not to its author," deserves careful considera
tion.28 If a single saying of great nobility,

vi EXPANSIONS OF TEACHING 143
such as the famous, " Father, forgive them,"
is almost certainly not authentic, there
seems no reason why ten such sentences,
or why five noble parables, may not be un
authentic too. It is, doubtless, quite true
that before many years had passed the char
acter of Christian thought and literature
greatly changed ; but perhaps this is no ade
quate argument against the occasional happy
inspiration of the earliest compilers and
editors writing under the near influence of
the master. Do we not see a parallel phe
nomenon in the Old Testament Prophets ?
There, too, the original authors were much
greater than their editors : there, too, in
another hundred years or so, the character
of the literature entirely changed ; and yet
critics do hold, and, as I think, rightly, that
now and then the editors rose to great
heights of sympathetic comprehension, and
that some of the noblest sayings in the pro
phetical writings are probably due to them
and to their momentary inspiration.
In the Gospels we may detect an emphasis
and expansion of the authentic thought of
the historic Jesus in many directions. Some
times that emphasis and expansion are in
directions, or on lines, which to some of us
to-day seem noble and great ; at other times
they are not. Sometimes they expand and
emphasise the thought of Jesus where that

144 THE TEACHING OF JESUS vi
thought itself was inconsistent, and thus they
expand and emphasise it, as it were, in oppo
site directions and inconsistently with one
another. It is these expansions and ampli
fications, sometimes for good and sometimes
for evil, to which our attention must now be
called. I do not, however, propose to take
them in any systematic order, and I obviously
shall not be able to make any attempt at
completeness. First, let us notice the attitude of the
Gospels towards Jew and Gentile. There
had been here a double current in the teach
ing of Jesus. He had never dreamed of a
general preaching of the Kingdom among
the heathen, yet he had contemplated, like
the prophets before him, that many heathens
would be admitted into the Kingdom at its
establishment ; and he had, on a few separate
occasions, done good, and spoken words of
comfort, to some individual heathen. Did
the editors here emphasise in both directions ?
As to the anti- Gentile utterances there is
some doubt. Did Jesus say, " Go not unto
the way of the Gentiles " ? (Matt. x. 5).
Did he say that he was only " sent to the
lost sheep of the House of Israel " (Matt.
xv. 24), and that " it is not meet to take the
children's bread and cast it to dogs " ? (Matt.
xv. 26). Or are these utterances editorial ?
And is it the editor of an editor who softens

vi EXPANSIONS OF TEACHING 145
the last saying with an addition, " Let the
children be filled first" ? (Mark vii. 27). I
will not attempt to decide. But, in any case,
the order to " teach all nations " (Matt.
xxviii. 19), and the saying that "the gospel
must first be proclaimed among all peoples "
(Mark xiii. 10), are certainly additions.
Doubtless Jesus in the heat of his antagon
ism with certain Rabbis and Priests, and with
those also who refused to accept the divine
origin of his mission, declared that his
opponents would not be admitted into the
Kingdom (Matt. viii. 12). To him, as to
Savonarola, his own cause was the cause of God.
But the editor tried to make Jesus do more.
The Jews, generally, are to be cast out into
the outer darkness (Matt. viii. 12), and their
places in the Kingdom are to be filled by
" another nation " (Matt. xxi. 43). Jesus
spoke his parables in order that those who
are without might hear and not understand
(Mark iv. 12). The Jews who refuse to
listen to him are not the children of God,
but the children of the devil (Matt. xiii. 38).
The awful dualism of the Fourth Gospel has
cast its shadow before.
No credence is likely to be given to me if
I hold that the order, " Go not to any city of
the Samaritans" (Matt. x. 5), is more likely
to be genuine than the position which the
Samaritans occupy in Luke, and that the

146 THE TEACHING OF JESUS vi
famous good Samaritan of the parable is
rather due to the inspiration of the editor
than to his master's.29
I pass, however, from this to another point.
There were two sides in the character of Jesus,
one stern and one tender, one forgiving and
one severe. He preached and taught that we
were to forgive and do good to our enemies, but
in actual life he sometimes forgot to put his
own precepts into practice ; violent invective
and denunciation of the sinner, who was also
his opponent, rather than of his sin, fell some
times from his mouth.30 It was natural that the
editors should usually expand and emphasise
the lower side of the master's teaching rather
than the higher, for in their time the cleft
between the Synagogue and the Church had
become more wide. Yet once or twice we
have expansions upon the right side. Thus
we have in some MSS. the fine but probably
unauthentic saying, " Ye know not what
manner of spirit ye are of. For the Son of
Man is not come to destroy men's lives, but
to save them" (Luke ix. 55, 56). The
authorities differ as to the genuineness of the
story of the woman taken in adultery (John
viii. 2-1 1 ), but almost all are agreed as to the
apocryphal character of the superb prayer,
" Father, forgive them, for they know not
what they do " (Luke xxiii. 34). Surely
we must be grateful to an editor who could

vi EXPANSIONS OF TEACHING 147
rise to such a noble height. On the other
hand, we probably find many examples of the
opposite tendency. Was it Jesus who said
that if the brother will not repent his fault,
even when it has been reported to the con
gregation, he shall be unto thee " as a heathen
and a tax-collector " ? (Matt, xviii. 17). Was
it not rather Jesus who said, " I say not unto
thee, until seven times, but until seventy
times seven " ? (Matt, xviii. 22). We cannot
be by any means sure that Jesus did not
speak of his opponents as "offspring of
vipers and serpents" (Matt, xxiii. 33), but
the vehemence and the number of his accusa
tions against them, as recorded in Matthew's
twenty-third chapter, have almost certainly
been added to and exaggerated by the editors.
At least, let us hope so — all the more because
some of them are almost certainly untrue.
It is interesting to find that one commen
tator oft eminence thinks that the tolerant
saying, "he that is not against us is for us"
(Mark ix. 40), is genuine, while the dubious
utterance, "he that is not with me is against
me " (Matt. xii. 30), is unauthentic, whereas
another commentator of equal distinction takes
exactly the opposite view.
Did Jesus say the ominous and only too
faithfully fulfilled words, " I came not to
send peace, but a sword " ? (Matt. x. 34).
In any case we must not make him responsible

1 48 THE TEACHING OF JESUS vi
for false interpretations. Even if the parable
of the King's Supper be authentic, the words,
" Exi in vias et saepes, et compelle intrare "
(Luke xiv. 23), may not have the dread mean
ing which history throws back upon them, and
which the Revised Version, by the ingenious
substitution of " constrain " for " compel,"
has sought to soften and to remove. On
the other hand, would that the dubiously
authentic parable of the tares had been ob
served by the Church ! Would that it had
allowed the tares to grow in peace beside the
wheat till the harvest of the Judgment Day
(Matt. xiii. 30) ! What endless sorrow, and
pain, and misery would then have been spared
to man !
I turn now to another point. We have seen
that the historic Jesus had in all probability a
certain antipathy to the rich. There was a
certain tendency in his mind if not to identify,
yet closely to bring together, riches and
iniquity, poverty and righteousness, or at
any rate the potentiality of righteousness.
He was inclined to emphasise the distinction
between this age and the next, regarding this
age as the age in which the righteous must
inevitably suffer and the wicked be prosperous,
while the age to come would witness an exact
reversal of these conditions. But these feel
ings and opinions were probably hardened
and over-emphasised by some of the editors,

vi EXPANSIONS OF TEACHING 149
especially by Luke or one of his sources.
" Woe unto you that are rich. Woe unto
you that are full. Woe unto you that laugh
now " (Luke v. 24, 25). These tremendous
ejaculations are not unquestionably authentic.
Again, we need not, I think, suppose that
Jesus regarded tribulation and persecution
as the natural, and almost as the desirable,
lot of the good and the faithful before
the establishment of the Kingdom. The
doctrine of the resurrection and the future
life which grew up among the Jews between
the Old Testament and the New gave the
key to an entirely different interpretation of
earthly prosperity and earthly sorrows. Jesus
made full use of this key, but though the
future life enabled him (and others) to teach
that earthly troubles must be thought light of
and bravely and cheerfully borne, it is perhaps
somewhat doubtful how far he went in posi
tively welcoming misfortune, and in treating it
as a privilege and a joy. " Happy are ye
when men shall hate you and persecute you.
Rejoice ye in that day and leap for joy "
(Matt. v. 11, 12). There were no persecu
tions of his disciples in his lifetime. So have
we not here intensifications of the authentic
teaching, intensifications which, nevertheless,
have borne great fruits, and been of enormous
influence, in the history of the world ? Did
Jesus, indeed, say that " whoever does not

150 THE TEACHING OF JESUS vi
bear his cross and come after me cannot be
my disciple " (Luke xiv. 27, cp. Mark viii.
34) ? Are there no true disciples except the
persecuted and the martyr ? Yet, in any
case, what strength and high consolement in
trouble, what ready and even joyous accept
ance of pain, what prolonged courageous
endurance of privations and sorrow in the
service of the master and of his cause, have
these words and others like them not pro
duced ! They struck a new and solemn note
of high nobility in the religious development
of mankind. Connected with the expansion of the
authentic teaching about suffering we may
take the expansion of the teaching about
renouncement. It is, of course, uncertain
how far Jesus himself went in this direction.
It is quite probable that his demands varied,
and that towards the end of his ministry they
were increased in severity. Scholars are not
agreed as to this question. It is, for instance,
disputed whether the famous reply to the
rich man in Mark, " One thing thou lackest"
(Mark x. 21), is a special requirement, made
to fit the inquirer's case, or whether it was
at that period the deliberate belief of Jesus
that only those who literally renounced every
thing could be sure of a place in the Kingdom
of God. Or did Jesus make a distinction
between the full disciple on the one hand,

vi EXPANSIONS OF TEACHING 151
and an ordinary pious and humble believer on
the other ? I can hardly bring myself to
believe that he thought that every one who
did not literally sell all that he had and give
it to the poor would be excluded from the
Kingdom. In the Synoptics, as we have
them, we find the tendency, however, to
imply this. The difficulty of entering the
Kingdom is intensified for all. And where,
for instance, we are told by Jesus in Luke
that " whoever renounces not all that he
has cannot be my disciple " (Luke xiv. 33),
it would not appear that to Luke at any rate
any clear distinction is intended between the
ordinary believer on the one hand, and an
inner ring of full discipleship upon the other.
I cannot do more than just allude to the
awful question of Gehenna. That Jesus, like
all his contemporaries, really believed in such
a place of punishment for those who die
upon earth seems to me scarcely to admit of
doubt. But whether it is editors and com
mentators who have made him imply the hate
ful doctrine that those who reach " eternal "
life are very few in number compared with
those who miss it ; whether it is he or they
who speak to us of " eternal punishment "
and " eternal and quenchless fire " ; and what
is the precise meaning of the Greek words
which our Authorised and Revised Versions
translate by " eternal " and by " punishment,"

152 THE TEACHING OF JESUS vi
I will leave undiscussed and undetermined.
I will only add that to the modern Jew (who
is a passionate universalist) no teacher whose
reported words are so thickly strewn with
allusions to Gehenna, and to the devil, and
to the way that leads to destruction, and to
permanent interdiction from everlasting life,
can be regarded without the most grave and
serious criticism.
Another tendency is discernible elsewhere.
The beginnings of what may be called a
double morality, so fateful in its consequences
— an ordinary morality and ideal for the lay
man, another for the professional candidate
for excellence and heaven — go back at least
to the Synoptics, but not, in all probability,
to Jesus. " If thou wilt be perfect," says
Jesus to the rich man in Matthew (Matt.
xix. 21). "He that is able to receive it, let
him receive it" (Matt. xix. 12). But it is
not implied that they who cannot will not
also be saved. Thus the existence of two
standards, one for the everyday person and
one for an ilite, is clearly presupposed. Such
a double standard is, for good or evil — and
there is something to be said on both sides —
practically unknown to Judaism. There the
ideal — to be holy even as God is holy — is the
common obligation of all.
We may also observe a certain highly im
portant generalisation and spiritualising of the

vi EXPANSIONS OF TEACHING 153
doctrine of renouncement. Jesus had said,
" Whosoever would save his life must lose
it" (Luke ix. 24, Mark viii. 35, etc.). By
this saying he had almost certainly meant
that a man must be prepared to give up all
earthly possessions, and even life itself, in
order to win admission into the Kingdom.
Or, as we should say, you must be willing to
sacrifice earth in order to gain heaven.
Jesus was not looking at distinctions within
the earthly life itself. He did not mean that
in order to gain the higher life we must
forgo the lower life. He did not mean,
" die to live," in the sense in which that adage
is so constantly used to-day. That may
perhaps be the meaning of the saying as we
find it in the Talmud,31 but it was not the
meaning of Jesus. In him the words have a
definite and restricted eschatological significa
tion. But already, in the Synoptic Gospels
themselves we may trace the beginning of a
more spiritual interpretation. In Luke — at
least in many MSS. — we read : " If any man
would walk after me, let him deny himself,
and take up his cross daily, and follow me.
For whoever would save his live shall lose
it " (Luke ix. 23, 24). Here by the tiny
addition of the single word " daily " we are
introduced to the idea of a long life of con
tinuous and regular self-denial. Such a life
will lead to the other life beyond the grave,

154 THE TEACHING OF JESUS vi
but its value is also in itself. It has often
been noticed that Luke points forward in
many ways and in many places to the mystic
and spiritual reinterpretation of the teaching
of Jesus in the fourth Gospel. It is possible,
though not probable, that he intended a
certain Greek particle to be translated
" within " and not " among," and that he
therefore is responsible for the famous utter
ance, " the Kingdom of God is within you "
(Luke xvii. 21). If Jesus said the words, we
may, however, be fairly sure that the Greek
particle, which represented the Aramaic
original, must be rendered not " within " but
"among." It is, in any case, curious that
Luke emphasised both the outward and the
inward side of the master's teaching — the
outward, for example, by his intense insistence
upon almsgiving, the inward by the instances
that have already been adduced, and perhaps
also by making Jesus urge his disciples to
pray to God for the gift of the holy spirit
(Luke xi. 13).
I have already observed that in the teach
ing of the historic Jesus there must have
been a marked personal element. Yet this
feature too was emphasised by tradition and
the editor. " For my sake " probably occurs
more often in the Gospels as we have them
than it occurred in their sources ; we may
perhaps conjecture that it occurred more

vi EXPANSIONS OF TEACHING 155
often in their sources than in the mouth
of Jesus. " He that loses his life for my
sake shall find it " (Luke ix. 24). Jesus
must be more loved than father, or mother,
or daughter, or son (Matt. x. 37). Not God,
or God's cause, but Jesus. What tremen
dous issues these words and others like
them have had, it is unnecessary to state.
But of one special application of them in the
Gospels a word or two must be said. It is
urged that any deed of love or charity done
to a disciple is reckoned by Jesus as if it were
done to himself. " Whoever shall give one
of these little ones but a cup of cold water to
drink in the name of a disciple, he shall in no
wise lose his reward " (Matt. x. 42). If a
man receives the disciples, he receives the
master, and receiving the master means
receiving God (Matt. x. 40). But here again
we have a spiritualisation. To " receive "
meant at first to show hospitality. If the
saying be genuine, we may suppose that this
is what Jesus intended to say. But the word
was soon given a more inward meaning.
First, by the addition of the clause, " he who
receives me, receives Him that sent me "
(Matt. x. 40). And then by such amplifica
tion as we find in the saying, " whoever shall
receive one of these little ones in my name
receiveth me, and whoever receiveth me,
receiveth not me, but Him that sent me "

156 THE TEACHING OF JESUS vi
(Mark ix. 37). In this fullest form of the
saying, the idea of the indwelling spirit of
Christ and God seems, if not intended, yet
prepared. " Receives " has journeyed more
than half-way towards a profoundly mystical
significance. But ethically the most excellent, and also
the most simple, amplification of the teaching
" for my sake " occurs in the twenty-fifth
chapter of Matthew, where the doctrine is
laid down that any good deed is regarded by
the risen and immortal Jesus as if it had been
done to himself. " I was thirsty and you gave
me drink. In so far as you rendered such
services to one of the humblest of these my
brethren, you rendered them to myself"
(Matt. xxv. 35, 40). Here the deed of love
has been done not " in the name of Jesus,"
not even consciously " for his sake," and yet
it is accepted by him as done unto himself.
And though the words used are " one of the
humblest of these my brethren," it may per
haps not be going too far to assume that
Jesus is here represented as speaking, not as
the founder of a community, but as the head
or representative of all suffering humanity
at large. There is hardly any doubt that
this fine passage is editorial and unauthentic.
If so, how loudly it speaks for the occasional
inspiration of the editors. Even its painful
conclusion, with its horrible announcement

vi EXPANSIONS OF TEACHING 157
of " eternal fire " and " eternal punishment,"
cannot undo the impression and the signifi
cance of those wonderful and moving words,
" In so far as ye did it to one of these
my brothers, even to the least, ye did it
unto me."
Now let me turn to quite another subject
— the subject with which I opened these
Lectures — the Law. The attitude of Jesus
towards the Law and the religion of his con
temporaries has already been touched upon.
It had probably not reached the theoretic
stage. Jesus still recognised the divinity
of the Law ; he did not make theoretic
distinctions between ceremonial and ritual
enactments, but he did so in practice and in
conflict. Perhaps the most " theoretic " thing
he ever said was not so much, " The Sabbath
is made for man," but rather, " No man pours
new wine into old wine-skins " (Mark ii. 22),
a saying of which it is extremely hard to
determine the precise significance which he
may have meant to give to it, but which
could obviously be interpreted in a most anti-
legal and revolutionary sense. It is notorious
that we find both a legal and an anti-legal
strand in the editors, neither of which is
probably authentic. Jesus probably did not
say : " Not one jot or one tittle shall pass
from the Law till all be fulfilled" (Matt.
v. 18); or, "Whoever shall break one of

1 58 THE TEACHING OF JESUS vi
these least commandments shall be called least
in the Kingdom of Heaven " (Matt. v. 19) ;
or, " Whatever they bid you observe, that
observe and do " (Matt, xxiii. 2). But, on
the other hand, he had not perhaps framed
such a theory of the relation of his own teach
ing to the Law as to say : " The Law said
this, but I, on the contrary, tell you this " ;
or again, " I come not to destroy, but to
fulfil " (Matt. v. 17). Even his saying about
true inward defilement was not intended to
go as far as his Pauline editor supposed :
"Thus spake he, making all foods clean"
(Mark vii. 19, R.V.). It is disputed whether
the prohibition of all divorce, on every ground,
as we have it in Mark, or its prohibition in all
cases except for unchastity, as we find it in the
Sermon on the Mount, more authentically
represents his genuine teaching.
I am on more dangerous and disputed
ground when I take the line that the con
scious and intentional opposition of his own
teaching, as (in one sense) easy, to the heavy
burdens of the teaching of the Rabbis is also
due to the editors and not to the master.
We perceive a tendency to represent the mass
of the people either as quite neglected —
"sheep without shepherds" — or as groaning
beneath a heavy burden, the burden of the
Rabbinic Law. Matthew speaks of them as
"harassed and prostrate" (Matt. ix. 36).

vi EXPANSIONS OF TEACHING 159
Of their teachers he makes Jesus say :
" They bind heavy burdens and lay them on
men's shoulders ; but they themselves will
not move them with one of their fingers"
(Matt, xxiii. 4). In Luke the same idea
is expressed thus : "Ye lade men with
burdens heavy to be borne, and yourselves
touch not the burdens with one of your
fingers" (Luke xi. 46). The charge is his
torically inaccurate, and in all probability it
was never made by the historic Jesus. But
it supplies a fine foil for the verses, partly
modelled upon Ecclesiasticus, in which, in
spite of the repeated assurance that " who
ever does not renounce all that he has, or
whoever does not bear his cross, cannot be
my disciple," Jesus invited the weary to find
rest under his yoke. " Come unto me, all
ye that are weary and are heavy laden, and
I will give you rest. . . . My yoke is easy,
and my burden is light " (Matt. xi. 28). To
how many sorrowing and suffering souls have
these words not brought healing and strength
and courage ! But it is by no means certain,
to say the least, that they were ever uttered
by the historic Jesus.
The same may be said, in my judgment,
for the immensely important passage which
precedes them. There was doubtless a certain
antagonism in the life and teaching of Jesus
to the intellectualism of the Rabbis, or perhaps

160 THE TEACHING OF JESUS vi
I should say, upon occasion, to their intel
lectual casuistry. They were also well able
to discern weak spots in their opponent's
arguments ; they could show, as in the dis
cussions about the Sabbath they probably did
show, where Jesus was logically wrong, even
if he was morally right. Jesus made his
appeal to the general public, and even to the
submerged tenth, rather than to the most edu
cated and cultivated classes. Yet to a theoretic
antagonism to a wisdom which happened to
oppose his doctrine or claims, such as we find,
for instance, in the Pauline " wisdom puffeth
up," or " the wisdom of this world is foolish
ness with God," he in all probability did not
advance. It is true that he said, " Whoever
does not receive the Kingdom as a little child
will not enter it " (Mark x. 15), but we need
not think of him as deliberately depreciating
wisdom and intelligence and reason. It is
probably an editor, and not himself, to whom
those significant words (with their various
issues for good and evil) must be ascribed,
" I praise thee, O Father, Lord of heaven
and earth, that thou hast hid these things
from the wise and the clever, and has revealed
them unto the simple" (Matt. xi. 25).
The verse that follows this striking utter
ance brings me to the last point or subject of
amplification and emphasis which I am able
to mention. And just because this last point

vi EXPANSIONS OF TEACHING 161
is so important and difficult, I must content
myself with a very few words. I refer to the
conception which Jesus formed about himself.
Here the emphasis is naturally all on one
side. We have seen that in all probability
the historic Jesus did regard himself as the
Messiah, and did therefore hold that his
position towards, and his place in, the King
dom was primary and exceptional. He was
its chief or head. Moreover, even before the
Kingdom actually arrived, Jesus, as the
Messiah in posse felt that he possessed greater
power, and claimed a more personal allegiance,
than any prophet before him. Even before
he realised that he was the Messiah, he
realised his power of healing, he taught with
a conviction of direct personal inspiration, he
sought to win men over not merely, if I may
so express myself, to God's side, but also to
his own. So far, I think, we must go. Yet
so far as we can judge, his estimate of his
own power, and of his relation to God, was
gradually intensified by the sources and the
editors. The Kingdom of God becomes his King
dom ; it is he who brings it at his Parousia
or manifestation in glory. He becomes at
the supreme crisis and tribunal not merely
the witness, but the judge. At his resurrec
tion he announces that all power has been
given to him in heaven and on earth.
M

1 62 THE TEACHING OF JESUS vi
Again, Jesus as a prophet, like the prophets
of old, doubtless announced that divine pardon
for sin which is the great prerogative of God.
But even in Mark there is a subtle advance,
and a distinct claim for independent action.
Jesus, the Son of Man, the Messiah, has
power to forgive sins, and so immediate and
direct is the power which he ascribed to him
self in this regard that the Rabbis say or feel :
" Is not this blasphemy ? Can any one forgive
sin but God ? " 32 (Mark ii. 7).
We know that Jewish speculation had
advanced in some quarters beyond the con
ception of a purely human Messiah as we
find it in the oldest prophets. There was
a certain tendency among a few thinkers to
make of him a super-human and pre-existent
being. It is, however, doubtful whether the
historic Jesus shared these speculations or
believed in them. In his earthly career he
probably felt himself to be no more divine
than his neighbours ; he and they were both
the children of God, though none perhaps
realised this sonship so purely and intensely
as he. If he was the Son of God in any other
sense, it was in virtue not of his nature, but
of his Messiahship. At the inauguration of
the Kingdom, at the resurrection, he may
very likely have believed that his own nature,
like all men's, would be changed, and his to
a greater degree of glory than theirs. Further

vi EXPANSIONS OF TEACHING 163
than that it is hardly safe to go. But it is
scarcely needful to point out that the sources
and the editors went a good deal further.
Jesus very soon became, not merely the Son
of God as Messiah, but the Son of God in
his own nature. There was only one Son as
there was only one Father. In a very ancient
verse in Mark, which is nevertheless probably
not authentic, we find the Son used in this
absolute sense by Jesus, and though in know
ledge of one particular subject he is inferior
to the Father, he is nevertheless pointedly in
ferred to be superior to the angels (Mark
xiii. 32). And in one of Matthew's sources
— a very ancient source, moreover — we find
the beginning of that mournful Christian
particularism which would deny any true
knowledge of God the Father except to
those who also believe in the Son. " All was
delivered unto me by my Father ; and no
man knoweth the Son except the Father ;
neither knoweth any the Father except the
Son, and he to whom the Son would reveal
him " (Matt. xi. 27).
In my perverse and prejudiced Jewish
outsideness, I still continue to hope that we
have here an intensification of a source and
not a genuine record. And if the great
Harnack keenly upholds the authenticity, I
have the satisfaction of feeling that other
distinguished authorities, such for instance
M 2

1 64 THE TEACHING OF JESUS vi
as Loisy, are against him. I would rather
think of Jesus, in the quaint words of
Mr. Balmforth, as "a Unitarian above all
men."33 I would rather end these lectures
by recalling that famous passage in Mark,
already objectionable to, and altered by,
Matthew, in which Jesus replies to the rich
man who had called him good, " Why callest
thou me good ? No one is good save God
alone" (Mark x. 18; Matt. xix. 17, R.V.).
Or, lastly, that other passage in Mark, no less
significant and beautiful, in which Jesus and
the best spirit of his own religion are brought
into unison and agreement. " Then one of
the Scribes asked him, Which commandment
is the first of all? And Jesus" (like the
good Jew that he was) " answered him and
said, The first of all the commandments is,
Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God the Lord
is One ; and thou shalt love the Lord thy
God with all thy heart and with all thy soul
and with all thy mind and with all thy
strength. And the second is this, Thou
shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There
is no other commandment greater than these.
And the Scribe said unto him, Excellently,
Master, hast thou said the truth, that He is
One, and there is none other but He ; and
to love Him with all one's heart and with
all one's understanding and with all one's
strength, and to love one's neighbour as one-

vi EXPANSIONS OF TEACHING 165
self, is much better than all burnt offerings
and sacrifices." If, leaving other things for
the moment aside, some one would say,
" here is true Christianity," then, I too, leav
ing other things for the moment aside, would
fain also say, " here is true Judaism." Thus,
like the Scribe and Jesus, we too, the
Christian and the Jew, can meet together,
and so, perhaps — while each of us will still
prefer the accents of his own home — we
may yet, with Jesus, say of the other, " Thou
art not far from the Kingdom of God."

NOTES
(i) As to the question of ritual purity and the extent
to which the ordinary layman had to trouble himself
about " Levitical " cleanness or uncleanness, see
Montefiore, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion
as illustrated by the Religion of the ancient HeBrews
(Hibbert Lectures), pp. 474-478. Also additional note
10 by Mr. Israel Abrahams in vol. iii. of my Commentary
upon the Synoptic Gospels (to be published shortly).
As to the religious condition of the masses of the
people, this involves the question of the 'Am ha-Aretz.
For this see additional note 43 by Mr. Abrahams in
vol. iii. of my Commentary upon the Synoptic Gospels, and
Dr Btichler's large monograph, Der galilaische 'Am ha-
Aretz des zweiten Jahrhunderts (Vienna, 1906), and his
short pamphlet The political and the social Leaders of the
Jewish Community of Sepphoris in the second and third
Centuries (1909).
(2) This conception of the old prophets is largely
based upon Wellhausen. Cp., for instance, his
Israelitische und jiidische Geschichte, p. no (3rd ed.),
p. no (6th ed.).
(3) Cp. Synoptic Gospels, p. lxxx. 53, 54, and the
authors there quoted, especially Loisy, Evangiles synop-
tiques, vol. i. p. 231.,
(4) The reference here is to the abolition by the
Rabbis of the literal application of the Lex talionis and
167

1 68 THE TEACHING OF JESUS
the substitution of a monetary fine. See my Commentary
upon the Synoptic Gospels, p. 513, and the additional note
38 (in vol. iii.).
(5) The reference is to Prof. Bacon's commentary on
Mark {The Beginnings of the Gospel Story), 1909, where
phrases of this kind occur several times.
(6) See Burkitt's Gospel History and its Transmission,
pp. 170-173.
(7) I refer here to the conflict about vows as recorded
in Mark vii. n. Cp. my Commentary upon the Synoptic
Gospels, pp. 164-166.
(8) Cp. the discussion in my Commentary, pp. 167-
176. The translation of Mark vii. 19^, according to
R.V., "This he said, making all meats clean," assumes
that Mark, at any rate, or a later editor, interpreted the
words of Jesus to mean that he abolished the distinction
of meats and the dietary laws of the Pentateuch.
(9) In a friendly review of my Synoptic Gospels in
the Nation (April 9, 1910) the writer says : "When he
blames Jesus for breaking the law of love by vehemently
denouncing the Pharisees, the censure fails in psycho
logical acuteness. One had imagined that Martineau
had given the death-blow to this sort of criticism." My
criticism of this criticism must be reserved for another
place and occasion. A wise and dear friend, who kindly
revised these lectures in proof, wrote : "I do not feel
quite as you do about the ' woes ' to the Pharisees.
These woes, it seems to me, were pronounced on the
class, so far as they possess the faults referred to in the con
text, just as Jesus says elsewhere, ' Woe unto you when
all men speak well of you.' In neither case need
Jesus, it seems to me, be supposed to express hatred of
the persons addressed, but only hatred of an attitude of
mind." This criticism must also be considered else
where. (10) Perhaps demoniac possessions should not be put

NOTES 169
upon the same level as disease in respect to previous
sin. Dr. Plummer says emphatically : " Christ did not
treat possession either as disease or as sin. He seems
never to have blamed the possessed, or to have suggested
that they had brought the affliction upon themselves "
{An Exegetical Commentary on St. Matthew (19 10),
p. 104). (11) In my interpretation of Jesus's conception of
the kingdom of heaven I mainly follow Loisy and
Johannes Weiss. In the famous passage in Luke xvii.
21, I translate the Greek preposition by "among "and
not by "within."
(12) Christianity at the Cross Roads, p. 126.
(13) The reference is to Loisy, Evangiles synoptiques,
vol. i. p. 238, and similar passages.
(14) The references are to Prof. B. W. Bacon, The
Beginnings of the Gospel Story (1909), p. 136, and to
Loisy, op. cit., vol. i. p. 239.
(15) The expression "for my sake" is found in
Mark viii. 35 (Matthew x. 39, xvi. 25 ; Luke ix. 24) ;
Mark x. 29 (Matthew xix. 29) ; Mark xiii. 9 (Matthew
x. 18; Luke xxi. 12); Matthew v. 11 (cp. Luke
vi. 22). The authenticity of the phrase in every one
of these passages is not above suspicion.
(16) The reference is to Loisy, Evangiles synoptiques,
vol. i. p. 229.
(17) See Dr. Schechter's articles on " Rabbinic
Parallels to the New Testament" and "Rabbinic
Conceptions of Holiness " in Jewish Quarterly Review,
vol. xii. (April 1900) p. 427, and vol. x. (October
1897) p. 11, and my Commentary, p. 499.
(18) See Loisy, jfrvangiles synoptiques, vol. i. p. 233.
(19) The allusion is to Harnack in his Wesen des
Christentums and elsewhere.

170 THE TEACHING OF JESUS
(20) See Luke xvii. 10. I follow the Sinaitic Syriac
in omitting the adjective "useless" or "unprofitable."
Cp. my Commentary, p. 1008.
(21) The reference is to H. Gunkel in a note in
his commentary upon the 4th book of Esdras (vii. 32)
in Die Apokryphen und Pseudepigraphen des alten Testa
ments, vol. ii. p. 370 (1900).
(22) The reference is to Luke xiii. 1-9. Cp. my
Commentary, p. 965.
(23) The reference is to Abodah Zarah, 17^.
(24) The reference is to Wellhausen, Israelitische und
jiidische Geschichte, p. 384, note I (ed. 3), p. 389, note
2 (ed. 4). In edition 6 this footnote has disappeared.
(25) The reference is to the Life and Letters of
Benjamin Jowett, by Abbott and Campbell, vol. ii. pp.
85, 445.
(26) Tyrrell, Christianity at the Cross Roads, p. 39.
Tyrrell is here describing the conception which
" Liberal Protestants " have formed of the Messiahship
of Jesus. (27) See Loisy, Evangiles synoptiques, vol. i. p. 223.
(28) See Wellhausen, Einleitung in die drei ersten
Evangelien (1905), p. 86.
(29) The bearing of this remark will be found in
my Commentary upon the Synoptic Gospels, pp. 935-937.
I need not here repeat what is there said, but I am
very glad to observe that in a very kindly notice of my
book in the Christian Commonwealth, Prof. Cheyne has
accepted the suggestion of J. Halevy, for which I have
contended. (30) See Note 9.
(31) The reference is to Tamid, 32a, where we
read : " Alexander of Macedon asked the Wise Men of
the South two questions. . . . He asked : What should
a man do that he may live? They answered: Let

NOTES 171
him kill/ himself. He asked them : What should a man
do that he may die ? They answered : Let him keep
/himself alive."
(32) It is possible that in the original narrative
which underlies Mark ii. 1-12, or in the source from
which it was taken, verse t,a was immediately followed
by \\b {i.e. (5) "And Jesus, seeing their faith, said
unto the paralysed man (11) : Arise and take up thy
bed, and go home.") The section about the forgiveness
of sins may have been interpolated. So Loisy, Evangiles
synoptiques, vol. i. pp. 88, 107,480. Bacon, Beginnings
of the Gospel Story, pp. 23, 24.
(33) The reference is to The Bible from the Stand
point of the Higher Criticism, vol. ii. : The New Testa
ment in the Light of the Higher Criticism (1905), by
Ramsden Balmforth, p. 246.

THE END

Printed by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh.