JESUS
THE SON OF GOD
BENJAMIN W. BACON
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Gift of the Publishers

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JESUS THE SON OF GOD

OR

PRIMITIVE CHRISTOLOGY

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BY

BENJAMIN WISNER BACON, D.D., Litt.D., LL.D.,
Buckingham Professor of New Testament Criticism and
Interpretation in Yale University

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NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON: HENRY FROWDE, OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
MCMXI

PUBLISHERS' NOTE

The three critical essays on titles applied to Christ in the earlier
sources of the New Testament were originally published in the Harvard
Theological Review (1909-1911). The discussion which follows them,
"The Christology of Peter," has been hitherto unpublished.

PART I
PRIMITIVE CHRISTOLOGY

JESUS THE SON OF GOD

I. The Logion Mt. 11 25-27, Lk. 10 21-22, and its Parallels
No passage of the Synoptic Gospels throws so much light upon
Jesus' sense of his own mission as that which deals with Knowing
the Father and Being Known of Him in Mt. 11 25-27, Lk. 10
21-22. It belongs to the common element of Matthew and Luke
unknown in Mark, and in the judgment of the great majority of
critics must therefore be referred to a common source of high
antiquity. In short, as respects attestation, its claims to authen
ticity are unexcelled. As respects content, it deals with the all-
important matter of Jesus' doctrine of divine sonship, and yet
it seems to stand alone among Synoptic sayings, and to be paral
leled only by utterances ascribed to Jesus by the fourth evange
list. But the Johannine discourses give every indication of having
been composed by the evangelist himself in order to expound in
dialogue form his own deutero-pauline Christology. The only
instance in all Synoptic tradition of anything comparable to this
apposition of "the Son ... the Father," is Mk. 13 32, Mt. 24 36.
Of that day or that hour knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven,
neither the Son, but the Father.
But this Markan saying cannot be employed to prove the super
human consciousness of Jesus; for in the Lukan version of the
same saying, Acts 1 7,
It is not for you to know times or seasons, which the Father hath set
within his own authority,
the apposition disappears, and, in view of Mark's freedom in the
composition of the eschatological chapter (Mk. 13), and of his
individual Christology as reflected at the beginning and end of
his gospel (Mk. 1 l and 15 39),1 it is more reasonable to attribute
to the evangelist the reference to "the Son" in Mk. 13 32. The
1 The paraphrase of Is. 5 1-7 in Mk. 12 1-9 reflects the same standpoint and
is better understood as an allegorical composition of the evangelist than as an
authentic parable of Jesus, though a parable somewhat resembling this is inserted
by Mt. just before it (Mt. 21 28-32).

2 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
original saying was, then, no parallel to our logion, and the latter
remains unique. It is the sole unshakable utterance of Jesus to
which the doctrine of his divine sonship can be referred. And
yet, even after the most drastic application of both textual and
higher criticism, it does remain unshaken; and it well deserves its
description as "the Johannine passage," for it forms, however
interpreted, a true link of connection between Synoptic and
Johannine Christology.
We are bound, nevertheless, by all sane principles of criticism,
and of exegesis as well, to prefer that form of text and that inter
pretation which leave the saying in harmony with the rest of
Synoptic tradition rather than a text and interpretation whose
affinities are all with the Fourth Gospel. Such a form and inter
pretation may reveal a root from which the later developed Chris
tology might spring; any other could give us no more than an
erratic block, in which the geologist must see violent displacement
from its original bed.
Harnack 2 has recently submitted the textual evidence to a
searching examination. Since it is not our present object to test
his results, but to present an interpretation applicable whether
these results be accepted or not, it will suffice merely to indicate
by square brackets the material he omits, and by marks of
parenthesis the altered readings which he introduces.
Mt. 11 25-27 Lk. 10 21-22
25 At that season Jesus answered 21 In that same hour he re-
and said, I thank thee, O Father, joiced in the Holy Spirit and said,
Lord of heaven and earth, that I thank thee, O Father, Lord of
thou didst hide these things from heaven and earth, that thou didst
the wise and understanding, and hide these things from the wise
didst reveal them unto babes: 26 and understanding, and didst re-
yea, Father, for so it was well- veal them unto babes : yea, Father,
pleasing in thy sight. 27 All for so it was well-pleasing in thy
things have been delivered unto sight. 22 All things have been
me of [my] Father: and no one delivered unto me of [my] Father:
knoweth the Son, save the Father; and no one (hath recognized) [who
neither doth any know the Father, the Son is save the Father; and]
save the Son, and he to whom- who the Father is, save the Son,
soever the Son willeth to reveal and he to whomsoever the Son
him. [willeth to] reveal(eth) him.3
2 Spriiche und Reden Jesu, 1907, Exkurs I, pp. 189-211.
3 In the extract only Harnack's positive results are exhibited. He leaves it
doubtful, for example, whether the order in Mt. 11 27 should not be "the Father . . .

JESUS THE SON OF GOD 3
From a comparison of these emended texts of Mt. and Lk. Harnack
concludes that the common source (Q) represented by their coin
cident material read as follows:
At that season Jesus answered and said, I thank thee, Father, Lord
of heaven and earth, that thou didst hide these things from the wise and
understanding, and didst reveal them to babes; yea Father, for such
was thy good pleasure. All things were delivered to me by the Father,
and no one hath known the Father [or who the Father is] save the Son,
and he to whomsoever the Son maketh the revelation.
We ourselves are not so much concerned with the sense given
to the passage by our first and third evangelists, as with the sense
it bore in their common source, now commonly designated Q.4 It
may well be, as has recently been declared by no less weighty and
unprejudiced an authority than Jiilicher, that
The evangelist who makes Jesus exclaim, No one knoweth the Son
save the Father and likewise no one knoweth the Father save the Son
(Mt. 11 27; cf. Lk. 10 22), surely presupposes in him a consciousness
derived from another world and period.5
An evangelist demonstrably dependent on Mark, one who takes
over and improves upon the "high" Christology of his predeces
sor, and who seems even to have adapted this very logion to the
form of a post-resurrection commission to the apostles to make
converts of all the nations (Mt. 28 18), may well have accepted
a Pauline Christology with all its implications of pre-existence.
But the inquirer into the pre-pauline conceptions, the historian
of the doctrine, who would know what Jesus himself felt to be
the Son . . . the Son . . . the Father, " and whether in the last clause we should
not read "revealeth," as in the emended Lk., instead of "willeth to reveal." As
these are merely possible changes and make no practical difference to the sense,
they are not indicated.
4 So the Germans generally and Salmon (The Human Element in the Gospels,
1907). The designation is better than L (W. C. Allen, International Critical
Coram., 1907) or A (H. J. Holtzmann, Synoptische Evangelien, 1863), for it does
not prejudge the question of the relation of this Mt.-Lk. source to the Matthaean
"Logia of the Lord" mentioned by Papias. Burton and Sharman of Chicago
University employ the letters G (Galilean document) and P (Perean document)
for the respective intercalations of Lk. 6 20-8 8 and 9 51-18 14, which other
critics designate together as Q.
* Paulus und Jesus, 1907, p. 31.

4 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
implied in his own "sonship," will not delay over secondary and
derived information when primary sources are accessible. Mark
and the first evangelist show the form of the tradition current in
the period 70-90 a.d.; for the period 40-60 a.d. we are able to
use as a standard of comparison the Pauline epistles and the
reported utterances of Jesus himself in the material drawn from
Q and common to Matthew and Luke.6
In this earlier material we are fortunately not devoid of parallels
for either portion of the logion. Even if we grant the cogency of
Harnack's textual argument for attributing to our first evange
list, and not to Q, the clause "no one knoweth the Son save the
Father," yet the Pauline epistles will furnish evidence, as we hope
to show, that this supposed addition is no invention of the evange
list, but is itself an expression of the spirit of Jesus. Besides Q
and the Pauline epistles we have a further resource in the con
temporary Jewish literature. Of all these aids we must avail
ourselves in order to determine in what sense utterances concern
ing "the Son," "the Father," would be understood by Jesus'
auditors, and must therefore, since he had no purpose to mislead,
have been intended by himself.
Harnack 7 very justly indorses the judgment of Pfleiderer in
finding in 1 Cor. 1 19 21 a Pauline parallel to our logion so close
in thought and to some extent even in language as to suggest
direct literary dependence:
For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
And the prudence of the prudent will I reject.
. . . For seeing that in the wisdom of God the world through its wis
dom knew not God, it was God's good pleasure through the foolishness
of the preaching to save them that believe.
6 That this common Mt.-Lk. discourse material (Q) is not derived by one
of these evangelists directly from the other has been conclusively demonstrated
by Wernle (Synoptische Frage, 1899, pp. 40-80), and is an accepted result of New
Testament science. Even Allen pleads only for an "influence" of Matthew upon
Luke. Advocates of oral tradition (A. Wright) make their oral source the equiva
lent of a document, since its form is so stereotyped as to make the resemblance, of
Mt. to Lk. closer in the portions not shared by Mk. than in the parts taken by each
from this admittedly written source.
7 Spriiche und Reden Jesu, p. 210, note 1.

JESUS THE SON OF GOD 5
On the question whether Paul is dependent on the logion or
Q influenced by Paul, there is disagreement. Harnack rejects
Pfleiderer's decision in favor of the latter alternative, on the ground
that "babes" (vrj-moi) "is not Pauline." 8 And yet in the same
context, scarcely more than a score of verses further on (1 Cor.
3 l ) Paul applies this very term " babes " (vrjmot) to his Corinth
ian converts as recipients of the revelation.
Important as this matter of the relation of Paul to Q undoubt
edly is, we may still leave the question of priority undecided.
The essential point for the interpreter is the existence of the
relation, and this becomes the more apparent the more closely
we scrutinize the two contexts.
As regards the setting of the logion in Q, accepting Harnack's
textual results, we can go no further than the coincidence of
Matthew and Luke allows. As this comprises, however, all the
evidence we have, and as all bears in one direction, there is no
likelihood of contradiction for Harnack's conclusion 9 that in the
source it stood between the Woes on the Unrepentant Cities of
Galilee and the Denunciation of the Scribes who Blasphemed the
Spirit and demanded a sign from Heaven. Pursuing the sequence
a little further back it would appear that the Woes against the
Unrepentant Cities followed upon the Complaint against the
Generation which was satisfied neither with the " wailing " of the
Baptist's disciples nor the "piping" of the followers of Jesus, and
this in turn came after the Mission of the Twelve, which itself
was preceded by the incident of the Centurion whose faith put
to shame the unbelief of Israel. Certainly one cannot fail to per
ceive the dominant motive in this sequence, particularly as it
reappears so strongly both in Paul (Rom. 9-11) and in all our
canonical evangelists (Mt. 4 1-25, 12 1-12, 13 1-23, 21 33-43,
Lk. 4 16-30, 24 44-49, Acts passim, Jn. 12 20-43). The author
of Q treated the logion as a rebuke of the dull ears and blind
eyes of unbelieving Israel, in this respect following the lead of
Paul, and being followed by all our evangelists.
8 Yet our passage furnishes the only occurrence of the word in the gospels
(save the quotation from Ps. 8 3 in Mt. 21 16) against eleven occurrences in the
Pauline epistles.
« Spriiche und Reden Jesu, p. 126.

6 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
In 1 Cor. 1 18, 2 16 the flesh which "glories before God
(1 29) is not indeed, as in Rom. 2 17-20, the Jew who claims to '
"know God" and to be "a teacher of babes," but the wise in
their own esteem generally. In the logion as originally intended
it is of course "the wise and understanding" of Israel, the scribes,
who are meant, and their oppressive yoke is contrasted with that
of Jesus in the invitation framed by Matthew as an appendix to
it from Ecclus. 6 28, 51 26 ff.10 Only the compiler, to whom is
due the context of Q's sequence, seems to have had in mind the
peculiar pretensions and the signal rejection of Israel as a whole.
With the evangelists and Paul alike we have here an application,
now wider, now narrower, of the passage Is. 29 9-24, a favorite
passage of Paul " and also used more than once in Q.12 In rep
resenting the "babes" as the choice of God's "good pleasure" to
receive revelation, Paul is only extending to the spiritually dis
inherited of the gentile world the assurance which Jesus had
given to his "little flock" of repentant sinners and synagogue
outcasts. He bases it explicitly on the Isaian passage which
tacitly underlies the logion.
II. The Revelation given to the Lowly.
The comparison of Paul's rhapsody over "the word of the
cross," "the foolishness of the preaching," with Jesus' exultation
over the revelation given to his "little ones," and the connection
of both with their common Old Testament basis, is much more
than a mere vindication of the authenticity of the saying. It
already goes far toward determining its sense; and this in turn,
as it becomes clearer, will enable us to detect parallels perhaps
hitherto unsuspected.
The fundamental point of agreement of all three witnesses, the
logion, the Isaian passage, and the Pauline, is the vindication of
u> Mt. 11 28-30, which fails to appear in Luke, seems, beautiful as it is, to be
of the evangelist's composition from phrases derived from the Wisdom-literature.
See W. C. Allen, ad loc, in Internat. Crit. Commentary, 1907, and Bousset, Reli
gion des Judentums, p. 338, for the parallels.
u Rom. 11 8, Col. 2 2, 1 Cor. 1 29 30, 3 19, Rom. 9 20 21, 2 Tim. 2 20 21,
2 Cor. 13 4,76,1 Thess. 3 7, 4 18, 5 14.
12 Cf. besides the present passage Mt. 11 5, Lk. 4 18, 7 22.

JESUS THE SON OF GOD 7
the revelation given to the unlearned, the lowly, the plain people,
against the usurpations of, ecclesiastical authority. In the time of
Amos God had been free to choose as the bearer of his message
a herdsman, a dresser of sycamore trees, in preference to the
prophet by avocation, if it so pleased him (Am. 7 14 15). Isaiah
already felt the pressure of hierocratic usurpation, and followed
the lead of Amos in pouring scorn upon the prophets "whose
eyes are closed," the seers "whose heads are covered," the learned
to whom "all vision is become as the words of a book that is
sealed," so that God turns. to "the meek" and "the poor," making
the children to sanctify his name, and erring spirits and "stam
mering lips to utter peace." 13 Since the extinction of the voice of
prophecy, and the establishment of the exclusive authority of the
synagogue and the written law, the usurpations of the profes
sional religionist had become in Jesus' time immeasurably more
intolerable still. A coterie of scribes with a few thousand Phari
saic followers had arrogated to themselves alone the spiritual
inheritance of Israel. Sitting in Moses' seat with their preroga
tive of the interpretation of the written law, they held the keys
of the kingdom of heaven. They entered not in themselves, and
the masses that would enter in by the broad door of the baptism
of John and the proclamation of forgiveness and adoption by
Jesus they hindered. They had made it impossible for the
average son or daughter of Abraham to expect any "part in the
world to come"; for this phrase had come to be the current
expression for a share in the common national inheritance, the
birthright of the sons of Abraham, the messianic hope. As the
Gracchi in Rome became the champions of the lowly against the
usurpation of the common domain by the aristocracy, so John the
Baptist and Jesus resisted the usurpation of the common spiritual
inheritance in Israel. To Jesus the baptism of John had been a
sign from heaven (Mt. 21 23-25). John himself had been an
Elias, the "restorer of the tribes" (Ecclus. 48 10), having as his
mission not merely the "great repentance" (Mai. 4 5 6), but the
turning of fathers to children and children to their fathers, in the
sense of restoring those who had been excluded by violence and
wrongfully, and excluding those who had usurped the place of
" Is. 29 9-24 (LXX).

8 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
the sons and daughters of Abraham." As such a sign the Bap
tist's warning of "wrath to come" had been "a greater matter"
than the preaching of Jonah to the Ninevites, and the generation
which rejected it were bringing on themselves greater condem
nation (Mt. 12 4l).15
The Isaian basis of our logion, the Pauline parallel, the gospel
affinities, the context and internal evidence of the logion itself,
all combine to show that we must interpret it in the light of this
championship by Jesus of the cause of the lost sheep, and of the
lost son against the grudging elder brother. The "weary and
heavy laden" to whom is given the invitation, "Take my yoke
upon you and learn of me," which Matthew appropriately appends,
are those that have been learning of the scribes in Moses' seat,
those scribes who make the yoke of the law more and more griev
ous and intolerable, "binding heavy burdens and grievous to be
borne, which they themselves did not touch with one of their
fingers." The "revelation to babes" for which the supreme Lord
is thanked, is the sight and knowledge granted to the pure in heart
(Mt. 5 8), more than offsetting the unused "key of knowledge"
in the hand of the professional exponent of Mosaism (Mt. 23 IS,
Lk. 11 52). The spirit of the context is that of the promise of
Jer. 31 34 of the days of the new covenant, when
They shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his
brother, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know me, from the
least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord : for I will forgive
their iniquity, and their sin will I remember no more.
In the light of these connected passages it is manifest that
those expositors are right who point out that the word here ren-
" Mt. 11 12-15. This obscure passage is illuminated by the rabbinic tradition,
Edujoth viii, 7, where on the authority of Johanan ben Zakkai the function of Elijah
as restorer of the tribes is declared to be, "not to pronounce clean or unclean, to
exclude or receive in general, but only to receive those who had been excluded
by violence, and to exclude those who had been received by violence." See Bacon,
"Elias and the Men of Violence," Expositor, sixth series, xxxi (July, 1902),
and W. C. Allen, Intern. Crit. Coram, on Mt., ad he.
is On the reference to "the baptism of John" in this answer of Jesus to the
demand for a sign from heaven, which Matthew and Luke in contradictory ways
endeavor to apply to Jesus himself, see Bacon, Sermon on the Mount, p. 232, and
cf. the parallel demand for a sign and its answer, Mt. 21 23-25; also the combina
tion of the two in Jn. 2 18-21.

JESUS THE SON OF GOD 9
dered "delivered" (irapcBoQr)) is not the same as that used in the
utterance of Mt. 28 18, "All authority hath been given (eSo'fy)
unto me in heaven and on earth," but is the technical term for the
conveyance of authoritative docttine (™pa8oo-is). If the post-
resurrection commission (Mt. 28 18) is framed, as seems probable,
on our logion, the evangelist has extended the sense beyond the
original intention. In reality the logion is more justly paralleled
in Jn. 7 16 17, " My teaching is not mine, but his that sent me."
Against the "traditions (7rapaSdo-eis) of the scribes" Jesus sets
the tradition of his Father, which is "hidden from the wise and
understanding, but revealed (by the Father) to babes." We are
reminded how in a closely connected Lukan passage, denouncing
as blind leaders of the blind the scribes and Pharisees who had
demanded of him a sign from heaven, he had referred his hearers
to "the light that is in thee" as a guide which no other can replace
(Lk. 11 34-35). If we penetrate through the setting to the intrin
sic sense of the parable of the Good Samaritan, we shall perceive
there too a vindication of the inner law against the written. The
Samaritan stands contrasted with priest and Levite because in
his simple obedience to "the righteousness of God" he puts to
shame the professional expounders of Mosaism. It is in the name
of himself and his "little ones," then, that Jesus "rejoices in the
Holy Spirit," when he thanks the "Lord of heaven and earth"
that the scribe has no monopoly of the knowledge of God. The
title "Lord of heaven and earth" is chosen, as Amos had chosen
equivalent titles (Am. 9 5 6), in protest against a clique of eccle
siastics who imagined themselves able to monopolize knowledge
of the Infinite One. Paul delineates for us this would-be monopo
lizer of the "Lord of heaven and earth." For Paul it is of course
not merely the scribe, but the Jew generally in contrast with the
untaught gentile, who
rests upon the law and glories in God, having the knowledge of his will,
discriminating in matters of casuistry, being instructed out of the law,
confident that he himself is a guide of the blind, a light of them that are
in darkness, an instructor of the foolish, a teacher of "babes," having
in the law the pattern of knowledge and of the truth.
But Paul's expressions belong to a time when the issue regarding
inheritance of the kingdom had widened. Jesus' exultation is the

10 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
declaration of independence of the old prophetic spirit so long
enslaved. It is a reassertion of the rights of the spiritually disin
herited of Israel. Paul is the champion of the gentiles, who
without the law are a law unto themselves. Both rest ultimately
on the same basis. In both cases the appeal is to the awakening
Spirit of adoption that witnesseth with our spirit that we are born
of God, teaching us to cry, Abba, Father.

III. Relation of the Sating to Mark 4 11.
With this recognition of the bearing of the earlier part of our
logion must follow a recognition of certain hitherto unsuspected
affinities. On the surface there is little to indicate the affinity of this
saying with that attributed to Jesus in Mk. 4 11,
To you is given the mystery of the kingdom of God, but for them that
are without aU things are done in parables.
We believe this Markan saying, however, to be a genuine variant
of our logion. Our second evangelist is notably free in his cita
tions of logia, adapting them to his own purposes, and frequently,
as in Mk. 1 15, giving them a tincture of Pauline phraseology.
The use here of the Pauline term "the mystery" for "the revela
tion," and the adaptation of the logion to a theory of the teaching
in parables which is obviously the evangelist's own creation,
though also based on Paul,16 has obscured the relation. But
Clement of Alexandria has fortunately preserved for us from an
16 Mk. 4 11 12 is an editorial insertion quite out of harmony with the con
text, which presupposes that not merely the parable of the sower, but "all the
parables" have preceded (vs. 13), and expresses surprise that explanation should
be needed (vs. 13). In vss. 10 and 13 the sense of the question about the para
bles is not, as assumed in vss. 11 and 12, " Why use this method?" but "What is
the meaning of the symbolism?" Vss. 11 12 with their Isaian proof-text apply
the Pauline doctrine of the hardeningof Israel (Rom. 11 7 8) to the fact that Jesus
had taught in "parables," the "parable" being erroneously regarded as an enigma,
riddle, or dark saying. Mark doubtless applied the parable of the sower to the
hardening of Israel much as Ep. Barn. 9 5 (cf. Heb. 6 8) applies the common pro
totype of Jer. 4 3, "Sow not upon thorns, break up the fallow ground." But
Mark did not invent a logion to justify his theory of the parables as a preaching
of judgment. He adapted that now under consideration to suit his Pauline theory.

JESUS THE SON OF GOD 11
unknown gospel a middle link. In his Stromata, v. 10, 69, he
declares that he found "in a certain gospel" the saying,
My mystery belongs to me and to the sons of my household.
In the Clementine Homilies xix, 20 the same logion is quoted in
a form reminding us of the exclusive spirit of Mt. 7 6,
Keep the mysteries for me and for the sons (viols) of my household.
In these agrapha we are manifestly dealing with the same logion
that appears in Mk. 4 11 in a form adapted to Mark's theory of
the parabolic method. The reservation of "my mystery" is an
unmistakable point of connection with Mark; but the reversion in
the latter half of the agraphon to " me and the sons of my house
hold" as the antithesis to "outsiders" shows equally close con
nection with our logion, indicating that Mark has merely adapted
it, after the example of Paul, to the wider issue of his own time,
and embodied in it the protest of the spiritual seed of Abraham
against Jewish pretensions. Mark has paved the way for this
adaptation by introducing immediately before the Teaching in
Parables, and between it and the Choosing of the Twelve, the
saying in which Jesus declares these to be the " sons of his house
hold," And looking round about upon those who were sitting in a circle about
him he saith, Behold my mother and my brethren; for whosoever doeth
the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother.
It is a matter of no small significance that our second gospel,
in striking contrast to the other two synoptists, entirely excludes
the great exhibition of Jesus' teaching delivered to the masses,
the Sermon on the Mount, and at the corresponding point intro
duces a deliverance of "the mystery of the kingdom of God" to
the inner circle of Jesus' spiritual kindred, while "to those who
are without all things are done in enigmas." We should greatly
mistake the intention of this most democratic of all the evange
lists if we conceived him to suggest a new spiritual aristocracy,
with the apostles as trustees of "the mystery." We must under
stand the inner circle just as he defines it (Mk. 3 31-35). The
"mystery" is given to the believing and obedient (cf. Jn. 7 3-5 17

12 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
with Mk. 3 31-35); the preaching to the Jewish people gen
erally is to him a mere " sowing upon thorns." 17
On the other hand Mark does not wholly neglect to justify his
drastic theory of the hiding of the revelation from the unbelieving
Jewish "outsiders" whom he refuses to call "wise and under
standing." At the close of his parenthetic discussion of the reason
for Jesus' teaching in parables, he resumes the saying at which
he turned aside, " If anyone hath ears to hear, he is the one that
shall hear" (Mk. 4 9 and 23), and introduces another logion ls to
qualify the seeming harshness of his doctrine,
For it (the mystery) is not hid but only that it might become known;
nor was it concealed but only that it might come to fight.
In fact this whole paragraph, Mk. 4 21-25, beginning with the
comparison of the lamp that "comes" not to be hidden, but to
be lifted up,19 and ending with the warning to the unreceptive
that they will be deprived of their prerogative, can only be appre
ciated when it is read with reference to this great issue of the
first century between Jewish particularism and Christian univer-
salism. Whatever the original sense, to Mark the parable of the
good and bad soil and the appended sayings constitute a protest
against Jewish claims to monopolize the knowledge of God and
the messianic hope.
There can be little doubt in view of these various lines of con
nection that our second (Roman) evangelist, in his section on the
Choosing and Training of the Twelve, extending from Mk. 3 7 to
6 13, has adapted our logion on the Hiding of the Revelation
from the wise and understanding and the delivering of it to babes
to the special case of the hardening of Israel, the case so vividly
brought into the foreground in Paul's great epistle to the Romans.
Fortunately we have in 1 Cor. 1 18-3 l, and especially in the
w For Mark's estimate of the Jewish people generally and their religious
character see Mk. 7 3 4 6 7.
w Mk. 4 22 is given twice in Luke. Lk. 8 17 = Mk. 4 22; Lk. 12 2 = Mt.
10 26. is Commentators differ as to whether in the evangelist's application "the
lamp" stands for the Messiah, who is destined to occupy the throne of glory (cf.
Rev. 21 23), or, as originally intended, for the gospel message. Either interpre
tation would suit our contention.

JESUS THE SON OF GOD 13
common Isaian basis, Is. 29 9-24, a standard by which to measure
the degree of departure from the original sense.
As a guide to the original occasion of the utterance, Mark's
setting has but little value. It is true that Matthew also places
in the same relation to the parables a saying which Luke sub
joins to our logion as part of the congratulation addressed " to the
disciples privately":
Blessed are the eyes which see the things which ye see. For I say
unto you that many prophets and kings (Mt. righteous men) desired to
see the things which ye see, and saw them not, and to hear the things
which ye hear, and heard them not.
In Mt. 13 16-17 this utterance is separated from the logion on
the Hiding of the Revelation and appended to the Markan digres
sion on the Parables as a Hiding of the Mystery. It illustrates
the saying, "He that hath ears let him hear" (Mt. 13 9, Mk. 4 9).
But this displacement is almost certainly due to the influence of
Mark. Probably, then, the full content of the saying as it stood
in the common source of Matthew and Luke (Q) was as given in
Lk. 10 21-24, which we give again in Harnack's reconstruction :
At that season he said, I praise thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth,
that thou didst hide these things from the wise and understanding, and
didst reveal them unto babes. Yea, Father, for such was the good pleas
ure before thee. All things (matters of revelation) were delivered to
me by the Father, and no one hath recognized (e yvo>) [the son save the
Father, nor hath any recognized] the Father save the son, and he to
whomsoever the son willeth to give the revelation. Blessed are your
eyes for they see, and [your] ears for they hear; [for verily] I say unto you,
many prophets [and kings] desired to see the things which ye see, and saw
them not, and to hear the things which ye hear, and heard them not.
Our previous discussion of the context in Q has indicated a ten
dency already apparent even in this primitive compilation to
apply the saying to the wider issue between Jew and gentile.

rV. Knowing and Being Known of God.
That which mainly interests the modern student in this so-
called "Johannine" saying is its bearing on the messianic con
sciousness of Jesus, and it is highly significant that all the affini
ties of the passage, whether in the Old Testament or the New,

14 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
make it a protest against the spiritual disinheritance of the common
people at the hands of the professional religionist. In the light of
this circumstance it is impossible to suppose that Jesus is speaking
either of a "revelation" or of a "sonship" which is his in an
exclusive sense. He speaks of himself simply as the leader and
champion of those who have no claim to sonship but the ethical,
whose only pretension to be "sons of the Father in heaven" and
"children of the Highest" rests on their exhibition of that divine
spirit of unlimited, disinterested goodness, which "is kind even
to the unthankful and the evil" (Mt. 5 43-48, Lk. 6 27-36), who
"know the will" as the Good Samaritan knew it. But it was the
ancient prerogative of Israel as a people to be "the beloved son"
of God, "the first born and only-begotten"; whereas God had said
of "the other nations which also come of Adam, that they are
nothing," and had "likened them to a drop that falleth from a
vessel." 20 According to the rabbis the evidence of Israel's special
prerogative was that Israel had " knowledge of the law." 21 Whom
indeed of mankind does the Creator destine to inherit his world,
if not those to whom he has made the revelation of how and why
he created it,22 and of bow he wills that men should live in it ?
No wonder if in the eyes of scribes and Pharisees the people
of the land who "knew not the law," and did not so much as
lend themselves to the guidance of its authoritative expounders,
were "accursed" and worthy of no "share in the world to come."
The privilege of the " publicans and sinners " could only be that
which Paul later ascribed to the "sinners of the gentiles," not
"a righteousness of their own, even that of the law," but the
right to "become imitators of God as beloved children and
walk in love, even as Christ had loved them and given himself
for them" (Eph. 5 1).
But if such be the general bearing of the passage, we may well
ask by what right the English versions write "Son" with a cap
ital letter. The true parallel to the use which our logion makes
of the term "the son" is Jn. 8 35,
20 2 Esdr. 6 55-59, referring to Gen. 1 26 27 and Is. 40 15. Cf. Psalms of
Solomon 17 30, "He shall take knowledge of them that they be all the sons of then-
God." 21 Cf. Deut. 4 6-8. 22 Ass. Mos. 1 14.

JESUS THE SON OF GOD 15
The bondservant abideth not in the house forever; the son abideth
forever. Here no one thinks of writing with a capital, because the sense
is obviously, "Any one who is a son." The fourth evangelist is
reproducing Gal. 4 30, and we have only to turn to that passage
to find Paul using both elements of the saying about Knowing
God and Being Known (recognized, acknowledged as a son)
of God, and then a little further on referring to the law as a
"yoke of bondage." If in addition we find this use of the term
"the son" to be justified by contemporary Jewish application of
these complementary ideas of knowing God and being known of
him, it will appear that such is certainly the intention of the
logion itself, whatever later evangelists may have made of it.
If we accept the fuller Matthaean form, which is also the Lukan
in all forms of the text except Codex Vercellensis,23 the combina
tion of the reciprocal sayings is paralleled by Paul in his own
vindication of the sonship and heirship of the "sinners of the
gentiles" without the "yoke of bondage." The disposition of
his Galatian converts to take up the yoke of Mosaic ordinances
is met with a passionate adjuration to remember the Spirit of
adoption which they had received,
Because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your
hearts, crying, Abba, Father. So that thou art no longer a slave but a
son; and if a son, an heir also through God. . . . But now, having come
to know God, or rather to be known (acknowledged, recognized as sons)
by God, how turn ye back into bondage. ... Be not held again in a yoke
of bondage.
Knowing and being known come into the same antithesis again
in 1 Cor. 13 12,
Then shall I know (have the gift of gnosis) even as also I have been
known (acknowledged).
We may leave the question unsettled whether it is Paul who
has set the example of this antithesis to our canonical Matthew,
or the logion which suggests it to Paul. The decision will depend
upon the solution of the problem of the text. More important
23 Cod. Vercell. gives in Lk. (not Mt.), Omnia mihi tradita sunt a patre, et
nemo nobit quis est pater nisi filius, et cuicumque voluerit filius revelavit.

16 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
than the question whether the saying about Being Known (i.e.
recognized, acknowledged as a son) by God, was or was not
originally connected with the one on the Knowledge of God, is
the question of the meaning the former saying was intended to
convey. What was the current application of the phrase " to be
known (yvo>6fjvai) by God " ?
On this point we have the testimony of a collection of logia
still older, apparently, than that referred to by Papias. The
Pastoral Epistles, attributed to Paul, and in some parts admittedly
Pauline, make repeated reference to "faithful sayings," and
especially to "the wholesome words (Aoyoi), even the words of
our Lord Jesus Christ," as the standard of doctrine (1 Tim.
6 3). Among the quoted sayings of these epistles are two which
together are said to constitute the "seal" of God's foundation,
the Church,
The Lord hath acknowledged (eyvw) those that are his own, and, Let
every one that nameth the name of the Lord depart from iniquity (2 Tim.
2 19, cf. Mt. 7 21-23).
The context shows that the writer has in mind the same com
plementary principles as are illustrated in the parable of the great
supper with its Matthaean appendix of the guest unprovided
with the wedding garment.24 God's spiritual building has this
twofold basis; on the one side no exclusion of those whom God
himself accredits, "as many as are led by the Spirit of God are
sons"; on the other no inclusion of the morally discredited, "by
their fruits ye shall know them." Because
God said, I will dwell in them and walk in them, . . . therefore
Come ye out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord,
And touch no unclean thing,
And I will receive you,
And be to you a Father,
And ye shall be to me sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty
(2 Cor. 6 16-18).
These complementary principles of the older Paulinism are now
embodied in the " seal " of the " foundation of God," just quoted.
The foregoing examples from the Pauline writings, which show
2< Cf . the two kindred parables, also peculiar to Matthew, of the tares and
the net full of fishes, Mt. 13 24-30 36-43 47-50.

JESUS THE SON OF GOD 17
what was the primitive treatment of the complementary prin
ciples of "knowing" and "being known of" God, should be our
guide to the historic sense of the logion, or logia, of Mt. 11 25-27,
13 16-17 = Lk. 10 21-24. To the scribes' contention that no
man can claim to be a son who does not "know" the God whom
he claims as his Father, and who has no revelation of his will
(Rom. 2 18), reply is made by Jesus, in words which rest on
Is. 29 14, that the little ones, whom he welcomes as his brother,
sister, and mother because they hear the will of God and do it,
have a better, fuller "knowledge" than "the wise and under
standing." This is the good pleasure (rfSWa) of the "Lord
of heaven and earth," and it behooves us to be glad and rejoice
that the deepest knowledge of God is not intellectually but mor
ally conditioned. Those "know his will" who perceive and
imitate his spirit of unstinted, universal goodness "even to the
unthankful and the evil." These, and not scribes, nor priests
and Levites, official custodians and interpreters of the law, are
qualified to "make revelation" to others as widely as they will.
Jesus expresses this in the pregnant, epigrammatic phrase so
characteristic of him, _
It is the son who is competent to give revelation of the Father; but this
knowledge is not that of the wise and understanding, it is such as is given
to those who are simple-hearted as babes.

V. Relation of the Sating to that on the Keys of the
Kingdom, Mt. 16 19.
Since the complementary idea of being known of God is not
certainly found in both gospels, we cannot be sure that it is not
a reflection of that great experience of the Church for which Paul
has given us the term "the witness of the Spirit of adoption."
From the stammering lips of those who prayed as the Spirit gave
them utterance Paul takes down the cry Abba, Abba,25 appealing
to it as a superhuman testimony that through faith we are made
25 The parallel to the above-quoted passage (Gal. 4 6 7) in Rom. 8 14-16
26-27 shows that the reference is to the charisma of tongues. Those who " prayed
in a tongue,'* amid their inarticulate groanings and utterances intelligible only to
God (Rom. 8 26, 1 Cor. 14 14-17), stammered forth the infant's cry, Abba, Abba.

18 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
sons and heirs of God. This one thing only need be known, if
any arise to dispute the right of gentiles to be reckoned heirs of
the promise. Received they the Spirit ? If God ha>e recognized
as a son, who dare dispute the title? In this sense of recogni
tion the principle was admitted as decisive in all branches of
the Church. Since Pentecost it had been a " seal of the founda
tion," for "the Lord accrediteth them that are his." But the
earliest struggle against the Jewish spirit of exclusiveness was
earlier than Pentecost. To Jesus also the very essence of his
mission had been to break down the artificial barriers which
excluded publicans and sinners from the inheritance of sons,
to resist the usurped prerogative of the "power of the keys."
The scribes claimed authority to "bind and loose." By virtue
of their occupation of Moses' seat they held "the key of knowl
edge," and used it to hinder the entrance of the repentant masses
into the kingdom. Though preserved in late and variant form,
the utterance attributed to Jesus which bestows this usurped
power of the keys on the brotherhood of his disciples, or on their
leader and representative, is a genuine echo of his championship
of the people's cause, and similar parallels to the saying, "The
Lord hath accredited them that are his," are to be found in
Mt. 18 18,
Verily I say unto you, What things soever ye shall bind on earth shall
be bound in heaven : and what things soever ye shall loose on earth shall
be loosed in heaven.
and in Mt. 16 17-19,
On this rock I will build my Church. . . .
I will give unto thee (Peter) the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and
whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and what
soever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.
These reported sayings of Jesus, before they were perverted into
the decretals of a new ecclesiastical despotism, were themselves
a declaration of the liberty and independence of the " little flock."
Instead of suffering the little ones to be excluded from the syna
gogue by those who held the keys, claiming power to bind and
loose, making the son or daughter of Abraham who resisted their
tyranny "as the gentile and the publican," he that hath the key
of David restores it to his own. The key of knowledge, the key

JESUS THE SON OF GOD 19
of authority, the key of admission or exclusion, the keys of the
kingdom of heaven, are given to the Church itself or to the Church
in the person of Peter as its leader. Alas that the Church only
repeated under the name of Peter the old-time tyranny of the
scribes! These several appeals to a saying of Jesus of this type
show that he was understood to have protested against the scribes'
usurpation of this power, and that the references in the Pauline
writings to God as the sole accreditor of his own sons have an
authentic basis. Even were the reference to the son's being
known of the Father held to be borrowed from Paul, yet Jesus
himself had in substance established it as a "seal of the
foundation of God" that not man but the Lord accrediteth
them that are his.
In fact the commission of Peter in Mt. 16 17-19, with its sig
nificant reference to " the gates of Hades " which had closed upon
the crucified Leader, is closely related to the commission to " Peter
and the twelve " which forms the central feature in all forms of the
resurrection story. God gave him to be made manifest unto
them in order that forgiveness of sins through repentance and
faith in his name might be preached unto all the gentiles, begin
ning from Jerusalem (Lk. 24 47-49). The authority of their
commission is the authority to "loose" from sins. Its token
is baptism. Its seal is the outpoured Spirit. Cf. Mt. 28 18 19,
Jn. 20 21-23.
VI. Beaking of the Saying on the Messianic Conscious
ness of Jesus.
But we are more concerned with that portion of the logion
which is certainly attested by both Matthew and Luke, and
which vindicated the claim of the "babes" to have that true
knowledge of God without which one cannot be deemed a son.
Here if anywhere we can discover the secret of the messianic
consciousness of Jesus. The title " Son of man " which has been
called his " favorite self -designation, " and to which many turn as
the principal source of first-hand knowledge on this vital point, is
doubly open to question. On philological grounds it is doubtful
if the phrase could have existence in the Aramaic spoken by

20 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
Jesus. If it did, that very existence was owing to connotations
most foreign to the sane and well-poised quality of Jesus' character
and teaching. His fundamental conception of his calling is not
the apocalyptic, and appears not in the eschatological sayings
but in the Sermon on the Mount. The apocalyptic notions of
his mission and destiny may easily have been superimposed upon
his own conception in the superheated atmosphere of the primi
tive Church, while the reverse is inconceivable. Jesus was not
a visionary. The Danielic figure looms large to the vision of
post-resurrection prophets and seers, but not on the mental and
spiritual horizon of the Carpenter of Nazareth, least of all as
offering a career for himself. The phrase which is really and
demonstrably characteristic of him, the title which in the oldest
documents of Christianity is universally pervasive, as against not
one single occurrence of the term Son of man, is that of Son of
God. In any case we may say that as certainly as the conception
of Exodus and Hosea that Israel is God's son (to say nothing of
the as yet unethicized common Semitic idea) is antecedent to the
apocalyptic figure of Daniel, Enoch, and 2 Esdras, just so cer
tainly is the conception of sonship to God in Jesus' mind ante
cedent to that of Son of man, whatever may have been the apoca
lyptic dreams to which he turned under the growing certainty of
martyrdom. It is true that we give small notice to this humble
title "son of God" except when the translators assist our vision
with a capital letter, or when in some way its simple ethical sense
is transcended; but that which really concerns Jesus and Paul is
" the inheritance of sons," by which they both mean " sons of the
Highest," " sons and daughters of the Lord Almighty." 26 It is
also true that a Roman gospel, admittedly of the second genera
tion, gives something more than an ethical meaning to this desig
nation "the son of God," which in our logion Jesus applies to
himself only as representative, leader, and champion of those
whose sonship required to be vindicated. In Mark the title " the
Son of God" has already a special and peculiar sense allied to
the Pauline metaphysics. The outcome of this process of apoca
lyptic transcendentalizing appears in the vision-story of the Trans
figuration, a typical apocalypse, wherein the rabbinic device of
2« Mt. 5 45 = Lk. 6 35, 2 Cor. 6 18.

JESUS THE SON OF GOD 21
the bath qol, or voice from heaven, is employed to set forth along
with the characteristic imagery of this type of literature the author's
Pauline or quasi-Pauline Christology. For the author of this
vision-story the real being of Jesus was revealed when the eyes
of his intimates had been enlightened to pierce the veil of his
flesh and to behold the Son of God, not in the ethical, but in the
apocalyptic sense, even the Beloved, of pre-existent glory. The
same device of the voice from heaven and the same phraseology
are employed in the preliminary narrative which Mark prefixes
to his gospel. His doctrine of Jesus the pre-existent Son of God
is intelligible to us, and was acceptable to his own and later gen
erations. The Gospel of Mark became the very framework of
gospel tradition. But if we look at the references to divine son-
ship which pervade that other source, which nearly all critics
admit to be an older and better authority, we shall find the term
"son of God" to bear a far different sense. Jesus is still "the
son," but only as "the first-born of many brethren." This sense
is as little "theocratic" as it is metaphysical. It is historic, ethi
cal, and religious. It finds its affiliations not with the crude
metaphysics of the Roman gospel, nor with the profounder and
subtler speculations of the Ephesian, but in the familiar subject
of dispute in the Pauline epistles, the demand for the admission
to the Abrahamic inheritance of those who have no title under
the law, the question whether our inspired cry of Abba, Father,
is or is not a sufficient earnest of our sonship. Most of all it finds
its attestation in the common background of current Jewish inter
pretation of the messianic hope.
VII. The Messianic Hope from the Prophets to the
Pharisees.
It is an utter misapprehension of this national expectation in
its origin to regard it as having had primarily to do with royalty.
The passage which in modern times is commonly taken as its
very foundation, the promise to David of a successor to his throne,37
finds scarcely an echo in the entire New Testament. In reality
the hope is far older, far broader, far more fundamental. Not
w 2 Sam. 7 13, Ps. 132 11, referred to in Acts 2 30.

22 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
David's successor primarily, but Israel itself is God's son. The
fundamental passage is Ex. 4 22,
Thou shalt say unto Pharaoh, Thus saith the Lord, Israel is my son,
my first-born; and I have said unto thee, Let my son go, that he may
serve me; and thou hast refused to let him go: behold I will slay thy son,
thy first-born.
God first adopted the people,
When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of
Egypt (Hos. 11 1).
If in later times he became a Father to their king, it was for the
people's sake.
Professor F. C. Porter has very properly reminded us that the
prophets represent themselves not as creators, but as critics of
the messianic hope. The hope itself was as old as Israel. It
partook in its earliest form of the crudity of the common Semitic
conception of the divinity of a land as the progenitor of its popu
lation. Jahveh, however, unlike neighboring divinities, had not
begotten Israel, but "adopted" bim, when he was a bond-slave
in Egypt. This made the relation ethical and spiritual.28
"You only have I known (acknowledged)" is Jahveh's word
through Amos, but this acknowledgment was the free choice of
a "Lord of heaven and earth," who directs all the nations and
rules them under a law of righteousness. Amos became the first
great critic of this national hope by subjecting it to ethical condi
tions. He ethicized the doctrine of election.
In the time of Jesus the messianic hope, in spite of all its trans
formations and refinements, had by no means lost its fundamental
significance. The experiences of the monarchy had caused it to
crystallize around the theocratic figure of the son of David; the
experiences of national disintegration and admixture with the
world had clothed this figure with mythological attributes and
widened the programme of his activity. Most of all, life under
the law had profoundly modified the conception of its conditions.
But even in Jesus' time the messianic hope remained fundamen
tally what it had always been. Israel is God's son and heir, Israel
must possess God's land, that is the world. The destruction of
28 Budde, Israel before the Exile, 1897.

JESUS THE SON OF GOD 23
Jerusalem by Titus only elicits from a groaning patriot and
believer the cry,
O Lord, thou hast said that for our sakes thou madest this world. . . .
And now, O Lord, behold these nations which are reputed as nothing
be lords over us and devour us. But we thy people, whom thou hast
called thy first-born, thy only-begotten and thy fervent lover (beloved ?),
are given into their hands. If the world now be made for our sakes,
why do we not possess for an inheritance our world? How long shall
this endure ? (2 Esdr. 6 56-59).
Many were the forms under which the old belief in the adoption
and the inheritance survived, from the cry of the Zealot for national
hegemony to the philosopher's academic demonstration that the
truly wise man is the "heir of the things belonging to God."28
Of these many developments we are concerned with but one,
the religious. Pharisaism had withdrawn from the nationalistic
movement against the forcible hellenization of Antiochus Epiph-
anes, as soon as that movement degenerated into a mere strug
gle for self-aggrandizement on the part of the successors of Simon
the Maccabee. The Pharisees became the Puritans of the first
century b.c. by eliminating worldly ambition from the messianic
programme. Israel's calling was to be the people of the law.
Righteousness, "even that which is of the law," was to be its
work and ambition in the world. Its reward was to be in a new
heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. This
was the deepest and most fruitful movement of the times in the
bosom of a people whose genius had ever been religious. Its
purest expression appears in the so-called Psalms of the Phari
sees, nearest in sentiment of all uncanonical writings to the can
ticles of Luke.
In true Pharisaism, of the type which produced the noblest
and greatest of the followers of Jesus, sonship in the religious
sense became the very essence of the messianic hope and the
true prerogative of Israel. To be the son of God by knowing
and doing his will is the Pharisee's ideal for his people. The
Christ, when he comes, " shall take knowledge of them that they
be all the sons of their God." (Ps. Sol. 17 30). Many gen
erations earlier we have the same ideal in the same phraseology
29 Philo, Quis rerum divinarum heres ?

24 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
from the son of Sirach. The Great Repentance of Mai. 4 6 here
became a turning in mutual reconciliation not of mere earthly
families, but " of the Father (God) to the son (Israel) and of the
son to the Father," thus restoring the tribes of Israel (Ecclus.
48 10). A century later than Sirach the author of the Wisdom
of Solomon delineates " the righteous man " in traits that acknowl
edge no ethnic limitation, but he has in reality Israel — a Phari
saic Israel — to sit for the portrait.
Let us he in wait for the righteous man,
Because he is of disservice to us,
And is contrary to our works,
And upbraideth us with sins against the law 
He professeth to have knowledge of God 
And nameth himself son (iro£s) of the Lord 
And he abstaineth from our ways as from uncleannesses.
The latter end of the righteous he calleth happy,
And vaunteth that God is his Father.
Let us see if his words be true,
Let us try what shall befall in the ending of his life;
For if the righteous man is God's son, he will uphold him (Wisdom of
Solomon 2 12-18).
An earlier contemporary of the same Alexandrian school claims
it as a testimony of the wise Egyptian priests that the Jews are
men of God, a name which belongs not to others, but only to him who
worships the true God. For these others are men of food and drink and
clothing; for all their thought is taken for these things. But those who
are of our faith give no heed to these things, but their whole hfe long
they are concerned with searching out the works of God (Aristeas 140,
ca. 90 B.C.).
These Alexandrian Jewish writers of the first century B.C. seem
indeed "not far from the kingdom of God," with their ideal of
Israel's destiny and prerogative. But we must come down to
the writing of a Palestinian Pharisee almost contemporary with
Jesus himself for the nearest approximation to the Sermon on
the Mount in an expression of the messianic hope. He hopes
for nothing less than the outpouring of a spirit of righteousness,
God's Spirit, who by communicating his nature makes Israel
indeed his son, and thereby exalted, as in the Pauline writings,
" over every angel and spirit."

JESUS THE SON OF GOD 25
And Moses fell upon his face and prayed, and said: O Lord, my God,
forsake not thy people and thy heritage, that it should walk in the error
of its own heart, and deliver them not over into the hands of the gen
tiles, that these may not rule over them and compel them to sin against
thee. Let thy mercy be exalted over thy people, and create in them a
right disposition and let not the spirit of Belchor (Belial) rule in them,
to accuse them before thee and to seduce them from all paths of righteous
ness, that they should perish far away from thy countenance. For they
are thy people and thine heir, whom thou didst save by thy great might
out of the hand of the Egyptians. Create in them a clean heart and a
holy spirit and let them not be entangled in their sin henceforth and
forever. And God said unto Moses, I know their contrariness and their (evil)
disposition and their stiff neck, and they will not hearken until they
acknowledge their sin and the sins of their fathers. After that they will
return unto me in all uprightness, with all their heart and all their soul.
And I will circumcise the foreskin of the hearts of their children, and
will create in them a holy spirit and make them pure, so that they shall
no more turn away from me from that day to all eternity. And their
soul shall follow me and all my law, and they shall do according to my
commandment, and I will be a father to them, and they shall be my chil
dren. And they shall be called the children of the living God. And all
angels and all spirits shall know that they are my children and that I am
their Father in truth and righteousness and that I love them (Jubilees
1 19-25). It is a Puritanism of this noble type which is represented in its
degeneracy by the synagogue-system of scribe and Pharisee in
the time of Jesus. After the downfall of the Maccabees reaction
against Zealot nationalistic fanaticism on the one side and Sad-
ducean worldliness on the other had thrown back the religious-
minded upon the orthodoxy of the written law. The Pharisee
became a blind follower of the scribe, his blind guide. Insist
ence on the letter of a deified law, whose ideal was separation
from the ceremonially unclean,30 carried exclusiveness to a degree
unmatched even by the Puritanism of Scotland or New England.
For the "people of the land," the "publicans and sinners," the
ordinary peasant or fisherman or handicraftsman of half-heathen
Galilee, the Mosaic ideal of separation was utterly impracticable,
its prescriptions "a yoke which neither we nor our fathers were
able to bear" (Acts 15 10), the scribes' interpretations of its
requirements were a "binding of heavy burdens and grievous
to be borne which they themselves touched not with one of their
so Ex. 33 16, Jer. 51 45, Ez. 20 34, 41 Is. 52 11, 2 Cor. 6 17.

26 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
fingers." The poor man, the unlettered, the ordinary artisan
and father of a family saw himself under this odious and hypo
critical tyranny gradually excluded from all share in the world
to come. He too was a son of Abraham, but by decree of the
scribes he saw himself deprived of his Abrahamic inheritance
in favor of the little coterie of the Pharisees (the "separated"),
whose legalistic righteousness was only too often mercenary and
external. There were but two classes, the chaberim, or consistent
devotees of the law, a religious caste withdrawing from the defiling
contact even of their kindred and coreligionists of less strict
observance, and the am ha-aretz, the out-caste who had "no
share in the world to come."
The religious centre of gravity cannot be permanently swung
to this social extreme. The reaction, when it came, was cor
respondingly sweeping and profound. John the Baptist and
Jesus revived the old prophetic spirit of religious democracy.
They led a rebellion of the simple Israelite against the usurpa
tion of the Abrahamic inheritance by the scribes and Pharisees.
Like another Elijah John led a " great repentance," 31 the token
of which was the new rite of baptism, self-evident in meaning,
unknown to legal prescription. The publicans and sinners
flocked to him; the scribes and Pharisees held aloof. His mar
tyrdom could not check the movement. In the Carpenter of
Nazareth it found a new and greater leader, who himself sought
out the lost sheep of the house of Israel in Galilee, and defended
the lost son against the grudging elder brother. His fisherman
followers he taught to cast nets for the scattered wanderers from
the kingdom.32 Like a trustee for an orphan defrauded of his
inheritance, Jesus demanded restoration to the "little ones" of
their rightful part in Israel's spiritual inheritance. He insisted
upon the full content of this inheritance, and on that which is
of primary importance, the spiritualities, before the temporalities.
The conflict with the intrenched power of scribes and Pharisees
was a war to the knife. Since the days of John the Baptist — the
si This was the function of Elias redivivus in contemporary legend, cf. Mai.
4 6 resting on 1 Kings 18 37. See Bacon, "Elias and the Men of Violence," Exposi
tor, sixth series, xxxi (July, 1902).
32 Mk. 1 17, resting on Jer. 16 16.

JESUS THE SON OF GOD 27
Elias who should come as a "restorer of the tribes" to "admit
those who had been wrongfully excluded and to exclude those
wrongfully admitted" to Israel's inheritance33 — the kingdom of
heaven had suffered violence, and men of violence were now
prepared to take it by force. Jesus was unsparing in his in
vective against this one class, and this only; and he has not neg
lected to tell us why. He told them to their faces that the law
and the prophets, as the charter of their monopoly, could en
dure only " until John." He predicted (Mt. 23) that they would
not spare him; and they did not.
It was his championship in this conflict which first gave to
Jesus his right to be called the Son of God. It was for the sake
of his little flock that he demanded it, and for them that he de
fended it with his life. Sonship to God was the vital element of
that religious inheritance of which the synagogue-system, the
legalism of scribe and Pharisee, sought to rob the simple Israelite
by its usurpation of the key of knowledge and its pretence of
doing the will of the Father. Therefore it is that Jesus thanks
the infinite Lord of heaven and earth that the knowledge of him
is no monopoly of the wise and understanding, that it is not the
learned in the law that know him, but the little ones, the babes,
if so be that they have the spirit of sons in kindness even to the
unthankful and the evil. Such knowledge, such inward light, he
claims to have in his own person, the tradition not of dead author
ities, but of his Father, and he maintains that they who are quali
fied to give "revelation" are those who are sons in this sense.
A good Samaritan is a better teacher than a selfish and cowardly
priest or Levite.
More than this, he disputes also the scribal usurpation of
the power to " bind and loose," to admit and to exclude. Who is
the son ? John the Baptist had said, " God is able of these stones
to raise up children unto Abraham," and the publicans and sin
ners had repented at his word. None denied the Pharisees' right
to the name. But Jesus had promised salvation to the repentant
publican, "forasmuch as he also is a son of Abraham." Which
has the better title to the inheritance of the sons of God ? Jesus
puts the question in the form of the parable of the two sons.
33 So Edujoth viii, 7, resting on Ecclus. 48 10.

28 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
Whether of these twain did the will of the Father, he that said, I go,
sir, and went not; or he that afterward repented and went? . . . There
fore the publicans and harlots go into the kingdom of heaven before you.
When Paul lays it down as the token of sonship that one be
"led by the Spirit of God" (Rom. 8 14), he is adapting the ancient
principle of the foundation of the Church, that "the Lord (by
the 'seal' of the Spirit) acknowledgeth them that are his," to
Jesus' more strictly ethical test, " Whosoever doeth the will of my
Father, the same is my brother and sister and mother." In an
earlier writing he enunciates his principle in a more primary
form. In the Galatian parallel to Rom. 8 15 3i he defines the
divine "acknowledgement" to be the sending forth into our
hearts of the Spirit of his Son teaching us as sons the cry Abba,
Father. Whosoever receiveth the Spirit is a son. According to
Jesus, "whosoever doeth the will," were it publican, harlot, or
Samaritan, is "known of God," and "doing the will" is exem
plified, not in the Pharisees with their yoke of bondage, but in
those whose inward disposition is akin to the Father's. Paul is
not original, but only a follower of Jesus, as he claimed to be, in
meeting the pretensions of intrenched and traditional authority by
the self-evidencing testimony of the Spirit, which makes foolish
the wisdom of the wise and gives its revelation to babes. By no
other conceivable course was it possible to meet the authority of
the scribes; for with them in pre-eminent degree knowledge was
indeed power. Unless he were ready to abandon the cause of
the disinherited "little ones," whose leader and champion he had
become since John was shut up in prison, Jesus had no alterna
tive but to maintain, "No man knoweth the Father save the
son." In opposition to the "violence" which made the key of
knowledge an instrument for excluding from the kingdom the
repentant "publicans and harlots," while none but submissive
bearers of the yoke of the law as interpreted by themselves were
recognized as sons, Jesus had no alternative but to appeal to a
binding and loosing that has validity in heaven. This is the
principle implied, if not directly expressed, in the saying,
No man knoweth who the son is (who is a son) save the Father.
s« Gal. 4 6.

JESUS THE SON OF GOD 29
VIII. Later Development.
Our oldest and most trustworthy source has but this single
instance in which Jesus seems to claim messianic honors for
himself. We have agreed that it may well be called "the Johan
nine passage," for it forms a manifest point of departure for the
later theological and metaphysical interpretations of the title Son
of God which reach their culmination in the Fourth Gospel. But
the metaphysics is not from Jesus. In the passage from Q,
historically interpreted, there is not one trace of this. There is
not even the exclusive sense in which our second evangelist in
two or three instances has employed the title. Jesus is simply
championing the cause of the disinherited sons and daughters of
Abraham, when he maintains. that if any
Professeth to have knowledge of God,
And nameth himself son (irali) of the Lord, . . .
And vaunteth that God is his father,
he must be a " son of the Highest," because he has that kind of
spirit which the Father manifests. He is continuing the work of
him who had said, " God is able of these stones to raise up children
unto Abraham," as John himself was consciously continuing the
message of Amos, the prophet of ethical election. Jesus speaks
simply as leader, defender, and representative of the "babes,"
when he thanks the "Lord of heaven and earth" for the revela
tion that is "delivered" to those that have eyes to see and ears
to hear, though it be "hid from the wise and understanding."
There is no pretension in this to superhuman, or even to messi
anic, dignity for his own person; and the utterance was not so
understood by his hearers. Nevertheless it would logically lead
to this if the conflict with the oligarchy of scribes and Pharisees
were maintained. And so it was.

IX. Relation to the Claim of Messiahship.
A pivotal point of the Petrine tradition embodied in our second
gospel (Mk. 8 29) is the tendering to Jesus by Peter, with the
support of the eleven disciples, of the title "the Christ." This

30 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
was during a temporary lull in the conflict. The great collision
in Capernaum with " the scribes who came down from Jerusalem "
had issued in Jesus' exile from the scene of his early popularity,
and in the permanent interruption of his public teaching in Gali
lee. There remained, besides Samaria, which he felt no call to
evangelize, only Judaea beyond Jordan, and Jerusalem. Toward
these he set his face, with Jerusalem as his goal. The odds
against him and his little flock would now be doubled. If he
proposed to reclaim for them full rights in the temple as well as
the synagogue, he would have to issue his challenge to an alliance
of the priestly hierarchy with the already hostile scribal oligarchy.
No wonder he predicted for himself a fate like John's. But con
sistency allowed no other alternative. He had either to desert
the cause of the disinherited sons, or else to present their claims
at the doors of the temple itself, protest against the abuses of the
high-priestly clique, and demand a restoration of the temple to
the uses of a house of prayer for all the people.
Under what other role could one become the champion of the
lost sheep of the house of Israel against the faithless shepherds
who had served themselves of the flock, than as the true Shepherd
of Ezekiel's vision ?
He shall feed them, even my servant David; he shall feed them, and
he shall be their shepherd. And I, the Lord, will be their God, and
my servant David prince among them (Ez. 34 23-24).
If the Pharisees had not themselves led the way in cancelling all
political significance from the messianic hope, Jesus could never
have consented to be called the Christ. As it was, the title is to
him the least acceptable of all possible descriptions of his mission.
In spite of his utmost endeavor to prevent being forced into the
false position of a leader of Zealot nationalistic agitation, it fur
nished to his enemies their best opportunity for misrepresentation,
nay, the very snare by which they actually compassed his death.
Palpably, manifestly, it was a crown of thorns that Peter was
ignorantly offering him at Caesarea Philippi. And yet in some
sense he must take it, or be recreant to the trust that the God
of these lost sheep and lost sons had imposed upon him. Their
inheritance was the full inheritance of sons. He was not at lib-

JESUS THE SON OF GOD 31
erty to compound with the usurpers for a part. They had no
other leader or representative. The knowledge of sonship had
been delivered to him. Now to these "babes" also had come
something more than that revelation of the Father, and of their
own sonship which he had awakened in them. They had received
now a revelation on their own account. It came not from flesh
and blood but from the Father himself when they now perceived
that vindication of their sonship depended upon him as "the
Son," the Christ.
The movement of Pharisaism had had this great merit, that it
had changed the perspective of the messianic hope. Israel was
first to become God's son by knowing and doing his revealed will.
Afterwards it should receive its inheritance. The spirit of cen
sorious exclusiveness, admitting to participation in the inheri
tance not those whose sonship was evinced by a spirit kindred
to the Father's, but those only who submitted to the yoke of
legal prescriptions, had shown the fatal unfitness of the Phari
sees' method of attaining the messianic hope, but had left the
ideal itself in broader, distincter outline and nobler proportions
than ever before. The Pharisees' method was that of the Puri
tans of all ages.
Come ye out from among them and be ye separate, saith the Lord,
And touch no unclean thing.
Their ideal was:
And I will receive you,
And will be to you a Father,
And ye shall be to me sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty.
For this ideal of the messianic hope there is but one title which
can appropriately be applied to the personality which becomes
its leader. Such a leader must designate himself "the Christ,
the Son of the living God."
R. H. Charles has called our attention to a phenomenon which
confirms Professor Porter's far-reaching observation that the
prophets are not creators but critics of the messianic hope. It
is that the manifold titles applied to the Messiah in the literature
of this period, particularly the apocalyptic literature, wherein the

32 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
figure of the Messiah plays so large a part, such titles as "the
Elect," "the Just," "the Saint," "the Beloved," "the Servant,"
"the Heir," are in almost every instance derived from the titles
bestowed on Israel as the people of God. The Messiah is "the
Elect" as representative and head of the elect people, "the Just"
as head and representative of "the just," "the Saint" as repre
senting " the people of the saints of the Most High," " the Beloved "
— and we may rightfully add in view of the passage cited above
from Second Esdras, "the Only-begotten" — as representing
the people whom God had "called his beloved, his only-begotten,"
"the Heir" as representing their claim to the inheritance of God's
creation. It is so also with the title "the Son." For one whose
ideal of the messianic hope is that of the passages quoted from
Ecclesiasticus, Aristeas, Wisdom, the Psalter of Solomon, and
Jubilees, who shares the prophetic ideal as enlarged and re
fined by the experiences of the exile, the return, the Maccabean
revolt, and the Pharisean reaction against the later Hasmonaeans,
there is no title so expressive of the work to be achieved by this
Friend of publicans and sinners as "the Son." Not because in
some peculiar and metaphysical sense he taketh hold upon the
nature of God, but because " he taketh hold on the seed of Abra
ham" to bring them to their inheritance, because he is "made in
all points like unto his brethren," because he is "the first-born
of many brethren." It is in this sense that Jesus the Son of God
was willing also to become the Christ for his brethren and com
panions' sakes. When we go back to his own words, his claim
appears in its true historical light as a sacrifice of his life to win
back for the disinherited "little ones" of Israel their "right to
be called the sons of God." Paul's invincible logic applied the
principle to the disinherited sons of all humanity, and made Jesus
known as "the Saviour of the world." When, a generation later,
the Roman disciple of a disciple undertakes to relate " the gospel
of Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God," he manifests the disposi
tion we should expect. What he is eager to prove is that Jesus
was endowed with this distinction in his own right by a voice
from heaven, that he contended for it and was vindicated in it
by a life of wonder-working power and goodness, and by a super
natural resurrection from the dead. Fortunately even Paul,

JESUS THE SON OF GOD 33
eager as he is to exalt the divinity of his Redeemer, and ready
with a doctrine of his descent from pre-existent messianic glory,
does not pervert the doctrine of "sonship" into something which
appertains to Christ in distinction from us, but loyally presents
it as that which he possesses on our behalf, and as our represen
tative; When the fulness of the time came God sent forth his Son, born of a
woman, born under the law, that he might redeem them which were
under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because
ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying
Abba, Father. So that thou art no longer a bond-servant but a son; and
if a son, then an heir, through God. Howbeit, at that time, not knowing
God, ye were in bondage  But now that ye have come to know
God, or rather to be known of God, how turn ye back again ? . . . For
freedom did Christ set you free. Be not entangled again in a yoke of
bondage (Gal. 4 4-9, 5 l).

JESUS AS SON OF MAN 35

JESUS AS SON OF MAN
In a discussion of the great christological passages of the
Synoptic Gospels we have seen that the messianism of Jesus
was pre-eminently ethical and religious. His attitude toward
current expectations of Israel's redemption resembled that of
the prophets in being critical rather than originative. He ethi-
cized and spiritualized a hope which in its origins and in its
undisciplined popular manifestations had little to differentiate it
from the expectations entertained by heathen worshippers of
their tribal or national divinities.
As regards the political hopes of the Zealot, or nationalist,
party this is universally recognized. Jesus' prohibition of the
application of the title Christ to himself (Mk. 8 30)1 is commonly
explained as due to his unwillingness to be understood to claim
messiahship in the political sense.
As regards the Pharisaic, or pietistic, type of messianism, then
largely affected by the apocalyptists, many influential critics
are endeavoring to convince the modern world that Jesus' attitude
was more sympathetic than critical. The apocalyptists since
Daniel had given a transcendental turn to the ancient belief,
and the Pharisees, once characterized by a more ethical and
inward type of pietism, were now degenerating into a more formal
legalism, while they enforced the burden of Mosaic requirements
imposed by the scribes under penalty of exclusion from a share
in the supermundane "world to come." This doctrine of a
transcendental messianic "world to come" was an acknowledged
innovation borrowed from apocalypse. The contention of J.
Weiss and his school is that Jesus was fundamentally an Apo-
1 Parallels are not cited where there is no evidence of independent tradition
In the reference Mk. 8 30 the earliest of the three embodiments of the tradition
is appealed to. The fact that it is transcribed with slight modifications in Mt.
16 20 and Lk. 9 21 adds nothing to the force of Mark's evidence. ,
fatJ.-&ftt ¦¦ ¦¦¦¦ ft,.

36 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
kalyptiker, in full sympathy with this tendency, especially as
represented in John the Baptist, the popularizer of the move
ment. Our own attempt has been to show that Jesus' preaching of " the
kingdom" involves no less truly a critical attitude toward the
transcendental other-worldliness of the Pharisees than toward
the worldliness of Sadducee or Zealot. We hold that with all
his sympathy for the Baptist's revolt against hierocracy, with
all his endorsement of the Baptist's warnings of the impending
judgment, Jesus explicitly differentiated his message from that
of John also, emphasizing his own milder, more mystical type of
messianism. The germs of this may in fact be found in the older
literature of Pharisaism, and in the kindred writings of the school
of "wisdom."
Jesus' teaching, accordingly, regarding human destiny, as
reflected in the messianic hope, goes deeper down and further
back than Pharisaism. It is not identified with sect or party.
It takes hold upon the ancient hope of Israel before it had suffered
its special applications first to the institution of the Davidic
monarchy, then to the post-exilic substitution of supermundane
for nationalistic hopes. Jesus returns to the elementary prin
ciple of messianism, the old popular belief that Israel is (poten
tially) God's son. He agrees with the Pharisees that this ideal
is to be realized by the son's "knowing" and "doing the will"
of the Father. The difference lies partly in his conception of
that "will"; for to the scribe and to his blind follower the Phari
see the will of God is a written precept to be obeyed; while to
Jesus it is an inward disposition to be acquired. In this respect
he approaches the wisdom- writers. The difference lies also in
the result aimed at, which to the scribe and Pharisee is a re
ward added to the sonship, to Jesus the sonship itself with what
ever of blessing that may entail (Q; Mt. 5 45, Lk. 6 35). In
this respect he is more in antagonism than in sympathy with
the apocalyptists, and again resembles those of the school of
"wisdom," though himself not a man of the schools, but of the
people. If this interpretation of the messianism of Jesus be correct,
it remains for us to explain how believers in his messiahship

JESUS AS SON OF MAN 37
should have given it the intensely transcendental and apocalyp
tic interpretation reflected in the earliest evangelic tradition.
Both Paul and the Synoptists are saturated with the type of
eschatology characteristic of the Synagogue. In both cases
the messianic hope is pre-eminently transcendental. How can this
be, if Jesus himself had not so taught? The answer in general
terms will be that the belief in Jesus' messiahship did not spring
from the utterances of his life-time, so much as from the ecstatic
experiences of his followers after his death, and that these were
conditioned upon the disciples' predetermined forms of thought.
At first it was not even pretended that Jesus bad made his own
person and work the subject of his teaching. This we find only
in the late theological gospel emanating from Ephesus, the
headquarters of Paulinism. In all the earlier writings, whether
historical or epistolary in form, the doctrine of Christ's person and
work is avowedly based, not on his remembered teaching, but
on psychological phenomena in the experience of Paul and others,
principally after Jesus' death. And Paul was an out-and-out
Pharisean apocalyptist.2
It is a highly significant fact that while our two ultimate wit
nesses, Paul and the evangelic tradition, are at one (as they
could not fail to be) in their fundamental conviction that Jesus
had been "manifested as the Son of God with power by the
resurrection from the dead" (Rom. 1 4), or, in Petrine phrase,
had been "made" by it "both. Lord and Christ" (Acts 2 36),
they differ widely in the titles by which they express their con
ception of his being and office. The title "Lord" is that which
in Paul's use expresses the nature and function of the Christ.
It is not peculiar to him, for we have just seen it employed in a
typical Petrine passage. Neither is it of Pauline coinage; for we
find Paul quoting even an Aramaic ejaculation of which it forms
part (Maran atha, "Our Lord, come"), and the phrase "Jesus is
Lord" is repeatedly referred to as expressing the consensus of
2 The transfiguration story is expressly designed to carry back the Pauline
transcendental conception of the messiahship into the earthly career of Jesus.
But even in the Synoptic tradition it intervenes as a psychological anachronism,
a rebuke of the twelve, which as yet they are incapable of understanding, for con
ceiving the messiahship of Jesus "after the things that be of men." In the Apoca
lypse of Peter it is frankly placed after the resurrection.

38 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
apostolic faith. Only indirectly and incidentally have we evi
dence even of Paul's acquaintance with the distinctively apoca
lyptic title Son of Man. His quotation from Psalm 8 in 1 Cor.
15 27, and his doctrine of "the heavenly man," make us suspect
indeed that in his thinking he applied to Christ, in his own dis
tinctive way, this apocalyptic title. But from his writings other
wise we should not so much as guess that the title had ever been
applied to Jesus.
The evangelic tradition, on the other hand, displays it in a
manner entirely peculiar to itself. The title "Son of Man"
occurs in no New Testament writing, outside of those of Matthew,
Mark, Luke, and John; and these are notoriously interdependent.
If, as many maintain, its frequent occurrence in the gospels can
be accounted for on no other theory than the usage of Jesus
himself, our view of his eschatological teaching will require adjust
ment to the fact. But we shall also be required to account for
its non-appearance outside the four interdependent evangelic
writers. If, on the other hand, we advance some other theory to
account for its occurrence here, our burden of proof will not be
light. We shall not be suffered to reject the combined testimony
of the four evangelists that Jesus applied the title to himself,
unless we deal comprehensively with this question of the literary
interdependence of the sources; for no careful student will admit
that the common participation in this feature can be due to
accidental coincidence. Let us face the situation. The peculiar
term can only have pervaded the four gospels by transmission
from some very early common source. Such a primitive common
source, capable of affecting all by its use of the title Son of Man
as a self-designation of Jesus, is the document Q, only the Gospel
of Mark lying, as some hold, outside the range of its influence.
No other source definitely known to us ever occupied a place
primitive and authoritative enough to produce this result. If,
then, this application of the title be a contamination of the primi
tive tradition rather than a true record of Jesus' usage and con
sciousness, the evidence for such a conclusion must be sought in
the document Q.
This document has been restored more carefully by Harnack
than by any predecessor in the field, from the coincident non-

JESUS AS SON OF MAN 39
markan material of Matthew and Luke. Harnack singles out
the Thanksgiving to the Father (Mt. 11 25-27, Lk. 10 21-22)
and the discourse on the Jews' Stumbling in Jesus (Mt. 11 2-11,
12-13, 16-19, Lk. 7 18-28, 31-35, 16 16) as the most important in
all Q for their christological content.3 Having already dis
cussed the significance of the former of these passages, we may
now take the latter as our starting-point for a consideration of
the question of the real origin and significance of the title Son of
Man. In Harnack's restoration the passage reads as follows: "For
John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, He hath a
devil. The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say,
Lo, a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and
sinners. But Wisdom hath been justified by her children."
Harnack concludes his discussion of the christology of Q with
a remark both just and significant: "Even with the most conser
vative application of psychological considerations it is apparent
that Jesus' consciousness of sonship must have antedated his
consciousness of messiahship, and paved the way for it." We
take this to mean that of the two supposedly fundamental pas
sages of Q 4 Harnack himself recognizes the one distinguished by
the use of the title "the Son" as more characteristic than that
which employs the title the "Son of Man." Jesus unquestion
ably had the consciousness of sonship. He probably found in it
the solution of the messianic hope cherished by the people. Did
he infer from the present leadership imposed by circumstance
upon the possessor of this consciousness such continued leader
ship in "the world to come" as current eschatology expected of
the apocalyptic figure of the Son of Man? What ground have we
for accepting the authenticity of the second title?
It is scarcely conceivable that in so old a source as Q the title
Son- of Man should be repeatedly placed in Jesus' mouth if it did
not really belong in some way to his vocabulary. But this ad
mission, while abandoning the philological line of argument of
the Aramaists who maintain that in Aramaic the expression "the
3 Spriiche und Reden Jesu, p. 166.
4 In Harnack's Spriiche und Reden Jesu they are numbered 25 (Mt. 11 23-27,
Lk. 10 21 f.) and 15 (Mt. 11 16-19, Lk. 7 31-35) respectively.

40 JESUS THE SON OF GOD '
Son of Man, " would be impossible, is by no means equivalent to
an admission that Jesus applied the title to himself. For, first,
it is not only probable but demonstrable that even our most
ancient records, including Q itself, insert the title in many cases
without authority, and, secondly, among the admittedly authen
tic instances of Jesus' own use of the term, there are several where
the meaning is more characteristic of him if Son of Man is un
derstood as applying to some other than his own glorified per
sonality. We may take up these two propositions in order.
1. It is certainly remarkable that Harnack, in a footnote on
the very same page on which occurs his classification of the dis
course on the Stumbling of the Jews (Nos. 14, 15) with Jesus'
Thanksgiving for his Revelation (No. 25) as the two most im
portant christological passages of Q, expresses the following opin
ion on the occurrence of the title Son of Man in the former:
Of course in individual cases one is utterly without positive assurance
that Jesus referred to himself as "the Son of Man" in sayings wherein
Q represents him as so designating himself. It is more than doubtful,
for example, that Jesus should have used the expression in No. 15; 6
while earlier in the same discourse (No. 14, "Blessed is he that shall not
be stumbled in me," etc.), he has quite manifestly avoided every messianic
self-designation. In other words, Harnack himself concedes the probable un-
authenticity of the term in the passage which he advances as the
most important! For we can only escape the linguistic argument
of Lietzmann, Wellhausen, and N. Schmidt, that as a title "Son
of Man" would be meaningless in the Aramaic spoken by Jesus,
if we suppose that the etymologically colorless expression, equiva
lent to "human being," homo, Mensch, had acquired a more
specific connotation through its application in Daniel and later
apocalypses. Its employment, then, by Jesus would be either
enigmatic, or distinctly messianic in the transcendental sense.
Either employment would call public attention to his personality
in a manner admittedly contrary to the policy of silence observed
by himself and imposed upon his disciples (Mk. 8 30). Even
those, accordingly, who maintain that this was Jesus' "favorite
6 The passage whose comparison of the coming of the Baptist with that of
" the Son of Man " was quoted above.

JESUS AS SON OF MAN 41
self -designation" are cautious about admitting his employment
of it otherwise than in the privacy of the apostolic circle, and sub
sequently to the revelation of the messiahship at Caesarea Philippi.
The passage from Q regarded by Harnack as the most important
manifestly meets neither of these conditions. Here, therefore,
the occurrence of the title is certainly to be attributed to the
redactor of Q. To him the appearance of Jesus in his work of
preaching and healing in Galilee, contrasting as it did with the
Baptist's warning of judgment, was the coming of the Son of
Man. Jesus himself, if he really looked upon his work as ful
filling the expected coming of the Son of Man,6 could not have
thus publicly declared it and at the same time retained the incog
nito which be imposed upon his disciples.
Since we are dealing with Harnack's discussion of the christol
ogy of Q, and since we are clearly within the range of bis own
conclusions when we infer from the passage under consideration
that Q manifests a disposition to insert the title Son of Man
without historical warrant, we may properly call attention here
to a further significant observation of the same distinguished
critic :
Christology as Q understood it gives a perfectly consistent and simple
portrait. Q has no other conception than this: Jesus was the Messiah,
ordained to divine sonship at his baptism, and all his sayings accordingly
rest upon this background. If, however, the introductory narrative be
removed in thought, an essentially different conception results (p. 169).
This comes very near to an admission of the contention of
Wernle in the most thorough study applied to the question until
Harnack's, that we must distinguish a Q1 and a Q2, attributing to
the later hand (Q2) the introductory narratives relating to John
the Baptist, together with some other elements.7 Manifestly, the
two sections on Jesus' baptism by John, and on the stumbling of
the Jews at John and Jesus, have in common not merely the trait
of the Baptist's work, but the common purpose, not apparent in
Q as a whole, of setting the personality of Jesus on the highest
6 On Jesus' idea of the Coming of the Son of Man, see below.
7 Wernle, Synoptische Frage, p. 226: "Diese zwei Stiicke [the Baptist's dis
course and the Temptation of Jesus] sehen iiberhaupt aus wie eine geschichtliche
Einleitung, die nachtraglich dem Werk vorgesetzt wurde."

42 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
plane. Here, if anywhere in Q, we must suspect secondary
elements. Besides the discount to be made on the score of this admitted
Tendenz of Q2 or Qr, we must also ask consideration for the effect
of a more general disposition of the times illustrated not only in
Q, but from the Pauline epistles down to the period of the Oxy-
rhynchus Logia, namely, the disposition to attribute to Jesus
"faithful sayings" or other current saws and apothegms having
more or less affinity with his teaching, in particular "wisdom-
sayings," such as that of Lk. 13 34-35, which in Mt. 23 37-39
is attributed directly to Jesus, with suppression of the actual
derivation from "the Wisdom of God." The Oxyrhynchus logion
"I stood in the midst of the world, and in the flesh was I seen
of them," etc., is another plaint of the divine Wisdom, kindred to
Baruch 3 37, similarly put in the mouth of Jesus. There is strong
textual reason for so regarding Mk. 2 27 also, which appears
neither in the parallels nor in the ft text, but is found as a rabbinic
saying in Joma (fol. 85). To this category of aphorisms included
among the sayings of Jesus from very early times because of
resemblances of phraseology or content must, in our judgment,
be reckoned at least one whose strongest title to the place it
occupies is its employment of the expression "the Son of Man."
It is the saying of Q: "The foxes have holes and the birds of the
air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay bis head "
(Mt. 8 19-20, Lk. 9 57-58). The very mode of its employment
here (in antithesis to the birds and beasts) is so different from any
other of the employments attributed to Jesus, and the plaintive
tone of self-pity so opposite to the grateful assurance of his hos
pitable reception in Mk. 10 29 f. (cf. Lk. 8 3, 10 38-42, 22 35),
that we cannot regard the saying as authentic.8 It seems to be
a current aphorism contrasting the helplessness of the individual
human being, a waif and stray when left alone in the environment
of nature, with the self-sufficiency of birds and beasts. Only by
a play upon the expression "Son of Man" can it be applied to
Jesus at all. Even were its authenticity admitted, there is the
same reason in this case as in that of the saying contrasting
8 Against Harnack, who exclaims, apropos of the same, " Welch' ein Zeichen
der Echtheit!" (p. 165).

JESUS AS SON OF MAN 43
Jesus' mode of life with the Baptist's for questioning its use of
the title Son of Man under the circumstances described. It seems
far more probable that this pendant to the warning against super
ficial discipleship (Mt. 8 21 f., Lk. 9 59 f.) has been taken up
merely because of a misunderstanding of its untechnical use of
the term "the son of man."
A third instance of Jesus' employment of the title Son of Man,
adduced by Harnack in his reconstruction of Q, we are also com
pelled to reject as unauthentic, though it may possibly have
stood in the source. Jesus is reported to have presented "the
Son of Man" as "a sign to this generation in explanation of his
offer of 'the sign of Jonah.'" Since it occurs in the same dis
course as the instance first adduced, which Harnack himself con
siders doubtful on the ground that Jesus manifestly avoids mak
ing a public claim to messianic authority, it is difficult to see the
consistency of maintaining the authenticity of this. However,
we need not insist on this point, for it is easy to show indepen
dently that the explanation offered of "the sign of Jonah" is
secondary and unauthentic.
We have at least four variant accounts of Jesus' answer to
the demand for a sign from heaven. The oldest of our existing
sources presents the enigma without any attempt at solution.
Mk. 8 11, 12 (Mt. 16 1-4) treats it as simply a refusal to the
unworthy people of their demand for an evidential miracle. Jesus
"sighed deeply in bis spirit and saith, Why doth this generation
seek after a sign? Verily I say unto you, There shall no sign be
given unto this generation." The addition, "no sign but the
sign of Jonah," made in Matthew's transcript of this verse, is of
course due to the influence, direct or indirect, of Q. Both forms
of the Markan version agree, however, in representing that Jesus
did not make a merely apparent refusal of the demand (which
after all was ultimately to be granted), but made absolute the
refusal of miraculous confirmation of his message. Both our
first and our third Gospels, contrariwise, introduce explanations
of the enigma calculated to mitigate the inconsistency of the
refusal with their own disposition to find the chief evidences for
their claims precisely in the miraculous element of Jesus' career,
in particular the resurrection. The explanations given, however,

44 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
are inconsistent the one with the other. Critics are agreed that
Matthew's interpretation of the sign of Jonah as the resurrection
is too flagrantly contradictory of the context to be authentic.
They are very generally disposed, however, to accept the expla
nation of Luke that the sign of Jonah is the person of Jesus.9
In reality we have only to place the two side by side in the iden
tical context to see that both are guesses, Luke's only less in
consistent than Matthew's with the general bearing of Jesus'
discourse. We give the context in a translation of Harnack's
text of Q.
But he said, An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign,
and no sign shall be given it save the sign of Jonah.
For like as Jonah was in the sea- For like as Jonah was himself
monster's belly three days and a sign to the men of Nineveh, so
three nights, so shall the Son of shall the Son of Man be to this
Man be in the heart of the earth generation.
three days and three nights.
The men of Nineveh shall arise in the judgment with this generation
and shall condemn it, because they repented at the preaching of Jonah,
and lo, a greater matter than Jonah is here.
A glance at Mt. 21 23-32, which, if not also embodying ma
terial from Q, is at all events in substance a parallel to the story
of the Galilean demand for a sign from heaven, will show that in
Jesus' conception the great sign of the times was the repentance
of the masses at "the baptism of John." It was to him a ful
filment of the promise (Mai. 4 6) of the great repentance to be
wrought by Elias before the Day of Yahweh. In remaining cal
lous to this movement of the publicans and sinners the scribes
and Pharisees had rejected their sign "from heaven." Thus
the two examples of the Ninevites and the Queen of the South
condemn "this generation" for its rejection of the "wailing"
of John and the "piping" of Jesus. It is compared to "children
in the market-place" because it yields neither to threat nor to
entreaty. Whether, then, we have in Mt. 11 and Mt. 21 dupli
cate traditions of the same incident, or parallel utterances of
9 Jn. 6 30 ff. combines these two.

JESUS AS SON OF MAN 45
Jesus on similar occasions, in either case they determine for us
the sense of the answer unfavorably comparing the men of this
generation to the men of Nineveh. It is only in the second mem
ber of the poetic comparison, that which compares them unfavor
ably to "the Queen of the South," that Jesus refers to his own
preaching as "a greater matter" than the wisdom of Solomon.10
In the first member he refers to the preaching of John the Baptist.
Both the interjected explanations of the sign of Jonah, there
fore, Luke's as well as Matthew's, are incorrect; and, if incor
rect, then certainly unauthentic. Jesus referred by this expres
sion11 neither to his own personality nor to his resurrection, but
to "the baptism of John."
2. Dismissing those instances whose real bearing attests not
an authentic use by Jesus of the title Son of Man in application
to himself, but on the contrary a disposition on the part of trans
mitters of the tradition to multiply unauthentic instances, we
come to a relatively small residuum whose first value is to ex
plain the Tendenz observed. Jesus really did employ the phrase;
otherwise the Tendenz would be inexplicable. But did he em
ploy it in application to himself? A satisfying answer calls for
consideration of every authentic instance without exception,
first of all the undisputed occurrences in Q. They are as
follows :
(1) Mt. 12 32, Lk. 12 10.12
(2) Mt. 24 27, ¦ 37, 39, Lk. 17 24, 26, 30.
The former passage is one of the principal bones of conten
tion between Wellhausen and the critics who continue to main
tain the priority of Q to Mark. In Wellhausen's view, compari
son of the variants in Mt. 12 31, 12 32, derived respectively
10 Note the similar antithesis in Lk. 12 13-34, where Solomon appears as the
rich and wise king of Ecclesiastes in contrast with the poverty of Jesus and hia
followers. 11 Assonance between the names John and Jonah may have played a part.
12 It is not apparent from Harnack's language in note 2 on p. 165 whether he re
gards this occurrence as "unsicher," as well as that in Lk. 12 8, where the parallel
Mt. 10 32 has simply "I," or whether he holds to Mt. 12 32, Lk. 12 10 as certainly
authentic. The former is designated by him No. 34a the latter No. 34b- His
statement on p. 165 is: "Doch ist er [der Ausdruck Menschensohn] in Nr. 34
unsicher."

46 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
from Mk. 3 28 and Q (cf. Lk. 12 lo), shows the priority of Mark
to Q. He says:
In Mk. 3 28 we have: All blasphemies are forgiven the sons of men,
except blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. In Q (Lk. 12 10) on the con
trary : Utterances against the Son of Man are forgiven, only those against
the Holy Spirit are not.
Were Wellhausen right, Q would be convicted in one more
instance of introducing the title Son of Man with no better
authority than a perversion of Mk. 3 28, thus increasing the
probability that it is from later modification that the peculiar
usage has pervaded gospel tradition.
But on this question we are constrained to take the view
of Wellhausen's opponents. "Son of Man" is the original, "sons
of men" the derived form. This is not a mere inference from the
conclusion forced upon us by the evidences of Q's priority in all
other instances of relation to Mark, it is apparent from the con
text of this particular discourse. According to all three reporters
the utterance in question should explain the peculiarly heinous
nature of the offence just committed (the declaration, "He cast-
eth out by Beelzebub") which excepts it from even the divine
pardon. According to Q (Mt. 12 32, Lk. 12 10) this is because,
while seemingly directed only against Jesus, it had really assailed
the Spirit of God. Because it is not Jesus personally who effects
the healings and exorcisms, but "the Spirit of God," the offence
is unpardonable. This is precisely the distinction which Mark,
in accordance with the whole spirit of his gospel as shown in
repeated instances, refuses to admit. The difference pointed to
by Jesus between his exorcisms, performed "by the Spirit (Lk.
finger) of God," without any assumption of special power or
gift resident in himself, and the exorcisms of "your sons" (Mt.
12 27 f., Lk. 11 19 f.), — a vital element of the whole argument, —
is omitted by Mark. The result — the intended result, so far
as we can judge — is to make it appear that blasphemy of Jesus,
by calumny of his works of power, is identical with blasphemy
of the Holy Spirit, and hence unpardonable. In Q the offence
is unpardonable because it is not against Jesus, but against the
Holy Spirit. In Mark the offence is unpardonable because it is

JESUS AS SON OF MAN 47
against Jesus, and this is equivalent to an offence against the Holy
Spirit. It is scarcely needful to indicate which of these two con
structions of Jesus' utterance bears the stamp of originality and
authenticity. But the later Markan construction would have encountered
an insuperable obstacle if the language of Q, "Whosoever blas-
phemeth the Son of Man it shall be forgiven him," had been left
unchanged. The alteration in Mk. 3 28 to "All blasphemies
shall be forgiven to the sons of men" is indispensable to Mark's
conception, and hence was probably made for this reason.
Have we, then, by establishing in this instance the originality
in Q of the title Son of Man, established its authenticity as a
title applied by Jesus to himself? On the contrary, the whole
force of Jesus' argument depends upon the distinction between his
own personality as on a level with other men's, and the superhuman
dignity of "the Spirit of God." In other words, the term Son
of Man is used here not in the transcendental sense of apocalypse,
but in the ordinary Old Testament sense of an every-day mortal
as contrasted with God. The article, if the article was used
in Jesus' utterance, would have to be understood as generic, —
in German, die L'dsterung gegen den Menschen wird vergeben, which
in English must be rendered: "Blasphemy against a man can be
forgiven." This, by all the evidence of context, is the real mean
ing of Jesus' saying. If there is application of a special title to
Jesus himself in the passage of Q, it is not meant by Jesus, but
is the importation of the compiler himself.
(3) The only other occurrences of the title Son of Man in Q
stand in a single context, and unquestionably refer to the apoca
lyptic figure of the transcendental, Danielic, Deliverer. We
give the passage in Harnack's reconstruction (No. 56) :
If, then, they shall say unto you, Behold, he is in the wilderness, go
not forth; behold, he is in his chambers, believe it not. For as the light
ning goeth forth from the east and shineth unto the west, so shall be the
Coming of the Son of Man; wheresoever the carcase is, there will the
vultures be gathered.
As were the days of Noah, so shall be the Coming of the Son of Man.
For as men were in the days before the cataclysm, eating and drinking,
marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into

48 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
the ark, and knew not until the cataclysm came and swept them all away,
so shall be the Coming of the Son of Man.
There will be two in the field; one shall be taken and one left. Two
women shall be grinding at the mill; one shall be taken and one left.
If there is any real ground in Q for regarding the title Son of
Man as a "self -designation of Jesus," it must be found in these
three connected occurrences of the phrase "the Coming of the
Son of Man." Did Jesus mean by it his own return in glory;
or did he refer to the Executioner of the divine judgment of whom
John the Baptist had sounded the warning?
The general bearing of the teaching here in question is the same
as of the apocalyptic chapter of Mark, into which parallel utter
ances have been taken up. Jesus deprecates resort to the casters
of horoscopes and calculators of the end of the world and of the
coming judgment. Vain and futile are their predictions. The
coming of the Son of Man is a great divine event, comparable
only to the mighty judgments visited on the earth in the days of
Noah, or on the cities of the Plain in the days of Lot. What
Old Testament writers refer to as the Day of Yahweh is now
spoken of as the day of the coming of the Son of Man. We
must certainly allow for the effecting in popular usage of an
equivalence between the transcendental figure of Daniel (with
the more recent apocalypses dependent on it) and the Coming
One of John the Baptist. But there is no indication whatever
that the equivalence, "Jesus is the Son of Man," had entered the
mind of the speaker in the above discourse, or indeed any mind
previous to that of the compiler of the Sayings. Until it can be
shown (1) that Jesus regarded himself as the Messiah; (2) that
he also considered this office to involve his return as executioner
of the divine judgment in the coming of the Son of Man, the
passage — the only one in which we have reason to think Jesus
employed the title as applying to a transcendental figure — re
mains utterly without force to prove the contention in support
of which it is adduced. The real evidence that Jesus entertained
the fantastic dreams of apocalypse as applying to his own per
sonality in a resurrected state thus reduces itself to nothing.
There is evidence in plenty that the compiler of Q in the form
employed by our evangelists had adopted the equivalence, "Jesus

JESUS AS SON OF MAN 49
is the Son of Man," and made no scruple of occasionally substi
tuting the title for the personal pronoun where it seemed to him
appropriate. There is here a possible explanation of the prac
tice which has spread to all the gospels. There is no adequate^
evidence that Jesus ever applied the title to himself.
We have two possible criteria to determine whether this pos
sible explanation of the spread of the usage is also the true one.
(1) Mark, if at all dependent on Q, is admittedly so in a differ
ent sense and to a less degree than Matthew or Luke. We should
expect, then, to find the title Son of Man less at home (so to
speak) in Mark than in Q. (2) In Acts, especially in the speeches
of Peter, we have by common consent a very early type of chris
tology, if indeed we have not traces of a type of evangelic tra
dition wholly unaffected by Q. Let us briefly consider these
two criteria.
(l) The facts regarding the Markan employment of the title
are briefly summarized on p. xxxviii of the introduction to my
commentary entitled Beginnings of Gospel Story, as follows:
"The title Son of Man does not appear to characterize the funda
mental elements of Mark (P). It occurs in editorial supplements
derived from Q, and even then in an adapted sense." Space
limitations of course preclude the citation here of the evidence
on which this statement is made, but a reference to the individ
ual instances as discussed in the volume quoted will suffice. The
title does not appear from these to be indigenous to Mark, but
an exotic. It occurs only in passages where there is independent Y
evidence of the influence of Q.
(2) There is no occurrence of the title Son of Man throughout
the Petrine speeches of Acts, though these are so largely con
cerned with the doctrine of Christ's humiliation and exaltation.
As is well known, its only occurrence in the New Testament
outside the four gospels is in the Speech of Stephen, Acts 7 56,
recognized by Harnack and many others as derived from a differ
ent source. Even here it is not the words of the speech itself,
but of its reporter, which suggest the equivalence, "The Son of
Man is Jesus." On the theory that this was "the favorite self-
, designation of Jesus" the striking fact of its complete absence
! from the speeches of Peter in Acts remains as inexplicable as the
equally unbroken silence of Paul.

50 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
We have reached the conclusion of our examination of the
data. A just valuation of all the documentary evidence will
at least compel us to admit a large discount from its prima facie
impression. The alleged consensus of witnesses may easily
reduce itself to the testimony of one, and the evidence of this
one, the compiler of Q, is not altogether consistent with his own
material or with the indirect evidence of others. Against it
stands the incongruity of the conception with other teachings
of Jesus, and the case with which the enthusiastic apocalypti
cism of the early church might pass from certain sayings about
the "Coming of the Son of Man" to the equivalence, "Jesus him
self is the coming Son of Man." The preponderance of evidence
would seem to incline toward an origin for this equivalence not
in the sane and sober mind of Jesus, but in the exalted and vision
ary expectations of a church on fire with momentary expecta
tions of the end.

JESUS AS LORD 53

JESUS AS LORD
In successive discussions of the title Son of God, which seems
to have been Jesus' own self-designation, and Son of Man,
which would seem to have been applied to him after his death by
the primitive Aramaic-speaking community of believers in his
second coming, we have sought to disentangle primitive from
secondary tradition. We have particularly emphasized the fact
that in its distinctive principles Jesus' own teaching attaches itself '
to the primitive form of the messianic ideal — Israel as Yabweh's
son; not the later theocratic — the Davidic heir to the throne as
Son of God; nor the still later apocalyptic — the supernatural
^ deliverer coming on the clouds of heaven as the fulfilment of the
'promise. In agreement with this view of the teaching of Jesus,
our earliestjlocuments, the Pauline epistles, make sonship in the
j fethical and religious sense the essence of the glad tidings. Since
the publication of our argument our conclusions have been con
firmed by the important newly -discovered document, the Odes of
Solomon. The confirmation is especially strong if the view of
Harnack be taken, that the Odes in their original form are Jew
ish, rather than the view of their discoverer, J. Rendel Harris,
who regards them as Christian. The Odes give irrefutable evi
dence of the existence in first-century Judaism, or at least in
primitive Christian circles, of a doctrine of sonship in the ethical
i and religious sense closely in line with what we have urged as the
distinctive element in the messianic consciousness of Jesus. The
ideal of the odist for Israel is an ideal of spiritual sonship. By
the knowledge and love of the Beloved, "the Most High and
Merciful," Israel is guaranteed not only sonship to God, but
immortality, an eternal dwelling in God's presence.
The point was also emphasized against those who regard the

54 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
title Son of Man as "the favorite self -designation of Jesus," and
who in logical consistency make apocalyptic eschatology the
dominant note in his message, that of three great sources of evi
dence, (1) the Pauline epistles, (2) Petrine tradition as embodied
in Acts and the groundwork of Mark, (3) the Matthaean Precepts*^
of the Lord, it is only the third which gives independent evidence
of the currency of the title; and this source, corresponding to the
Q-document of critics, is, if not the latest, certainly not the earliest
of the three. To the Pauline gospel the title Son of Man is
completely unknown. To the Petrine, so far as we are able to
reproduce it, it is equally unknown. Its occurrence is strictly
limited to the Aramaic source which circulated in that portion of
the church which looked to James the Lord's brother as "the
bishop of bishops," and to writings directly affected by this
Judaean influence, such as our canonical gospels, including one
occurrence in Acts. In early post-canonical literature we find it
used only by Hegesippus in his report of the martyrdom of James,1
by the Gospel according to the Hebrews,2 and by the so-called
Traditions of Matthias.3
It remains for us to show, as the final link in our chain of evi
dence for the priority of the ethical and religious form of Christian
messianism, that there is no vacancy in the gospels of Peter and
of Paul on this score; but that in their christology the doctrine
that "Jesus is Lord" occupies the place taken in Matthaean
tradition by the doctrine, "Jesus is the Son of Man."
In the Pauline epistles and the Petrine speeches of Acts we
meet with many expressions which throw light upon the real
origin of the worship of Jesus as a superhuman being. Occurring
as they do in completely stereotyped form, and in documents
some of which at least are much older than Q and none of which
betrays any knowledge of the title Son of Man, they certainly
justify the inference that the doctrine, "Jesus is Lord," is not a
mere substitute for the Danielic form, "Jesus is the Son of Man,"
nor an outgrowth from it; but that the two represent rather
parallel and independent types of christology. "Jesus is the Son
1 Cf. Euseb., H. E. ii, 23 13.
2 Cf . Jerome, De viris illustribus 2.
3 Cf . Clem. Alex., Strom, iv, 6 35.

JESUS AS LORD 55
of Man" may be regarded, so to speak, as a translation into
the dialect and phraseology of Palestine of the doctrine which
Greek-speaking Christians expressed in the confession, "Jesus is
Lord." We have seen in the preceding discussion that Paul does not
hesitate to employ such Aramaic terms as Abba, Maranatha,
Amen; he certainly does not shrink from addressing gentile con
verts as "men that know the law." It is, therefore, not easy to
suppose that he avoided the title, the Son of Man, the "favorite
self-designation of Jesus," because it could not be understood in
Greek without a reference to Daniel 7 12-14. No more could the
Hebrew phrase ben 'adam in Aramaic; yet it found currency there
in the form bar 'enash, and, having made the transition from He
brew to Aramaic, it surely could, had there been occasion, have
similarly passed over into Greek. In point of fact we know that it
ultimately did. But not in Paul's day. It was quite a different
term which he borrows from the Aramaic. In fact there lies an
important clew to the actual beginnings of christology in that
watchword, Maranatha, which comes down to Paul from a period
so primitive that Aramaic is still the general language of the
church. For the watchword of the church echoed by Paul is
not barnash atha, "the Son of Man cometh," but maran atha, "our
Lord cometh." It is in fact, as we shall see, the title Kvpios,
the Greek equivalent of the Aramaic mar, which is made promi
nent wherever the question concerns Jesus' divine authority.
Only such a title as this, indicative of the holder's right to com
mand obedience in all things, could be expressive of Christian
fealty. Accordingly we find it in more than one passage where
it is clearly chosen to express this sense of fealty.
First of all, the Pauline passage where this Aramaic watch
word occurs (1 Cor. 16 22) is itself significant, not merely because
First Corinthians is the best authenticated writing of the New
Testament, and some twenty years older than our earliest gospel,
but because on this occasion Paul coins a phrase intended to be
distinctive of the genuine Christian. Side by side stand the
Greek title and the Aramaic equivalent: "If any man loveth not
the Lord (tov nvpiov), let him be accursed. Maranatha." Paul's
own dictum is here reinforced by the phrase caught up from

56 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
primitive assemblies, kindled to enthusiasm by "visions and
revelations of the Lord," assemblies where,
"with echoes long and loud,
The mighty Maranatha smote the air."
Another passage from this same epistle is still more indicative
of the part played by the word in primitive tests of loyalty.
When it became necessary to distinguish real from pretended
utterances of the Spirit, the test which Paul offered was this:
"No man can say Jesus is Lord but by the Holy Spirit" (1 Cor.
12 3). This is surely intended not as an ordinary pious ejacu
lation, but as a solemn confession. The principle laid down is
manifestly fallacious unless the utterance of the confession is
understood as a pledge of fealty and obedience.
Or, if further evidence be required that the title Lord embodied
— at least for the Pauline churches — the distinctive element of the
Christian's faith, let us take the passage where Paul formulates
the essential content of the common faith in writing to believers
in Rome — and these were no mere converts of his own who might
be supposed to represent only some special type. The form in
which the confession is drawn is this: "If thou shalt confess with
thy mouth Jesus as Lord, and shalt believe in thine heart that
God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved" (Rom.
10 9). Once more, outward expression of the common faith of
believers takes the form of the confession, Jesus is Lord.
These passages are selected from the greater Pauline epistles
because it is apparent from their nature that the author is not
coming a new title, but purposely employing the one which has
most universal acceptance, both in Greek-speaking and Aramaic-
speaking churches, and which most fully expresses in a single word
the full content of the common faith. That word is icvpios, the
imperial title expressive of complete sovereignty, ownership, and
dominion. When used absolutely, its reference could be to noth
ing less than supreme lordship over the created world. When
used with the genitive of the pronoun ("my Lord," "our Lord,"
etc.), it expressed a relation of personal loyalty, for which the
abstract "Son of Man" gave little opportunity. If anywhere,
then, surely in the phrase, "Jesus is Lord," we have the very

JESUS AS LORD 57
phraseology of what was termed "confession of (or in) the Name."
Yes; for this lordship, or sovereignty, of Jesus must not only be
loyally maintained against the empire, but "angels and princi
palities and powers in the heavenly places" are to be made sub
ject unto him.4
Turn for a moment to a later document. A writer who in
the name of "Peter" encourages the Pauline churches of Asia
Minor to steadfastness under persecution urges heroism to "glorify
God in this name" (of Christ), but inwardly to "sanctify in their
hearts Christ as Lord." This was after Paul's death, and against
an imperial despot who had directed that his decrees be issued in
the form "dominus et deus noster." But to Paul also this name,
Lord, marked the prerogative of Christ against both earthly
and heavenly potentates. Every knee must bow, of beings in
heaven, or beings on earth, or beings under the earth, and
every tongue must join in the supreme confession "that Jesus
Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." This, then, is
"the name which is above every name" given to Jesus because
of his supreme exemplification of the principle, "He that hum-
bleth himself shall be exalted," — the name of Lord.
It will not be without significance to our further inquiry into
the origins of this primitive christological confession to ask where
Paul finds the name of Lord so given. For answer we need only
(turn to the parallel passage on the exaltation of Jesus in 1 Cor.
15 25, where a few words, quoted from the scripture that Paul
has in mind, reveal the fact that he is thinking of the famous
/nmessianic Psalm: "The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my
right hand until I make thine enemies thy footstool." 6 And it
needs only the further comparison of Rom. 14 10 f ., where the same
4 It is not within the province of the present discussion to point out the prac
tical superiority of a formula expressive of the sentiment of personal loyalty over
a formula expressive only of abstract belief. Nevertheless, in days like ours,
when efforts are being made to find a watchword of union, one can hardly resist
asking the question, Why not return to the earliest attested of all? Thousands
who differ widely in their definitions of the person of Christ, and their theories of
the nature of this redemption, stand ready to unite upon the principle of a common
loyalty to a common Master. Why not unite on the confession of "Jesus as
Lord"? 6 Cf. also Rom. 8 34, Eph. 1 20, Col. 3 1.

58 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
fundamental passage (Is. 45 23) is used as in Phil. 2 11, to prove
that this bowing of the knee and confession of the tongue are
to be "before the judgment-seat of Christ." In other words,
this is the Pauline form of the doctrine of Jesus as the Son of
Man. But herewith we begin a transition from passages which merely
evidence the practice of the Pauline churches to another group
which evidence both the practice and its origin, and which appear
not in Pauline literature only, but in that which has best title
to represent to us the Petrine type of doctrine.
This can hardly be said to be the case with First Peter, an
epistle which even Zahn acknowledges to be Pauline in con
tents, though bearing — to his mind legitimately — the name of
Peter. Because of this Pauline character of First Peter we have
simply placed its exhortation to the Pauline churches to "sanctify
in their hearts Jesus as Lord" in the group of Pauline evidences.
Second Peter, on the other hand, is so generally recognized as both
spurious and late as to merit no place in serious comparison of
Petrine with Pauline tradition. The case is different, however,
with the speeches placed in the mouth of Peter by the author of
Acts. These are admitted to present, whether incorporated
from earlier sources or composed by the evangelist, a peculiar
and very primitive type of christology, easily distinguished from
the Pauline because it has no trace whatever of the conception
of the pre-existence of Jesus or of the atoning significance of his
death. Here, then, is at least an early and independent type
of christology, entitled to be designated "Petrine," if only because
jt is presented under the name and authority of Peter and is in
reality different from the Matthaean on the one side and the
Pauline on the other. It should not surprise us that the nearest
affinity of this type of christology is with the Gospel of Mark in
its more fundamental outlines, those least affected by accommo
dation to Pauline ideas or the influence of the Q-source; for the
Markan, too, is a type credibly reported to rest upon the teaching
of Peter. But the main point of our reference to the christology
of Acts is that the author grounds the church's faith upon the
same confessional basis as does Paul, and by appeal to the same
scripture. The starting-point of "Luke's" story of the spread

JESUS AS LORD 59
of the gospel is Peter's demonstration to the multitudes assem
bled at Pentecost, partly on the basis of the phenomena of "spir
itual gifts," and partly on the basis of the Psalm quoted in 1 Cor.
15 25, that God had given to Jesus the name of Lord.
For the author of the Petrine speeches of Acts one demonstra
tion is vital, all else hangs upon it. It is the demonstration from
the coincidence of prophetic scripture and present experience
that God hath "made that same Jesus, whom ye [his country
men] crucified, both Lord and Christ." In the conception of
"Luke" this marks the beginning of the Christian church. His
preliminary chapter (Acts 1) merely recapitulates the ending of
Jesus' earthly career, glorified as it had been by the promise of
an enthronement soon to follow. Until Pentecost Jesus had not
been Lord or Christ. He had been Yahweh's Servant sent to
bless Israel by turning them away, every man from his iniquities
(Acts 3 26). Pentecost is the Servant's coronation day. From
henceforth as Lord he occupies "the throne of glory." "The
heavens must receive him," says Peter in his next address, "until
the times of restoration of all things." Then God in his mercy j
will send him as the Christ. For it is the nationalistic phase of j !
christology, rather than the apocalyptic, or transcendental, which
here appears as the distinctive trait supplementary to the Paul
ine. The new fulfilments of Scripture appealed to besides Ps.
110 l are the promises of the outpouring of the spirit of prophecy
(Joel 2 28-31), the promises of an heir to the throne of David
(Ps. 132 11, 2 Sam. 7 12 f.), and the "prophet like unto Moses"
(Deut. 18 15). True, the nationalistic christology shows the influ
ence of apocalypse. It has been, so to speak, transcendental-
ized. But the only actual trace of the doctrine of the Son of
Man "coming with clouds" is in the angels' promise to the wit
nesses of the ascension: "Ye shall see him in like manner coming
again" (Acts 1 ll). The real difference from Pauline christol
ogy is not that the author reverts toward the apocalyptic doc
trine of a pre-existent or transcendental Son of Man. On the \
contrary, he does not even adopt Paul's doctrine of incarnation.
As Pfleiderer has so justly and discriminatingly pointed out,
the christology of the "Petrine" source of Acts is a doctrine
of apotheosis, the apotheosis of the Suffering Servant. "Peter"

60 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
merely supplements the Pauline doctrine that "Jesus is Lord"
by adding an expression of the national hope that he will soon
reappear as "the Christ."
Peter's preaching to gentiles is represented in Acts 10 36-43,
where the gospel message is summarized in a preliminary state
ment as the doctrine that Jesus Christ "is Lord of all"
(iravTtov Kvpios).
Surely, if the dominant note in Jesus' teaching was the doc
trine of the Danielic, transcendental Being to appear upon the
clouds, and if Son of Man was his favorite self-designation, it is
surprising that "Peter" should lay the very foundations of the
church's faith in these successive speeches, and never once em
ploy the title or allude to the predictions. The doctrine of the
Lordship is here. It is supplemented now by the doctrine of a
preliminary work of the Christ-to-be, — Jesus the Servant sent
to effect the great Repentance, the prophet like unto Moses,
mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, the son
and heir of David — of which little or nothing appears in Paul.
The doctrine of the coming Day of Judgment is present, as in
Paul (compare Acts 10 42 and 17 31 with 1 Thess. 1 10). Only
the phraseology employed, and the scriptures appealed to, give
no more ground than in Paul to think of the title Son of Man,
or indeed of any apocalyptic teaching of Jesus, as the starting-
point of the Petrine christology.
To judge, then, by these two strands of primitive tradition,
the Pauline and "Petrine," it was not a self -designation of Jesus,
but the manifestation of him as Lord, which became the starting-
point of the faith. This result is in complete conformity with
the thorough and scholarly discussion of Professor S. J. Case on
"KYPIOS as a Title for Christ,"6 wherein he disproves the current
idea that the deification of Jesus was a result of the use of Ktlpios
in the Septuagint as a rendering of the Hebrew divine name,
and the application to Jesus of Old Testament passages in which
the term occurred. The practice existed, but it is not primitive;
nor could the confusion have occurred in an Aramaic-speaking
community or among those familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures.
8 Journal of Biblical Literature, vol. xxvi (1907), pp. 151-161.

JESUS AS LORD 61
It is most conspicuous in writers, like the author of Hebrews,'
whose only acquaintance with the Scriptures seems to be through
the Greek. Neither the address of prayer to Jesus, nor the appli
cation to him of Scripture that originally referred to God, gives
adequate warrant for the theory in question. As Case points
out, prayer addressed to Jesus — always exceptional, and progres
sively rarer as we approach the earliest times — implies only "that
God and Christ have similar positions in relation to men," not
that Jesus is treated as God. In particular the one supreme
messianic gift, potentially inclusive of all others, is the gift of
"the Spirit." As a pledge of adoption to sonship and heirship,
and as the "earnest" of immortality, it is naturally regarded as
the all-inclusive object of prayer (compare Luke 11 13 with
Mt. 7 ll). But the Spirit, while ultimately "the gift of God"
(Acts 8 19 f., Jn. 4 10), is in a special and peculiar way the
gift of Christ. The "outpouring" of it is secured by his exal
tation to the messianic throne (Acts 2 33, Eph. 4 7-12); it is
conditioned by his going to the Father (Jn. 16 7 ff., 20 17, 22).
Prayer in general, then, might well be "in the name" of Jesus;
prayer for the Spirit particularly we might even expect would
sometimes be addressed to the risen "Lord." Ii cases exist in
early times of prayer so addressed, they certainly do not imply
confusion between his person and that of the Supreme Deity.
On this point the philological argument of Professor Case is
conclusive. In reality the attempt to account for the apotheosis of Jesus
by literary causes falls little short of absurdity. The worship
of Jesus did not originate in the scriptorium. It was a product
of real experience among men most of whom had little to do with
the scribes. After it had begun, Scriptural apologetic came into
play, and exercised an important, perhaps a dominant, influence
upon the form and mode of its development. And this is re
flected in the philological phenomena. As Case has again pointed
out, when Paul "writes paga.va.6a to the Corinthians it is per-
7 A notable instance is the quotation of Ps. 102 25 ff. in Heb. 1 10-12 as if
applying to Christ as creator. See the present writer's discussion in Zeitschrift
fUr neutestamentliche Wissenschaft, vol. iii, 1902. Here the doctrine is of course
a Pauline doctrine.

62 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
fectly plain that he is passing along a phrase which originated
with Aramaic-speaking Christians." Moreover, the title em
bodied, mar or maran, was not taken from Scripture, but from
the ordinary usage of common life. It is the exact equivalent
of the Greek nvpios, 6 nvpios fipHv, which Paul and "Peter" sub
stitute for it. We certainly "may believe that Jesus was called
'Lord' even during his earthly life."8 It was not this usage,
however, which gave significance to the title, but the experience
of those who after his death felt that they had received a mani
festation of his God-given sovereignty. We may at first be
tempted by the coincident appeal in so many different passages 9
to Ps. 110 l to think of this Psalm itself, either in its origi
nal form, or as employed by Jesus, according to Mk. 12 35 f., as
having given rise to the conviction. It is true that there is much
to indicate that even Paul was not the first to hit upon this script
ure as a proof -text in support of the Lordship. Its apologetic
use no doubt reacted upon the doctrine it was used to support.
But here, as elsewhere, the conviction came first, and the proof-
text was discovered afterward. Case is certainly right in say
ing, "It was not any similarity of usage between jhvh and mar
that led to the custom [of applying Old Testament language
spoken of Yahweh to Christ], for in Aramaic this did not exist;
but the practice was due to an apologetic necessity on the part
of those who claimed that God had exalted their Messiah to a
place of heavenly lordship."
Our real question accordingly is this: What was it which pro
duced the conviction of the exaltation of Jesus to "the throne of
glory" in the minds of the primitive disciples, an exaltation for
which the suitable term to those of Aramaic speech seemed to
be maran and to those of Greek speech 6 kvoios jj/wov? To
judge by the coincidence between Acts 2 32 f. and Eph. 4 7-11,
it was the phenomena of Pentecost accepted as tokens of a
sovereignty conferred upon Jesus. The spiritual gifts were
proofs to his followers, who found themselves thus suddenly
8 Case, ibid. p. 161.
• In addition to Acts 2 34 f. and 1 Cor. 15 25, see especially Rom. 8 34, Eph.
1 20, Col. 3 1. Pss. 110 and 8, combined in 1 Cor. 15 25-27, are made almost
the entire Scripture substratum of the Epistle to the Hebrews.

JESUS AS LORD 63
"endued with power from on high," that he had been exalted
and enthroned.10 Fundamentally, the argument of Paul and of
"Peter" is the same. The phenomenon of the gift of the Spirit
is the datum to be explained. Both revert at once to the common
scripture: "The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right
hand." Thereafter the apologetic varies. According to "Peter"
this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel concerning "the
last days." According to Paul this is that which is referred to
by the Psalmist when he describes the triumph of Yahweh over
his enemies: "When he ascended on high he led captivity cap
tive and gave gifts unto men." The exaltation, or ascension, is
proved by the visible and audible phenomena. The Scripture
citations are apologetic proof -texts. Latest of all comes the nar
rative of visible transportation of the glorified body of Jesus
through the clouds, while angels explain the significance of the
occurrence to astonished bystanders.11
It is among the Scripture proof-texts cited after the event, and
m>t among the causes of the belief, that we must reckon the
argument put in the mouth of Jesus by our oldest evangelist in
Mk. 12 35-37. The reader will find in my comments on the
passage in the volume entitled Beginnings of Gospel Story (pp.
160 f., 175) the reasons for regarding this fourth Colloquy in the
Temple as an addition by the evangelist to the series which pre
cedes introducing successively the moot questions of Pharisee,
Sadducee, and Scribe. The appended colloquy introduces the
distinctive tenet of the Christian, the Lordship of the Christ.
Jesus debates with the unbelieving Jews the doctrine of his own
ascension to "the right hand of God." And the passage by which
he is represented as defending it is the same which at the time of
Mark's writing had long been a locus classicus of Pauline tradi
tion (and probably of Petrine as well) to prove the connection of
the risen Jesus with the phenomena of "spiritual gifts."
Were it possible to invert the literary relation of Mark and the
10 In the Gospel of Matthew, which was not followed by a record of the mighty
works of the Spirit, the Lordship is expressed by a declaration of Jesus (Mt.
28 18; cf. Mk. 16 17).
"On the later and legendary character of Acts 1 6-14 as compared with
Acts 2 15 ff., and still more with Acts 3 1-4 31, see Harnack, Acts, ad loc.

64 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
Pauline epistles, or even to look upon the appended colloquy of
Mk. 12 35-37 as of equal antiquity with the series preceding in
verses 13-34, there would be better ground for the traditional
idea that Jesus himself was the originator of the apologetic based
on Ps. 110 1. In reality the proof -text proves too much. Its
true application is to the enthronement, the ascension, the seat
ing "at the right hand of God." It is Paul and "Peter," then,
who use it correctly, and Mark, together with his dependent
fellow-evangelists, who introduces it mal a propos.
Our attempt to trace the history of the doctrine of Jesus as
Lord indicates then that its origin was in no sense of the word
literary. The conviction of the Lordship 12 was the most vital
and fundamental one for every Christian, no matter what the
special type of his belief. He could be known as a Christian
because he confessed "Jesus as Lord." But the conviction did
not rest upon wrong interpretation of the Greek Old Testament.
That was a consequence rather than a cause. It did not rest
primarily upon Old Testament passages at all; though it was
affected by these. It did not even rest upon remembered expres
sions of, or titles applied to, Jesus; though the fact that he had
been commonly called mar or Kvpic (cf. Jn. 13 13) had doubtless
its effect, as well as the fact that he had spoken of "the Coming,"
or "the Day," of the Son of Man. The belief rested upon a great
experience, the occurrence of a single, definite day, an occurrence
which all Christians from that time forward regarded as "a desig
nation with power of Jesus as the Son of God," 13 a day ever
memorable as the coronation-day of the risen Jesus. Can we
point to such a day?
In a sense we have already pointed to it. Even if Acts did not
make of Pentecost the occasion which it does, we should know
from the allusions of Paul to an outpouring of the Spirit expe
rienced by every believer in some degree, and by the church
as a whole from the beginning, that some great manifestation
of the kind had marked its origin. We should naturally think
12 Whether the Lordship (ku/>i6ttjs) despised by the heretics in Jude 8, 2 Pet.
2 10, is that of Christ is doubtful.
13 Such, according to Sanday and Headlam, should be the rendering of Rom.
1 4.

JESUS AS LORD 65
of that day on which, as Paul relates, an assembled company of
"more than five hundred brethren at once" had seen the Lord.
But this is by no means all. Few things can furnish historical
evidence so strong as an institution, observance, or rite, directly
traceable to a given event. Such an observance, or institution,
can in our judgment be surely traced to the day of Pentecost,
and to this event. The institution exists today. Its existence
is attested in the oldest documents of the New Testament; though
it so happens that its distinctive name is not mentioned until the
Revelation of John, written about 95 a.d. In Rev. 1 10 the day
which in the Pauline epistles (1 Cor. 16 2), the travel-document
of Acts (Acts 20 7), and the gospels is referred to simply as "the
first day of the week" and appears merely as a weekly day of
assembly, is called "the Lord's day" (¦% /cupia/o) ij/«pa). In our
judgment a strictly critical analysis of the evidence will show that
"the Lord's day" originally commemorated the day of Jesus'
enthronement "at the right hand of God." It was the day when
"God made him both Lord and Christ."
By the time our gospels were written the day had come to
be regarded as commemorating Jesus' resurrection. In fact, Paul
himself makes the "resurrection" (return from Sheol?) to have
occurred "on the third day," which (the crucifixion having oc
curred on a Friday) would make it to have fallen on "the first
day of the week." This, accordingly, is the date on which our
gospels place the visit of the women to the sepulchre and the
finding of it empty; and in common acceptance the weekly ob
servance of "the Lord's day" is supposed to commemorate this
event. Why it should be a weekly observance, when the cele
bration of the resurrection was annual, and why it should fall on
the day when (according to later forms of tradition) the resur
rection manifestations began, instead of the day of Christ's actual
victory over "him that had the power of death," the common
theory does not attempt to explain.
Is it, then, the fact that observance of "the Lord's day" began
with a fixation of this "first day of the week" as that on which
Jesus "rose from the dead," whether with Paul as an inference
from " the Scriptures," or with the evangelists from the report of
the women and other phenomena connected with the empty sepul-

66 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
chre? We venture to say that the objections to accepting this as
the origin of the observance are absolutely insuperable. Such
observance could only begin in commemoration of some great and
joyous, but above all perfectly definite and undisputed, event.
The experiences of the women and the inferences of Paul from
Scripture were not occurrences of this kind. Even were it possible
to know what "scripture" Paul has in mind when he reports it as
the common faith that Jesus "rose again on the third day accord
ing to the Scriptures," we cannot imagine the primitive commun
ity sitting down in conference and saying: "Go to, now. We
need a day on which to commemorate the triumph of Jesus over
the gates of death; let it be, then, the first day of the week; for
according to Hosea it must have been 'on the third day' (Hos.
6 (2). The crucifixion occurred on the sixth day of the week.
Let us then substitute the 'first day of the week' for the Sabbath,
and institute thus a weekly memorial of the resurrection."
Equally unimaginable is the origin of such an observance from the
report of "certain women which were early at the grave, and, when
they found him not, reported that they had seen a vision of angels
which said that he was alive." Granted even the trustworthi
ness of these late traditions ignored by Paul, why celebrate this
day rather than the day when he "was seen of Cephas"? In
point of fact the whole group of traditions which centres about
the sepulchre, found empty by the women and others "on the
third day," is absolutely excluded as accounting for the observance
of "the Lord's day," because they manifestly come to light at a
time long after the observance of the Lord's day had become
well established. Had the early church wished to celebrate the
beginning of the manifestations of the Lord, they would certainly
have taken the day of the manifestation to Peter. But that,
according to all we can learn about it, took place at the Sea of
Galilee, the mere physical conditions making it practically cer
tain that it was not so early as "the third day." Our only direct
witness (Gospel of Peter 14 58-60) states, in fact, that Peter's
return to Galilee did not take place until "the last day of Un
leavened Bread," a full week after the crucifixion. In point of
fact the early church did not attempt to date the resurrection by
the discovery of the empty tomb, nor by the connected group of

JESUS AS LORD 67
appearances in Jerusalem, all of which concern themselves with
the later disputes about the nature of the resurrection body.
Two characteristics of Paul's recapitulation of the resurrection
story, as proclaimed not by himself alone but by all authorities,
are fatal to the supposition that the sepulchre-group of traditions
had anything to do with the origin of the observance of the Lord's
day: (1) the entire absence from his list of proofs of any one of
these traditions; (2) the fact that the resurrection (that is, the
return from Sheol "clothed upon" with the heavenly "body of
glory") is dated "on the third day" because of certain "script
ures" and for no other reason assigned. It is hardly probable
that the passages in Paul's mind included Hos. 6 2, natural as
this might seem; for the New Testament writers never make use
of this particular passage. It does not seem probable that Paul
rested on Jonah 1 17 like the author of Mt. 12 40. But diffi
cult though it is to say what particular passages of Scripture
Paul had in mind, it is not impossible to say what he meant by
"the third day," and that it had reference not to the succession
of the days of the week at all, but to those of the month, or
rather of the feast of Passover and Unleavened Bread.
First Corinthians is written from Ephesus, apparently in the
midst of the celebration of a (Christian) Passover. In 5 7 the
Corinthians are exhorted to "put away the old leaven, . . . for
Christ our Passover hath been sacrificed for us." In like manner
the chapter on the resurrection borrows the imagery of the temple
service. Christ's death, burial, and resurrection are compared
to the wheat buried in the ground but restored again at harvest.
The first day of Passover — Mazzoth (Nisan 14) was the day when
the lamb was slaughtered. "The third day" in the year of the
crucifixion was the day of Firstfruits (airapxv, Nisan 16), when
the first sheaf of the wheat-harvest was lifted up to God. When,
in the midst of this comparison, Paul writes: "But now is Christ
risen from the dead and become the firstfruits (airapxn) of them
that slept," and in the same connection points to his burial, and
to his having been raised "on the third day," the significance
of the date can be no other than the fact of its coincidence
with the ritual. o£ Firstfruits, just as the crucifixion had coin
cided with the slaughtering of the passover lamb. The fact

68 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
that in the particular year in question this happened to be
also a "first day of the week" was at the utmost a secondary
consideration.14 We are led by this glimpse into Paul's commemoration of the
death and resurrection to a realization of what event the early
church actually did attempt to celebrate, and when they really
dated it.
The crisis in the life of Peter referred to in the prayer of Jesus,
"Simon, . . . when thou art turned again strengthen thy breth
ren," was worthy to be commemorated by the church, because
it unquestionably was the crisis of its own birth. Had the church
thought of celebrating the beginning of the resurrection faith, it
must have noted and observed the day when in Galilee, some ten
days or more after the crucifixion, so far as we can judge, the
risen Lord "appeared to Cephas." It did not do so. Either be
cause this humble beginning was overshadowed by the later,
more spectacular triumph, or for some other reason, Pentecost^
was looked upon as the real birthday of the church, and Peter's
experience was but vaguely connected with it. What the church
was intent upon commemorating, even so early as the time of
Paul's stay in Ephesus, was Jesus' victory over the gates of Sheol.
/This triumph of the Prince of Life (6 apxtyo's t^s ^wijs) over
the prince of darkness and death was commemorated, however,
in an annual festival, coincident with the Passover of the Jews,
and in fact with the equinoctial feasts of the many cults which
make the vernal new birth of nature a symbol of their resurrec
tion hope. In Paul's time Jewish ritual was still adhered to with
sufficient closeness to warrant the marking of a separate corre
spondence of the crucifixion with the slaughter of the lamb on
Nisan 14, and the resurrection with the lifting up of the wave
sheaf on Nisan 16. But a century later this refinement has dis
appeared. The quartodecimans are still celebrating the Christian
Passover in Asia where Paul had celebrated it with them, but it is
14 Clement of Alexandria shows precisely this point of view in arguing for the
observance of the fourteenth of Nisan as the anniversary of the death and resur
rection. "And the resurrection confirms this [argument for quartodeciman observ
ance]. At all events [Jesus] rose on the third day, which is the first day of the
weeks of wheat-harvest, on which it was prescribed that the priest should offer
the sheaf [of firstfruits]. (Citation in Paschal Chronicle.)

JESUS AS LORD 69
only the single great Passover day which is remembered.16 Death
and resurrection are celebrated together on the fourteenth Nisan,
"the day when the people [that is, the Jews] put away the
leaven." Great controversy arises because at Rome and in the
West, where the hebdomadal system has become supreme, men
wish to insist that "the mystery of the resurrection" shall not
be celebrated on any other but "the Lord's day." Asia and the
East remain firm in the authority of apostolic precedent, and again
and again reiterate the nature and meaning of their observance.
"The fourteenth is the true Passover of the Lord, the one great
sacrifice, the Servant of God slain instead of the [passover] lamb,
he who was bound having bound the strong man [that is, Satan,
who had the power of death; cf. Mt. 12 29 and Heb. 2 14 f.],
and he who was judged judging quick and dead, . . . who was
buried on the day of the Passover, a stone being set upon the
tomb." 16
But while we can be perfectly certain that it was the victory of
Christ over the power of Sheol which was celebrated by quarto-
decimans in the annual breaking of fast on the fourteenth of
Nisan, and while the greatest importance was attached to the exact
determination of the true date of this single day, it is equally
certain that the ancient Oriental observance did not attempt to
determine from the traditions of manifestations, discoveries of
the empty condition of the tomb, Scriptural predictions, or other
wise, just how long after the crucifixion this triumph known as
the resurrection, or return from Sheol, had occurred. Indeed, a
letter of Basilides, bishop of the parishes in Pentapolis, consults
Dionysius of Alexandria as to the hour when the fast commemo
rative of the Lord's passion should be terminated by the feast
of the resurrection, some of the brethren thinking they should
do it at cock-crow, others "from the evening." "He was at a
loss," says Drummond, "how to fix an exact hour; for while it
would be 'acknowledged by all alike' that they ought to begin
their festivities after the time of the resurrection of our Lord,
and to humble their souls by fasting up to that time, the Gospels
16 Epiphanius, Haer. drat- yip toB Utovs ptav iipipav tov iriaxa. of toiovtoi
(quartodecimans) <pCKovelKw$ ILyovo-i.
16 Apollinaris of Hierapolis in Paschal Chronicle.

70 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
contained no exact statement of the hour at which he rose." 1J Diony-
sius in his reply does not pretend that he can solve this question
of the exact time of the resurrection, but recommends a lati-
tudinarian tolerance of difference in mode of observance.
It is perfectly clear from this and other accounts of ancient
commemoration of Jesus' death and resurrection that the two
were celebrated together, and that no attempt was made to draw
such inferences as moderns draw from the story of the women at
the sepulchre regarding the day and hour when Jesus had been
(in Pauline language) "clothed upon" with his "body of glory."
If for a time memory lingered of the Pauline correspondence be
tween Firstfruits on Nisan 16 and a scripture (Hos. 62?) pre
dicting resurrection on "the third day," it soon disappeared.
Clement's reference stands isolated. The second-century church,
at least in the Orient, thought of, and celebrated, Jesus' death
and resurrection as practically simultaneous. Indeed, the Gos
pel of Peter makes even the ascension take place from the cross
itself immediately after the great cry.18
Dr. Erwin Preuschen even goes so far as to say:
In the Orient Sunday was not known as the day of resurrection,
and hence there was no weekly celebration of this day [but cf. Acts
20 7 and Rev. 1 10], but in the Occident Wednesday and Friday
were regular fast-days, and Sunday was celebrated as the day of
resurrection. It is doubtful whether the Occident possessed in
addition a special day in the year for the commemoration of the
death and of the resurrection of the Lord.19
We cannot agree with this scholar that the hebdomadal system
of the church originated in the West and was unknown to the East.
It is essentially Jewish in character, and would have been most
pronounced among the earliest churches, where synagogue prac
tice was taken over with least alteration. The very document
on which Dr. Preuschen seems to base his statement regarding
semi-weekly fasts 20 is almost certainly of Syrian origin, and
17 Character and Authorship of the Fourth Gospel, p. 471. The italics are
ours. 18 "And the Lord cried out, saying, My Power, my Power, thou hast forsaken
me. And as soon as he had spoken he was taken up" (xoi eiirtlic d»«Xi}097().
19 New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopaedia, Art. "Easter," vol. iv (1909), pp. 46 f.
M Didache, 8 1.

JESUS AS LORD 71
the fasts on the fourth day of the week and the Preparation
(irapao-KojiJ) are expressly set over against those of "the hypo
crites" on "the second and fifth" (cf. Luke 18 12). The heb
domadal system of the church is certainly of synagogue origin,
all the more because such pains are taken to distinguish its festal
"first day" from the festal "seventh day" of "the hypocrites,"
and its fourth-day and sixth-day fasts from their fasts on the sec
ond and fifth days of the week. But Preuschen is entirely cor
rect in saying that observance of "the Lord's day" had no such
origin as we of the West, following the Roman tradition of Mark
and the Synoptic Gospels,21 have been accustomed to suppose.
His appeal to the immemorial rite of quartodeciman observance
on the part of all the more ancient churches, explicitly and rightly
justified as it was by apostolic tradition and practice, is con
clusive on this point. Preuschen's inference from the history
of the long controversy is as follows:
The Christians of' Asia Minor must have celebrated the mystery
of the resurrection on the day on which the fast [the annual fast
commemorating the Passion] was broken, and this day was not
Sunday but the fourteenth of Nisan, around which the controversy
revolved. This conclusion is justified by the account of Epiphanius
concerning the quartodecimans (that is, those who commemorated
the Lord's death on the 14th), in which he relates that fasting and
the celebration of the resurrection took place on the same day. . . .
The Christians of Asia Minor appealed to an old apostolic tradition
according to which Jesus rose on the evening of the day of his death,
and the opposition of the Occidentals was directed mainly against
the commemoration of death and resurrection on the same day.
In one respect this statement requires correction. It was not
the "resurrection" of Jesus in our sense of the word that quarto
decimans commemorated "on the same day" as the crucifixion
(better, after a vigil corresponding to the vigil of Passover, which
extended in many cases "until cock-crowing"), nor did they hold
that he "rose" (that is, manifested his presence to his disciples
on earth) on the fourteenth. They accepted the same gospels
that we do, and were indignant at the charge of going counter to
them. They probably held just as Paul did, and perhaps on the
21 Even the quartodeciman Fourth Gospel is affected on this point by its
predecessors (cf. Jn. 20).

72 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
basis of the same "scriptures," that "he was raised (vy^i)
on the third day," that is, on the sixteenth, or day of Firstfruits.22
What the quartodeciman festival commemorated was, as Apolli-
naris clearly (though somewhat rhetorically) states, the "binding
of the strong man," that is, the. church's victory over "the gates
of Sheol," accomplished when Christ "through death overcame
him that had the power of death, and delivered us who through
fear of death were all our life-time subject to bondage." It is
the true Oriental, pre-christian doctrine of the "Harrowing of
Hell" which underlies it, and is reflected in unmistakable terms
in the fifth of Hippolytus's Heads against Caius:
The heretic Caius [ca. 180 a.d.] objects [to Rev. 20 2 f.] that
"Satan had already been bound, according to what is written [in
Mt. 12 29] that Christ entered the house of the strong man, and
bound him, and despoiled him of us his vessels."
It thus becomes unmistakably clear that the celebration of the
Passover among the Oriental churches, as taken over from the
synagogue through the very hands of the apostles themselves,
became in Christian interpretation a feast of redemption indeed
as before, but — of redemption from the darkness and bondage of
Sheol. The imagery is perfectly familiar to us from the epistles
of Paul, and must have been at least equally famihai to every
communicant in "the Supper of the Lord." The mere date
when it became known that the tomb was empty, or when indi
viduals were lifted out of their despairing unbelief, whether by
"visions of angels" or "manifestations of the Lord," was to the
Oriental Christian's mind a matter of quite secondary importance.
He resented the attempt of Rome and the West to force upon him
a delay in the breaking of his fast until "the Lord's day"; and
denied the validity of their ground, namely, that the Jerusalem
traditions regarding the sepulchre, which since the days of Mark's
Roman gospel had begun to supersede the Galilean as given by
Paul (1 Cor. 15 l-ll), proved "that the mystery of the Lord's
resurrection from the dead" had taken place at a specified day
and hour and therefore "should be celebrated on no other day
than the Lord's day."
" Cf . the statement of Clement cited above, p. 219, note.

JESUS AS LORD 73
Our protracted inquiry into the primitive apostolic celebration
of the resurrection will be justified by the importance of the re
sult. We need not prolong it by a consideration, however inter
esting historically, or strong in corroboration, of the later attempts
at harmonization. We can only refer the reader to Preuschen's
explanation of the curious calculation of the "three days" in the
Syriac Didascalia, which treats the three hours' darkness on the
crucifixion day as a "night." We must also pass over his analo
gous explanation of the equally curious phraseology of Mt. 28 l.
In our judgment the inquiry already fully justifies the statement
with which we began, that at least so far as the ancient Oriental
churches or those of apostolic or Pauline foundation are con
cerned, "the whole group of traditions which centres about the
sepulchre, found empty by the women and others 'on the third
day,' is absolutely excluded as accounting for the observance of
'the Lord's day.'" Their dating on that particular day is a
consequence, not a cause of the practice.
But this leaves the practice itself still to be accounted for.
Moreover, as we have just seen, the hebdomadal system, so far
from being a mere Western innovation, as Preuschen appears to
hold, is rooted in the most ancient apostolic observance. The
innovation of the West consists merely in a perversion of its sig
nificance. The three characteristics which should guide us to a more
trustworthy judgment of the origin of "the Lord's day" are (1)
its Jewish derivation, (2) its hebdomadal observance, (3) its
festival character. It unquestionably began as a commemora
tion of some signal event in the history of the church. But we
have seen that the resurrection was otherwise commemorated,
and the mere accounts of "manifestations," even that to Peter,
which in the earliest times was by far the most important, were not
understood as determining the date of the Lord's triumph over
Sheol. One "manifestation," however, did remain fixed in the.
memory of the church, not only because of the significance which
from the beginning appears to have been attached to it, but be^.
cause, as tradition most credibly avers, it coincided in date with
the annual Jewish "Feast of Weeks." If any one day could be
pointed to in the whole history of the church worthy of perpetual

74 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
commemoration as "the Lord's day," it would be the day when
according to apostolic belief he was enthroned " at the right hand
of God." The phenomena which accompanied the first "out
pouring of the Spirit " are appealed to in different ways by both
"Peter" and Paul as proving the exaltation of Jesus to the
supreme Lordship (Acts 2 33, Eph. 4 7-10). Both apostles see
in it a fulfilment of the coronation ode, Ps. 110: "Yahweh said
unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine
enemies thy footstool." So vital was this conviction to the primi
tive church that it became incorporated in the earliest baptismal
confession: "He ascended into heaven and sitteth on the right
hand of God."
But is it capable of proof that this supreme day of the "demon
stration of the Spirit and of power" was really a "first day of the
week"; and, if so, was there any reason why it should be com
memorated by weekly, instead of annual, observance? Both
questions can be answered in the affirmative. Lev. 23 1-21
gives the "perpetual statute" of the feasts of wheat-harvest,
introduced by the law of the Passover on Nisan 14 (ver. 5).
Verses 9-14 give the "perpetual statute" of Firstfruits "on the
morrow after the Sabbath" (Nisan 16). Next follows the "per
petual statute" of Pentecost, which celebrated the conclusion
of the seven weeks of wheat-harvest:
And ye shall count unto you from the morrow after the sabbath
[of Passover week], from the day that ye brought the sheaf of the
wave offering [Firstfruits]; seven sabbaths shall there be complete:
even unto the morrow after the seventh sabbath shall ye number
fifty days . . . and ye shall make proclamation on the selfsame day;
there shall be an holy convocation unto you; ye shall do no servile
work; it is a statute for ever in all your dwellings throughout your
generations.
This law of Pentecost, or "the Feast of Weeks," is the founda
tion of the Jewish hebdomadal system. The new moon of Nisan
fixed the annual calendar, whose first great feast was Passover at
the full of the moon. Nisan 16 with its ritual of the sheaf of \
firstfruits was the starting-point for the seven-weeks' period of \
wheat-harvest, culminating in Pentecost, which would thus by j

JESUS AS LORD 75
one interpretation always fall on "the first day of the week."23
Moreover, it constituted a kind of second Sabbath, which, as we
know, was the mode of observance of "the Lord's day" in the
primitive Christian communities. Of these communities nothing
is more certain than their assiduous devotion to the festal system
of the Law. Passover and Pentecost, so far from being discon
tinued, were redoubled in significance. The redemption-feast, as
we have seen, became the feast of the new and greater redemp
tion through the death of Christ, a commemoration of his break
ing of the bars of Sheol. Pentecost also continued in redoubled
honor, observed even in the Pauline churches (1 Cor. 16 8,
Acts 20 6, 16). And not only so, but the intervening period
of the seven weeks of wheat-harvest long continued, as among
the Jews, to be a period of continuous festivity, "the joy of
harvest." Says Drummond, summarizing the statements of
Eusebius: So full of joy was the time [of Easter] that they feasted for seven
whole weeks, till "another great feast," Pentecost, came in.24
No doubt whatever exists as to the new meaning attached by
Jewish believers of the earliest time to the festival of Pentecost
as an annual observance. It was the day on which he who
had "become the first fruits of them that slept" entered into the
full possession of the inheritance; and of this fact had given the
assurance by a showering of the Earnest (dppa/Mv) upon his
followers. But what of the old-time significance of the day to
pious Jews as the foundation of the hebdomadal system? Is it
likely that for Christians there woidd be in succeeding years no
special significance in the period of rejoicing, which was marked
for them above their fellow Jews by the fact that it had been filled
with successive manifestations of the risen Lord? According
to the tradition these manifestations had followed in rapid suc
cession from the time when, some ten days after the crucifixion,
the Lord "appeared to Cephas" down to Pentecost itself. It was
28 Orthodox rabbinic interpretation of the legal date "the morrow after the
sabbath" seems to have given it the sense as early as New Testament times of
Nisan 16, regardless of the day of the week. Samaritan and sectarian prac
tice made Firstfruits (and consequently Pentecost) fall invariably on Sunday.
24 Character and Authorship of the Fourth Gospel, p. 466.

76 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
the period during which "he presented himself alive after his
passion by many proofs, appearing unto them by the space of
forty days." And if early Christian observance of this festal
period followed the same analogy as the other observances which
they took over from the religion of their fathers, their kindred,
and their own childhood, it would be almost inevitable that
these "manifestations" should follow the hebdomadal order and
begin to be dated uniformly on "the Lord's day. "
If, then, we look to Paul, and not to the relatively late tra
dition of the Roman editor of our second canonical gospel, for
an explanation of primitive observance of "the Lord's day," we
shall find it in the wide-spread and primitive Oriental observ
ance of a festival of corn-harvest, which among Jews at least
covered a period of seven weeks, beginning and ending — in the
year of the crucifixion — on "the first day of the week."
That inferences regarding the first Lord's day were based on
Scripture rather than on tradition is clear, from 1 Cor. 15 4.
When at last tradition forsook the older Galilean narrative, and
began to build on the Jerusalem form first known to us in the
Roman Gospel of Mark, it was inevitable that the resurrection
"on the third day" should be interpreted not with reference to
Passover and Firstfruits, but with reference to "the Lord's day"
of an established Christian hebdomadal system.
Our study of the primitive institution of "the Lord's day,"
intricate as the course of argument must be, leads to a conclu
sion thoroughly in harmony with that based upon literary and
philological grounds. Primitive christology rested not so much
upon Scripture, nor even upon phrases caught from the lips of
Jesus, as upon the experience of the church. First had come the
reawakened faith of Peter, then of the Twelve. Peter's brethren
were "strengthened" in the conviction that God had raised Jesus
from the dead. But the experience which created Christianity
was the "baptism of the Spirit." In it was given the assurance
of his exaltation to " the right hand of God ." By it he was " mani
fested as the Son of God with power."
For believing Jew and Greek alike this implied that God would
soon send Jesus back again to judgment as "the Christ." For it
is Paul's teaching as well as Peter's that "we must all stand before

JESUS AS LORD 77
the judgment-seat of Christ." And so far as doctrinal content is
concerned, no more was implied when Christians of Semitic mode
of speech declared that Jesus had been manifested as "the Son of
Man." It does, however, make a great difference to moderns
whether by the strict canons of criticism we are obliged to hold
that this christology of the apocalyptists, resting as it does upon
the more morbid developments of later Judaism, has its ground in
fundamental elements of the teaching of Jesus himself; or whether
we may hold, in accordance with the argument now brought to
its conclusion, that the doctrine of Jesus as "Son of Man," and
the doctrine of Jesus as "Lord," are parallel developments of a
common experience. That experience we believe to have beent
the gift of the Spirit of adoption which teaches us to cry Abba,
Father. Historically speaking, there could be no other media
tion of that Spirit to humanity than through him who has taught
us, once and for all, by word and action, in his life and in his
death, what it is to be a "Son of God."

PART II
THE CHRISTOLOGY OF PETER

THE CHRISTOLOGY OF PETER 81

THE CHRISTOLOGY OF PETER
The foregoing series of studies on three of the principal titles
applied by the primitive Church to its risen Lord has only paved
the way for the great problem, a problem antecedent even to that
of the Christology of Paul. Important and enlightening studies1
have been made of late years in tracing the development of Paul's
interpretation of the person and work of Christ. His Christology
shows itself a true incarnation doctrine already fully equipped
with the idea of preexistence. It has unmistakable affinities with
the speculative tendencies of later Judaism, including elements
scarcely represented, if at all, in Synoptic literature. On the
other hand the Christology of the Petrine speeches of Acts has
absolutely no trace of any doctrine of preexistence. It is an apo
theosis doctrine. It can only be reconciled with the Christology
of Mark (adopted by subsequent evangelists) by means of the
exegetical device of the Christus futurus. The "prophet" who
has been "made" Christ and Lord by the resurrection (Acts 2
32-36) has not been the Christ before, even on earth, to say
nothing of preexistence.
It is clear that in becoming a Christian Saul of Tarsus simply
transferred to the person of the glorified Jesus the attributes
which as an educated and progressive Pharisee he had learned tp
attach to the person of the expected Messiah. One important
connecting link would seem to have been the identification of
"the Spirit" exhibited in the various charismatic gifts of primU
tive believers, with the personality of Jesus.2 The spirit of wisdom;
prophecy, service, in the church could not be other than the
"spirit of God" manifested in Old Testament worthies. Froni1
this the transition was easy to a further identification with the
Wisdom of God, hypostatized in the Wisdom literature. Christ
1 See especially W. Sanday, Christologies Ancient and Modern, 1910; J. Weiss,
Christ: The Beginnings of the Dogma, 1911; J. C. Granbery, Outline of N. T.
Christology, 1909; and W. Bauer's edition (1911) of Holtzmann's Neutestament
liche Theologic
2 2 Cor. 3 17 f.

82 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
became thus the First-born of the creation, through whom are
all things, and in whom all things consist.3 As "the Spirit"
he was the guiding, enlightening, and redemptive agency mani
fested in the training of the people of God, the " spiritual following
rock from which they drank." 4
But Paul also identifies this preexistent Christ with the "second
Adam" or "heavenly man," made in the image of God and des
tined to have dominion over the entire creation (Gen. 1 26-28).
This, on the basis of the rabbinic category of preexistence, would
be implied in the conception of the Christ as "the Heir," the
"Son of God's love," the "Lord" to whom angels and principal
ities and powers have been, or are to be, made subject. AH
things are thus "unto," as well as "through" him. These doc
trines no qualified scholar will maintain to have been derived
by Paul by direct acceptance from the teachings of Jesus. The
only question that can be raised is whether to any extent they are
directly due to current Hellenistic ideas, reflecting popular forms
of the Stoic doctrine of the creative Logos; or whether they can
be completely accounted for in Pauline (and to some extent even
in pre-Pauline) Christology by the indirect influence of Platonic
and later Greek ideas, so notoriously prevalent among the Phari
sees. For Gamaliel himself, we are told, was the most distin
guished champion of these Greek studies. By birth, by tem
perament, and by training, Saul of Tarsus, most progressive of
the Pharisees (the progressive party in the direction of transcen
dental messianism), was the man of all men to entertain in most
extreme form that type of pre-Christian Christology wherein
his writings actually show their most marked distinction from the
non-Pauline elements of the New Testament. The most recent
results of New Testament science, exploring the mazes of Hellen
istic theosophical mythology, have shown the abundant prece
dent that exists in later Jewish and Hellenistic speculation for
the pre-Christian element of Paul's Christology. The studies
of R. H. Charles, Bousset, Volz, and others have made it clear,
for example, how this doctrine of Israel (and by logical in
ference Israel's representative the Messiah) as the heir of the
3 Col. 1 15-17, cf. Sap. 7 24-27.
4 1 Cor. 10 4; cf. 1K.1 11.

THE CHRISTOLOGY OF PETER 83
creation, destined to dominion over the entire universe of created
beings, angels themselves included, is rooted in the promise to
that Adam "which was the son of God" (Gen. 1 26-28; cf. Lk.
3 38). But there were other connecting links between Pauline and
pre-Pauline Christology besides an identification of "the Spirit"
with the personality of Jesus, and besides the concepts of current
transcendental messianism. Though neither the Pauline Epistles
nor the Petrine speeches display acquaintance with the title
Son of man, there can be no question that it was already current.
Paul's application of Ps. 8 to the glorified Christ6 suggests the
fact, and it may even be that the titles "second Adam" and
"heavenly man" (avOpwros orovpawos) are related to the Dan-
ielic. We have questioned whether Jesus himself ever em
ployed the title Son of man otherwise than in general, objective,
and impersonal references to the coming agent of divine judg
ment, especially in stereotyped phrases, such as "the day of the
Son of man"; but the beginnings of its application to him per
sonally are coeval with faith in his return as judge of the world
— a constant of primitive evangelism.6 If Paul did not actually
hear the application of the title to Jesus from the lips of Stephen,
he must have heard it from others even before his conversion, and
the very use of this title implies at least a potential doctrine
of preexistence, while passages such as Mk. 2 10, 28 and Mt.
11 l9=Lk. 7 34 (Q) make such a doctrine logically unavoidable.
In the historical perspective of developing Christology the ap
plication of the title Son of man to Jesus individually and per
sonally cannot, therefore, be made antecedent to the Christology
of the Petrine speeches of Acts; for here preexistence is ex
cluded. Jesus is "made" Lord and Christ by the resurrection,
and hence has not been such before. Moreover this type of
adoptionism is immovably established as the primitive Christol
ogy by the support of Paul in his most general affirmation of the
common faith (Rom. 1 4). The true_place of the title Son of
man, therefore, in the order of historical development is between
the Christology of the Petrine source of Acts, and the Chris-
6 1 Cor. 15 27.
6 Cf . Acts 2 40, 3 21, 10 42, 17 31 with Gal. 1 4, 1 Thess. 1 10, etc.

84 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
tology of Paul. It forms a connecting link, and no more, though^
a link of vital importance.
Trustworthy explanation of the origins of New Testament
Christology depends, then, upon an adequate tracing of the inter
relation between the Hellenized Pharisean messianism which
Paul would inherit from his rabbinic training, and the imper
fectly developed Christology which came to him by contact with
earlier believers. Our New Testament documents are all later
than this fusion, though the elements are still distinguishable.
The Pauline Christology, already composite, the Petro-Pauline,
and the Johannine, are the three great factors out of which,
through successive prevalence now of a Jewish-Christian Adop-
tionism, now of a Hellenistic Docetism or Monarchianism, the
Church at last developed its Nicene Confession.
Our present concern is not with the doubly and triply complex
Christology of the post-Pauline literature, nor even with that
element of the Pauline which Paul brought from pre-Christian
or non-Christian sources, but solely with that which came to
him from earlier believers. And this is the vital problem. Start
with Paul's application to the person and work of Jesus of the
categories of the Hellenistic religions of redemption, so prevalent
in the world from which he came, and there will be little difficulty
in accounting for the subsequent development. But this is not
starting far enough back. The real question is, How came Paul
to apply these extraordinary attributes to the Nazarene Prophet
whom the publicans and sinners since his crucifixion had begun
to hail as Messiah and Lord?
A mind so logical and critical as Paul's, so insistent on testing
even the material content of prophetic vision in the sober court of
reason and conscience, could not have found complete and lasting
satisfaction in the ascription of these transcendent attributes to
Jesus of Nazareth without cogent reason. We must give due
weight to the unquestionable fact that Saul in the course of his
persecutions had encountered an exalted type of Christology in
the person of many a victim prepared like Stephen to give the
witness of martyrdom to the sincerity and earnestness of his
faith, and to the equally patent fact that, however great the
differences between Paul and those who were apostles before him,

THE CHRISTOLOGY OF PETER 85
there is no evidence that in respect to Christology they were not
substantially agreed. Indeed while Paul nowhere mentions
Stephen or any other specific victim of his persecuting days,
he does intimate in clear and unambiguous language that the
experience which had made of him a new man in Christ Jesus was
not unprecedented. There is even a resemblance strong enough
to suggest real psychological dependence between his own vision
of the glorified Jesus standing forth in defence of his persecuted
followers, and the apostrophe of Stephen (reported in Acts 7 54-60
as taking place in the presence of Paul) to the Son of man, the
"righteous judge"7 "standing at the right hand of God."
At all events Paul freely admits that the experience by which he
was regenerated and commissioned with his apostleship and his
gospel was not primary. God, who had "energized in him unto
an apostleship of the Gentiles" had previously energized unto a
more limited apostleship in others.8 His experience had been
simply the last of a series, not different in kind from its prede
cessors.9 The common gospel which all preached was the mani
festation by God of the risen Jesus as "His Son." 10 The first to
undergo this experience had been Peter. God had "energized
in Peter unto an apostleship of the circumcision."
The recognition of this fact evokes a new psychological problem
antecedent to that of Paul. Our new question must be how those
who were "apostles" and believers "before him," beginning with
Peter, came to have the experience expressed in their Christology;
a Christology which, as we have seen, remains even down to the
period of the Synoptic writers still clearly distinguishable from the
Pauline, in the characteristic absence of the Hellenistic factor.
For Synoptic Christology, though more developed than that of
the Petrine speeches of Acts, is still fundamentally, as we have
seen, an apotheosis, as against an incarnation, doctrine. The
cosmological and speculative aspects are still wanting. Pre
existence, if implied at all, appears only in the self-application,
imputed to Jesus, of the title Son of man. Even the narratives
of virgin-birth rather exclude than favor it.
Our quest, then, is no longer the Pauline, but the pre-Pauline
7 2 Tim. 4 8. s Gal. 2 8; cf. 2 Cor. 4 6 ("our hearts").
9 1 Cor. 15 5-8. " Rom. 1 1-4.

86 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
Christology. But contemporary documents are wanting. The
earliest and most fundamental of the Gospels already employs
the Petrine story in the interests of Pauline doctrine. Direct
record of Petrine or Matthaean tradition we have none. Paul
• himself is our chief witness; for Paul himself makes occasional
direct reference to Petrine Christology, and on the other hand,
as we have seen, elements of Pauline Christology such as
the preexistence doctrine can be identified as distinctively
his own.
This, then, is the Christological problem of our time. It is
comparatively easy to understand how a Hellenist by birth, out
stripping even the most advanced Pharisean doctrine of his time
in the process of transcendentalizing the messianic hope into a
cosmic process of redemption, agonizing to the distraction of his
soul in the Stoic antithesis of flesh and spirit, brought to the
extremity of despair by the sudden discovery of the hopelessness
of redemption and life by the Pharisean road of legalism, should
have undergone violent reaction to the standpoint of his victims,
if these victims thought of the "Lord" or "Christ" in whom they
trusted as fulfilling the functions of a personal Redeemer. But
what reason have we to suppose that they did? How could the
pre-Pauline Christology have come to be sufficiently Pauline to
account for Paul's sudden discovery that it contained the solu
tion of his soul's deep need?
The data available for determination of the nature of pre-Pauline
Christology fall at once, according to the relative directness of the
evidence supplied, into two classes: (1) References and implica
tions of Paul; (2) statements and implications of the non-Pauline
tradition. 1. The recent attempts of an extreme school of idealistic
monists to excise from the admittedly genuine Pauline writings
all explicit references to the historic Jesus, such as the account
In 1 Cor. 11 23 ff. of the institution of the "Lord's Supper" on
"the night in which the Lord Jesus was betrayed," and even the
references to the common apostolic gospel of the crucifixion and
resurrection in 1 Cor. 15 l-ll, founded on the "appearance to
Cephas," are not only arbitrary and violent, but logically self-
destructive. The marvel to be accounted for is the connecting

THE CHRISTOLOGY OF PETER 87
by such a thinker, writer, and theologian as Paul, of his ex hypo-
thesi transcendental Hellenistic conceptions, his pre-Christian
messianism, his idea, whencesoever derived, of a Redeemer-god
passing through the avatar of incarnation, conflict with the powers
of darkness, glorification, with the personality of the crucified
Nazarene. It does not elucidate this problem, it only aggravates
it, to remove the connecting figures of Peter and the pre-Pauline
believers. All the critical and exegetical violence resorted to in
championing the absolute originality of Paul, the disposition to
ignore the Galilean strain in the parentage of his Christology,
are from the historian's point of view completely misapplied and
illogical. A desire to really comprehend the dogma in its origin
and development should lead to just the reverse procedure.
We should search the Pauline writings for every scrap of reference
or allusion to this factor of earlier tradition emanating from the
Galilean following of Jesus ; for this alone can historically account
for the extraordinary pied-a-terre of the Pauline metaphysic.
To account for the attachment of Paul's pre-Christian, abstract,
messianism to the person of the crucified Galilean Prophet, a his
torical transition point is indispensable; precisely such a point
¦t as we find in the experience of Peter, at first a companion and
* disciple of the Nazarene, admittedly in face of the approaching
tragedy more or less out of sympathy with his Master in respect
fto messianic expectations; yet afterwards undergoing a great
"conversion," from which he emerges the leader and representa
tive of a new type of Christological doctrine. The significant
/thing is that in this new Christology of Peter Paul recognizes no
'essential difference from his own. Here, then, is the psycho
logical transition point. If there were no Peter to account for
Pauline Christology, we should have had to invent one.
Paul's own writings are not devoid of implications concerning
this antecedent Christology of Peter. The very fact of his perse
cution of "the church of God" (Gal. 1 13) is unaccountable if to
Saul, the legalist,11 its doctrine was not in fundamental conflict
with the legalistic doctrine of salvation. While its Christology
may have been offensive, this is not presented either by Luke or
Paul as the chief occasion for persecution. Doubtless the phrase
11 Phil. 3 6, 9.

88 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
"I strove to make them blaspheme" (Acts 26 ll), and the inflic
tion of the death penalty, may be best accounted for by a Chris
tology regarded as punishable under the law of Dt. 13. But this
is not made prominent. The Lukan narrative is singularly free
from the idea represented in Mk. 14 60-64 (an editorial addition)
that Jesus' disciples were charged with blasphemy on this ac
count. When Pharisean persecution breaks out, soon if not from
the start under the leadership of Paul, its occasion is "the con
troversy that arose about Stephen," and the original charges
against Stephen refer to Jewish prerogative. His doctrine opposes
"the temple" and "the law." The blasphemy (?) of his appeal
to "the Son of man" is incidental. So for Paul also the supreme
issue between the old faith and the new is not Christological but
"the law" as a basis of justification.12 In Peter's case as fully as
in his own there had been, to his mind, no escape from the alter
native: law, or Christ. Fidelity to either was impossible without
infidelity to the other. This is the whole point of the retrospec
tive argument of Gal. 2 15-21. It is true that Peter at Antioch
was still unready to admit this alternative. But according to
Paul it was something he should have perceived to be true from
the very outset, and in view of the basic position it occupies in
Paul's thought we shall do well to think of it as governing his
action as a persecutor as well as that later action as a Christian
which reversed its application. Paul persecuted, so far as we can
judge from his own expressions, because the doctrme of grace
which he encountered in his victims "frustrated the righteousness
which is of the law," the death of Christ making the law "of
none effect." 13 On both sides, then, the matter in question be
longs to a religion of personal redemption. "The faith of Christ"
has become with individuals, more or less consciously, a substitute
for Mosaism as a ground of acceptance with God. If this be
indeed a fact, it is a phenomenon of fundamental historical sig
nificance. How is it to be accounted for?
One conspicuous testimony remains, surely pre-Pauline, and
yet no less surely of origin subsequent to the crucifixion, which
emphatically confirms our inference as to the motive of Paul's
persecution, and throws light upon the strange expressions of the
12 Gal. 2 15-21. >» Cf . Gal. 2 21 with 1 Cor. 15 3.

THE CHRISTOLOGY OF PETER 89
creed he imputes to Peter. The distinctive rite by which mem
bers of the new sect set themselves apart as a brotherhood await
ing the advent of the Messiah and the institution of the divine
kingdom was an adaptation of John's "baptism unto remission
of sins." We must indeed acquit the primitive circle of believers
of any conscious intention to separate themselves from the gen
eral body of pious sons of Abraham. They were Israelites with
out guile, and fully intended to remain such. To their mind the
formation of a brotherhood of believers in Jesus as the Messiah,
sealed to him by this initiatory rite, only emphasized the more
their fidelity to "the hope of Israel" witnessed in the law and the
prophets. It was a segregation after the same type as the Phar
isee's, whose name of "Separatist" signified his withdrawal into
a chaber, (i.e. a "neighborhood") of punctilious observers of every
Mosaic ordinance and every interpretative tradition of the scribes.
Pharisaism denoted a Puritanic "withdrawal" from the laxer,
half -heathen, practice of "the people of the land." If Essenes
could withdraw in ascetic celibacy, employing lustrations of their
own, and Pharisees could form brotherhoods of stricter legalists,
holding aloof from the mixed multitude, why should not the be
lievers in the risen Jesus as the coming Messiah set themselves
apart by a "baptism of repentance unto remission of sins"?
To the Pharisee, however, the cases could not seem parallel.
His "separation" was for the purpose of a stricter observance of
the law. Those from whom he withdrew were largely of the very
class of "publicans and sinners" who were now aspiring to a
"share in the world to come" by other and extra-legal methods.
Their consolidation might to some extent be a reaction provoked
by his own; but it was a consolidation in the opposite sense. The
rite of initiation adopted by them at the very formation of their
obnoxious brotherhood of Jesus, under a conviction that such was
the commandment of the spirit of Jesus, and explicitly sealing
them with his name, could seem to the consistent Pharisee noth
ing less than a taking of the kingdom of heaven by violence.
The publicans and sinners would on this plan receive the Phari
see's reward by mere "grace," or favor, of Jesus. Logically, then,
as Paul distinctly saw, both before and after his conversion,
baptism must become wholly or in part a substitute for "the yoke
of the law."

90 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
Clearly the adoption of the rite was in reality a harking back
to the warning of John the Baptist to prepare by repentance, re
gardless of Abrahamic descent or prerdgative, for the impendmg
Day of Yahweh. Because God in the exaltation of Jesus had
"given assurance to all that he hath appointed a day of judg
ment," repentance and baptism were the immediate steps to be
taken. Neither Peter, nor any who had been with him and like
Peter had been disloyal, felt ready to stand before the judgment
seat until they had sought forgiveness. And the forgiveness was
sought not on the ground of their relation to Israel or the law,
but on the ground of their relation to Jesus. They were no longer
reckoned Abraham's, but Christ's. Baptism had become a cir
cumcision "into the name of Jesus."
Nothing then so fully and adequately explains Paul's persecu
tion as the practice of baptism. Better than aught else its adop
tion marks the transition between the condition of the disciples
of Jesus as members of the old Israel, and their condition as mem
bers of a people of God not after the flesh. He who was baptized
into the name of Jesus, confessing bis sins, acknowledged that he
thereby sought "to be justified from all things from which he could
not be justified by the law of Moses." u His faith in Jesus as the
Christ, and self -surrender to him, became to the baptized disciple
a new "Way," a Way of "grace," a means of personal redemption
apart from the national redemption of Israel. Logically, then,
— though this was less apparent to the untrained minds of such
as Peter than to the rigorous logic of Paul — baptism, with the faith
that it implied, must inevitably be looked upon as a means of
"justification (forgiveness) apart from works of law." We have
here a clew to the seemingly unwarranted imputation made by
Paul in Gal. 2 15-18 of his own distinctive gospel of "justification
by faith apart from works of law" to his antagonist Peter. Thus
the one clear and unmistakable testimony, wholly independent
of Paul, which comes down to us from the pre-Pauline church is
the rite of baptism into the name of Jesus "for the forgiveness of
sins." This was the distinctive, conspicuous mark of those whom
Paul had persecuted as a zealot for the law. They made the
law of none effect. A Pharisee could not well be expected to see
14 Cf. Acts 13 38 f .

THE CHRISTOLOGY OF PETER 91
any other significance in the rite than precisely this.16 Surely,
Paul was justified in pointing out to Peter at Antioch that one
cannot put his trust in one ground of acceptance with God with
out ipso facto removing it from the other, and this Petrine doc
trine of grace is the new factor which marks the transition in Peter's
Christology. To Paul's mind at least, Peter's "conversion" had
been a recognition "that a man is not justified through the works
of the law, but only through faith in Jesus as the Christ." 16
We need not recall again that which Paul so often designates
or implies as the formula expressive of the primitive and common
faith, the confession of Jesus as "Lord." That this was elemental
in the Christology of Peter needs no further proof. We have
indeed no specific reference in Paul to indicate that Peter's defini
tion of the term did not differ from his own. But it cannot be
mere accident that our fundamental Petrine sources coincide with
Paul in building upon Ps. 110 1 as the foundation of the doctrine.
Whether it be the speech at Pentecost (Acts 2 34 f.) or Mark's
report of Petrine tradition, presentmg Jesus as confounding the
scribes with the witness of Scripture to his own Lordship (Mk. 12
35-37); or again Paul's allusions to the seating of Jesus "at the
right hand of the Father" (Rom. 8 34, 1 Cor. 15 25-28, Phil. 2
9-ll), there can be no doubt that this sovereignty in Peter's mind
as well as Paul's was universal, comprehensive of angelic and
demonic as well as of human authority. We surely have small
reason to suppose that the control of "spirits" in "the name of
Jesus" was less convincing evidence of this sovereignty to Peter's
mind than to Paul's. In the great battle with Gnostic theosophy
of the subapostolic age it is this doctrine of Lordship (icupioT^s)
which forms the centre of orthodox faith. The later Pauline and
the deutero-Pauline documents are full of insistence upon this
superiority of the Son to angels, his absolute preeminence as
"King of kings and Lord of lords." Can we imagine that on this
point Peter's Christology would have differed from Paul's? On
the contrary, the resistance to a primitive type of Arianism, which
characterizes New Testament Christology as well as that of second
16 Cf. Josephus' defence of the Baptist's rite as "not for the expiation of
sins" (Ant. XVIII, v. 2).
"Gal.. 2 16.

92 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
century fathers, is a direct inheritance from Jewish messianism.
It rests, as we have seen, on the doctrme of the Son as Lord and
heir of creation based on Gen. 1 26-28. Surely, the writer who
but a score of years after the death of Paul and Peter writes in
Peter's name, has done no injustice to the great Apostle of the
circumcision in making him apply the Pauline terminology to
"Jesus Christ, who is gone into heaven and is at the right hand
of God, angels and principalities and powers being made subject
unto him." 1?
As respects the title "Son of God" we must indeed recognize a
difference. It is true that by implication Paul looks back to
Peter's anticipation of his own calling and apostleship, as having
been also a "manifestation of God's Son in him." Both in Gal.
1 16, 2 7 f., and 1 Cor. 15 3-11, the substantial identity in signifi
cance of the "manifestation" is indispensable to the argument.
It is also true that in addressing himself to the Romans, a church
founded independently of his own efforts, and speaking in the
most general terms of the common accepted gospel, Paul refers
to it as the doctrine that Jesus had been "designated the Son of
God with power by the resurrection." 18 But in this very connec
tion he gently deprecates that aspect of the Sonship which is
made prominent in Peter's Pentecostal speech. There the point
of departure is the oath of God sworn to David, "that of the fruit'
of his loins one should sit upon his throne." Only at the close is
the transcendental nature of the fulfilment made plain. Paul's
summary of "the gospel of God" inverts this relation. Only
"according to the flesh" was Jesus "of the seed of David." The
"sonship" is brought into no relation whatever with the theo
cratic promise of 2 Sam. 7 12 f. and the "sure mercies of David."
But it would be easy to exaggerate the importance of this differ
ence. It can be fully accounted for by the difference of occasion.
In the synagogue of Antioch in Pisidia Paul is made by Luke to
repeat the arguments of Peter, while Mark's cavalier treatment
of the doctrine of the Davidic sonship 19 well illustrates how
Petrine Christology could be modified for Rome. Conscious
misrepresentation there certainly is not, either in the case of Mark
» 1 Pt, 3 22. « Rom. 1 4.
19 Cf. Mk. 12 35-37, and the omission of pedigree.

THE CHRISTOLOGY OF PETER 93
or Luke. Peter and Paul were really at one in the belief that Jesus
according to the flesh had been "of the seed of David," though
Mark ignores this. They were also at one in the conviction that
in making him Lord and Christ God was now fulfilling the promise
to David. Only, as we have seen reason to believe, for Paul
the implications of sonship were wider and deeper than such as
inhere in the theocratic application of the term.
Whether Peter's doctrine of the Spirit really coincided with
Paul's to the extent of identifying the spirit of prophecy in
the Scripture writers with the pre-incarnate Christ, as 1 Pt.
1 11 implies, cannot be inferred with strictness from any writing
of Paul's. All that can be said is that the use of formulae of
trinitarian type, and the appeal in anti-Judaistic argument to the
manifestations of the Spirit as the supreme proof of divine adop
tion make it clear that no difference was felt to exist in principle,
however Paul may have felt obliged to distinguish between the
higher, abiding, ethical gifts, and the more spectacular, sought
after by the superficial. The doctrine of mystical union with
Christ by infusion of the Spirit is too closely related to Paul's
distinctive religious experience for us to expect traces of it in
parts of the New Testament not directly dependent upon Pauline
teaching. But who can think that Paul stood alone in identi
fying the Pentecostal outpourings as a working of "the spirit of
Jesus"? 20 Paul at least is not conscious of any departure from
the conviction of "those that were before him" in this pregnant
identification. 2. If now we turn from the implications and allusions of the
Pauline writings to the testimony of later tradition regarding
the Christology of Peter, we shall find it fruitful, even in those
documents which we have least reason to regard as influenced
by Paulinism, in corroboration of the results already attained.
It is true that we solve but one-half the problem in showing how
Peter's Christology might seem in harmony with Paul's from
either apostle's point of view. It is equally needful to under
stand how it could harmonize with the recollections Jesus' in
timate followers must have had of their personal association and
intercourse with him. And here we touch indeed upon the most
20 Cf. Acts 16 7 (R. V.).

94 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
vital point of all our undertaking, the psychological transition
point in the mind of Peter.
It is useless to refer the religious psychology of Paul back to an
antecedent, but comparatively unknown, psychological experi
ence of Peter, unless to some extent we may hope to give account
to ourselves of this primary experience. And if it deserves to be
called a "giving account" of such an experience to refer it baldly
to "the act of God," supernatural and inscrutable, such an "ex
planation " explains nothing. It is utterly sterile, leaving the mind
no more helped or enlightened than before. Either there is no
justification for the attempt to understand, or else the attempt
must begin with the acknowledgment that while Peter's experi
ence, like all other events, great and small, was the act of God, it
too, like all other acts of God, but chiefly such as affect our most
vital interests, calls for reverent inquiry into the mode of God's
action, even to the limit of the resources of the mind.
What we know of Peter's experience when God manifested to
him the glorified Jesus as "Christ" and "Lord" is scanty indeed,
and yet enough to determine its character as transitional or re
constructive in the sense already described. Peter changed his
idea of the Christ. Certainly, if we can depend upon anything in
the whole sphere of gospel tradition, we can depend upon this.
The whole story of the journey to Jerusalem begins with it, the
whole story of the final tragedy revolves about it.
The passage which we must consider fundamental among the
remnants of Petrine tradition is Luke's report of Jesus' outlook
upon a reaction to follow after Peter's desertion and denial. "I
have prayed for thee, Simon, that thy faith fail not; and when
thou art turned again (imo-Tpaj/a's) strengthen (orifpio-ov) thy
brethren." 21 The terms here employed (ono-i-pe'i/fas, arrjpurw),
whether we treat the prediction as wholly authentic, or to greater
or less extent colored by the event, represent a perfectly uniform
tradition as to Peter's part in the founding of the brotherhood
whose corner-stone was the faith that Jesus bad been divinely
delivered from the power of Sheol, and would soon reappear as
the Redeemer of Israel. This is Peter's one title to primacy.
Before the tragedy of Calvary there is little of a reliable character
21 Lk. 22 32.

THE CHRISTOLOGY OF PETER 95
to distinguish him from other members of the group of earliest
disciples. He is not elder than Andrew nor earlier called than
James and John. He is not "first" except in the later, ecclesias-
ticized Gospel of Matthew. His distinction is that he became the
Rock on which the church was founded when the opposing power
was "the gates of Sheol." James and John appear with him in
Paul's references as companion "pillars"; but if we go back to the
earliest tradition there is no rivalry or ambiguity about the matter.
Peter was first to promulgate "the gospel of God" that Jesus had
been "designated as the Christ, the Son of God," by the resurrec
tion.22 His primacy dates, then, from after Calvary.
It is true that there is here a discrepancy between Paul's impli
cations and Synoptic tradition. Mark, in conformity with his
systematic attempt to antedate the divine sonship of Jesus, makes
his Christhood begin at his baptism; the demons recognize it
from his first exorcism. In Mark's view Peter only voices the
conviction of the whole inner circle of disciples in making the
definite acknowledgment at Caesarea Philippi: "Thou art the
Christ." This, then, is already a drastic prolepsis; for Mark
certainly makes no distinction in the confession of Christhood
as meant by Peter at Caesarea Philippi, and Christhood as under
stood in the full Christian sense.23 Matthew goes further still.
Not merely is the Petrine confession carried back as in Mark to
the beginning of the journey to Jerusalem and Golgotha, even
the founding of the church is carried back along with it. Jesus
builds it already on Peter's faith, and makes it already victorious
over the gates of Sheol, although the conflict with the gates of
Sheol is still to come, and Peter's denial and "turning again"
are all as truly events of the future as the Christus futurus whom
he acknowledges, and the ecclesia futura whose keys are placed
in his hand. It hardly needs the parallel in Jn. 21 15-19 to
prove the anachronism of this development upon Mark's story.
Peter's first confession, in spite of the rebuke it is admitted to have
incurred, is to be made as nearly as possible to take the place of
that later experience, the account of which has been so singu
larly eliminated from evangelic story. It is a further step in
the same direction already taken by Mark in introducing here the
22 1 Cor. 15 1-8. *» Cf. Mk. 9 41.

96 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
Transfiguration story, a revelation of the (glorified) Christ to
Peter. It is a notable fact that the Apocalypse of Peter places
the transfiguration after the resurrection.
We have no call on account of this disposition of our evangelists
toward prolepsis to deny the historicity of Peter's first confession.
The evangelists who so assiduously seek to obliterate the distinc
tion between Peter's ascription to Jesus of a Christhood "accord
ing to the things that are of men," and his subsequent recognition
of the glorified Son of God, are not likely to have invented the
story of the rebuke. Neither can we account psychologically for
the later experience without the former. The betrayal, denial,
desertion of Jesus by his followers are facts to be accounted for.
They surely imply a lack of harmony between his ideals and theirs.
The evangelists hold that this was already potentially overcome
by Jesus' inculcation of the Son of man doctrine. In their view
Jesus had explicitly substituted this for his disciples' concep
tion of a Messiah without an antecedent death and resurrection;
only "their hearts were hardened," they were as men who "hav
ing eyes see not, and having ears hear not." But from this
Markan theory, dominant as it became, modern criticism is com
pelled to make important discounts. The utter consternation of
the disciples at the tragedy is incompatible with these explicit
predictions, still more their alleged incredulity at the report of
the resurrection. Both the Petrine Christology in its primitive
form and the Pauline are destitute, as we have seen, of the title
Son of man, and rest upon another conception of Christhood
than the Danielic and apocalyptic. In reality the title Son of
man has been shown to connect itself in origin with the apolo
getic of the cross. Precisely as rabbinic theology reconciles by
means of a doctrine that Messiah is first born as man among men
and thereafter caught away into heaven24 the conflicting ideas
of a Son of David, or a prophet like unto Moses raised up in
Israel, with the transcendental figure of Daniel brought "upon the
clouds;" or again as 2 Esdras meets the same difficulty by the
representation that after a preliminary work in human form
Messiah dies and is immediately resurrected in superhuman,25 so
MPesikta 496, "Messiah, like Moses, will first appear then be withdrawn 45
days"; cf. Rev. 12 5, Jn. 7 27.
26 2 Esdr. 7 28 ff.

THE CHRISTOLOGY OF PETER 97
' early Christian apologetic resorts to the Danielic figure not only
impersonally and objectively, as Jesus had done, but as an ex
planation of the tragedy of Calvary. How could Jesus appear
on the clouds of heaven unto judgment, unless first he were
snatched away from the limitations of his earthly life? But even
in the modified form which the "consistent eschatological"
theory receives at the hands of J. Weiss, it is hard to reconcile
with the conduct of the Twelve. If Jesus really adopted this
"eschatological" answer to their objections to his predictions of
his martyrdom it would seem that they must either have ceased
to be his followers, or else have continued with at least a partial
hope of his prompt return in glory as Son of man upon the clouds
of heaven. The actual course of events implies that Jesus'
disciples accompanied him to Jerusalem with messianic hopes
'and ideals which were not in harmony with his own. Mark's
explanation, which sets the key for subsequent evangelists, repre
sents, it is true, that the only point of difference was the doctrine
of the cross and resurrection, which Jesus met by the Danielic
doctrine, though they refused to receive it. In other points
Master and disciples were at one. But the story itself implies
a far wider difference. We cannot indeed do justice to the facts
without acknowledgment that in some sense Jesus accepted (under
protest) the ascription, "Thou art the Christ." 26 But the whole
point of the narrative is lost and the events themselves become
unintelligible, especially that well termed the "conversion of
Peter," unless we give full significance to the terms of the rebuke
"Thou mindest not the things that be of God, but the things that
be of men" (Mk. 8 33). The difference that divides Jesus from
the twelve from this point on to the resurrection is more than a
difference on the inclusion of martyrdom in Messiah's career,
it is more than the admission or non-admission of the Son of man
doctrine. It is a difference of ethical quality, as the quoted
sayings constantly reveal. Again we reiterate that Jesus' appeal?
to Jerusalem was really intended to be messianic. Historically •
speaking the tragedy of Golgotha remains unaccountable if Jesus
26 On the question raised by Wrede whether Jesus ever countenanced the
application to himself of the messianic name and r61e see my Beginnings of Gospel
Story, pp. 109 ff.

98 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
to escape it had only to say plainly "I am not the Christ." Psy
chologically speaking the resurrection experience of Peter and
those who soon after repeated it is unaccountable, if Jesus before
his death had not in some sense welcomed the title of Messiah.
Peter's mind, if such a vision or "revelation" as Paul's had come
to him after the crucifixion could not have remained satisfied
with it unless it corresponded with the data of his previous life
with Jesus, any more than Paul's mind could have rested in
stable equilibrium after his "revelation," unless the Christ thus
found had met the agonizing yearnings of his soul. Neverthe
less the difference so candidly attested in all evangelic tradition
between Peter's Christology before and after his "conversion,"
the difference emphasized in the great rebuke of Jesus, " Get thee
behind me, Satan," is not the mere lack of a Son of man doctrme.
It is not the deficiency so easily supplied in Luke's narrative of
the walk to Emmaus and subsequent interview with the eleven,
when the risen Jesus "opened to them the scriptures" and showed
them that "thus it is written, and thus it behoved the Christ
to suffer and to enter in to his glbry." 27 These are later softenings
of the more fundamental difference emphasized in the expression
"the things of God — the things of men" (to. tov Oeov — to. tS>v
av6purir<ov).M Only such a deeply religious and moral difference
as this can account for so complete an abandonment of all
hope as the records unanimously attest after the catastrophe.
Conversely, its restoration could be based on no foundation less
adequate than the religio-ethical ideal that at first had found no
welcome. It was the Christology of Jesus, so far as Peter's
penitent thought could reproduce it, with which Peter "turned
again and strengthened his brethren."
We find, then, that it is not merely the implications of the
Pauline Epistles which show the real psychological transition
point to have been in the mind of Peter rather than the mind of
Paul, — implications which have been too greatly discounted as
unconscious adaptations by Paul of Peter's thought to his own.
No; the oldest and most authentic non-Pauline sources show no
less surely that Peter is really entitled to the place of originator
of the first article of the Christian creed, the doctrine that "Jesus
is the Christ," and "Christ" in the Christian sense. Paul is not
27 Lk. 24 25-27 and 44-47. 2S Mk. 8 33.

THE CHRISTOLOGY OF PETER 99
speakmg for himself alone, but for all the bearers of the gospel
message, most of all for those who had been "apostles before
him," when he declares "We (of the ministry of the new covenant)
henceforth know no man after the flesh; yea though (as Jews)
we have known a Christ after the flesh (Kara o-dpica. xp1<tt6v, i.e.,
in Markan phrase, a Christ "after the things of men"), yet
now would we know (such a Messiah) no more." M It is a
reference to the great transition from Jewish messianism to Chris-,
tian Christology, and Paul emphatically does not make it origi
nate with himself. In the exegesis of this passage we must part
company with the able and brilliant author of Christ: The Be
ginning of the Dogma, and hold that there is no reference whatever
in Paul's mind to any acquaintance of his own with Jesus in the
flesh. If any such acquaintance at all is implied (and this is not
a necessary inference), it will be that of Peter and other earlier
apostles, who if the ministry of the new covenant were «ara
crapxa might on this ground have claimed superiority to Paul.
But now this is not the case. They and Paul alike have adopted
a new definition of Christhood. All in common have renounced
that whose fulfilment is in "the flesh," for that whose fulfilment
is "after the Spirit."
We have reviewed the testimony of Paul to Petrine Christol
ogy, and found that while points or shades of difference exist they
are not fundamental. Both apostles have already crossed the real
dividing line which separates Jewish messianism from Christian
Christology. We have compared with this oldest and most au
thentic, though indirect, testimony the testimony of non-Pauline
tradition, endeavoring to give most weight to those sources which
are generally acknowledged to reflect in least altered form the
ancient Petrine gospel. The result has been confirmatory of the
view derived from the Pauline references. Peter's messianism
"according to the things that be of men" bad already been
changed to that ethico-religious form which is distinctive of the
religion of Jesus long before it was possible for him to be affected
by the ideas of Paul. The adoption of the rite of baptism from
the very outset in the church which owed its formation to Peter's
faith is the decisive proof of this. But we have left the supreme
29 2 Cor. 5 16.

100 JESUS THE SON OF GOD
factor in Petrine Christology as yet untouched. How came the
change in Peter's mind? Why was it, that having experienced
the vision or revelation of God's Son, "made Lord and Christ" by
the resurrection, his mind, like Paul's, remained satisfied with
a Christology whose fundamental note — whatever the Jewish
overtones — is distinctively ethico-religious?
To this, our final question, there can be but one answer. Peter's
sense of sin doubtless had much to do with the nature of his
"conversion." The early identification of the risen Lord with
the Danielic Son of man, whose Day had been predicted by Jesus
in further development of the warnings of John the Baptist, and
whose Coming was now the eager expectation of all hearts — this
conception, too, may well have played a part in the development
of Petrine Christology; but it is not the deepest, the most funda
mental. Events and records would have shaped themselves dif
ferently had the transition in Peter's Christology been no more
than the adoption of an eschatological element of Jesus' teach
ing at first excluded as unwelcome. The origin of Peter's change
of mind is to be found in nothing less than his personal and inti
mate relation with Jesus the Son of God.
In the Petrine speeches of Acts as in the Pauline Epistles it
is not the Danielic Christology of the Son of man which dominates.
This figure is absent from both. Of course the eschatological
apocalyptic conception could not fail to be present and prominent
in both; but the Christological figure which belongs to the Petrine
speeches of Acts and the First Epistle of Peter distinctively, being
traceable elsewhere only in a few primitive liturgical passages,
such as the prayer of Clement of Rome, the liturgical prayers of
the DidachS, the dying martyr's prayer in the Martyrdom of Poly-
carp, and the fragment of Apollinarius of Hierapolis on Christ
as the passover victim, is the Isaian figure of the suffering Servant
of Yahweh (5 irais Oeov). It is significant that the only use made
by Paul of this Isaian type of Christological doctrine is in the pas
sage wherein he refers to the gospel teaching received by him
from his predecessors in the faith: "I received . . . how that
Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures."
We need not suppose that the employment of the Isaian figure
of the suffering Servant necessarily goes back to Jesus himself,
though its association with the eucharist must date from extremely

THE CHRISTOLOGY OF PETER 101
early times. But this conclusion we may surely draw from our
review of the various types of primitive Christology: the transi
tion from Jewish messianism to Christian Christology was effected
in the mind of Peter, before the conversion of Paul; and in this
transition the fundamentally efficient factor was Peter's memory
of daily life with Jesus. To have been with him from the begin
ning and witnessed the whole-souled simplicity of his unbroken
walk with God, the serenity of his unconquerable faith in the
heavenly Father, the absolute consecration of a life given without
question or reserve to the "doing of the will of the Father," the
joy and peace of service and trust exemplified in One to whom
sonship meant likeness of disposition and purpose to the Father, —
this morally and religiously ideal life and the heroic death were
deeper influences with one of Peter's stamp than any inherited
forms of religious thought.
It is not so much the words we hear as the life we witness
which most deeply affects our religious convictions, especially if
we be simple and unsophisticated. Psychologically speaking, it
may be true that the vision or revelation of Peter which marks
the origin of the resurrection faith was conditioned upon the in
cident of Caesarea Philippi and the tragedy of Calvary. Possibly
the future historian may say: Peter's psychological experience
when (to use Paul's language) God "energized in him unto his
apostleship," revealing to him Jesus as the risen and glorified
Christ, is unaccountable without the antecedent suggestion of
Christhood in the messianic appeal of Jesus to Jerusalem, and
more tragically still in "the superscription of his accusation,"
making public proclamation that he suffered as "King of the
Jews." Be the proximate and external cause what it may, that
which filled the term "Christ" with its new content, transforming
it from a Jewish to a Christian sense, was the ethico-religious con
ception at first rejected, but now at last imbibed, traceable only to
Jesus himself. Jesus' words about the inwardness of the king
dom, about its essence being the filial relation to God, the doing
of the Father's will by all, gladly, from the heart, — these doubtless
came back to Peter at his "conversion." Most of all Jesus'
spirit and life came back, to give a new meaning to the title
"Son of God." The ultimate author of our Christology is Jesus
himself.