EXTRACT DECLARATION OF TRUST.
March i, 1862.
I, William Binny Webster, late Surgeon in the H.E.I.C.S., presently residing in Edinburgh, — Considering that I feel deeply interested in the success of the Free Church College, Edinburgh, and am desirous of advancing the Theological Literature of Scotland, and for this end to establish a Lectureship similar to those of a like kind connected with the Church of England and the Congregational body in England, and that I have made over to the General Trustees of the Free Church of Scotland the sum of ;C2ooo sterling, in trust, for the purpose of founding a Lectureship in memory of the late Reverend William Cunning- ham, D.D., Principal of the Free Church College, Edinburgh, and Professor of Divinity and Church History therein, and under the following conditions, namely, — First, The Lectureship shall bear the name, and be called, "The Cunningham Lectureship." Second, The Lecturer shall be a Minister or Professor of the Free Church of Scotland, and shall hold the appointment for not less than two years, nor more than three years, and be entitled for the period of his holding the appointment to the income of the endowment as declared by the General Trustees, it being understood that the Council after referred to may occasionally appoint a Minister or Professor from other denominations, provided this be approved of by not fewer than Eight Members of the Council, and it being further understood that the Council are to regulate the terms of payment of the Lecturer. Third, The Lecturer shall be at liberty to choose his own subject within the range of Apologetical, Doctrinal, Controversial, Exegetical, Pastoral, or Historical Theology, including what bears on Missions, Home and Foreign, subject to the consent of the Council. Fourth, The Lecturer shall be bound to deliver publicly at Edinburgh a Course of Lectures on the subjects thus choseni at some time immediately preceding the expiry of his appointment, and during the Session of the New College, Edinburgh ; the Lectures to be not fewer than six in number, and to be delivered in presence of the Professors and Students under such arrangements as the Council may appoint ; the Lecturer shall be bound also to print and publish, at his own risk, not fewer than 750 copies of the Lectures within a year after their delivery, and to deposit three copies of the same in the Library of the New College ; the form of the publication shall be regulated by the Council. Fifth, A Council shall be constituted, consisting of (first) Two Members of their own body, to be chosen annually in the month of March, by the Senatus of the New College, other than the Principal ; (second) Five Members to be chosen annually by the General Assembly, in addition to the Moderator of the said Free Church of Scotland ; together with (third) the Principal of the said New College for the time being, the Moderator of the said General Assembly, for the time being, the Procurator or Law Adviser of the Church, and myself the said William Binny Webster, or such person as I may nominate to be my successor : The Principal of the said College to be Convener of the Council, and any Five Members duly con- vened to be entitled to act notwithstanding the non-election of others. Sixth, The duties of the Council shall be the following : — (first). To appoint the Lecturer and determine the period of his holding the appointment, the appoint- ment to be made before the close of the Session of College immediately preceding the termination of the previous Lecturer's engagement ; (second). To arrange details as to the delivery of the Lectures, and to take charge of any additional income and expenditure of an incidental kind that may be connected therewith, it being understood that the obligation upon the Lecturer is simply to deliver the Course of Lectures free 01 expense to himself. Seventh, The Council shall be at liberty, on the expiry of five years, to make any alteration that experience may suggest as desirable in the details of this plan, provided such alterations shall be approved of by not fewer than Eight Members of the Council.
Tlie Cunningham Lectures for 1899
THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
THE WHOLE TEACHING OF JESUS CHRIST 1
I. THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS,
BEING HIS TEACHING CONCERNING HIMSELF,
ACCORDING TO THE SYNOPTISTS. IL
THE ETHIC OF JESUS,
BEING HIS TEACHING CONCERNING SALVATION,
ACCORDING TO THE SYNOPTISTS.
in. THE TEACHING OF JESUS
AS RECORDED BY ST. JOHN.
[Ld/fr.
T
HE CHRISTOLOGY
OF JESUS/* BEING HIS TEACHING CONCERNING HIMSELF ACCORDING TO THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS ,* By the REV. JAMES STALKER, M.A., D.D. * * ^^
SECOND EDITION
S^Ol ^
^) HODDER ^ STOUGHTON
27, PATERNOSTER ROW ^ »>^LONDON -ft- -^N 1900
AUG 2 1967
!?*«
ITY OF TOR<
Printed by Hazcll, Watson, &* Fitify, Lei., London a7id Aylesbury.
Ct 9^. »>♦
I
PREFACE
N the preface to an early issue of The Life of Jesus Christ, and again in the preface to Imago Christi, I made public my intention of writing on the Teaching of Christ. But the fulfilment of this purpose has been long delayed. This has not been due to the withdrawal of my attention from the subject, which for more than twenty years has been my favourite study. Again and again I have brought my materials to the verge of publication ; but I have shrunk back owing to the impossibility of doing justice to the subject, and to a fear lest my results were not grounded upon a sufficiently thorough exegesis of the Saviour's words. At length, however, when the trustees of the Cunningham Lectures did T*N me the honour of asking me to undertake the course for this year, I felt this to be a providential summons to delay no longer but to bring at least a portion of my materials to the maturity requisite for publication.
viii PREFACE
The result is the volume now offered to the public, which deals with a part of the teaching of Jesus complete in itself.
A word may be desirable to indicate the relation of what is here completed to what is left. More prominent than the Christology in the Synoptists is that which may be called the Ethic of Jesus ; and these two together — the Christology and the Ethic — pretty well embrace all that the Synoptists offer. The distinction between the two is that, while the Christology sets forth what God has done for man's salvation, the Ethic would cover what man has to do and experience in being saved. Then there remains the teaching of Jesus according to St. John, which, as has been explained in the opening lecture, is a formation by itself demanding separate treatment. Some of my hearers, I have learnt, were not satisfied with what I said in the first lecture about St. John, supposing my statement to be unfavourable to the authenticity of the Fourth Gospel. This, however, was by no means my intention. Supremely as I prize the Synoptists, I feel, after reading them, that there is something still untold. They fail to account fully for the origin of so stupendous a movement as Christianity, in the same way as, after reading
PREFACE ix
Xenophon's Memorabilia, one feels that something more requires to be told to make intelligible the influence of Socrates in the history of Greek thought. Whether the teaching of Jesus as recorded by St. John is idealised like that of Socrates in Plato's Dialogues, or in what other way the Teacher depicted in the Fourth Gospel is related to fact, I need not attempt here to define ; because it will be seen, from the advertisement at the beginning of this volume, that I look forward to writing both on the Ethic of Jesus as unfolded in the Synoptists and on the Teaching of Jesus as recorded by St. John. But it is astonishing how St. John, after being so often proved to have had nothing to do with the divine picture of the Fourth Gospel, ever and anon reappears as its veritable producer and owner, and, after having had to endure the reproach of fantasticality and incompetence, is loaded again with admiration and eulogy. There are enigmas in this Gospel which still await explanation ; but the world will never rest in the belief either that this intimate record came from anyone but an apostle, or that the disciple whom Jesus loved can have distorted and falsified the image of his Master.
Though each of the three divisions of our Lord's teaching indicated above has its own difficulties, the
X PREFACE
one treated in this volume is the most difficult of all ; for, whereas in expounding the Ethic of Jesus and His Teaching as recorded by St. John, we shall have prolonged and continuous statements to draw upon, here we are dependent on isolated sayings, scattered throughout the Gospels and frequently on this account difficult of interpretation. But it would be rash to draw the inference that, because the teaching of Jesus about Himself in the Synoptists is scanty and Incon- spicuous, it is, therefore, of subordinate importance. On the contrary, it is the salt of the whole.
Inside the flyleaf of each chapter I have given the entire evidence of texts for what follows ; so that every reader may have the means of verifying for himself what is advanced.
When I first began to occupy myself with this subject, the helps were few, and I was thrown back upon the Gospels themselves. In recent years, as is explained in the first chapter, this has altered, and an extensive literature has accumulated, of which a fuller account will be found in this volume than anywhere else, as far as I am aware, in the E nglish language. But, while I have profited by the labours of others, I have adhered principally to the biblical documents, and I hope my pages may still be redolent of the
PREFACE xi
intense delight with which I first found out the actual testimony of Jesus to Himself.
The critical remarks in the first lecture are supple- mented by a critical essay, reprinted from The Expositor, in the Appendix, on the first volume of Wendt's Lehre Jesu ; and I have to thank Messrs. Nisbet & Co. for permission to reproduce from The Thinker an essay on the Book of Enoch.
Glasgow, 1899.
CONTENTS
LECIUEE PAGE
I. THE IMPORTANCE OF THE TEACHING OF JESUS , . I II. THE SON OF MAN 43
III. THE SON OF GOD 85
IV. THE MESSIAH I25
V, THE REDEEMER 169
VI. THE JUDGE 209
APPBNOIC£S
A. WENDT'S UNTRANSLATED VOLUME ON THE TEACHING
OF JESUS 247
B. THE BOOK OF ENOCH #»..,,. 269
xiH
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE TEACHING OF JESUS
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE TEACHING OF JESUS
" I ^HE present generation is under the impression -*- that it has discovered the teaching of Jesus. It would be absurd, indeed, to speak as if our own age had been the first to appreciate the beauty and the power of our Lord's words ; for since the Christian Church began, the sentences of the Sermon on the Mount have found a lodgment in the memory of Christendom more secure than any other words whatever ; the Parables have never in any century failed to charm ; and the Farewell Discourses in the Gospel of St. John have in every generation been the solace of the Christian heart in its most solemn moods. Nevertheless, in our own day our Lord's words have obtained a prominence never accorded to them before. VVe now separate them from the rest of Scripture, with which formerly they were indiscriminately mingled, and assign them a commanding authority. Their unique theological value is acknowledged. It is recognised, in
THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
short, that Jesus is the best teacher of His own reh'gion.
This change is due to deep causes, to trace which thoroughly would be a long and arduous task.
Perhaps it may be best assigned to one of those mysterious movements in the depths of the human spirit which it is diffcult to scrutinise and account for, but by which, under the guidance of Providence, one epoch is made to end and another to begin. Suddenly, you can hardly tell how or why, one way of thinking about things, which has long appeared to be the only possible way, becomes disused, and a new way becomes so easy and universal that people can hardly realise that things have not always been seen in this light. At the Reformation the Pauline mode of conceiving Christianity fitted into the necessities of experience ; and the Christian mind rose up to take possession of its heritage as it is unfolded in the Pauline Epistles. The forms of truth there deposited are so priceless that it took long to bring them fully to light ; the theological consciousness was aware of profiting by the robust efforts which it had to put forth in the process of acquisition ; and so the predominance of this view of Christianity lasted long. But it could not last forever, because the Bible is rich enough to contain other ways of conceiving Christianity ; and these
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE TEACHING OF JESUS 5
were certain, some time or other, to get their turn. What Novalis says of Shakspeare — that in his works " the last and deepest of observers will still find new harmonies with the infinite structure of the universe, concurrences with later ideas, affinities with the higher powers and senses of man " — is far truer of the Bible. Humanity, under the training of history, is always being made ready to understand and appreciate some new portion of the Word of God, and some book or section of Scripture is big with a secret which it can only disclose to those providentially prepared for its reception. Everyone is aware how at present, in the Old Testament, the writings of the prophets, after being long neglected, are coming into such prominence that every young minister of ability is discoursing from them ; and in the same way, in the New Testament, we are moving from the Epistles to the Gospels. Rabbi Duncan was one of those lofty and sensitive spirits which catch the first rays of an approaching time, and he foretold this change : " I have certainly," he said, " more of the Pauline Epistles than of the four Gospels in my nature ; but, were I a younger man and to begin my studies again, the Gospels would bulk more prominently in my attention than they have done." As has been hinted, there is an overruling Providence in the
THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
matter : when the flock have long been in one section of the pasture and have nibbled it bare, the great Shepherd leads them into another, where the grass is lush and uncropped ; and there they abide till the fields which they have left have had time to grow again.
It may only be another way of stating the same reason to say, secondly, that the recognition of the importance of the words of Jesus has been prepared for by the extraordinary attention bestowed in the present century on His life. At the Reformation it was on the work of Christ that the thoughts of men were concentrated ; and this long remained the supreme and ruling conception of theology. Ever and anon, however, His person came into promi- nence ; and in the present century the most intense study has, owing to a variety of causes, been directed upon the details of His earthly life. Archaeology, the exploration of Palestine, the history of the century in which He was born, and many other subsidiary sciences have been pressed into the service ; and the Son of man has been made to walk forth in breathing reality before the eyes of men, who have eagerly followed every step of His course from the manger to the cross. But under this close inspection of the records His words could not fail to attract attention. Accordingly everyone
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE TEACHING OF JESUS 7
who wrote of His life expressed the hope to write some day on His words Hkewise. At last the press begins to teem with this new burden ; and in the next fifty years the books on the teaching of Jesus will probably be as numerous as in the last fifty have been those on His life. Observers who watch closely the signs of the times in the theological world are wont to keep an eye on the young Privatdocenten in the German universities. When these begin, as if by general consent, to write on any topic, it may be taken for granted that this subject is in the air, and will be heard of everywhere before long. And of late they have been taking, in full cry, to the teaching of Christ. The first monograph on the subject which I remember came from the pen of a French theologian, M. Meyer, in 1883 * ; then followed, at a considerable interval of time, The Kingdom of God of Dr. Bruce; then Wendt's Teaching of Jesus f ; but now it is scarcely possible to take up a theological catalogue without seeing the announcement of one or more monographs on the whole or on some special aspect of the subject.
* Le Christianisme dii Christ, dealing only with the words of Jesus recorded by St. Matthew.
t Dr. Robertson's excellent handbook in the Guild Series of the Church of Scotland deserves special notice as the first popular presentation of the subject.
THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
And the demand in the public mind is equally keen ; for multitudes are saying, that they only need to know for certain what Jesus believed in order to believe the same.
Another cause which has stimulated interest in this subject has been the rise of Biblical Theology.* The old view of the Bible was that it is a unit, all its paits forming one glorious whole and conspiring to coiivey one divine message ; and this view ex- presses an eternal truth. But it is also manifest that the Bible is a library of books, differing enor- mously as to age, style and contents. If they all convey one message, yet they severally embody different parts and aspects of it ; and, if the unity of Scripture is a grand truth, its variety lies more obviously on the surface. To see how revelation grew from simplicity to complexity, and how the germ unfolded into leaf, flower and fruit, is to follow the course of a spiritual romance ; and it brings Biblical knowledge into line with the ideas of evolu- tion so characteristic of our time in all the other departments of knowledge. In the New Testament we see how elementary conceptions of Christianity,
* This is the science which defines the circle of ideas belonging to each prominent writer of Scripture, or group of writers, and, by arranging these types of thought in chronological order, seeks to trace from stage to stage the growth of revelation.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE TEACHING OF JESUS 9
in the Book of Acts and the Epistles of St. James and St. Peter, expand into the comprehensive and philosophical system of St. Paul, and how the development is crowned by the mystic views of St. John. But the question could not but be asked, Where do Christ's own views come in ? They stand at the commencement of the volume in the Gospels ; but is this their place in the development } Arc they really overtopped and overshadowed by the teachings of the Apostles ? This was virtually the place assigned them in the older handbooks of Biblical Theology. But, as time has gone on, they have been allowed more and more space, till in the latest specimen — the handbook of Holtzmann * — they obtain nearly half of the whole room to them- selves. The question will undoubtedly force itself more and more to the front. Is the teaching of Jesus a rudimentary form of Christianity which the others transcend, or is it the perfect form, which they only supplement ?
Whatever may be the answer given to this question, there can be no doubt that the tendency
* Since this was penned, Stevens' Theology of the New Testament has appeared ; and all English-speaking people are to be congratulated on now having accessible from so able and trustworthy a hand an extended treatise, written originally in their own tongue, on this grej^t subject,
THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
to attach supreme importance to the words of Christ is a healthy one. It is in accordance with the mind of Christ Himself ; for He frequently spoke of His own words in terms the grandiosity of which it would be difficult to surpass. The very first lesson which a student of Christ's teaching should take is to collect the sayings of Jesus about His own words. In the first place, He took a very high and unusual view of the value of words in general. There is nothing which to the ordinary man appears more trivial than a word. What is it .'' A breath converted into sound : out it goes on the air, and is carried away by the wind ; and there is an end of it. No, said Jesus, it does not end there, and it does not end ever : when once it is called into existence by the creative force of the will, it becomes a living thing separated from our control ; it goes ranging through time and space, doing good or evil ; and it will confront us again at the last day — " Every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof at the day of judgment." * At that solemn crisis the influence of our words on our destiny will be extraordinary ; for " by thy words thou shalt be justified and by thy words thou shalt be condemned." f There is nothing of which the
* Matt. xii. 36, t Matt. xii. 37.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE TEACHING OF JESUS ii
average man is more surely convinced than that his tongue is his own, and that he can at will make it utter words either good or evil. Very different was Christ's estimate : words are inevitable : if the speaker be good, then they are good, but, if he be evil, then they are inevitably evil : for as much control as he seems to have over them, he cannot alter their character unless he first alter his own ; for " out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh." *
Such was Christ's conception of words ; and such were His own words : they were the overflowings of His heart, an effluence from His character, bits of Himself. No wonder if virtue resided in them. Poets and thinkers have sometimes boasted, half in jest, that their words would survive the most permanent works of man — pyramids of kings and monuments of brass — but Jesus declared, in sober earnest, that His would outlive the most stable works of God — " Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away." f
He spoke of attachment to His words as attach- ment to Himself, and as the test of discipleship — " If ye continue in My word, then are ye My disciples indeed, and ye shall know the truth, and
* Matt. xii. 34. t Luke xxi. 33.
THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
the truth shall make you free " ; " If a man love Me, he will keep My words, and My Father will love him ; and We will come unto him and make Our abode with him. He that loveth Me not keepeth not My sayings ; and the word which ye hear is not Mine, but the Father's who sent Me." * When Mary was seated at His feet listening to His words, He declared that she was doing the one thing needful. f
He attributed to His words the power of re- generating and sanctifying the soul — " Now ye are clean through the word that I have spoken unto you " ; " The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life " ; " Verily, verily, I say unto you, if a man keep My sayings, he shall never see death." And those who first heard His words confirmed out of their own experience the justice of these claims, when St. Peter said in their name, " Lord, to whom can we go ? Thou hast the words of eternal life."J
It was only the logical consequence of this when Jesus alleged, that the eternal destiny of His hearers would depend on the attitude they assumed to His words — " He that rejecteth Me and receiveth not
* John viii. 31 ; xiv. 23, 24.
+ Luke X. 42.
\ John XV. 3 ; viii. 51 ; vi. 68.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE TEACHING OF JESUS 13
My words hath one that judgeth him : the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him at the last day."* He wound up the Sermon on the Mount with the well-known imagery of incomparable solemnity : " Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of Mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock : and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house : and it fell not : for it was founded upon a rock. And every one that heareth these sayings of Mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand : and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house ; and it fell : and great was the fall of it."'|'
I have considered it worth while to quote all these sayings in detail ; because they show not only how high was the estimate placed by Jesus on His own words, but how frequent a theme of thought and speech this was with Him. He claimed for Himself as a teacher a position far above all who had pre- ceded Him, when He said to His hearers that many prophets and kings had desired in vain to hear the things which they were blessed enough to be hearing
* John xii. 48. f Matt. vii. 24-27.
14 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
from His lips ; and still more decisively did He place Himself above all who should come after Him, when He said, " Be not ye called Rabbi, for One is your teacher ; and all ye are brethren," * There could not be a more emphatic warning against placing the apostles on the same level as the Master.
From the point of view of the old doctrine of inspiration an objection might be raised : indeed, I have heard it said, " Why should the words of Jesus be considered more important than the rest of the Bible ? all the Scriptures are utterances of God, and what more are the words of Christ ? " But even from the old point of view this objection can be met with a decisive answer. It is true that in one sense all sections of Scripture are equally im- portant ; because they are parts of a whole which would be mutilated if any of its constituent parts, even the smallest, were absent. In the same sense the smallest joint of the smallest finger is as im- portant in the human body as the head, because it is essential to the perfection of the whole. But manifestly there is another sense in which a finger is by no means as important as the head. The members of the body differ in dignity, the eye being a far more glorious member than the car, and the
• Matt, xxiii. 8 ; " even Christ " is unauthentic.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE TEACHING OF JESUS 15
majesty of manhood far more fully exhibited in the face than in the foot. In a similar sense some portions of Scripture may be spoken of as more important and glorious than others. This has never been questioned by even the strictest orthodoxy. The nature of God is more fully revealed in the pages of Isaiah than in the lines of Nahum ; and no one would think of comparing the message of St. James for glory with that of St. Paul. When God made use of inspired men, He did not destroy their individuality or make them all speak in the same strain, but, like one playing on instruments of different shapes and sizes, He transmitted one element of revelation through one and another through another. He let the light of the knowledge of His glory shine through a great variety of media ; but some of these were larger and more transparent than others, and let more of the light of revelation through. If this is recognised, it is impossible to deny a unique value to the words of Jesus ; for of all the media ever employed by God for purposes of revelation none can be compared to Him : in no other mind did the spirit of revelation obtain such ample room, and never, either before or after, did it find such perfect channels of outlet as through His organs of thought and speech. This is the very least that must be conceded from even the
16 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
most orthodox point of view ; and it is enough to place the words of Jesus above all human words — even those of revelation.
By some this contrast, however, is carried much further, and it is proposed to convert the teaching of Christ into a standard with which to criticize and to correct the rest of Scripture. Formerly the whole Bible was looked upon as a single authority ; but first the Old Testament was dropped and the New adopted as the sole authority ; and now the narrowing process is carried further : not the New Testament as a whole, it is contended, is the authority, but the teaching of Christ alone ; and some go so far as to draw a circle of exclusion even inside the teaching of Christ, maintaining that the Sermon on the Mount is an ample norm both of faith and practice. This is the position taken up by Dr. John Watson in The Mind of the Master. " The religion of Protestants," he says, " or let us say Christians, is not the Bible in all its parts' but first of all that portion which is its soul, by which the teaching of Prophets and Apostles must itself be judged — the very words of Jesus " ; and he goes on to argue that even of the words of Jesus those contained in the Sermon on the Mount are sufficient.
THE IMPORTAKCE OF THE TEACHING OF JESUS 17
To suggestions of this sort the reply has often been given, tb.at Jesus expressly intimated at His departure that He had not been able to utter all He had to say, but would find means of conveying it to His Church after He was gone ; and that the teaching of inspired apostles was the virtual continuation of His own : " I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now ; . howbeit, when He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He shall guide you into all truth ; for He shall not speak of Himself; but whatsoever He shall hear that shall He speak ; and He will show you things to come ; He shall glorify me ; for He shall receive of Mine, and shall show it unto you." * For one thing, the resurrection and ascension of our Lord entirely altered the point of view. As long as He was on earth, He had perforce to speak from the level of the earth, the minds of the disciples obstinately refusing to take the hint of anything higher ; but, after He had risen and ascended, He was to all who believed in Him the Lord of glory ; and it is from this point of view that the latter half of the New Testament is written. It is especially contended that within the very extensive promise of illumination quoted
* John xvi. 12-15.
i8 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
above, the full truth about His own death was included, because it was impossible, or at least unnatural, that He should speak fully about this event before it had taken place, and before the minds of the disciples were opened to credit it. Even if Jesus had spoken fully on this subject from His own point of view — that is, the point of view of the Giver of salvation — it would still have been necessary that it should be fully and authoritatively explained from the opposite point of view — that of the receivers of salvation. Jesus might speak of salvation, but He was never Himself saved ; and there would have been an intolerable blank in the Bible had not inspired men, when the forces of salvation, in their first freshness, were doing their work in their soul and life, committed their experience to the pages of Holy Writ. This is the value of the writings of St. Paul, St. John and St. Peter, who tell what Christ was to them- selves as Saviour and Lord.
A still weightier argument is, that Christ Himself is more than His words. Stier, the commentator on our Lord's sayings, calls them " the words of the Word " — a most suggestive title, because it reminds us that Christ Himself is the great and final Word of God, of which His detailed wordi are only fragments. Even all of these in com-
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE TEACHING OF JESUS 19
bination are not equal to Him ; for there are other words of the Word : His earthly history, His miracles and His sufferings are all words of the Word, on a level with His spoken words. His association with publicans and sinners was no less significant than were the parables of St. Luke xv. ; His weeping over Jerusalem was more eloquent than anything He said on patriotism ; His sufferings and death were far more suggestive than anything He ever said about sin. We are wont in modern thought to draw a distinction between revelation and inspiration — revelation being the grand, primary fact in God's relation to men, whereas inspiration is subsidiary and ministerial. Revelation did not take place, as the old orthodoxy assumed, through whispers of truth communicated to the prophets, but through the institutions, the events and the personages of a divine history ; and inspiration was the power of interpreting this history and putting its meaning into words. Now, that which was perfected in Christ was the revelation : in Him the divine history culminated and the divine love was fully disclosed. It may no doubt be argued that the inspiration culminated in Him likewise, and was adequate to the revelation. But at all events even His inspiration did not exhaust the revelation embodied in Himself, which invited the
THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
attention of other inspired personalities, to interpret it from the point of view of their own experience. And this is the reason why, instead of merely collecting His words and commenting on them, the apostles go straight themselves to the revelation made in Christ and give it an original interpretation out of the fulness of their own experience.
There is a double objection to the exaggerated way of putting the matter on which I am com- menting. First, it tempts to disparage St. Paul and the other New Testament writers in order to exalt Christ. This temptation Dr. Watson has not escaped. " If," he says, " one may be pardoned his presumption in hinting at any imperfections in the Apostle of the Gentiles, is not his style at times overwrought by feeling } Are not some of his illustrations forced } Is not his doctrine often rabbinical, rather than Christian .-' Does not one feel his treatment of certain subjects — say marriage and asceticism — to be somewhat wanting in sweet- ness ? " In the fancied interest of Jesus, it is not uncommon at present to hit in this style at inspired men. But would Jesus accept such championship } The truth is, Jesus Himself could be criticized in this tone to His disparagement. And this is the other side of the objection : it tempts those who vindicate the apostles to depreciate Jesus, or at
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE TEACHING OF JESUS 21
least to put Him in the background. " The specifically Christian consciousness," it is argued, " which has to be scientifically developed by the theologian, is not the consciousness of Jesus, it is the consciousness of reconciliation to God through Jesus ; " * and the teaching of Jesus, being thus, by means of an ingenious definition of theology, excluded from the immediate materials of the theologian, no specific place is assigned to it at all.
Of course, the decisive question is, whether St. Paul and the other apostolic writers are at variance with their Master. If they are, then undoubtedly they must go to the wall ; and Dr. Watson is quite justified when he contends that St. Paul must be read in the light of Christ rather than Christ in the light of St. Paul. Only he and others are constantly taking it for granted that St. Paul cannot stand this test, but that a considerable portion of the apostolic teaching must be cast aside as inconsistent with that of Jesus, although Dr. Watson himself is vague and meagre in the extreme, when he comes to particulars. There can be no question that Jesus abolishes a great deal of Moses ; for He does so in express terms ;
* These words are from Dr. Denney's Inaugural Lecture on Dogmatic Theology (published in The Expositor, December, 1897); perhaps, however, it is scarcely fair to criticize thus a mere obiter dictum.
22 The CHRiSTOLOGY OF JESUS
but it is gratuitous to assume that He would have done the same to St. Paul. Even in the Synoptists the germs are to be found of all that the Epistles contain ; and, if St. John be taken into account, the Christian theologian may without hesitation under- take to prove the substantial identity of the teaching of the Master and that of the disciples. He speaking from the point of view of the Saviour and they from that of the saved."^
I have spoken of the importance of the words of Jesus in themselves, and of their comparative import- ance when contrasted with the apostolic writings ; but I should like to add something about their importance in relation to dogma.
Dr. Watson speaks as if the words of Jesus were the long neglected but rich source of dogmas, where anyone can lay his hand on them, as on the eggs in a discovered nest, and find his creed made-and- ready. In fact, he gathers a creed from them, in half-a-dozen lines, and says that, if only a church could be found to adopt it, men would come from the north and the south, the east and the west, to press into its membership. Experiments have not, however, been wanting to found churches on verj''
* Compare the preface to the new edition of Dr. Robertson Nicoll's The Incaruate Saviour.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE TEACHING OF JESUS 23
abbreviated creeds. Their success has not been con- spicuous. And it may be doubted whether articles of belief thus found made-and-ready would be of much utility, whatever might be their origin — even if it were in the words of Jesus. I have found, in preaching, that to tell people how little Abraham believed or what were the precise limits of Isaiah's theology does not affect them much ; and that merely to expound a doctrine as having been that of St. Paul or even that of Jesus does not make much impression. Herein lies perhaps the weakness of all Biblical theology, which to a student is in many ways so fascinating : it is apt to become a mere branch of archaeology ; whereas the truth which affects the human mind is that which has on it a streak of warm blood. Personal conviction is the soul of religious testimony.*
But, besides, when we go to the words of Jesus for the articles of a creed, is not this to mistake the genus to which these words belong } The diff*erence between religion and theology may be hard to define, but it is not hard to feel ; and surely the words of Christ belong not to theology but to religion.
* What underlies my friend Dr. Watson's argument, which I have ventured to criticize so freely, is the perfectly just perception, that the teaching of Jesus is predominantly ethical, and that theology has done no sort of justice to the Ethics of Jesus.
24 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
They are kerygma, not dogma ; nature, not science. Rothe denies that there are any dogmas in the Bible ; * and perhaps he is right. Many parts, indeed, of the writings of St. Paul approach pretty near to the dogmatic type ; yet even they are perhaps best considered as kerygma — warm out- bursts of emotion and experience — rather than scientific theology. At all events the words of Jesus are at the opposite pole from scientific state- ments. Who has not felt the transition from a confession of faith or a dogmatic treatise to the Parables and the Sermon on the Mount ? It is like the change from the atmosphere of a library to the open air, or from a museum, stuffed with skeletons and specimens, into a fair garden, where the flowers are in bloom and the dew of the morning is glisten- ing on every blade of grass.
A strong corroboration of this view may be found in the form in which Jesus left His words. He did not write them down Himself, but entrusted them to the memory of Ilis disciples, although these were not men of literary culture. This was not because He was indifferent on the subject. On the contrary,
* " Ich ziehe natiirlich nicht in Abrede, dass es eine religiose Lehre in der Bibel gibt ; aber ich bestreite, dass der religiOsen Lehre in der Bibel bereits die Qualitat eignet, vermoge welcher sie den Namen des Dogmas ausprechen kann." — Zur Dogtnatik, p. i8.
THE IMPORTANCE OE THE TEACHING OF JESUS 25
never has there lived a son of Adam to whom it has been so imperative a necessity to be remembered after death ; and He took the most elaborate and far-sighted measures to secure this end. But His anxiety was not that of the professor, who dictates the ipsissinia verba of his paragraphs, or of the jurist, who inscribes his decrees on tables of stone. He could trust the memory even of humble men, supplemented, as He knew it would be, by the living epistle of their life.
There is a widespread desire among theologians at present to find at least the organizing idea of the theological system in the teaching of Christ. Thus in Ritschl's small handbook of Christian Instruction the Kingdom of God is the organizing idea, and this is a favourite notion ot the whole Ritschlian school. But, although Jesus published His Gospel under the form of a doctrine of the Kingdom of God, it may be doubted whether He did this strictly on His own motion or rather under stress of circum- stances, adapting His teaching to the modes ot thinking current in His time. Principal P'airbairn takes the Fatherhood of God to be the centre of Christ's teaching and proposes to make it the centre of theology * ; and this is a proceeding which falls
* In Christ in Modern Theology.
26 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
in with the tendencies of the modern mind. But, like the Kingdom of God, the Fatherhood of God is a figure of speech of extremely uncertain application, even in the teaching of Christ sometimes describing the relation of all men to God and at other times the peculiar relation of believers. Other great ideas might be lifted from Christ's teaching and made the ruling conceptions of theology. There is Righteous- ness, for example, which is certainly the ruling idea of the Sermon on the Mount * ; and I have been much interested in a work on the teaching of Jesus by Titius,t one of the younger German writers, who proposes to investigate not it only, but the whole teaching of the New Testament, from the standpoint of Blessedness — to my mind a most central and comprehensive idea. Of course all such proposals must be tested by their success, when the attempt is actually made to organize by their means the whole mass of theological material ; but, if the attempt be successful, this will be due, I venture to think, not to the idea being that of Jesus, but to its being that of the thinker himself.
This desire to find dogmas ready-made in the teaching of Jesus, or at least to borrow from Him
• Dante said it was the theme of The Divine Cotnedy. t Die N. T. Lehre von der Seligkeit. Erster Theil : Jesu Lehre vom Rciche Go tics. 1895.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE TEACHING OF JESUS 27
the organizing conception of theology, savours too much of the old notion that the Bible is a vast collection of proof-texts, and that the work of dogmatic theology is merely to arrange and sys- tematize them. Dogmatic theology is not, indeed, at present very sure of its own definition ; but at all events, since Schleiermacher, it is pretty certain that it has a close relation to Christian experience. Some would define it merely as the science of dogmas, and restrict the material with which it has to deal to the creed of the church to which the theologian belongs ; others would make its material to consist rather of the living faith of the Church — that is, of the dogmas modified by opinion — while others still would em- phasize most strongly the Christian experience of the dogmatist himself. But at all events dogma is more than the mere datum of Scripture : it is this taken up into the mind of the Church in combination with all the knowledge of which it may at any stage be possessed and viewed under the providential light shining at the time. It is not a mere report by the Church to the world that such-and-such a statement was made by Isaiah or Moses, by St. Paul or Jesus, and, therefore, must be true ; but it is an affirmation by the Church of its own present conviction : " I know and declare this to be true, not merely because the Bible says it, but because I have experienced it.
28 THE CHRtSTOLOGY OF JESUS
and because it is at this moment throbbing in my heart as the power of God unto salvation."
The old view was, that a perfect theology could only have one form, and that the organizing idea must be either the right or the wrong one. But does not the whole history of theology prove that the intention of nature is different 1 The form is continually changing ; and new organizing ideas emerge with every new generation, every spiritual movement, and every original thinker. Even the individual, if his religion be progressive, does not see truth always from the same point of view. John Bunyan's experience is normal in this respect ; who, in Grace Abounding,^ tells, that, preaching ever what he saw and felt, he moved every two years or so from one standpoint to another, being now absorbed with the curse and doom of sin, then with the offices of Christ, and again with union to Christ. So the Church at large, if its mind is not stagnating, must quit one point of view and move on to another. This is because its own historical position is shifting. While Scripture is meant to explain all the changing aspects of providence, providence, on the other hand, likewise casts on Scripture an ever-changing light. The organizing thought of theology is with one
* Pars. 276 to 278.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE TEACHING OF JESUS 29
thinker the Sovereignty of God, with another Justifi- cation by Faith ; but, if the Church is progressing instead of stagnating, it will neither be the one nor the other forever. In our day the best ruling idea may possibly be the Kingdom of God or the Father- hood of God ; but, if so, it will be, not because this was the supreme conception of Jesus, but because it is the thought which corresponds most intimately to the knowledge and the temper of the age.
The use of Scripture, and especially of the Words of Jesus, is not to supersede the spiritual and intel- lectual processes of the Church's life by supplying her with dogmas ready-made, but to give stimulus and direction to these processes. The Scriptures have the same relation to the thinking and tes- timony of the Church as the influences of the atmosphere have to the products of the soil. Let the mind of the Church be continually refreshed with the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms, with the Epistles of St. Paul, the Writings of St. John, and, above all, the Words of Jesus, and it will think both copiously and correctly ; but, let it cease to absorb into its experience these divine oracles, or let it deal with them carelessly and deceitfully, and its thinking, as well as the other manifestations of spiritual life, will suffer. Thus there is always an appeal from the teaching of the Church to the truth
30 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
as it is in Jesus, and the Scripture is always above the Church, but not in the sense of a creed or a doctrinal system. The Scripture is like the rain from heaven, without the continual soaking of which through the soil the rivers, lakes and reservoirs would soon dry up and every green thing perish from the face of the earth. And this shows what should be the aim of a revival of the teaching of Jesus — not to set up a creed of Christ in opposition to the creeds of the churches, which would simply be to revive in the twentieth century the arrogance of those who in the first said at Corinth, " We are of Christ," but to facilitate such a saturation of the Christian mind with the words and the spirit of the Author of Christianity that from the soil, thus nourished, all forms of good thinking as well as all manner of good living may spontaneously spring.
It will be observed that, in this course of lectures, I propose to derive the teaching of Jesus from the Synoptical Gospels, to the exclusion of St. John. One reason for this is the present state of criticism. At one time the Gospel of St. John — the pneumatic gospel, as it was called, or gospel of religious genius — enjoyed singular favour among the most advanced critics, who declared, that in it, if anywhere, was to be found the authentic portrait of Jesus ; but at
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE TEACHING OF JESUS 31
present the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme, and this gospel is spoken of in terms of great dubiety, if not of condemnation ; and in these circumstances, whatever one may think of the merits of the case, it is advisable to adduce the evidence for the teaching of Jesus concerning Himself from the two sources separately. There is, besides, another reason, which to my mind is still more cogent : the Gospel of St. John is a work of unique character, in which the shape given even to the teaching of Jesus is due to the peculiarities of the Evangelist ; and the whole hangs together so compactly that the parts cannot without some violence be separated from the whole, in order to supplement the outline of the Synoptists. In short, the system of the thoughts of Jesus, as it is presented in St. John, ought always to be developed from its own centre. Dr. Wendt, the author of the most important mono- graph which has yet appeared on the teaching of Jesus, does not follow this course, but gives, under each leading article, first the account supplied by the Synoptists and then the corresponding section from St. John. This is extremely interesting ; in fact, it is the most striking feature of Dr. Wendt's per- formance ; and many readers must have been astonished at the identity of thought which he has often been able to demonstrate as existing beneath
THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
both the plain language of the Synoptists and the mystic phraseology of the Fourth Evangelist. Yet it must also have been felt that this method scarcely does justice to St. John, whose ideas are torn from their natural connexion and not infrequently some- what distorted in the process.
We have not, however, done with critical questions when we leave St. John out, but, on the contrary, are face to face with the Synoptic Problem, the most perplexing of literary riddles. It is known how interminable has been the controversy about the order of the first three Evangelists and their relation to one another ; but it seems to me that those who have contended for the priority of one or another have seldom taken sufficient time to consider what is the precise value of priority, even if it could be made out. As a rule, it is taken for granted that priority must necessarily imply superiority ; but to a student of the words as distinguished from the acts of Jesus this must appear a doubtful proposition. Suppose three authors of our own time were to write memoirs of a life belonging to about the middle of the century, would the one who wrote in 1880 have a very great advantage over the one who wrote in 1890, or he over the one who wrote in 1900.^ Might not any such advantage be far outweighed by superior ability or access to special
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE TEACHING OF JESUS 33
information ? I do not pretend that the cases are exactly parallel, but, on the other hand, I do not know that there is any very great difference, unless we are to assume that in the Christian circles of the first century there was at work a strong mythopoetic propensity, which was engaged in adorning with legendary marvels the memory of Jesus. The distance between St. Mark and St. Matthew, or St. Matthew and St. Luke, is so inconsiderable that the question of priority is of only secondary importance.* Far more worthy of notice are the evidences which the contents of these books them- themselves supply of special aptitude for investiga- tion or presentation. St. Mark, to whom the priority in time is now generally conceded, has seemed to many to possess a remarkable gift for indicating the movement and energy of the life of Jesus, together with the sequence and articulation of its periods ; and through his rough, hasty and graphic sketches there is conveyed an image of the facts which carries on its face the signature of veracity. But St. Mark has no such gift for rendering the words of Jesus. This belongs to St. Matthew, who inspires me, as a student during many years of the words of Jesus, with the same enthusiasm
* The dates given by Harnack in his great work on Chronology are— St. Mark 65-85, St. Matthew 70-75, St. Luke 78-93.
3
34 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
as students of the events feel for St. Mark. Evidently St. Matthew had a passion for the words, and he diligently searched them out. They were treasured in his mind, where they arranged themselves in the pregnant forms in which he has reproduced them. For he does not render them in chronological order, but in groups, as a goldsmith arranges gems in such settings that one precious stone is set off by another. The supreme instance of this is the Sermon on the Mount ; but only less conspicuous are the parables grouped together in chapter xiii., the succession of sayings on Offences in chapter xviii., and the dis- courses on the Last Things in chapters xxiv. and XXV. St. Matthew has penetrated down through the original sayings to the spirit moving beneath them all, and everywhere in his record we feel the height, the wisdom and the subtlety of the mind of Him who spake as never man spake. In the Gospel of St. Luke, as a whole, I feel more of the atmosphere of a later time ;* yet how little the faithfulness of his reporting has been impaired by greater distance from the events may be realised by recalling the parables which we owe to him alone, such as the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son.
Of course it would be different if we could get
* A striking illustration of this is the frequent occurrence of "the Lord" as a name for Jesus.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE TEACHING OF JESUS 35
back much nearer to the life of Jesus than the date of the Synoptic Gospels ; and at this problem scholarship is labouring at the present time with astonishing enterprise. It is believed that the words of Jesus were the first memorials of Him which His followers collected in written form, and that there existed such a collection from the pen of the Apostle Matthew, upon which the authors of the canonical St. Matthew and St. Luke, and possibly St. Mark, drew in compiling their gospels. By the close scrutiny of the Gospels as we now have them, and especially by gathering together the common element which they exhibit, it has been recently attempted to reproduce this assumed document.* In a critical volume published by Dr. Wendt before his work on the Teaching of Jesus which has been translated into English, this original St. Matthew is printed verse by verse in Greek. Another German scholar, Dr. Resch, well known for his profound studies on the forms in which the words of Jesus appear in the earliest postcanonical literature, has gone further: holding that the original St. Matthew contained, besides discourses, an element of narrative, he has reproduced narrative and logia together ; and, since
* Besides the works described in the following sentences, mention should be made also of The Apostolic Gospel, by J. Fulton Blair, B.D., 1896.
36 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
Papias, to whose information the idea of the original St. Matthew is due, says that it was written in Hebrew, he has supplied a Hebrew rendering of his own in addition to the Greek.* Finally, Dr. Dalman, an eminent Aramaic scholar, in the first volume, just published, of a work on the Words of Jesus, maintains that the Hebrew of the original St. Matthew was really Aramaic ; although he does not propose to retranslate back into that language, but only to make constant use of Aramaic, which he believes to have been the tongue in which Jesus spoke, in order to throw light on the sayings in general and in detail.f
The attempt, not only to prove the existence of a written gospel earlier than the canonical Gospels, but actually to reconstruct the document, must be felt to be of profound interest. Dr. Resch believes that we are thus carried back to a date not later perhaps than four years after the death of Jesus, when, he supposes, St. Matthew committed his recollections to writing,
* Die Logiajesu, 1898. The author holds that the Hebrew, as the sacred and Hterary language, would in any case have been employed for such a purpose.
t Die Worte Jcsu, 1898. The impression left on my mind by the arguments of Dalman, who speaks with great contempt of the knowledge of Aramaic possessed by his predecessors, is that there do not exist sufficient remains of the language or dialect spoken by Jesus to make it possible to determine with any great amount of certainty the actual vocables He used.
I
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE TEACHING OF JESUS 37
if he did not actually keep notes of his Master's utterances from day to day ; though of course this is only the conjecture of a sanguine specialist. It would be gratifying to learn that any of our Lord's words or acts could be traced back, in written records, so near to the confines of His actual life. But the use made of the results thus obtained falls in rather with German ideas than with ours ; for it is proposed to employ this gospel above the Gospels as a standard by which to try the other contents of the canonical Gospels. German scholarship, even of a comparatively orthodox type, takes quite naturally to the idea, that even among our Lord's words there must be distinctions made between those the authen- ticity of which is of first rank and others belonging to a secondary or tertiary formation, in which His actual sentiments are compounded with later elements caught from the atmosphere of the apostolic age. Indeed, a German theologian is never quite happy unless, in dealing with a book of Scripture, he is making use of one portion to test, and generally more or less to invalidate, the rest. In this country scholarship is more modest : we at least keep open the possibility that the application of the test may justify all the sayings. We are not unfamiliar, indeed, even in this country, with the fact that for reasons of edification an evangelist may have
THE CHRISfOLOGY OF JESUS
omitted words in his possession, and I have already referred to the influence of St. John's genius on his reporting ; there may be modifications due to other causes of like kind ; but it does not seem to me reasonable to suppose that a first sketch such as is attributed to St. Matthew would contain all that was vital in our Lord's teaching ; and I prefer to start with the presupposition that all the sayings are authentic till strong evidence is forthcoming to the contrary.
No other words ever uttered possess in the same degree the power of self-authentication. As a painter of the highest genius, like Raphael or Rubens, has a style of his own by which his work may be recognised, so the words of Jesus are full of peculiarities by which they can be identified.
One of their prominent characteristics is Preg- nancy. No other speaker ever put so much into few words. Yet the matter is not too closely packed : all is simple, limpid, musical. This virtue was studied in the rabbinical schools, and it was realised in a high degree in the Wisdom Literature of the Old Testament, where, it may not be irreverent to suppose, Jesus admired and studied it. But in His case it was chiefly due to the cast and habit of His own mind. It is when truth has been long and thoroughly pondered that it embodies itself in brief
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE TEACHING OF JESUS 39
and memorable language, as it is the ore thoroughly smelted which flows out in an uninterrupted stream and crystallizes in perfect shapes ; and such intense and convinced thought was so habitual to Jesus that the most striking sayings were often coined by Him on the spur of the moment, as when He said in con- troversy, " Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things which are God's." Sentences of this kind stick like goads and nails. No other words have adhered as those of Jesus to the memory of mankind. Let almost any of His sayings be commenced, and the ordinary hearer can without difficulty finish the sentence. But, if we can retain them so easily since they have been written, the first hearers could remember them as easily before they were written.
Another very prominent characteristic is Imagina- tiveness. The style of Jesus is intensely figurative. He never says, " You ought to exert a good influence on your fellow-creatures," but, " Ye are the salt of the earth ; ye are the light of the world " ; never, " All events are ordered by Providence," but, " Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing .-* yet one of them shall not fall to the ground without your Father." Never abstract statements or general terms, but always pictures, full of life, movement and colour ! Of course the use of imagery was a
40 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
feature of the sacred books He studied. In many a verse, for example, of the Book of Proverbs a moral truth is embodied in a picture borrowed from the realm of nature ; and, indeed, the Hebrew word for a proverb means a simile. The psalmists and the prophets have a grasp of nature such as can be found in no other ancient literature. But, whatever influence Jesus may have derived from this quarter, the peculiarity of His language was due, in the fullest sense, to Himself — to His insight into the secret of beauty, His sympathy with every aspect ot human life, and His perception of the play of natural law in the spiritual world. It is frequently said that the use of parables is common in the rabbinical schools, as, indeed, it is native to the Oriental mind ; but the specimens produced from Indian and Jewish sources only illustrate the perfection of His by con- trast ; and, although His have been so long before the world, they have never been imitated with even tolerable success. The early Christians have not infrequently been credited with inventing the miracles, but the man would only betray his own intellectual and literary incapacity who ventured to say that they invented the parables.*
* Just and choice remarks on what may be called the Style of Jesus will be found in Wendt's Teaching of Christ and Holtzmann's N. T. Theologie ; also in Julicher's introductory
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE TEACHING OF JESUS 41
These characteristics, however, are only external ; and far more significant are those which concern not the form but the substance of His teaching-, such as the sublimity and simplicity of His conception of God, which answers perfectly to the idea sunk at creation in the texture of human nature, and His conception of man, which ennobles while it humbles, at once dwarfing all human attainment and yet opening up boundless vistas of progress. In all great teaching the speaker is more than the word spoken ; and this is pre-eminently true of the teach- ing of Jesus. Behind the qualities of the words we divine a personality in which they are all united — a personality serene and harmonious, solid and firm at the centre and yet shading off at the circumference into the most ethereal nuances of beauty, revealing God so perfectly because of its perfect union with God, and appealing to all that is great and tender in man because of the comprehensiveness of its own human experience.
volume on the Parables. The latter work is a powerful plea for what is now the recognised method of interpreting the parables — illustration and truth being regarded not as two flat plates, meeting at every point, but as a sphere resting on a plate and touching it at a single point. But the correct theory is carried too far. Jesus Himself uses the word " parable " loosely for any figure of speech, and was probably unconscious of the literary structure of His illustrations. Jiilicher writes as if He had never taken His eye off a rhetorical model.
42 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
By characteristics such as these the words of Jesus authenticate themselves ; and I am not with- out the expectation that there may yet be founded on them a powerful apology even for His miracles ; because the words are inextricably mixed up with the acts — words so original and characteristic that they must have been His, and, at the same time, so obviously occasioned by the miracles, in the midst of which they stand, that the latter must have been actual also. At all events the words support and vindicate one another ; for they bear the stamp of the same incomparable mind, and the study of them as a whole will make it increasingly evident that they form the constituent elements of one harmonious circle of truth.*
* This brief discussion of the sources is supplemented in Appendix A.
THE SON OF MAN
43
Passages in which " the Son of Man " is mentioned : —
Matthew viii. 20 ; ix. 6 ; x. 23 ; xi. 19 ; xii. S, 32, 40 ; xiii. 37, 41 ; xvi. 13, 27, 28 ; xvii. 9, 12, 22; [xviii. Il] ; xix. 28; xx. 18, 28 ; xxiv. 27, 30, 37, 39, 44 ; xxv. [13], 31 ; xxvi. 2, 24, 45, 64.
Mark ii. 10, 28; viii. 31, 38; ix. 9, 12, 31; x. 33, 45; xiii. 26, [34]; xiv. 21, 41, 62.
Luke V. 24 ; vi. 5, 22 ; vii. 34 ; ix. 22, 26, 44, [56], 58 ; xi. 30 ; xii. 8, ID, 40 ; xvii. 22, 24, 26, 30; xviii. 8, 31 ; xix. 10; xxi. 27, 36; xxii. 22, 48, 69 ; xxiv. 7. The square brackets indicate interpolations.
44
T
II
THE SON OF MAN* HE name by which Jesus most frequently designated Himself was " the Son of Man,"
• The following list contains the principal books on the subject; but neither here nor in the lists at the beginning of the subsequent chapters are the older treatises on New Testament Theology included :— Weiss: Nentestamentliche Theologie, 1880, § 16. Beyschlag: Nentestamentliche Theologie, 1891, I. pp. 54 «• Holtzmann: Neutestamentliche Theologie, 1897, pp. 246—264. Stevens: The Theology of the New Testatnent, 1899, cap. IX. NoESGEN : Christus der Menschen- unci Gottessohtt, 1869. Bruce: The Kingdom of God, 1889, cap. VII. Wendt : Die Lehre Jesu, 1890, II. pp. 44° ff- Baldensperger : Das Selbstbewusstsein Jesu, 1892, c. VII. Grau: Das Selbstbewusstsein Jesu, 1887, c. VI. Lietzmann : Der Menschensohn, 1896.
Appel: Die Selbstbezeichmmg Jesu : Der Menschejisohn, 1896. BoEHMER : Reich Gottes tmd Menschensohn im Biiche Daniel,
li
Franz Sieber : an essay printed at p. 257 of Schnedermann's
second voUime on Jesu Verkiindigung und Lehre vom
Reiche Gottes. Krop : appendix on La Question du Fils de T Homme in his
book on La Pensee de Jesus sur le Royaume de Dieu,
pp. ii8ff. 1897. Dalman : Die Worte Jesu, 1898, cap. IX.
45
46 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
which occurs in St. Matthew thirty-two times, in St. Mark fifteen times, in St. Luke twenty-five times, and in St. John twelve times.
How did Jesus come to designate Himself in this way "i
He never either defines the title or mentions where He found it ; so that we have to ascertain its origin and significance for ourselves by examining His mode of using it. This proves to be a difficult inquiry, which has given rise to extraordinary diversity of opinion. A laborious German, writing on the subject, has recently collected a perfectly bewildering enumeration of the different meanings assigned to the term by different writers.*
The supposition which would most naturally occur to the unsophisticated mind is that He invented the term Himself. If this was His favourite self-designa- tion, it must, one would suppose, express what was most prominent in His consciousness of Himself, and He must have carefully constructed a phrase to express His own conception ; in which case the way for us to arrive at the meaning would be to analyze the words themselves. In sound the title
* Appel, work named in the list given in the foregoing note. Though rather bewildering, the conspectus of opinions is most interesting.
THE SON OF MAN 47
seems to be a most appropriate expression for the human side of His person ; and in this sense it has been understood by Christendom. The Greek and Latin Fathers, from Irenaeus downwards, thus employ it ; and at the present day probably ninety-nine out of every hundred Christians do the same. To the average man it is a designation for the human side of our Lord's person, as " the Son of God " is for the divine ; and these two phrases, complementing each other, define the God-man.
Merely to read over, however, a continuous list of the passages in which the name occurs will shake anyone's faith in the correctness of this assumption ; because it will at once be felt that the statements made about "the Son of man" are anything but characteristic predicates of humanity. How, for example, does this assumption harmonize with a saying like the following : " And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but He that came down from heaven, even the Son of man, which is in heaven " ; or with this, " When the Son of man shall come in His glory, and all the holy angels with Him, then shall He sit upon the throne of His glory, and before Him shall be gathered all nations, and He shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth the sheep from the goats, and He shall set the sheep on His right hand, but the
48 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
goats on the left " ? Many more sayings of a similar strain might be quoted, in which things are predicated about " the Son of man," which are the reverse of simply human. This has never escaped the observation of those who have actually looked at the facts ; and as early as Origen we find the hermeneutical principle laid down, that throughout the Scripture the divine nature of Christ is mentioned with human characteristics and the human nature adorned with divine attributes.*
In modern times the belief that this title refers primarily to the humanity of our Lord has been represented by many famous names and from different points of view, without its being held, however, that Jesus Himself invented it. Thus Neander interprets it as the ideal man ; and he has had a multitude of followers. His beautiful words are well worthy of quotation : " Jesus thus names Himself as belonging to mankind — as one who in human nature has accomplished such great things for human nature — who is man, in the supreme sense, the sense corresponding to the idea, — who makes real the ideal of humanity." He supports this definition by reference to such passages as St. Matthew ix. 8, where it is said that to the Son
* The remark is a common one in subsequent Fathers.
THE SON OF MAN 49
of man is given the power on earth to forgive sins ; and xii. 8 : " The Son of man is Lord even of the Sabbath day." * Others have supposed the view of humanity which the title expresses to be from beneath rather than above — from the side of weakness and lowliness rather than of dignity. This was the view of Baur, and he has had many supporters. "Jesus," he says, "designates Himself by this term as one who is man, with all the attributes which belong to human nature . . . one who takes His share in all that is human, qui nihil kumatti a se alienum putat." In support of this view he appeals especially to St. Matthew viii. 19 : " Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man hath not where to lay His head," which he thus paraphrases, " A child of man, like Me, must endure the very lowest which belongs to the lot of any man." f
One circumstance which might make it doubtful to an observant reader of the Bible whether Jesus invented this phrase Himself is, that it occurs frequently in the Old Testament. Everyone is aware how steeped the mind of Jesus was in biblical
• Also St. John i. 32; ii. 13; v. 27; vi. 53. — Leben Jesu, p. 117.
t A^. T. Theologie, pp. 80, 81.
4
50 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
phraseology, and, therefore, the suggestion is not unlikely, that He may have adopted this name from one or other of the Old Testament passages in which it is found.
The most famous of these is in the eighth Psalm : —
"When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, The moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained ; What is man, that Thou art mindful of him, And the son of man, that Thou visitest him ?"
Here " man " and " the son of man " are obviously synonyms ; and the whole psalm is an incomparable utterance on human nature, bringing out both its lowliness and its loftiness. When contrasted with God, man is nothing : it is a marvel that the Creator of the moon and the stars should condescend to look upon him. Yet, regarded from a different point of view — as a favourite among God's creatures — this being, insignificant in himself, is crowned with glory and honour ; he is but a little lower than the divine ; and to him has been committed the empire over the rest of the creatures, which the psalmist causes to march past, as if in procession, testifying their submission. Thus, in this splendid poem, which seems to have been composed beneath the midnight heavens, both the heights and the depths of human nature are brought to light ; and, if the origin of the self-designation of Jesus were found
THE SON OF MAN $1
here, both the meaning of the term already quoted
from Neander and that quoted from Baur would be
united. One distinguished theologian, Keim, was
of opinion that it was in this place that Jesus
obtained the first hint of the name ; but he has
not been followed by many.*
There is another instance in the Psalms of the
use of the " son of man " as a synonym for " man "
which I am surprised has never been referred to as
possibly furnishing the seed-thought out of which
grew the ideas which Jesus combined in His favourite
self-designation. In Psalm Ixxx. 17 occur these
words :
" Let Thy hand be upon the man of Thy right hand, Upon the son of man whom Thou madest strong for Thyself."
The whole psalm is a passionate appeal for national
revival. It describes, first, the public defeat and
humiliation : the people are fed with the bread
of tears, and are given tears to drink in great
measure ; they are a strife unto their neighbours,
and their enemies laugh among themselves. Then
comes in the celebrated comparison of the nation
to a vine, brought out of Egypt and planted in
Canaan, where it grew and flourished, till the
hills were covered with the shadow of it and the
* Jesi^s 0/ A^azara, in. yg-g2. The whole passage is one of great beauty.
52 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
boughs thereof were like the goodly cedars. Alas, however, days of calamity supervened, when the hedge was broken down and the fair plant defaced : " the boar out of the v/ood doth waste it, and the wild beast of the field doth devour it." In these circumstances the sacred poet appeals to the Shepherd of Israel to shine forth — to come and save them — and the form in which he anticipates deliverance is indicated in the words quoted above. He expected a hero to be raised up, whom Jehovah would favour and sustain, until He should have accomplished the grand task of emancipating His people. This passage is interpreted messianically in the Targums * ; the situation sketched in the psalm is only too faithful a description of the political condition of Palestine during the youth of Jesus ; and the picture of a deliverer, under the designation of " the son of man," is such as might well have fired a pious and patriotic mind. Here, it will be observed, the idea is totally different from that in the eighth psalm : in the latter passage " the son of man " is humanity in general, but here the term signifies an individual, chosen from the mass and endowed with special gifts and graces for God's work.
There is another book of the Old Testament in
• See Delitzsch : Die Psalmen, in loco
THE SON OF MAN S3
which the phrase " the son of man " occurs no fewer than ninety times. This is the Book of Ezekiel ; and the term is always applied to the prophet himself. Thus, in the opening vision, which describes his call to the office of prophet, the very first words ad- dressed to him by Jehovah are, " Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak to thee." "And," he proceeds, " the Spirit entered into me, when He spake unto me, and He set me upon my feet, that I heard Him that spake to me." Then the voice con- tinued, " Son of man, I will send thee to the children of Israel " ; and, a little further on, " Son of man, be not afraid of them, neither be afraid of their word . . . thou shalt speak My words unto them, whether they will hear or whether they will forbear." The designation has obviously but one meaning through- out the entire book ; and it is not difficult to gather from these first instances of its use what this is. " It expresses the contrast between what Ezekiel is in himself and what God will make out of him, the aim being not exactly to humble the prophet, but to make his mission appear to him not as his own, but as the work of God, and thus to lift him up whenever the flesh threatens to faint and fail. By this form of address God testifies how well He knows what His prophet is in himself, and, therefore, promises to lay no burden upon
54 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
him without accompanying it with the appropriate equipment." *
Thus there was one before Jesus of Nazareth who bore this name, at least in certain moments of his life, and may have derived from it some of the support with which it inspired our Saviour. It would not have been surprising if other prophets, imitating Ezekiel, had appropriated it to themselves, as a designation of their office, since it expresses so admirably the situation of the prophet, as a man weak in himself but strong in the Lord ; and at least one young prophet betrays a disposition to do so ; for in Daniel viii. 1 7 we read, " So He came near where I stood ; and, when He came, I was afraid and fell upon my face ; but He said unto me. Understand, O son of man " ; and then follow words calculated to restore the trembling prophet's courage. Weizsacker f and others have suggested that Jesus may at first have used the term to express His claim to be reckoned one of the prophetic line in succession to Ezekiel and Daniel ; and it has also been sug- gested that His frequent employment of it may have led to His being classed among the prophets in popular opinion ; but these suggestions are somewhat
* Nosgen : Christus dcr Menschen- und Gottessohn, p. 16. t UntersHchungen Uber die Evangelische Geschichte, p. 429.
THE SON OF MAN 55
far-fetched, and they have not commanded any considerable amount of assent.
In the Book of Daniel, besides the passage just quoted, there is another reference to " the son of man " far more famous. It occurs in the seventh chapter, in one of the apocalyptic visions common in this prophet. He sees four beasts coming up out of the sea — the first a lion with eagle's wings, the second a bear, the third a four-headed leopard, and the fourth a terrible monster with ten heads. To the distress of the prophet, in his dream, these beasts bear rule over the earth ; but at last the kingdom is taken away from them and given to a fifth ruler, who is thus described : " I saw, and, behold, one like the son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and they brought him near before Him ; and there was given unto him dominion, glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations and languages should serve him ; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed."
This chapter is not a place where one would naturally look for the origin of a name so beautiful as " the Son of man " ; for to many minds the imagery of Daniel is anything but attractive, on account of its deficiency in those graces of plastic beauty which distinguish the Greek from the Hebrew
THE CHRI3T0L0GY OF JESUS
imagination ; and even a writer as near to our own time as Schleiermacher speaks of the notion, that Jesus could have derived His favourite designation from this source, as an odd fancy. Yet, since Schleiermacher's time the belief has steadily grown, that this is the classical passage to which we must go back, and this opinion seems destined to become universal. Read the words of Daniel : " Behold, one like the son of man came with the clouds of heaven . . . and there was given unto Him dominion, glory, and a kingdom : " then read the words addressed by Jesus to the high priest in the hour of His con- demnation : " Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven ; " and the echo of the Old Testament words is unmistakable. It is equally indubitable in the following, from the great discourse on the future in the twenty-fourth of St. Matthew : " Then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven ; and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn ; and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory ; and He shall send His angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together His elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other." There are other passages in which the echo is distinguishable, if not quite so distinct, such as
THE SON OF MAN 5-/
Matt. xiii. 41 : "The Son of man shall send forth His angels, and they shall gather out of His king- dom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire ; there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth," or Matt. xvi. 27, 28 : " For the Son of man shall come in the glory of the Father, with His angels, and then He shall reward every man according to his works. Verily, I say unto you, there be some standing here which shall not taste of death till they see the Son of man coming in His kingdom," or Matt. xix. 28 : "Verily, I say unto you, that ye which have followed Me, in the regeneration when the Son of man shall sit in the throne of His glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel."
In Daniel the kingdom given to " one like unto the son of man " supersedes the kingdom of the beasts ; and it is obviously the messianic kingdom, for it is described as universal and everlasting. No mention is, however, made of a personal Messiah : on the contrary, thrice over, in the explanation of the vision supplied in the second half of the chapter, the occupant of the throne is described as " the people of the saints of the Most High." Obviously, therefore, the " one like unto the son of man " is a symbolical figure, representing Israel, just as the
58 THE CHRIST OLOGY OF JESUS
Hon, the bear, the leopard, and the ten-headed monster represent the world-conquering peoples of that epoch. Jesus, however, by assuming the title, puts Himself in the place of Israel, no doubt on the ground that in Him its attributes culminated and its kingly destiny was fulfilled.
If it is a little disappointing to find the place of origin of this beautiful name in one of Daniel's visions, it will to some minds be even more disappointing to discover what, if this is granted, must be its primary signification ; for evidently it describes position, not character : it is an official, not a personal designation. Nevertheless, this is the key which fits the lock.
The passages in the Gospels where Jesus calls Himself " the Son of man," are easily divisible into three classes. First, there is a large num.ber, of which the verses last quoted are specimens, in which functions are attributed to Him above the range of ordinary humanity. These have been explained, by those who hold " the Son of man " to be the ideal man, as describing functions of humanity in its loftier aspects ; but they are much more simply explained as functions of the Messiah.* There is a
* How awkwardly, on the theory that " the Son of man " designates humanity on its humble and suffering side, comes in the addition in the first of these quotations, that "the third day He shall be raised again J
THE SON OF MAN 59
second large class of passages referring to the humiliation, sufferings and death of Jesus, like Matt. xvii. 22 : "The Son of man shall be betrayed into the hands of men, and they shall kill Him, and the third day He shall be raised again," or Matt. xxvi. 24 : " The Son of man goeth, as it is written of Him ; but woe unto that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed ; it had been good for that man if he had not been born." These have been explained, in accordance with another of the theories mentioned already, as de- scriptive of our Lord's humanity on its lower side, where it was exposed to the trials of the human lot ; but they are far more completely and satisfactorily explained as descriptive of what was to fall to His lot as Messiah. The point in these numerous passages is the contrast between the great destiny of Jesus as Messiah and His actual experiences during His earthly life — a contrast the pathos of which comes supremely out in the saying that " even the Son of man came not to be ministered unto but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many." The third class of passages is miscellaneous, and in them different points of view may be con- tended for ; but there is not one of them in which the messianic view does not yield a good and natural sense.
6o THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
I have discussed the possibility of Jesus inventing this name Himself, and, secondly, that of His borrowing it from the Old Testament ; but there remains a third possibility — that He may have derived it from the thought of the time in which He lived, or that, at all events, its transference to His mind from the Old Testament may have been mediated by means of the postcanonical literature of the Jews.
I have already pointed out that the term " son of man," applied by the prophet Daniel to Israel as a nation, is by Jesus applied to Himself as an individual ; but the question may be raised, whether this modification was entirely due to Jesus, or whether it may not have been made to His hand. Daniel was a favourite book in the interval between its composition and the commencement of the Christian era ; and it is conceivable that the religious mind, brooding on its promises, may have trans- muted the prediction of a messianic kingdom into that of a messianic king. By some scholars it is considered that remarkable proof of this having taken place is found in the Book of Enoch.
This book may be roughly said to belong to the second century before Christ ; it is apocalyptic in character and strongly influenced by the Book of Daniel ; and " the Son of man " plays in it a
THE SON OF Man 5 1
remarkable role. To prove this, let me make a few quotations, which might easily be multiplied : —
" And there I saw One who had a head of days, and His head was white like wool, and with Him was another being, whose countenance had the appearance of a man, and His face was full of graciousness, like one of the holy angels. And I asked the angel who went with me and showed me all the hidden things concerning that Son of man, who He was, and whence He was, and why He went with the Head of days. And he answered and said unto me. This is the Son of man, who hath righteousness, with whom dwelleth righteous- ness, and who reveals all the treasures of that which is hidden, because the Lord of spirits hath chosen Him, and His lot before the Lord of spirits hath surpassed everything in uprightness forever. And this Son of man, whom thou hast seen, will arouse the kings and mighty ones from their couches, and the strong from their thrones, and will loosen the reins of the strong, and grind to powder the teeth of the sinners. And He will put down the kings from their thrones and kingdoms, because they do not extol and praise Him, nor thankfully acknow- ledge whence the kingdom was bestowed on them."
"And in that hour that Son of man was named in the presence of the Lord of spirits, and His name
62 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
before the Head of days. And before the sun and the signs were created, before the stars of heaven were made, His name was named before the Lord of spirits. He will be a staff to the righteous, on which they will support themselves and not fall ; and He will be the light of the Gentiles and the hope of those who are troubled at heart. All who dwell on earth will fall down and bow the knee before Him, and will bless and laud and celebrate with song the Lord of spirits. And for this reason has He been chosen and hidden before Him, before the creation of the world and for evermore."
" And He sat on the throne of His glory, and the sum of judgment was committed unto Him, the Son of man, and He caused the sinners and those who have led the world astray to pass away and be destroyed from off the face of the earth."
According to this book, " the Son of man " pre- exists with the Ancient of days ; at the critical moment He is to be sent forth to destroy the unrighteous and to reign over the righteous for- ever ; and He is the judge by whom the destiny of men is to be decided. If these passages are genuine products of the period between the Old Testament and the New, they are among the most important documents of the life of Christ ; for their influence upon His thought and language is unmistakable
THE SON OF MAN 63
But the question of their date and origin is a highly debatable one. The Book of Enoch used to be considered the work of a single author, with possibly a few interpolations ; but its latest editor, Mr. Charles, considers it to be an extremely composite production, made up of at least five documents of different authorship and different dates. Indeed, he says, it is rather a collection of the fragments of an Enoch literature than a literary unity. The passages about " the Son of man " all occur in a portion of it known as the Book of Similitudes, which is a docu- ment of peculiar character and uncertain origin. It abounds with acknowledged interpolations, and the passages about " the Son of man " have been regarded by trustworthy authorities as Christian additions.
At the present moment, indeed, the trend of criticism is rather in the opposite direction ; and this is not to be wondered at ; because it falls in with the tendencies of a school, claiming several very able and zealous adherents, which is taking a prominent part in the discussion of the teaching of Jesus, and the watchword of which is, that He is to be understood by studying the conditions of thought and life in the midst of which He grew up.* The old way, they say, was to approach
* Baldensperger's Das Selbsibewusstsein Jesii is the ablest production of this school.
64 THE CHRI5T0L0GY OF JESUS
Jesus from the side of St. Paul and the other apostolic writers and to see Him in the light which these cast upon Him ; but this was not the light in which He actually lived and moved. The true way is to approach Him from the opposite direction, coming down to Him through the society in which the presuppositions of His life are to be found. No doubt the older theology approached Him in this way too, for it developed with peculiar zeal the Christology of the Old Testament ; but, they would say, it leaped from Malachi to St. Matthew without taking any account of the centuries lying between. Yet this interval was as long as from the Reformation to the present day, and the human spirit was not dead then : on the contrary, in Palestine and the other homes of the Jews the keenest intellectual activity was going on ; changes were taking place in the beliefs and the language of religion from generation to generation ; and a literature exists in which the course of this history can still be traced. Jesus, like every other human being, was a product of His age ; and it is to the ideas and customs of the age we must look, if we desire to understand Him.
The adherents of this school speak of their method in the tone of discoverers, and unfold remarkable enthusiasm and assiduity in exploring the records
THE SON OF MAN 65
of the two or three centuries immediately before Christ. It is not to such noble productions of this period, however, as T/ie Wisdom of Solomon or Ecclesiasticus that they chiefly turn their eyes, but to a series of apocalyptic writings, imitations of the spirit and style of the Book of Daniel, lying for the most part outside of the collection known to the common man as the Apocrypha ; * and among these the largest and most important is the Book of Enoch.
Unquestionably there is a true idea in this move- ment ; and, if in some minds a great deal too much is expected from it, this also belongs to the nature of the case ; for it is by such illusions that nature gets the necessary work done in unremunerative fields of inquiry. One is reminded of a literary parallel — the sensation created at one time in the region of Shakspeare criticism by the discovery of the sources from which the poet derived the materials of his plays. For a moment it seemed as if the very secret of Shakspeare had been found out ; and to this day no one can read without astonishment for the first time, in the introductions of Mr. Aldis
* Mr. Charles, in Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible gives the following as the leading products of Apocalyptic Literature: Apocalypse of Baruch, Book of Enoch, Book of the Secrets of Enoch, Ascension of Isaiah, Book of Jubilees, Assumption of Moses, Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, Psalms of Solornon, Sibylline Oracles,
5
66 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
Wright or other able editors, the old plays, the stories from Boccaccio, the extracts from Plutarch, and the other rough materials with which the dramatist worked ; for he adheres to them, often for pages at a time, with extraordinary closeness. On second thoughts, however, everyone perceives that the copiousness of such borrowing only enhances the marvel of that genius which was able to trans- mute whatever it touched into a product entirely its own. The secret of Shakspeare no more lies in his sources than does the secret of the Parthenon in the quarry out of which it was built. Of late certain editors have been making similar discoveries about Burns, and have been so surprised at them as to express the fear lest the general diffusion of their knowledge might impair the popular faith in the poet's originality ; and it certainly does give a shock of surprise to compare, for example, The Cotter's Saturday Night for the first time with The Farmer's Ingle of Ferguson. But they may spare their fears ; for authors who can make of foreign materials what Shakspeare and Burns have made of theirs may borrow wherever they can and on any scale they please. It may be that Jesus was more the child of His age than we have been accustomed to suppose ; and ideas or phrases may be recovered from apocalyptic literature which have
THE SON OF MAN 67
entered into His teaching ; but these are no more than the particles of inorganic matter which the plant takes up into its own substance and trans- mutes into forms of beauty. Indeed, the more the apocalyptic literature is unearthed, the more is the in- comparable originality of Jesus enhanced ; for nothing else in the whole range of human records is more utterly wearisome and worthless. The sneer of the great scholar, Lightfoot, about rabbinical literature might be applied to it with at least equal justice — Lege, si vacat, et si per tcedium et nauseam potes.*
* Those who insist so much more than is meet on the influence of the later Judaism on the teaching of Jesus might ponder, with profit to themselves, some words of Carlyle on a kindred subject : — " Show our critics a great man, they begin to, what they call, 'account for him.' He was 'the creature of the time,' they say; the time called him forth ; the time did everything, he nothing. This seems to me but melancholy work. The time call forth? Alas, we have known times call loudly enough for their great man, but not find him when they called. He was not there. Providence had not sent him. The time, calling its loudest, had to go down to confusion and wreck because he would not come when called. I liken common times, with their unbelief, distress, perplexity, their languid doubting character, impotently crumbling down through even worse distress to final ruin, all this I liken to dry, dead fuel, waiting for the lightning out of heaven that shall quicken it. The great man, with his free, direct force out of God's own hand, is the lightning. All blazes now around him. The critic thinks the dry, mouldering sticks have called him forth. They wanted him greatly, no doubt. But as to calling him forth ! They are critics of small vision who think that the dead sticks have created the fire,''
t)8 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
As for the Book of Similitudes, my belief, after many readings, is, that the passages on " the Son of man " are derived from Christianity. The whole book is strewn with interpolations, and must always have invited interpolation on account of the exces- sive looseness of its texture. Whatever definite connexion it has is interrupted by these passages, which bear a stamp of their own quite different from the adjacent materials. At all events their literary character is too doubtful to permit of any really scientific conclusions being built upon them.* Those who champion their genuineness suppose that the Enoch literature enjoyed an extensive circulation and was well-known in the circles in which Jesus grew up ; one proof of which is that his brother, St. Jude, quotes one of the opening verses of the Book of Enoch — " And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord Cometh with ten thousands of His saints, to execute judgment upon all ; and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him." The name of " the Son of man," as a messianic title, was, therefore, in the
• See Appendix B.
THE SON OF MAN 6g
atmosphere which Jesus breathed ; and it may have been thence, rather than directly from the Book of Enoch, that He derived it. But the phenomena of the Gospels are not in harmony vi'ith these assump- tions. In the book called by his name Enoch is a heroic figure ; he is the prophet of prophets ; once, at least, he is even identified with the Messiah. But in the Gospels he is never once mentioned, and, even when all kinds of conjectures are being made as to who Jesus is, it is never once suggested that He is Enoch, though this might have been expected to be the very first suggestion, if Enoch had held the position supposed in the popular mind. That " the Son of man " was in any degree a current name for the Messiah is contradicted by the fact, which lies on the very surface of the Gospels, that, while Jesus called Himself "the Son of man " in all audiences. He continued, almost to the very end, to forbid His disciples to make Him known as the Christ. And the form of His question to the Twelve in the critical interview at Caesarea Philippi, " Whom do men say that I, the Son of man, am " .? shows that the knowledge of Him as " the Son of man " was not identical with the knowledge of Him as the Messiah. To His own mind this was the meaning of the title ; and it was destined sometime to convey the same meaning to others ; but it more
70 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
than half concealed the secret till it was ripe for disclosure.*
Thus we have passed in review the possible sources of this name, with the result that the indica- tions point strongly to the passage in Daniel. And the place of origin determines the sense to be
* Baldensperger speaks with so much assurance of the sayings about the Son of man as original parts of the Enoch literature that in this country also some are affecting to take this for granted ; but I am glad to find that Bousset, one of the younger and certainly one of the ablest members of the same school, in his work entitled Jesu Predigt in ihrem Gegensaiz zum Judenthum, takes the same view as I have done ; and the general tone in which he speaks of the postcanonical literature is identical with that which I have used. His reasons for looking upon the passages in question as interpolations are three. First, they interrupt the connexion, which is restored when they are removed ; secondly, the view of the Son of man which they represent is non-Jewish, such an uplifting of the Messiah to equality with God and to the position of Judge of the world being totally unlikely on Jewish soil ; thirdly, in the development of Jewish Apocalyptic there is no tendency towards giving such a prominence to tlie Messiah : the tendency is rather the contrary way : the Messiah retreats more and more into the background, God's own infinite power alone being looked to as the agency by which the changes of the future are to be brought about ; so that the divine figure of the Messiah in this part of the Book of Enoch is neither preceded by anything similar to itself, leading up to it, nor followed by anything which it has produced. VVellhausen also declares it to be incredible that Jesus can have picked up His favourite title in the Book of Enoch : see Israeltttsche und Jildische Geschkhte, p. 312, note.
THE SON OF MAN ^\
messianic ; though it does not seem to me at all unlikely, but the reverse, that the other Old Testament passages in which it occurs may have contributed to enrich its significance in the con- sciousness of Jesus.
Our conclusion is established by the linguistic structure of the phrase. The Greek is full-sounding — 6 vto9 Tov apdpcoTTOv — with the definite article before each of the nouns, literally " the son of the man." The Fathers used to discuss the question, who " the man " was of whom He was the son. It was frequently held, that the reference was to the Virgin Mary, because of course " man " is equivalent to " human being." Other suggestions were David, Abraham, Adam. But some even of the Fathers were aware, that in the circle of thought in which Jesus moved " man " and " son of man " were synonymous, and that, therefore, the article before " man " is generic ; and this is now the accepted opinion. The other article, before " son," in all probability points directly back to the passage in Daniel, indicating that the " son of man " intended is the famous one referred to there.*
* A very thorough discussion of the Greek words will be found in Holsten's famous article on Die Bedeutiing der Aus- drucksfonn 6 vlos tov av6pu>irov im Bcwusstseiti Jesu in Zeiischrift fUr wissenschaftliche Theologie 1891, pp. 46 ff, Beyschlag,
72 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
The force of such linguistic deductions has been entirely called in question on the ground that the language spoken by Jesus was Aramaic, in which, it is argued, no phrase exists, or can have existed, equivalent to this Greek one. It is assumed, that the phrase employed by Jesus was barnash, which, instead of being a definite and dignified phrase like 6 V109 rov avOpcoTTOv, is in the highest degree vague and indefinite, meaning only " man " in the most general sense, or rather " anyone." Wide attention has been drawn to this suggestion through Wellhausen having lent it the support of his great name ; and a young scholar, Hans Lietzmann, has recently devoted an entire book to the development of the theory. His conclusions are, that Jesus never made use of the phrase at all, but that it came into use as a messianic title in Asia Minor not later than the middle of the second century. To English-speaking people such a theory will hardly appear serious enough for discussion, but will be thought one of those ifottrs de force by which the German Privatdocent seeks to attract public attention. It may, however, be worth while to show wherein its weakness lies. One point of
following a hint derived from Hupfeld, explains the second article from the Hebrew practice of placing the article before the second noun in such a compound phrase as " the son of man."
THE SON OF MAN 73
weakness is the dogmatic assertion, that the Aramaic language was incapable of supplying an equivalent to the Greek phrase. Evidently, barnash is no equivalent ; but this only proves that a mistake has been made in assuming this to have been the phrase employed by Jesus. The Greek words have all the appearance of an effort to render something which was not Greek ; and the task of scholarship is to find out what this was. But a still greater difficulty is to account for the introduction of the phrase, on so extensive a scale, into the Gospels, if, as is presupposed, these did not originally contain it. To begin to call Jesus " the Son of man " would have excited the strongest suspicion at a time when belief in His godhead was everywhere diffused ; and Lietzmann has not allowed himself to realise the difficulty of getting such a form of speech, arising in Asia Minor, introduced so extensively into the Gospels that no copies have remained without it. The author adduces, as one of his strongest arguments, the absence of the name from the Epistles of St. Paul and the other New Testament writings ; for it occurs only once in the Book of Acts, in Stephen's speech, and twice in the Book of Revelation.* But there may be other
• The writer of the Revelation seems, however, to go back not to the use of the term by Jesus, but to its use by Daniel.
74 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
reasons for this. For example, the name " Christ " itself had become so universal as to make other equivalents for the Messiah unnecessary. Very likely the chief reason was the fear, just alluded to, of throwing doubt on our Lord's divinity. At all events, if the name had been introduced into the Gospels in the way suggested by Lietzmann, is it not perfectly certain that it would have been inserted in the other New Testament writings as well ? *
* Wellhausen's statement occurs in a footnote, p. 312, of his Geschichte Israels, He assumes that Jesus simply said " man " where the Gospels make Him say " the Son of man." Krop, in his book entitled Le Royaimte de Dieu, has shown that this theological novelty is nothing more than the resurrection of a notion of the old rationalist Paulus. Great confusion is intro- duced into Lietzmann's book by the fact that he seems often to be arguing for this hypothesis too. This, however, is not really his drift. He sees that a splendid phrase like 6 vlos rov dvOpaynov cannot have been a rendering of barnash. But he is rash in affirming that it cannot have had any equivalent in Aramaic. Dalman, who, I suppose, is the most eminent Aramaic scholar living, sees no such difficulty, and he regards the discovery of Wellhausen as a mare's nest — " Holtzmann nennt es eine ' Entdeckung,' dass in Jesu Muttersprache Menschensohn der einzige zu Gebote stehende Ausdruck fiir Mensch sci. Wellhausen behauptet ' Die Aramaer haben keinen anderen Ausdruck fiir den Begriff,' und Lietzmann in Uebereinstimmung mit Eerdmans begriindet darauf seine These, 'Jesus hat sich selbst nie den Titel Menschensohn beigelegt, weil derselbe im AramSischen nicht existiert und aus sprachlichen Griinden nicht existieren kann.' Gleichwohl ist es ein schlimmer Irrtum,
The son op man 7s
We hold "it, then, to be established that the passage in Daniel is the source of this title, and that its meaning is messianic. But a question of great importance still remains : Why did Jesus appropriate this name as His favourite from among all those which were offered by the Old Testament or which might have occurred to His own mind ? It was not, as we have seen, thrust upon Him by its popularity among His contemporaries ; nor, if it had, would this alone have determined His choice : a
welcher bei gewissenhafter Beachtung auch nur des biblisch- aramaischen Sprachgebrauchs unmoglich gevvesen ware. Wenn der zusammangesetzte Ausdruck ii^^ii 13 Menschensohn deter- miniert werden sollte, konnte die Determination nur zu EJ'3^ treten, vvie bei hebr. DIX 13 zu DIN. So entsteht N^":X 13, DINH )| was ebennicht 'der Mensch'(sodeLagarde,Wellhausenj Lietzmann) sondern nur mit ' der Menschensohn' iibersetzt wer- den darf, wenn man nicht die Eigenart des Ausdrucks vollig verwischen will." Mrs. Lewis informs me that in Old Syriac the rendering of " the Son of man " is generally darek de ansha (in Cureton's MS. 42 times, in her own palimpsest 65 times), though it is a few times bareh de gabra. She does not, how- ever, suppose that this was the form of words used by Jesus ; but she adds, with much point, " It seems to me that the Evangelists and the copyists of their text must have been perfectly well acquainted with Syriac idioms and, therefore, could not have translated barnash by 6 vtor rov dfdpoojrov, and that some more definite phrase must have been behind the Greek." I am indebted to Mrs, Lewis and her sister, Mrs. Gibson, for their kind courtesy in examining manuscrijits and interviewing experts for mc on this ticklish point.
76 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
self-designation so intimate must have had its chief reason in His own mind.
The suggestion has been made, that it commended itself to Him because the figure in Daniel, being of heavenly origin and engaged in high and solemn fellowship with the Ancient of days, before descend- ing to engage in his earthly task, would correspond with His consciousness of pre-existence. Again, the practical reason has been hinted at already, that the name suited His purpose of concealing His messianic claims, while it expressed them to Himself and hinted them to His disciples. But, it seems to me, the deepest reason for His choice of this name must have been the admirable expression which it gives to His connexion with the human race. That the sense of His identity with all mankind was one of His master-sentiments requires no demonstration. With whatever is high and noble in man's nature or destiny He was in intimate sympathy ; and His compassion reached down to everything that is painful or pathetic in the human lot. He is the Brother of all, the Man of men. This is one of the two poles on which His messiahship rests. Without this connexion with the race and this universality of sympathy He could not have been the Messiah.
It must be confessed, hcvever, it is surprising in
THE SON OF MAN 77
how few of the passages in which " the Son of man " occurs there is direct and undeniable reference to this.* It has even been argued, that there is no such reference in any of them at all. But this is an exaggeration. When He says, " The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath," and then adds, "Therefore the Son of man is Lord also of the Sabbath," the force of the inference lies partly in the identity of the Speaker with all the children of men and partly in His supremacy above them. He is the head and representative to whom it belongs to guard and vindicate their rights.f When He contrasted Himself with the Baptist by saying that " the Son of man came eating and drinking," He was pointing to His sympathy with all simple and natural human enjoyments. Even when He says, " The Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost," while He may be describing a function of the Messiah, the great saying gains immeasurably in depth and pathos, if we consider it to express His sense of brotherhood with all men,
* Of course there is abundant reference to it in His sayings in general ; and nearly every incident of His life could be quoted in illustration.
+ Lietzmann and others take the inference to be that man collectively is Lord of the Sabbath. But would Jesus have made this assertion ? I do not think so,
78 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
even the worst. Indeed, even if it be allowed that the primary reference in every saying about " the Son of man " is to messiahship, yet, on the other hand, everyone of them gains in point and power, if this under-sense be also remembered.
There must have been a moment in the experi- ence of Jesus when the text in Daniel, so often referred to, suddenly shone forth upon Him as the guiding-star of His career ; and, if only a record of this incident had been vouchsafed to us, much that is dark would have been made clear. Where did it take place .-* Was it in Nazareth, some Sabbath, when in the synagogue the Prophets were being read .'' or was it later, during one of the nights of communion with His Father on some mountain-top of Galilee, when the words of the sacred Book stood out on the sky of His imagination in letters of fire ? To those His experience will not be altogether foreign to whom, in some great spiritual crisis, a word of God, detaching itself from the rest of Scripture, has been given as a pledge of the divine choice, to be kept forever. I have expressed a certain regret and disappointment that our Lord's favourite name is official rather than personal ; but I take this back ; because I now see, that, when He was standing before the Word of God, to receive the message of destiny, it was meet that this should
THE SON OF MAN
79
come to Him not as a reflection upon His own qualities and attributes, but as a summons to a grand work, which was to carry Him out of Himself and absorb all His powers. Or if, in any degree, in that solemn hour there was the consciousness of self, it was the consciousness of His identity with all the children of men, whom He was to seek and to save *
Identity — and yet at one essential point there is no evidence of participation by Jesus in the experi- ence of humanity ; for He betrays no consciousness of sin.
The proof of the sinlessness of Jesus is not derived exclusively from the Gospels ; and in the Gospels it is not proved exclusively by His own words ; nor are the most forcible even of such words in the Synoptists. The Synoptists, indeed, draw frequent attention to the impression of His perfection made on both friends and foes. Thus they tell us, how the centurion at the cross declared, evidently with
* During the passage of this book through the press an impor- tant essay on " The Son of Man " has appeared in the sixth volume of Wellhausen's Skizzen mid Vorarbeiten. It adds little to the arguments advanced by Lietzmann for eliminating the phrase from the words of Jesus ; but it is much more cautious about determining when and where the name was given to our Lord.
So THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
deep emotion, that Jesus was " a righteous man " ; how Pilate and Pilate's wife acknowledged His innocence ; how the Baptist affirmed, " I have need to be baptized of Thee, and comest Thou to me ? " how St. Peter, in the boat, dazzled with the proximity of perfect moral purity, cried out, " Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord " ; and how even Judas confessed that he had betrayed "innocent blood." * But they do not record sayings in which He lays claim to sinlessness.
They even narrate incidents which might be inter- preted as acknowledging the reverse. Such is His baptism. Was not the baptism of John the baptism of repentance .-* Such it was to others ; but it need not necessarily have been so to Him ; for, besides this negative side, it had also a positive side : it not only symbolized the washing of the nation from sin, but its consecration to a new career of holiness. Jesus knew Himself to be the Leader ot this new movement ; and, knowing this, He might choose, in His humility, to go through the common door, although the negative virtue of the ordinance was not a necessity to Him. Then, there is His state- ment to one who hailed Him as "Good Master": " Why callest thou Me good .-' there is none good
* Luke xxiii. 47, 4; Matt, xxvii. 19; iii. 14; Luke v. 8; Matt, xxvii. 4.
THE SON OF MAN «i
but One, that is God." Is not this a confession of imperfection ? It is an acknowledgment of a certain kind of imperfection — the imperfection of a character that is growing, and has to realise its goodness on every fresh stage of advancement — but this does not necessarily imply a guilty imperfection at any stage. It is not, however, for anything which they make Him say positively about His sinlessness that the Synoptists are remarkable, but for the things they do not make Him say. A recent writer has adduced as a fresh proof of His sinlessness, that He never prayed in company with others : He taught the Twelve to pray, but He did not pray even with them, the reason being that prayer requires the confession of sin, which He could not make.* On this I lay no stress, because I am doubtful of the fact. It seems to me that He did pray with others when He gave thanks in their name ; and may there not be prayer without confession ? But the broad fact remains, that Jesus did not confess sin. His habits of prayer are commemorated in the Gospels, and specimens of His prayers are given ; but these include no acknowledgments of personal transgression. This is in striking contrast with the other great
* Forrest, The Christ of History and of Experience, c. I. The chapter, as a whole, is an admirable statement on the sinlessness ot Jesus.
6
82 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
figures of the Jewish race. Isaiah confesses, " Woe is me, for I am undone, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell among a people of unclean lips." David says, " I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me." Job says, " I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes." Ezra says, " O my God, I am ashamed and blush to lift up my face to Thee, my God, for our iniquities are increased over our heads, and our trespass is grown up unto the heavens." Our Lord's own apostles make similar acknowledgments. Thus St. Paul groans, " Oh wretched man that I am ! who shall deliver me from the body of this death } " And even the saintly St. John confesses, " If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." Such is the tone of all the men of religious genius who were either the teachers of Jesus or His disciples. If He was merely the supreme religious genius among them all, it would be natural to expect from Him still more agonizing cries of penitence. But nothing of the kind is ever heard from His lips. What is the explanation of this singular phenomenon } It will hardly be interpreted as a defect. Could it be so understood, it would lower Him far beneath such figures as have just been quoted ; for what quality of saintliness is more essential than humility ? But, if it was not a defect, the only alternative is, that
THE SON OF MAN 83
He confessed no sin because He had none to confess but was "holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners.'
"*
* The proof of the sinlessness of Jesus rests primarily on His own testimony in St. John (see especially iv. 34 ; viii. 29, 46) and the Synoptists, secondly on that of the apostles (see, for example, Heb. iii. 15; vii. 26; Acts iii. 14; i Peter iii. 18; I John iii. 5 ; 2 Cor. V. 21), and thirdly on the prevalence in Christendom of the ideal of holiness. Wherever Christianity exists, holiness exists. Remarkable holiness may be a rare phenomenon ; but in every Christian community there are many striving after it, and there are few places in Christendom where there cannot be found some whose holiness impresses others as distinctly a divine creation. Not infrequently the effect is overawing in a high degree — a vision of unearthly beauty. And Christian holiness, which is a well proportioned mixture of religion and morality, traces itself back to Christ. Its communion with God is founded on reconciliation through Him ; it knows itself to spring from a Hfe rooted in Him ; it is a never-ending imitation of Him ; and it knows Him to be infinitely above itself. But, if He is far above the holiest, must He not have been perfectly holy ? The Christian movement towards holiness must have as its fons et origo One whose holiness was perfect. Ullmann's book on the Sinlessness of Jesus is one of the most artistic and enduring products of German theology.
THE SON OF GOD
i|
Passages in which Jesus is called "the Son of God" by OTHERS, Himself sometimes adopting the name : —
Matthew ii. 15 ; iii. 17; iv. 3, 6; viii. 29; xiv. 33; xvi. 16; xvii. 5;
xxi. 37, 38; xxvi. 63, 64; xxvii. 40, 43, 54. Mark i. [i], 11 ; iii. 11 ; v. 7 ; ix. 7 ; xiv. 61, 62 ; xv. 39. Luke i. 32, 35 ; iii. 22 ; iv. 3, 9, 41 ; viii. 28 ; ix. 35 ; xx. 9 ; xxii. 70.
Passages in which Jesus calls Himself "the Son": —
Matthew xi. 27 (thrice) ; xxii. 2 ; xxvii. 43 ; xxviii. 19. Mark xiii. 32. Luke X. 22 (thrice).
Passages in which Je^'S calls God His Father : — Matthew vii. 21 ; x. 32, 33 ; xi. 25, 26, 27 ; xii. 50 ; xxv. 13 ; xvi. 17,
27 ; xviii. 10, 19, 35 ; xx. 23 ; xxiv. 36 ; xxv. 34 ; xxvi. 29, 39, 42,
53 ; xxviii. 19. Mark viii. 38 ; xiii. 32 ; xiv. 36. Luke ii. 49 ; ix. 26 ; x. 21, 22 ; xxii. 29, 42 ; xxiii. 34, 46 j xxiv. 49.
w
III.
THE SON OF GOD*
THE Other self-designation of our Lord is " the Son of God." Jesus does not make use of it Himself in the Synoptists ; but it is frequently applied to Him by others, when He accepts it in such a way as to appropriate it to Himself. He makes use sparingly on His own initiative of the abbreviated form, " the Son," evidently with the same force ; and He often speaks of God as " the Father," or " My Father," or " My Father who is in heaven," in a way
* Weiss: Neutestanientliche Theologie, § 17. Beyschlag : Neiitestamentliche Theologie, I. 54 ff. HoLTZMANN : A^. T. Theologie, I. 265 ff. Stevens : The Theology of the New Testament, Chapter V, BovoN : Theologie dii Noiiveau Testament, pp. 412 ff. NosGEN : Christus der Menschen- nnd Gotiessohn. NosGEN : Geschichte Jesii Chrlsti, pp. 290 ff., 470 ff. Grau: Das Selbstbewtisstsein Jesit, cap. VIII. Beyschlag : Die Christologie des Neuen Testaments, pp. 40 ff. Dalman : Die Worte Jesu, cap. X. Gore: Bampton Lecttcres, 1891. Gore : Dissertations. Wendt : Die Lehre Jesu, II. 428 ff,
«7
88 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
that involves the consciousness that He is the Son of God.
The terms " Son of man " and " Son of God " appear to form a pair ; and they describe so aptly the two sides of our Lord's person that it is no wonder that this should have been taken to be their original meaning. So they have been interpreted from very early times ; and so they are understood by ordinary readers of the Bible to this day. As, however, we found reason to modify this assumption in the case of " the Son of man," so, in investigating this other term, we must not rashly yield to the impression conveyed by the mere sound of the words.
At all events there is no likelihood that Jesus invented this phrase ; for it occurs frequently in the Old Testament, and it has a wide range of application in the Bible.
Thus, first, it is applied to angels. In the Book of Job we read that at the creation of the world " the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy." In the same book an occasion is mentioned when " the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them," where it is not quite clear whether Satan is reckoned as one of the sons of God, or
THE SON OF GOD 89
whether he is an intruder forcing himself in where he has no right to be.* The reason why the angels are called by this name may only be that they are creatures of God, as we call a poet's works the children of his imagination ; or it may more probably be that, as spiritual beings, they bear a resemblance to God, who is a spirit.
Secondly, the term is applied to the first man. In the third chapter of St. Luke the genealogy of our Lord is traced back from generation to genera- tion, each member of the series being described as the son of his father, till Adam is reached, " who," it is added, " was the son of God."t This may mean simply that God was the Author of his being ; though it is more likely that there is also a reference to the fact, mentioned so impressively in the first chapter of Genesis, that Adam was made in the image of God. This raises the question, whether all the children of Adam might not be called by this name. It would seem to be in the spirit of Scripture to answer this question affirmatively ; and, if many passages cannot be quoted in favour of this applica- tion, there is at least one which weighs very heavily — the Parable of the Prodigal Son. The prodigal in the far country is still a son, though a lost one.
* Job xxxviii. 7 ; i. 6 ; ii. i.
f Luke iii. 38 : 'ASa/x tov Qeov.
90 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
Thirdly, the term is applied to the Hebrew nation as a whole. For example, Moses was sent to Pharaoh with this message, " Thus saith the Lord, Israel is My son, even My firstborn, and I say unto thee, Let My son go."* And in Hosea ii. i Jehovah says, " When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called My son out of Egypt." These quotations show very clearly the idea at the root of this desig- nation : Israel was the son of God as the object of His special love and gracious choice. The entire Old Testament, however, is pervaded by the cor- relative idea, that sonship implies likeness, or at all events the obligation to be like the Father. Thus in Malachi i. 6, Jehovah says, " A son honoureth his father, and a servant his master ; if I then be a Father, where is mine honour } and, if I be a Master, where is My fear?" It would be a natural transition from the application of the term to Israel as a whole to apply it to individual Israelites; and this appears to have been effected at least in New Testament times ; for, in argument with Jesus, the Jews affirmed (John viii. 41), " We have one Father, even God " ; and Jesus Himself said of the Jews to the Syrophoenician woman, " Let the children first be filled."
Fourthly, the kings of Israel, or at least some of
* |5xod. iv. 22.
THE SON OF GOD 9^
them, bore this title. Thus Jehovah said of Solomon, " I will be his Father, and he shall be to Me a son."* In Psalm Ixxxix. an ancient oracle is quoted in which Jehovah says of King David, " He shall cry unto Me, Thou art my Father, my God, and the rock of my salvation. Also I will make him My firstborn, higher than the kings of the earth." But the most remarkable expression of this idea is to be found in the second Psalm, where the king of Israel is represented as surrounded by a combination cf enemies threatening his throne ; whose machinations, however, are interrupted by an oracle, probably conceived as uttered in thunder from the sky, which proclaims " Thou art My son, this day have I begotten thee ; " and, before this angry and irresistible declaration of the divine will, the confederated heathen melt away. In this psalm two names occur which were destined to have an extraordinary history — " the Messiah " and " the Son of God " — and the king appears in the closest connexion with God, as joint-ruler with Him and as the object of His love and choice. His figure is highly idealized, and it may be doubted whether it could ever, as Hupfeld asserts it did, have represented the Israelitish king- ship in general. Applied to most of the actual kings
* 2 Sam. vii. 14.
92 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
it would have been gross and hyperbolic flattery ; * and, if any rules of sobriety are to be observed in interpretation at all, it is more natural to understand it only of an excellent actual king or, still better, of someone whom the best of the actual kings typified. The reason for designating the kings by this title was, that the nation culminated in them, and perhaps that the great position they held was one in the bestowal of which there was specially manifested the electing love of God.
Fifthly, in the New Testament believers in Jesus Christ are everywhere described by this name — " To as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe in His name." One reason in their case is that they have been born of God — " Being born again not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the Word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever." A further reason is that they are like God. On this Jesus Himself lays the greatest stress : " Love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you ; that ye may be sons of your Father which is in heaven ; for He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust."f And to these two has to be added the third reason,
* So Nosgen : Der Mensche?i- and Gottessohn, p. 144. + John i. 12; I Peter i. 23; Matt. v. 44, 45, R.V.
THE SON OF GOD 93
that they are objects of God's special and dis- tinguishing love — " Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God ; therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew Him not."*
Thus, the term is applied to angels, to men, to the Jewish nation as a whole, to the Jewish kings, and to all saints ; and the principal ideas which it em- bodies are, that those bearing the name are derived from God as their Author, that they are the objects of His love and choice, and that they are like Him in character and conduct.
Such being the wide and varied application of the term, the question arises, from which of these points it was that the title was transferred to our Lord. And the almost universal verdict of scholarship is that its application to Jesus arose from its applica- tion to the kings of Israel, He being the King to whom these all pointed forward. In short, this term, like " the Son of man," is messianic. Such is the accepted view, which, however, I wish to submit to a thorough examination.
It is commonly asserted that the term is a synonym for the Messiah in the apocryphal books ;
* I John iii. i.
94 The christology of jesus
but for this the evidence is slender. There is a passage in the end of the Book of Enoch where God is made to say " I and My Son " will do some- thing ; but it occurs in one of the most meaningless paragraphs of that incoherent production. Two or three references are also usually given to 4 Esdras ; but the value of these may easily be estimated from the following specimens : " For My Son Jesus shall be revealed with those who are with Him, and they that remain shall rejoice for four hundred years;" " And it shall come to pass after these years that My Son Christ shall die, and all men that have breath." *
It has already been remarked that in the Synoptists the term is for the most part applied to Jesus not by Himself but by others ; and from this circumstance it has been argued that its sense must be messianic, because it is manifest that the phrase was diffused among the people as a title of the expected deliverer.!
A close study of the instances does not, however, lend this conclusion very clear support.
* Enoch cv. 2 ; 4 Esdras vii. 28, 29.
t Beyschlag, Neutestamentliche Theologie, I. 66: "Dieses Vorkommen im Munde anderer zeigt von vornherein, dass der Name ein im Alten Testamente vvurzelender, in Israel bereits gangbarer war, und so ist auch fiir den Sinn, in vvelchem Jesus ihn fiir sich selbst in Anspruch nimmt, aufs Alte Testament zuriickzugehen."
THE SON OF GOD 95
In the first chapter of St. Luke the angel of the Annunciation calls the Child to be born of Mary by this name, not because He is to be the Messiah, but for the reason stated in these words : " The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee ; therefore also that Holy Thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God." * The derivation of His human nature from the special creative act of God is here the reason of the name — a reason akin to that on account of which it is also given by St. Luke to Adam. I do not remember any other place in Scripture where this precise point of view recurs.
When the centurion at the foot of the cross said, " Truly this was the Son of God," f the likelihood is, that he, a heathen, was thinking of a hero like the sons of divine fathers and human mothers of whom there were many in the mythology of Greece and Rome.
Demoniacs are reported to have cried out to Jesus as " the Son of God " ; and it might be supposed that in their mouths this was a popular name for the Messiah, especially as they sometimes addressed Him in so many words as the Messiah.
* Luke i. 35.
t Or, more correctly, " a son of God," Mark xv. 39
96 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
But there is something peculiar about their testimony. The Evangelists evidently look upon their exclama- tions as proceeding not so much from the possessed human beings as from the demons by whom they were possessed, and we are no judges of the meaning which would be attached to this term by such intelligences, except that Jesus was dreaded by them as the Strong One by whom their power was to be broken. Still less can we narrow down the meaning attached to the name by the prince of devils, when he played with it in our Lord's temptation.*
" They that were in the ship " on the occasion when Jesus stilled the tempest and rescued St. Peter from the waves, " came and worshipped Him, saying, Of a truth Thou art the Son of God." f If by this they meant that He was the Messiah, it was a remarkable anticipation of the confession at Caesarea Philippi ; but it looks more like an involuntary re- cognition of the divine in Jesus, extorted by the overwhelming impression produced by the miracle.
In the confession at Csesarea Philippi, which St. Matthew records two chapters later, St. Peter says, " Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God " ; and it is contended that the second phrase is only a variation of the first, without the addition
* Matt. viii. 29 ; Mark iii. 1 1 ; Luke iv. 41 ; Matt. iv. 3, 6. t Matt. xiv. 33.
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of anything new such as is involved in the meaning attached by theology to the name. This is rendered the more probable by the fact that St. Mark and St. Luke omit the second title altogether ; for is it conceivable that they would have done so if St. Peter had proclaimed his faith not only in the messiahship of Jesus but in His deity } This passage is the strongest support of the view that the name is messianic. Yet many instances might be quoted to prove that arguments based on omissions in one or even two Evangelists are far from trustworthy.*
Analogous is our Lord's confession before the high priest. According to St. Matthew the high priest asked, " I adjure thee by the living God that Thou tell us, whether Thou be the Christ, the Son of God. Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said. " Here, it is contended, the very collocation of the words proves that the phrases are equivalent ; and, besides, a Jewish high priest could have used the Old Testament phrase in no other sense. On the other hand, St. Luke describes this scene in a way that excites dubiety. Jesus is asked, " Art Thou the Christ ^ tell us. And He said unto them. If I tell you, ye will not believe ; and, if I also ask you,
* Matt. xvi. 16; Mark viii. 29; Luke ix. 2C.
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ye will not answer Me nor let Me go. Hereafter shall the Son of man sit on the right hand of the power of God. Then said they all, Art Thou then the Son of God ? And He said unto them, Ye say that I am," Here the question, " Art Thou the Son of God ? " is separated from the question, " Art Thou the Christ ? " and it is not obvious that it means the same thing. Perhaps it does ; but it looks more as if the reply of Jesus to the first question had suggested to His interrogators that He made a claim beyond even that of being the Messiah. Accordingly they asked, in angry curiosity, if He was the Son of God ; and how great was the shock caused by His affirmative answer is shown by their instant and unanimous decision, that He had committed blasphemy. If the claim to be " the Son of God " implied nothing more than a human messiahship, wherein consisted the blasphemy ? * Holtzmann, a passionate denier of the traditional theology, says, " The blasphemy can only have been found in this, that a man belonging to the lower classes, one openly forsaken of God, and going forward to a shameful death, should have dared to represent Himself as the object and fulfilment of all the divine promises given to the nation. Such a claim smote in the face
• RJatt. xxvi. 63, 64 ; Luke xxii. 66-71.
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all the presuppositions and the conclusions of the Jewish faith and irritated the national susceptibilities to the uttermost." * This is admirable special pleading, yet everyone must recognise that the blasphemy was far more obvious if the phrase meant what this scholar denies.
Besides, it is not to be forgotten that St. John says, " The Jews sought the more to kill Him, because He not only had broken the Sabbath, but said also that God was His Father, making Himself equal with God " ; and again, " The Jews answered Him, saying, For a good work we stone Thee not ; but for blasphemy ; and because that Thou, being a man, makest Thyself God." f These statements are not, properly speaking, portions of the Johannine theology : they are historical testimonies as to the sense attached by the Jews to their own charge of blasphemy and as to the claim of Jesus to be the Son of God ; of course they may be misrepresentations, but there is no ambiguity about them ; and it is not a departure from our plan in the present lectures of deriving the teaching of Jesus from the Synoptists alone to quote them here for what they are worth. |
* N. T. Theologie, I. 266. + John V. 18 ; x. 33.
X Dorner has the weighty words {Lehre von dcr Person Christi, p. 79) : " Das Wort Sohn Gottes bei den Synoptikern
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To sum up : the meaning attached to this title when applied to Jesus by others is not uniform. In some cases it may be messianic ; but the common element seems rather to be the recognition in our Lord of something above the level of ordinary humanity.
The use of the name by Jesus Himself is naturally what interests us most.
From whence did He derive it ? Are we to suppose that, like those who applied it to Him, He picked it up from the religious vocabulary of the period or borrowed it from the Old Testament ? Another source is conceivable — namely, the voice from heaven at His baptism, repeated in the Trans- figuration. In some minds there may exist doubt as to the objectivity of this occurrence ; but, even were it supposed to be purely subjective, it would be an accurate indication of what were the senti-
lasst sich nicht zuriickfiihren auf die Bedeutung dieses Wortes im A. T. ; er ist nicht bloss, vvie David, oder andere Konige Israels, oder wie Fromme dieses Volkes oder Propheten, Sohn Gottes : er erscheint iiberhaupt nicht vvie einer unter andern, nicht als einer der Sohne Gottes, sondern als der Sohn, der Einzige, der Geliebte. Ihm gegeniiber stehen die grOssten Manner und Propheten vvie SovXoi vor dem vldy." He goes on to describe His sonship as threefold— physical, ethical and official ; and of these the second depends on the first, and the third on the first and second.
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ments of Jesus at the time. What it most em- phasizes is His consciousness of being the object of the divine love. Even if " My Son " means nothing else than " Messiah," yet the adjective " beloved " is added, together with the phrase, " in whom I am well pleased." Thus the personal predominates over the official.
This is the phenomenon which encounters us everywhere, when we take a survey of His own language ; and, it will be observed, it is precisely the reverse of what we found upon a detailed examination of His use of the term " Son of man." The official meaning of that term is the one which makes everything clear, whereas the personal sense is rarely prominent, even if it can with certainty be traced at all ; but in the use of this term, while the reference to messiahship is sometimes present as a suggestive undersense, the reference to an interior relation between person and person is uniform. So it manifestly is in the very first recorded saying of Jesus, " Wist ye not that I must be in My Father's house } " ; and in the last, " Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit." *
* Luke ii. 49 ; xxiii. 46. In the latter passage Jesus is quoting from the Old Testament; but He adds "Father" to the quotation — a very significant addition.
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There is one passage in which this intense consciousness of personal relationship to God comes out with peculiar clearness and force, as the sense denoted by Jesus when calling God " the Father " and Himself " the Son." It occurs in a scene commemorated by both St. Matthew and St. Luke ; and the two accounts combined enable us to bring the circumstances vividly before our eyes.*
Jesus had been discoursing sadly on the reception He had met with at the hands of His generation, and reproaching the cities in which most of His mighty works were done, v/hen the Seventy re- turned overflowing with gladness at the success of their mission. And " in that hour Jesus rejoiced in spirit "j* and said, I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. Even so, O Father ; for so it seemed good in Thy sight." He had been looking back with bitter disappointment to the refusal of the learned and the influential to have anything to do with His cause ; but the appearance of the Seventy, with their enthusiastic report, so brought home to Him the success of His confidence in the honest and good hearts which He had attracted from the
* Matt. xi. 25-30; Luke x. 21, 22. t " In the Holy Spirit " (R.V.).
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ranks of the common people that He was able completely to rise above His depression and rejoice in the whole course of His ministry as the dis- position of God. Then He added, as if sunk in a beatific soliloquy — and these are the words which express so wonderfully the intimacy of His relation to God — "All things are delivered unto Me of My Father ; and no man knoweth the Son but the Father, neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him."
The opening words, "All things are delivered unto Me of My Father," have been very variousl)^ interpreted. Some have given them the widest possible scope, understanding Jesus to be claiming lordship and government over the universe. Modern interpreters restrict them as much as possible — Weiss to the control of all things essential to His messianic work, while Holtzmann thinks they only express the claim that His doctrine is of God. The meaning most consistent with the context seems to be, that all His fortunes are of divine appointment — the disagreeable as well as the agreeable — all are working together for good ; and in this assurance His spirit finds rest. But the next words are those which carry us into the sanctuary of His secret life: "No man knoweth
I04 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
the Son but the Father, neither knovveth any man the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him." * These words may be a continuation of the thought just hinted at : God alone knows the course of the Son's career, seeing clearly its glorious issues beyond its present intricacies ; and the Son alone knows the Father's design, and, therefore. He can bear without repining the disappointments of apparent failure. But this is only the minimum of meaning which can belong to the words ; and their full meaning is probably much more comprehensive. At all events the impressiveness of the parallel between the Father's knowledge of the Son and the Son's knowledge of the Father can escape no one ; and the saying is an incomparable expression of mutual intimacy, serene trust and perfect love. No wonder that Jesus burst out of His soliloquy with the memorable words on His lips, " Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." He felt in Himself a joy great enough to satisfy the whole world. He held the secret of peace, and could invite all to come and receive it from Him.f
t Keim thinks that tlie great passage must have ended thus : •' and he to whom the Father will reveal Him " (tlie Son). But
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Even the least enthusiastic writers kindle into unwonted warmth in speaking of this utterance ; but they hasten to add, that of course the sonship of Jesus was not specifically different from that of all believers. Sonship is the highest expression for the relation to God to which He raises those who receive Him, and it places them on the same platform with Himself. This dogmatic assertion is, however, confronted by the fact, that in all the Gospels Jesus carefully distinguishes His own sonship from that of His disciples. He speaks constantly of "My Father" and of " your Father," but never of " Our Father." Feeble attempts have been made to break down this distinction, but totally without avail. The fact, if substantiated, is a cardinal one, and it is useless, in face of it, to assert that obviously His sonship must be the same as ours.
A similar piece of dogmatism, very common at present, is the assertion that of course the sonship of Jesus was ethical, not metaphysical. Certainly it was ethical, consisting in the harmony of His mind and will with the thoughts and purposes of God, and in the affection and delight felt by Jesus for
surely this also is implied. Kcim's long exposition of this passage, which he considers the loftiest utterance of the self- consciousness of Jesus, is very fine. Holtzmann also calls it the pinnacle of Jesus' testimony to nimself.
io6 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
God and of God for Jesus. But it docs not follow in the least that, because ethical, it was not meta- physical. On the contrary, the ethical always rests on the metaphysical ; and ethical unity becomes less po?;sible the farther any two beings are metaphysically separated from each other. The sympathy between a beast and a man is imperfect, because they are metaphysically so far apart ; on the contrary, the union of man and woman is capable of such com- pleteness because, though between them there exists the difference of sex, yet both partake in the same human nature. Men, as we have seen, may be called the sons of God for a variety of reasons ; yet the union between God and man is a distant one ; and this not only for ethical reasons, but for the metaphysical one that their natures are distinct. Angelic nature is nearer the divine ; yet even here sonship is a figure of speech. No doubt the question whether any higher sonship is possible — a sonship as perfect in the divine region as sonship is in the human — is metaphysical ; but to deny this is as pure a piece of dogmatism as to affirm it.
We must rid ourselves of all such preconceptions, if we wish to receive on our minds the simple and natural impression made by the testimony of Jesus about Himself
In the parable of the Wicked Husbandman He
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describes the owner of the vineyard as sending first servant after servant to receive the fruits, but then, after much premeditalion, as sending his own son, his well-beloved * ; and by this figure, the peculiarity of which consists not in his office, but in his relation to the sender, Jesus obviously intended Himself It reminds us of His claim elsewhere to be above the kings and the prophets—" A greater than Solomon is here," " A greater than Jonah is here." t
This again recalls the well-known passage where He demands of the scribes, whose son the Messiah is, and, when they reply, "The son of David," immediately demands, why, then, David calls Him Lord.J We shall have to deal on a subsequent page with the notion that Jesus raised this question in order to deny the Davidic origin of the Messiah ; but what we are here concerned with is the subtle insinuation that the Messiah is the Son of God in such a sense that He is rightly styled David's Lord. What must this sense be .?
There is a saying of Jesus about His own sonship which is frequently quoted as the final refutation of the Church doctrine on the subject, because in it He confesses His ignorance of the date of His second coming— "Of that day and that hour knoweth no
* Mark xii. 6. t Matt. xii. 41-42- % Mark xii. 35-37.
loS THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father."* This saying does not stand alone : it is akin to many other statements in the Gospels, made by Jesus or about Him, in which His true and proper manhood is clearly brought out ; but perhaps there is no other passage which has done so much to keep the mind of the Church sound on this great doctrine and to restrain it from extravagance in the statement of the opposite one. It has not by any means been overlooked. On the contrary, in recent times especially it has attracted the attention of theologians ; and the most interest- ing contributions to modern Christology — the so- called Kenotic theories — have been founded on this more than any other text of Scripture, except the saying of St. Paul that the Son of God " emptied " Himself.f That by these efforts the mystery has
■"■ Mark xiii. 32.
t Of the teaching of Jesus on this subject we can hardly speak, as He offered no explanation of His ignorance. Stated dogmatically, the question is this : How can the omniscience of the Second Person of the Trinity be reconciled with the ignorance of Jesus ? The answer of theology is, that there took place at the incarnation a kenosis (from iavTov iKtvaxrev, Phil. ii. 7), by which the Second Person of the Trinity emptied Himself of certain of His attributes, till the period of His humiliation was completed. Great diversity of opinion has, however, prevailed as to the manner in which this kenosis ought to be conceived ; and all the Kenotic theories, as they are called, have been rejected by some eminent theologians. Full information will be found in
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been cleared away I do not say ; but the Church has been anew convinced by them that no theory of our
Bruce's Humiliation of Christ. The problem has recently received a remarkable access of interest in English theology in connexion with the burning question of our Lord's relation to the criticism of the Old Testament. The weightiest utterance is that of Gore in the book entitled Dissertations, where the second dissertation is on "The Consciousness of our Lord in His Mortal Life." There is an American book just published— Hall : 27ie Kenotic Theory. See also Mason, The Conditions of our Lord's Life on Earth, and Adamson, Studies of the Mind in Christ ; also the books on the Incarnation by Ottley, Powell and Gifford. During recent discussions a word of Tholuck has often recurred to my mind : "Nun ist das menschliche Wissen ein zwiefaches— das welches, unter grosserer oder geringerer aussercr Anregung, rein innerlich sich entwickelt, denkend oder anschauend, und das welches nur menschlich gelernt und dem Gedachtniss eingepragt werden kann. Ist die Entwicklung des ErlOsers die allgemein menschliche, so kann dasjenige Wissen innerhalb der religios- sittlichen Sphare, insbesondere das zur Auslegung erforderliche, welches nur auswendig zu lernen ist, ihm nur bekannt und zuganglich gewesen sein gemass der Biidungstufe seiner Zeit und den Bildungsmitten seiner Erzichung, seines Umgangs. Es liessen sich Belege beibringen, dass auch in solchen der gelehrten Exegese angehorenden Fragen, wie nachdem historischen Zusammenhange einer Stelle, nach Verfassung und Zeitalter eines Buches, ein originaler Geistesblick auch ohne Schulbildung das Richtige zu diviniren vermag,— das hochste Maass dieses divinatorischen Blickes lasst sich dem Erloser zuschreiben, immer aber wird derselbe das eigentliche wissenschaftliche Studium nichtersetzen. Nicht Wissenschaft, auch theologische nicht, der Welt zu ofTenbaren, war der ErlOser erschienen, sondern die religiOs- sittliche Wahrheit der Menschheit auszusprechen und der Menschheit darzuleben.— Z?aj alte Testament im neuen Testa- ment, p. 60,
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Lord's person can be correct which does not recognise that there is a mystery. In fact, there is no saying of Jesus which makes this more indubitable ; for He evidently states it as an astonishing thing that He does not know. He specifies four planes of being and of knowledge — that of men, that of angels, that of Himself, and that of God. " Of that day and that hour," He says, " knoweth no man, no, not the angels, neither the Son, but the Father," Evidently the Son is above not only men but angels, and knows more than they.
The conclusion would seem to be that He is a being intermediate between the angels and God. But this impression is corrected by the greatest of all the sayings in which He calls Himself the Son: " Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost" — where the Son is named with the Father and the Holy Ghost in a way that suggests the equality of all three, and an act of worship is directed to them jointly.*' This is the verse next
* " It has of course often been made an objection against the originality of this formula, that it is only once mentioned in the New Testament, while, on the other hand, the phrase ' to be baptized in (or into) the name of the Lord Jesus' occurs more than once in the Acts of tlie Apostles. But, whatever force such an objection may have been supposed to have, has been greatly weakened since the discovery of The Teaching of the Twelve
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the last of the Gospel of St. Matthew ; and of course to those to whom the bodily resurrection of our Lord, with all that follows, is mythical, such words will carry no conviction ; but to those who believe in His risen glory, they will appear perfectly congruous with the great occasion on which they were uttered.
Thus it would appear that, while Jesus took this title into His mind either from His religious environ- ment or from the voice from heaven, it became to Him mainly an expression for His own relation to God ; and this relationship was not only unique, but reached up beyond the competency of men or angels, till He named Himself in the same breath with the Father and the Holy Ghost as an object of worship. It has, I venture to avow, been no effort of mine to find in the name the meaning at which we have arrived. Had the evidence led to a different conclusion, I would have accepted it without hesitation. But I have been led on step by step by the sheer force of Christ's own testimony. It remains
Apostles. For that early document, which is sometimes referred to as if it represented a Christianity more original than that of the New Testament, mentions twice over the formula of baptism into the threefold name, and thus interprets the expression which it also uses in common with St. Luke, that of being ' baptized into the name of the Lord.'"— Gore, The Incar7iation of the Son of God, p. 84.
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to enquire what other testimony on the point His words contain apart from this particular name.
I. There is, in connexion with our Lord's miracles, a long series of remarkable utterances, in which He commands the paralyzed to arise, the blind to open their eyes, the demons to depart out of the pos- sessed, the stormy sea to be calm, and so on. Most of them are extremely concise, as, " I will, be thou clean," " Peace, be still," " Ephphatha," and the like ; but in this very brevity there is a sublime impressive- ness, like that of the words in the first chapter of Genesis : " Let there be light, and there was light." Even more impressive are the passages where He conveys the same powers to His disciples, as He sends them forth to preach and heal in His name — such as Matt. x. 7, 8 : " As ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand ; heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils ; freely ye have received, freely give." The fact, indeed, that such powers were exercised by the disciples proves that the working of miracles was not in itself evidence of anything superhuman in the miracle-worker. Some of the Old Testament pro- phets worked miracles too. Yet there is a difference. The scale on which Jesus acted entirely threw the prophets who were before Him into the shade ; and the power of the disciples was entirely derivative.
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In the Book of Acts we have an apostolic miracle described which must have been typical ; and, in performing it, St. Peter says to the subject on whom it took place, " ^neas, Jesus Christ maketh thee whole; arise, make thy bed,"* Words could not betray more clearly that the power with which the apostles acted proceeded from their Master. It may be said that He, in like manner, was only the organ of the power of God working through Him ; and this would be true. Yet would it be the whole truth } His miracles frequently produced an over- whelming impression of the divine glory embodied in His person. The exclamation of " those in the ship," when He stilled the storm, has been already quoted ; and the terror of St. Peter, when he cried, " Depart from me ; for I am a sinful man, O Lord," must have been repeated in many a sensitive mind on similar occasions. Remarking on the state ot mind which prompted St. Peter's exclamation, an enlightened modern commentator says : " It burst upon his perception that the Lord God of Israel was beside him in that boat. The claims of Jesus sud- denly rose upon Peter's conviction to those of the Highest. He is proved to be both God and Lord."t And, although this may go too far in the way of
* ix. 34.
+ Laidlaw : The Miracles of our Lord, in loco.
8
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formulating the apostle's thought, yet it is not too much to say that the apostle received vague and vast impressions which were equivalent to this thought, and were destined in the course of time to condense into it.
2. Another series of sayings in which our Lord's superhuman self-consciousness betrays itself is that in which He comes forward as the supreme and final Revealer of truth. Frequently such sayings commence with the formula, " I say unto you," or, "Verily I say unto you." This phrase occurs more than thirty times in St. Matthew alone ; and every- one will recall instances in which it falls on the ear with an extraordinary weight of authority. He not only sets up His own word in opposition to the authority of the scribes of His time and the tradi- ditions of the past, but even to the authority of Moses. With sovereign freedom He declares one law of Moses to be only a concession to the hardness of heart of his contemporaries ; and by His great statement, that not that which goeth into the man defiles but that which cometh out of him, He sweeps away at one stroke whole pages of Mosaic legislation.* It may be said that this was only the prophetic function in its most perfect development.
* Mark vii. 19. Obsene the R.V. translation : " This He said, making all meats clean."
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And this is true ; but is it all the truth ? The greatest of the prophets prefaced their oracles with, " Thus saith the Lord," but Jesus deliberately sub- stitutes for this formula the simple claim, " I say unto you." When the most intricate moral and religious questions are submitted to Him, He does not hesitate a moment, because the will of God is perfectly familiar to Him. It is often said that one of the peculiarities of the Johannine Christ is that He is intimate with the secrets of the unseen world ; but this characteristic is far from being confined to the Fourth Gospel. In the Synoptists, too, Jesus speaks like one to whom the scenery of the other world is native and familiar. Thus He says, that a sparrow does not fall but God marks it ; and that the hairs of those whom He is dissuading from carefulness are all numbered. The angels of children do always behold the face of the heavenly Father. When surrounded by those sent to arrest Him, He declared that, had He but asked it, His heavenly Father would have sent to His rescue twelve legions of angels.* He assured the thief on the cross, " To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise." Many similar sayings might be adduced to show His acquaintance with both the near and the
* Matt. X. 29, 30; xviii. 10; xxvi. 53.
ii6 THE CHRISTOLOGY Op- /ESUS
remote future ; but these are reserved for a later lecture.
3. A third remarkable series of sayings consists of those in which He lays His claims upon the con- science, and states what will be the consequences of acknowledging or of rejecting these. One of the great and characteristic words of His ministry was, " Follow Me," which He employed with remarkable effect in instances known to all, and which He must have employed in many more that have not been recorded. The power of this form of address doubtless lay in the indescribable charm of His personality and in the attraction with which a life in His company drew those who were capable of aspiration ; but there lay in it, also, an authority of a more sovereign description which He never attempted to conceal. When one whom He had called asked to be allowed to go first and bury his father. He said, " Let the dead bury their dead." He warned those who might be disposed to follow Him that they must not only sacrifice the prizes of the world, but even hate father and mother, wife and children ; and He did not hesitate to forewarn His disciples that they would be brought before principalities and powers, would be stripped and maltreated, and would even lose their lives.* The * Matt. viii. 22 ; Luke xiv. 26.
HIE SON OF GOD n?
one sufficient compensation, however, for every hardship would be that they suffered for His sake. These claims are not embodied in one or two ex- ceptional sayings : they were the daily language of Jesus. Who was He who dared to make such claims ? He repeated in every form of expression, that the eternal destiny of His hearers would depend on their attitude to Himself. Even His disciples, when they went forth in His name, carried in their persons the fate of those with whom they came into contact, for whosoever received them received Him, and whosoever received Him received the Father who had sent Him ; but whosoever rejected them brought down the contrary doom upon his soul.*
4. A very remarkable series of sayings, though not an extended one, is that in which He claims to forgive sins. The most outstanding case was that of the man borne of four who was let down through the roof to be healed. When Jesus pro- nounced this man's sins forgiven, a charge of blasphemy was instantly raised. The opponents did not believe that the man's sins were forgiven or that Jesus could forgive them.f Of course, however, anyone can pretend to forgive sins, because forgiveness belongs to a region which is beyond the
* Matt. X. 14, 40-
t Luke V. 21 ; vii. 49.
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control of human observation. The reply of Jesus was, that He would do something within the sphere of human observation which He could not do if He was capable of lying ; but, if His word took effect in the visible sphere, this would prove that it had taken effect in the world invisible. Thereupon He healed the man. Against the supposition that Jesus in this transaction claimed anything super- human the argument has been advanced, that He subsequently empowered the apostles to do the same thing. Obviously, however, the forgiveness of sins by them rested on His authority : it was purely declaratory and ministerial. And it may be said that in the same way His forgiveness was no more than the declaration that God had forgiven. He did not say so, however — not even when He was accused of blasphemy and might, by such an explanation, have escaped from the charge. The natural sense of His words undoubtedly is, that the authority rested in His own person.
5. There remain a few very great sayings which I need not attempt to include under any rubric. They are well entitled to stand alone and to be separately pondered. They need little exposition or remark.
In the exaltation of mind produced by St. Peter's great confession, Jesus said to him, "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church ; and
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the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven : and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven : and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." * It is with a kind of bewilderment that one thinks of the claims implied here in every line. No wonder that those who look upon Jesus as no more than a man try to make out that He never uttered the words. But their magnificent assurance fits Him well.
Is there not the same superhuman greatness in the appeal, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not } " f Is not this the same voice as that which of old claimed to have borne Israel through the wilderness as an eagle, fluttering over her nest, carries her young upon her wings ^
Repeatedly He promised to be with His own in the future, when in bodily presence He would be far away. Thus, when they were confronted with the opposition of the great and powerful, " I will give you a mouth and wisdom, which all your
• Matt. xvi. 18, 19. t Matt, xxiii. 37.
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adversaries shall not be able to gainsay nor resist " ; and again, when, escaping from the persecution of society, they should meet for fellowship and prayer, " Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them." *
The greatest saying of all is, appropriately, the last : " All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth . . . and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." f Many attempts have been made to define and confine these extraordinary words, but, like Samson's strength, they burst the withes of definition ; and those only know what they mean who, in prayer with their fellow-Christians, have felt the personal nearness of Him whom, having not seen, they love.
It is possible to take such great sayings one by one and either discredit them as unauthentic or deplete them of their meaning. The former is habitually done, for example, by Holtzmann, the latter by Wendt. According to Holtzmann such words are the rudimentary beginnings of dogma : that is to say, they did not proceed from the lips of Christ, but were crystallized from the consciousness of the primitive Christians. J But our knowledge
• Luke xxi. 15 ; Matt, xviii. 20. + Matt, xxviii. 18-20. X N.T. TJieologie, I. 352 £F.
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of primitive Christianity dates very far back ; the earliest epistles of St. Paul, as dated by the latest scholarship, stand at but an inconsiderable distance from the death of Christ ; and not only is the Christ of St. Paul's earliest writings the very same, in all essentials, as the Christ of his later writings — the same, for example, as He of the Epistle to the Philippians, who, " being in the form of God thought it not robbery to be equal with God," and has " a name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow of things in heaven and things in earth and things under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father " — but St. Paul's Christ was the Christ of primitive Christianity. On other subjects there was fierce controversy in the primitive Church, but on this there was none. Now, is it credible that there should have been such unanimity about a cardinal belief like this, if Christ's own words had contained no hint of it, but rather the reverse .-' Wendt takes each saying by itself, and having laboriously shown the very least it can possibly have meant, then assumes this to have been the original meaning. But it is often not the natural meaning ; and one gets tired of this con- tinual shallowing of everything that Jesus said. The truth is, if Jesus meant no more than Wendt
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makes Him say, He was the most paradoxical and hyperbolical teacher that has ever appeared, and He alienated His hearers by mystifications, when a few words of common sense, such as Wendt now speaks for Him, would have cleared away all difficulties and conciliated the minds of men.
These divine sayings of our Lord do not look like fragments of a different formation, but are congruous with all His words, of which they form the natural completion. You may attempt to take them from Him and assign them to other minds, or you may suppose that in some way, without the agency of any actual minds, they were crystallized from the atmosphere of the apostolic age ; but this is force- work ; and, when the hand of violence is removed, they revert to their Author and fill out the linea- ments of the great personality which rises upon us in the Gospels. I do not attribute to Jesus dogmatic statements or make Him responsible for the phrase- ology of the creeds. His utterances were of a totally different character : they were remarks made in passing, hints dropped of which He may sometimes hardly have been conscious, impressions rayed forth from his personality on the minds of others, and fitted at first to produce states of feeling rather than definite beliefs. But what I cannot credit is, that by the time of the earliest Christian records His
THE SON OF GOD 123
followers had already distorted and mistaken Him altogether, so that the history of Christianity was built from the very foundation on a misunderstanding and a misrepresentation, behind which we must, after two thousand years, get back, if we are to have a real Christ and a genuine Christianity. " Back to Christ " is the watchword of theology in this generation ; and I will repeat it with an en- thusiasm born of a lifelong study of His words ; but, when I go back to Him, I do not find a Christ who puts to shame the highest which His Church has taught about Him He is different indeed — far more simple, actual and human — yet in all that is most essential He is the same Son of God as for nineteen centuries has inspired the lives of the saints and evoked the worship of the world.
THE MESSIAH
i«S
Passages in which Jesus refers to Himself as the Christ : — Matthew xvi. 20, 22, 42 ; xxiii. [8], 10 ; xxiv. 5, 23, 24 ; xxvi. 64. Mark ix. 41 ; xii. 35 ; xiii. 6, 21 ; xiv. 61. Luke iv. 18, 19, 21 ; xx. 41 : xxi. 8 ; xxii. 67, 68 ; xxiv. 26, 46.
Passages in which others refer to Him as the Christ, He sometimes assenting : — Matthew i. i, 16, 17, 18 ; ii. 4 ; xi. 2, 3 ; xvi. 16 ; xxvi. 68 ; xxvii. 17, 22. Mark i. i ; viii. 29 ; xiv. 61 ; kv. 32. Luke ii. 11, 26; iii. 15; iv. 41 ; vii. 19 ; ix. 20; xxiii. 2, 35, 39.
Passages in which Jesus is called the So.x of David:— Matthew i. i, 6, 17, 20 ; ix. 27 ; xii. 23 ; xv. 22 ; xx. 30, 31 ; xxi. 9, 15 ;
xxii. 42, 45. Mark x. 47, 48 ; xi. 10; xii. 35, 37. Luke i. 27, 32 ; iii. 3 ; xviii. 38, 39 ; xx. 41, 44.
Passages in which "the Kingdom" is mentioned, or
"the Kingdom of Heaven," or "the Kingdom of
God " :—
Matthew iv. 17, 23 ; v. 3, 10, 19, 20 ; vi. ID, [13], 33; vii. 21 ; viii. II,
I2;ix. 35; X. 7, II, 12; xii. 28 ; xiii. II, 19, 24, 31, 33, 38,41,43,
44. 4S» 47. 52; xvi. 19, 28; xviii. 3, 4, 23; xix. 12, 14, 23, 24;
xx. I, 21 ; xxi. 31, 43; xxii. 2; xxiii. 13 ; xxiv. 14 ; xxv. I, 14, 34;
xxvi. 39.
Mark i. [14], 15; iv. Ii, 16, 30; ix. I, 47 ; x. 14, 15,23,24, 25 ; xii. 34 ;
xiv. 25 ; XV. 43. Luke i. 32, 33; iv. 43 ; vi. 20; vii. 28 ; viii. I, ID; ix. 2, 11, 27, 62 ; X. 9, 11; xi. 2, 20; xiL 31, 32; xiii. 18, 20, 28, 29; xiv. 15; xvi. 16; xvii. 20, 21 ; xviii. 16, 17, 24, 25, 29; xix. 11, 12, 15; xxi. 31 ; xxii. 16, 18, 29, 30 ; xxiii. 42.
136
IV.
THE MESSIAH*
/'~\F all the names of our Lord, with the exception ^-^ of His birth-name, " Jesus," the one which has stuck most firmly in the memory of the world is " Christ," which is the Greek equivalent for " Messiah," and in English is correctly rendered by the word " Anointed." Indeed, this name may be said to dispute the foremost place with the name
• Weiss : Lehrbuch der Biblischen Theologie des A'eiien Testa- ments, cap. I. etc.
Beyschlag : Netctestatnentliche Theologie, I. pp. 39 ft.
HoLTZMANN : KctitestdJncntliche Theologie, I. pp. 188 ff.
Stevens : The Theology of the New Testament, Cliapter III.
Baldensperger : Das Selbstbeiviisstseiii Jesu, cap. V.
Grau : Das Selbstbewitsstseiii Jesu, cap. V.
Wendt : Die Lehre Jesu, II.
Dalman : Die Worte Jesti, capp. I., XI.
Candlish : The Kingdom of Goa.
Bruce : The Kingdo?n of God.
Stanton : The Jewish a?id the Christian Messiah, 1886.
IssEL : Die Lehre vo7n Reiche Gottes im Neuen Testament, 1891.
ScHMOLLER ; Die Lchre vom Reiche Gottes iti den Schriften des Neuen Testatnents, 1891.
Johannes Weiss : Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes, 1892.
127
128 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
" Jesus " itself. Why the ordinary man sometimes says "Jesus" and sometimes "Christ," he could hardly tell ; though there appear to be peculiar states of religious feeling which incline towards the one or the other. Of course the original name was " Jesus " : this was what His mother called Him, and what He was called in the streets and the workshop of Nazareth ; whereas " Christ " was originally a title. Some preachers seem to them- selves to be imparting freshness to their sermons by saying " the Christ " instead of simply " Christ " ;
BoussET : Jesu Predigt in ihrent Gegensatz ziim Judenthu7n,
1892. Paul : Die Vorstellufigen voni Messias und voni Gottesreich bei
den Synopiikcffi, 1895. Ehrhardt ; Der Grundcharakter der Ethik Jesu im Verhdliniss
zu der messianischen Hoff7it0igen seines Volkes und zu
seinem eigenen messianischen Bewtisstsein, 1895. TiTius : Die neutesiamentlichc Lehre von der Seligkeit. Erster
Theil : Jesu Lehre voni Reiche Goites, 1895. ScHNEDERMANN : Die Israelitische Voi'stellung vom Konigreiche
Goties als Voraussetzung der Verkiindigung und Lehre Jesu,
1896. ScHNEDERMANN : Jesu Verkiindigung tmd Lehre in ihrer
geschichtlichen Bedeutung. i. Hdlfte : Die Verkiindigung
Jesu vom Kommen des Konigreiches Gottes, 1 893. 2. Hdlfte :
Die Lehre Jesu von den Geheim7iissen des Konigreiches
Go ties, 1895. Krop : La Pensc'e de Jesus sur la Royainne de Dieu d'afires les
Evangiles Synoptiques, 1897. The author prefixes to his
work a very full bibliography of the subject.
THE MESSIAH 129
and undoubtedly this was the original form ; but already in the New Testament " Christ," without the article, is a proper name. Very frequently the two names are combined in the form " Jesus Christ " or " Christ Jesus " ; and even the Evangelists St. Matthew and St. Mark announce that they are going to write the memoirs of " Jesus Christ." *
In the Old Testament " the Lord's anointed " is a synonym for " the king ; " and in poetical passages the two stand in parallelism, as Psalm xviii. 50,
" Great deliverance giveth He to His king, And sheweth mercy to His anointed."
The king was called " the anointed " because at his coronation the sacred oil was poured upon his head, by which he was consecrated to his office. This oil was a symbol of the Spirit of God, from whom the young monarch was supposed to receive the wisdom, dignity and other gifts necessary for the discharge of his functions ; as is beautifully brought out in Isaiah xi. 1-4: "And there shall come forth a Rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots. And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon Him, the
* On the N. T. use there are interesting statistics in Nosgen's Der Menschen- und Gottessohn, pp. 118 ff. The combinations " Jesus Christ " and " Christ Jesus " are formed exactly as " Emin Pasha " and " Queen Victoria."
9
130 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowlege and the fear of the Lord ; and shall make Him of quick understanding in the fear of the Lord ; and He shall not judge after the sight of His eyes, neither reprove after the hearing of His ears ; but with righteousness shall He judge the poor and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth ; and He shall smite the earth with the rod of His mouth, and with the breath of His lips will He slay the wicked ; and righteous- ness shall be the girdle of His loins and faithfulness the girdle of His reins." This perfect description of a king may well be quoted in full, because, although it does not contain the name " Messiah," it had a great deal to do with shaping the meaning ultimately attached to the term ; which was that of an ideal king, who should embody in himself all the attributes and achievements proper to the kingly office and thereby conduct the nation to the full realisation of its destiny.
For this ideal personage the title " Messiah " is already used in the second Psalm, though not else- where in the Old Testament ; in the postcanonical writings of the Jews there occur more frequent instances of its use in this sense ; * and in our
* Cf. Dalman, Die Worte Jesu, p. 239 ; Schiirer, The History of the Jewish People in the time of our Lord, II. ii. 158.
THE MESSIAH 131
Lord's time " the Messiah " was the regular term for the expected deliverer, as is manifest from the pages of the Gospels. In the palmy days of the ministry of John the Baptist " all men," St. Luke informs us, " mused in their hearts of John, whether he were the Christ, or not," * The same Evangelist tells us, a little later, that " devils came out of many, crying out, and saying. Thou art Christ ; and He, rebuking them, suffered them not to speak ; for they knew that He was Christ." f That our Lord should have disliked testimony coming from such a quarter, and have tried to check it, need occasion no surprise ; for, even when the same testimony came from unexcep- tionable quarters, He was slow to accept it. Yet this does not prove, as some extreme critics ot the Gospel history have contended, that He never claimed to be the Messiah of the Jews at all. The evidence to the contrary is as strong as it can be. First there is His declaration in the synagogue of Nazareth :
'' The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, Because He hath anointed Me to preach good tidings to the
poor ; He hath sent Me to proclaim release to the captives. And recovering of sight to the blind, To set at liberty them that are bruised, To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord." \
* iii. 15. t iv. 41. t Luke iv. 18, 19, R.V.
132 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
Because these words in their original setting describe the inspiration of a prophet, it may be argued that they express no more than prophetic consciousness ; but they are elastic terms, capable of embodying much more than Isaiah put into them, and capable, in fact, of embodying more than even Jesus put into them at Nazareth ; because they contain the entire programme of the ripest Christianity. And, if they be compared with the expectations of the time, as we find them in the hymns, in the first chapters of St. Luke, emitted by those who were waiting for the kingdom of God, and if the exalted and solemn tone be considered in which Jesus uttered them, it can scarcely be doubtful that they are an expression of messianic consciousness. Still less questionable is the reply of Jesus to the deputation from the Baptist, whose inquiry was, " Art Thou He that should come, or do we look for another ? " Can there be any reasonable question either which personage was intended by the Baptist or what was the force of our Lord's reply ? And with this we may join the fact, that more than once Jesus designated the Baptist as EHas * — the figure in the popular creed who was to be the forerunner of the Christ. Next there is the great crisis at Caesarea Philippi, when He drew from
* Matt. xi. 14; xvii. 12.
THE MESSIAH 133
the Twelve the acknowledgment that He was the Christ, and manifestly rejoiced in their testimony. Finally, on His trial, " the high priest asked Him and said unto Him, Art Thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed ? and Jesus said, I am." * And a little later Jesus " stood before the governor, and the governor asked Him, saying. Art Thou the King of the Jews .? And Jesus said unto Him, Thou sayest." f Around the head of Jesus, when He was hanging on the cross, these names, all meaning the same thing — " the Christ," " the King of Israel," " the King of the Jews " — flew, being shot like angry missiles from the mouths of His enemies, till He breathed His last ; and the inscription above His head ran thus, " This is Jesus, the King of the Jews." J
Another name applied still more frequently by others to Jesus — " the Son of David " — means pre- cisely the same as " the Messiah." It was the unanimous testimony of Old Testament prophecy that the messianic king was to be of David's line. So far does this feature enter into the conception that He is even called " David " pure and simple ;
* Mark xiv. 61, 62.
t Matt, xxvii. li. On the reply Sv eiTras see Dalman, Die Worte Jesu, pp. 253 ff., who repUes to tlie doubt which has been started as to whether this was an affirmative answer.
X Mark xv. 32 ; Matt, xxvii. 42, 37.
134 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
not as if it were supposed that the son of Jesse was to rise from the dead and ascend the throne of the country again, but to emphasize the fact that the new king, being of David's seed, was to reproduce the spirit and glory of the original.
Only once did Jesus of His own accord allude to this circumstance, when, on the great day of con- troversy at the close of His life, after replying to all the entangling questions of His enemies and reducing Pharisees and Sadducees to confusion, He propounded to them the problem, how it could be that in the hundred-and-tenth Psalm David called the Christ " Lord " who was at the same time his son. The school of interpreters who happen at the present moment to be most conspicuous in Germany make this out to be an announcement by Jesus that He did not claim Davidic descent or attach any importance to it. But, if Jesus had declared Himself not to be of David's line, He would have run counter not only to the tradition of the Jewish parties, but to the testimony of the prophets, as well as to the con- victions held both then and subsequently by the most intimate of His own friends ; for His descent from David is much insisted on by the writers of the New Testament.* Why, if this was the intention
* Rom. i. 3 ; 2 Tim. ii. 8 ; Rev. v. 5 ; xxii. 16.
THE MESSIAH 135
of Jesus, should He have raised the question at all ? It could only be because His descent from David was called in question by His enemies ; but of this there is not a hint in the evangelic records ; and yet nothing can be more certain than that it would have been a prominent and often repeated charge, if it had ever been made at all. The truth is, the question propounded by Jesus had a totally different drift : it was one of the most significant indications ever thrown out by Him of His conscious- ness of divine sonship in a unique sense ; and the only effect of twisting the point of His question in another direction is to obscure the glory of this sublime claim.
We may look upon it, then, as proved that Jesus claimed to be the Messiah, the Son of David ; and this turns our attention, which has hitherto been fixed on the Person, to the Work of the Saviour ; because His messiahship denotes the function which He came to fulfil. Not that these two topics lie far apart ; for the loftiness of the person points to a correspondingly important work, and, the grander the work, the greater must the person be who undertakes it. But we have now before us the inquiry. What, according to His own teaching, was the object of our Lord's earthly mission .'*
136 TtiE CHRtSTOLOGY OF JESUS
The immediate answer to this question is, The Kingdom of God.* If Jesus was the Messiah, the kingdom of God was the realm in which He was to rule t ; and He habitually made use of the phrase for the purpose of describing succinctly all the blessings which He had come to bestow.
The ordinary reader of the Gospels hardly realises how prominent in them is the idea of the kingdom of God. A little attention, however, reveals the fact that it is omnipresent : it is the name for the contents of the Gospel — the name habitually given by Jesus to His own message. If the average man were asked what Jesus spoke and preached about, he would answer without hesitation, " The Gospel " ; and in this he would not be wrong ; for Jesus did characterize His message as the Gospel, or Evangel, or Glad Tidings. But, if he were further asked what the Gospel which Jesus taught was about, he would answer with equal confidence that it was
* " The idea of the /SacriXe/a is found in Matthew 53 times, in Mark 16, in Luke 39, in John 5, in Acts 8, in the Epistles 18, in Revelation 7. It is absent from Philippians, i Timothy, Titus, Philemon, i Peter, 1-3 John and Jude." — Issel : Das Reich Gottes, p. 27.
t There has been a good deal of discussion as to whether ^aaiKeia in the mouth of Jesus means the domain in which the Messiah was to rule or the sovereignty which he was to exercise within this domain. It has both meanings, sometimes the one and sometimes the other idea being prominent.
THE MESSIAH I37
about Salvation ; and in this he would not be so right ; because, although " the Gospel of Salvation " is a phrase found in the writings of St. Paul, it never occurs in the records of the teaching of Jesus. What we find in place of it is " the Gospel of the Kingdom of God." Sometimes it is merely said that He preached " the Kingdom " ; or to this name may be added the qualifying phrase, "of God," or "of heaven." We find all these phrases : that Jesus preached " the Kingdom," " the Kingdom of God," " the Kingdom of heaven," " the Gospel of the Kingdom of God," and " the Gospel of the Kingdom of heaven."* In St. Mark i. 14 the commencement of His ministry is described in these terms : " Now, after that John was put in prison, Jesus came into Galilee preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God." Referring to a period a little later, St. Matthew thus describes His activity : " Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom."t Later still St. Luke says, " It came to pass afterward, that He went through every city and village, preaching and shewing the glad tidings of the kingdom of God."jI
* Matt. iv. 23 ; ix, 35 ; Luke iv. 23 ; Matt, x, 7 ; iv, 23 ; Mark i. 15. t iv. 23. t viii. I.
THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
When the Twelve are sent forth, their mission is described in these words : " He sent them to preach the kingdom of God." * The parables of Jesus, which form so large a portion of His teaching, are collectively denominated " the mysteries of the king- dom ot heaven " ; f and, it will be remembered, how many of them begin with the phrase, " The kingdom of heaven is like."
Thus it is evident that " the kingdom of God " formed the watchword of Jesus. J But, although it occupied so prominent a place in His teaching, it was not a phrase of His own invention. John the Baptist, before Him, summed up his message in the same phrase. In the First Gospel he is thus intro- duced : " In those days came John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judaea, and saying,
* Matt. ix. 2.
+ Matt. xiii. ll.
X In St. Matthew in the majority of passages where it occurs it is called " the kingdom of heav^en " ; but this is only a variation of phraseology without alteration of sense, for '* Heaven " appears to have been in the time of Jesus a not unusual synonym for " God." It is thus used by Jesus in the parable of the Prodigal Son — "I have sinned against Heaven and before thee," says the returning prodigal — and we use it to this day in the same sense in such phrases as " Heaven help them." Of course the phrase may also mean the kingdom which comes from heaven, or which is like heaven, or which will be consummated in heaven. It cannot always be determined with certainty which of these shades of meaning the word expresses.
(I
THE MESSIAH 139
Repent ye ; for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."* Indeed, the phrase is far older. In the Book of Daniel, the influence of which is known to have been great in the generations immediately before the Advent, the young prophet explains to the monarch the image of gold, silver, iron and clay which, in his dream he has seen shattered by " a stone cut out of the mountain," as a succession of world-kingdoms to be destroyed by " a kingdom of God," which will last forever ; and in his other famous vision of the Son of man, referred to on a previous page, it is said, '• There was given Him dominion, glory and a kingdom ; and all people, nations and languages shall serve Him ; His dominion is an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away, and His kingdom that which shall not be destroyed."!
This is the proximate Biblical source of the phrase; but the idea it represents mounts far higher in history. It will be remembered that at the very origin of the monarchy in Israel the proposal to appoint a king was condemned on the ground that Jehovah was King, and the appointment of Saul was only acquiesced in as a compromise, on account of the difficulty of getting the ideal to work. In David ideal and reality became approximately identical :
* Matt. iii. 2.
t Dan. ii. 44 ; vii. 14.
I40 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
God was King, and David was His vicegerent, governing in accordance with His will and purposes, and, therefore, able to make the kingdom great and prosperous in Jehovah's name. In Solomon the approximation was still tolerable ; but in the long succession of kings that followed there were few who did not cause the better spirits of the nation to sigh for the kingdom of God as something still unrealised. Never, however, did the conviction die out that Jehovah was the real King, and that the only right and stable kingdom would be that in and through which His will was done on earth as it is done in heaven. When at last even the form of earthly sovereignty was swept away, on account of its deflection from the ideal having become in- tolerable, the old faith, so far from perishing, flourished more and more vigorously ; and the one hope of the dark days of exile and oppression was that God would yet restore the kingdom to Israel.* That He would do so, the pious never doubted ; for to doubt this would have been to doubt His existence,
* When Israel lay beneath the shadow of the great world- powers, the pious recognised in these the diabolical counterfeit of what the kingdom of God was to be. In the relation of subor- dinate rulers, like their own, to the Roman central authority, for example, they saw a dim image of wliat the relation of the heathen princes and peoples would be to the Messiah, when he should appear.
I
THE MESSIAH 141
or at all events His character and His promises. All the prophets predicted that He would soon take to Himself His great power and reign ; and they vied with one another in painting the picture of the blessings which would ensue under His government. To us, with our modern habits of thought, it is astonishing that religious hope should have been so closely associated with political change. But the sense of the value of a well-ordered state to secure the safety and happiness of human life was universal in the ancient world ; and there were times when this was felt to be the one thing needful. Even " salvation " — a word which we associate with the most interior experiences of the individual — was a term the significance of which was social and national, and the realisation of which was to take place through political means. Only get your state right, it was thought — with perfect laws and a perfect administration — and everything will be right : even sin will disappear ; for all injustice will be smitten to the ground, and righteousness will flourish under the protection of authority. The grand difficulty was to find an earthly king — or a succession of kings — pious, able and stedfast enough to be the organ through which the divine wisdom and power might act. At this point failure had constantly taken place ; and it was always becoming more and
142 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
more evident that the only vicegerent of God who could ensure the perfect and enduring prosperity for which pious and patriotic hearts sighed must be One who, while earthly, shared in the perfection and everlastingness of the supreme Ruler. If they never actually put this conclusion into words, it lay in the line of their hopes to do so.
These messianic hopes continued after the date of the latest Old Testament writings and on to the time of Jesus. The rumour of them spread so far that its echoes are heard even in the Roman historians, Tacitus and Suetonius ; * and the post- canonical writings of the Jews themselves abound with descriptions, ranging from the driest prose up through all degrees to the most highly-coloured poetry, of the blessings to be anticipated when the kingdom of God begins. "I" Schiirer, the latest historian of this period, putting these passages together, has constructed a kind of messianic creed, which he attributes to the contemporaries of Jesus. Its articles are eleven in number, and the following order indicates also the chronological sequence in which the different phases of the messianic epoch
* Quoted by Schurer, II. ii. 149.
t See the valuable texts from postcanonical Jewish literature printed as an appendix to Dalman's Die Worte Jesu, and also published separately.
THE MESSIAH
143
were expected to develop themselves : — (i) The last tribulation and perplexity (the night of humiliation and oppression being darkest just before the dawning) ; (2) Elijah as the forerunner ; (3) The advent of the Messiah ; (4) The final attack of the hostile powers ; (5) The destruction of the hostile powers ; (6) The renovation of Jerusalem ; (7) The gathering together of the dispersed ; (8) The kingdom of glory in Palestine ; (9) The renovation of the world ; (10) The general resurrection ; (11) The last judgment: eternal condemnation and salvation.*
It remains doubtful, however, how far this creed extended, or, at least, to how many it was a living creed. Many Jews were, no doubt, too immersed in the world and too well pleased with their actual condition to care for such dreams. This was the attitude of the Sadducees. Others, imbibing these hopes in a narrow, nationalist spirit, indulged in fantastic imaginings as to the miraculous agencies through which Jehovah would destroy His enemies and bestow felicity on His favourites. Such were the Pharisees, and especially the Zealots. But the true repositories of the messianic hopes v/ere those who, regarding them from the spiritual and moral side, cultivated them with religious
* Schurer, II. ii. 126 ff.
H4 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
enthusiasm.* Of Joseph of Arimathea it is said that " he waited for the kingdom of God " ; and the same was, in all likelihood, true of Nicodemus and of other persons of rank and influence. The majority, however, of those to whom waiting for the kingdom of God was a portion of living piety, belonged to the humbler ranks of society.* To
* These were " die Stillen im Lande " — a beautiful name for the cultivators of a piety of this type. Another name is ol 7rpo(r8ex°Mf 0*' Schnedermann frequently directs attention to the importance of this class in his work on the Kingdom of God. He devotes three volumes (see page 128, supra) to the repetition, ot the single proposition that the Kingdom ot God of Jesus was fundamentally identical with the same idea as cherished by God's ancient people. His volumes form amusing reading to a foreigner, because he considers himself not only the owner but even the martyr of this proposition, and warns off all other writers from participation in his property. He appears, however, to excite strong feeling in the scholars of his own country, who resent his claims to originality. His vwiting is diffuse and paradoxical, yet he makes a number of good points. Such, for example, is his distinction between the " Israelite " and " Jewish " elements in the intellectual atmosphere in which Jesus grew up : though Judaism reigned in the schools of the scribes and held the field to outward appearance, yet an " Israelite " strain of piety and conviction prevailed in a certain section of religious society. Those who walked in the green pastures and beside the still waters of this faith of the heart were in touch with the Prophets and understood all that is deepest in the Old Testament. That this is true and valuable I have no doubt. Another of his striking sayings is that " the kingdom of God " is of fundamental but not of central importance in the teaching of Jesus
THE MESS/AH 1 45
their delightful circle we are introduced in the opening pages of the Gospel, which tell of Simeon and Anna, the Shepherds of Bethlehem, and other kindred spirits. In this circle were born both John the Baptist and Jesus ; and it is in the songs which, at the time of their birth, burst from the inspired lips of Mary and Elizabeth, Zechariah and Simeon, that we discover the truest image of what the messianic hope actually was. It is infinitely deeper than the creed compiled by Schiirer. It is redolent not of the schools of the scribes, but of the inspiration of the prophets. Above all, it is instinct with the humility of broken hearts and of souls passionately longing for salvation. It reflects precisely the state of mind to which our Lord subsequently addressed Himself when He said, " Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."
This circle of receptive and prepared souls may have been wider than is generally supposed ; for piety of this type, though exercising great influence, makes little noise and receives little notice from contemporary chroniclers. At all events, it would be the whole world to Jesus in the years during which His mind was forming. He may even, on this account, have taken long to realise how widely the spliit and views of the Jewish world at large
10
146 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
differed from His own ; and this may partly account for what is a difficulty of no inconsiderable magni- tude— that He should have given such prominence in His preaching to a term understood so differently by Himself and His hearers.
His use of it has sometimes been spoken of as an accommodation to the usages and the capacities of His contemporaries ; but it was the very form in which He thought His own thoughts. It was, indeed, a borrowed garment, and it may from the first have been too scanty for Him ; or perhaps His mind eventually outgrew it ; yet it was native to Him, and He moved in it without the sense of incongruity. It was, besides, a noble form. As the prophets had conceived it, and as it had shaped itself in the pious minds in whose midst He grew up, it was an ideal in which a young soul could revel and rejoice.
It was, therefore, with a great rush of emotion that He first announced the coming of the kingdom. His message was emphatically the " Gospel " of the kingdom of God. He commenced, like John, with announcing simply that the kingdom was at hand ; * and there is no reason to doubt that there existed in the public mind a sufficient amount of messianic
* Mark i. 14.
J
THE MESSIAH 147
sentiment to make this announcement attract atten- tion and excite enthusiasm. At first everyone would interpret it according to his own ideas of the expected kingdom ; and so the rumour of the preaching of John and Jesus rang through the land, and all men were in expectation as to the shape in which the promised kingdom would appear.
As soon, however, as Jesus began to explain Himself, it became manifest that the majority of His countrymen and He were expecting the fulfil- ment of the promise in totally different forms. Both employed the same phrase — " the kingdom of God " — but His countrymen laid the emphasis on the first half of it — " the kingdom " — while He laid it on the second — " of God." They were thinking of the external benefits and glories of a kingdom, such as political emancipation, a throne, a court, a capital and tributary provinces, while He was thinking of the character of the subjects of the anticipated realm and of the doing in it of the will of God as it is done in heaven.
Jesus had, indeed, Himself felt at one time the glamour of their point of view ; for this was the meaning of the Temptation. The account of this experience preserved in the Gospels may be an imaginative rendering of the actual facts ; and it is highly instructive as embodying a variety of
148 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
reflections on temptation in general, as all men have to encounter it ; but it is also the record of a crisis in the life of Jesus at a particular point, and it exhibits Him in conflict with the messianic pre- conceptions of His countrymen. This is clearest in the temptation in which He was offered the kingdoms of the world on condition of compromising with evil ; for manifestly this was a temptation to begin at the outside instead of the inside — to begin with the nation instead of the individual — to get the shell of mere appearance first and to fill it with reality afterwards. The temptation to turn stones into bread is generally interpreted as referring to the use of His miraculous power for His own behoof, but it was also, in all probability, directed towards the winning of popularity by creating the necessaries and luxuries of life on a lavish scale — by becoming, in short, a bread-king, like those who in another country courted the popular favour by giving paitevi et circenses.^ The temptation to cast Himself from the pinnacle of the temple is the one the messianic drift of which is least certain. It obviously refers in general to the fanatical faith which scorns the use of means, but it probably also has reference to
* Sec a remarkable series of papers on our Lord's Temptation in The Expositor; 3rd series, vol. iii., p. 369 ff., by the Kev. W. W. Peyton.
THE MESSIAH 149
a contemporary expectation that the Messiah would make His appearance in a sudden and striking manner. He was supposed to be hidden till the hour of fulfilment should strike, and then He would appear suddenly, it was believed, in the midst of the nation assembled in the temple on some such public occasion as one of the annual festivals.* Probably if we knew more completely than we do the details of contemporary messianic belief, we should be able to see the historical application of each of the temptations still more clearly ; but at all events Jesus left the wilderness steeled against the worldly and fantastic conception of the coming kingdom entertained by His fellow-countrymen and determined to insist upon one which was moral and spiritual.
It is impossible, as one reads the Gospels, to help pitying the Jews, who expected a Messiah so different from Jesus ; but we must remember three things. First, His conception was that of the Old Testament prophets, and, therefore, it might have been theirs too, since the writings of the prophets were in their hands. It was because they were unable to appreciate the depth and spirituality of their own sacred books that they failed to understand Him.
• Schijrer, II. ii, 16.
ISO THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
Secondly, it was His part to teach and theirs to learn. He would have been no Messiah, not even a prophet of the Lord, if He had simply fallen in with popular opinions and expectations. Thirdly, the way prescribed by Him was the true path even to the objects desired by them. If they had con- sented to His leading and faced the lowly road of penitence and humiliation, can there be any doubt that He would have led them up to glory in the long-run ? What the history of Judaea would have been, and what the history of the world, if they had accepted Him on His own terms, is, indeed, a question which defies human calculation ; but we cannot hesitate to answer it at least so far as to say, that all the happiness and the glory predicted by the prophets would have been realised. These predictions, however, as well as the conduct of Jesus, were conditioned on the response of faith made by the people. This response was never forthcoming ; and so the possibilities could never be fulfilled.
For a time, indeed, it looked as if Galilee were to respond to the appeal of Jesus, whose opening ministry was, therefore, full of hope and enthusiasm. But the response never came from a deep enough place ; so that He could not commit Himself to the multitude, but had to fall back on the work of
I
f
I
THE MESSIAH 151
preparation. This is the explanation of the fact, that, while everywhere throughout His ministry speaking with perfect freedom of the kingdom of God, He was astonishingly reticent about the Messiah.* The Messiah was not, in every mind, an absolutely essential feature of the kingdom. This is seen even in the prophets of the Old Testament ; for some of them, while predicting in glowing colours the messianic age, have no vision of the messianic King ; and the same may be said of the postcanonical writers. From the reticence of Jesus on this point some scholars have been disposed to draw the inference that He Himself, at first at least, was not aware that He was the Messiah, but was only conscious, like the Baptist, of being a forerunner ; and the intelligent reader of the Gospels may sometimes feel a doubt whether Jesus was not bound, if He knew Himself as the Messiah, to impart this knowledge more freely to those whose duty it was to acknowledge Him. But Jesus pre- ferred to act as the Messiah rather than to bear witness to Himself ; and He was not unduly
* The question of the Reticence of Jesus is one on which the last word has not yet by any means been spoken. It does not concern His messiahship alone, as anyone can see for himself who will look up the following references in a single Gospel — Mark i. 44 ; iii. 12 ; v, 43 ; vii. 36 ; viii. 26, 30 ; ix. 9, 25, 30.
IS2 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
reticent where any disposition was shown to look upon Him and His actions with an unprejudiced eye. But He could not entrust Himself to the multitude : their expectations were too impure. St. John mentions an occasion when they tried to take Him by force and make Him a king ; but of such zealotic enthusiasm He could take no advantage : it only drove Him more and more in upon Himself.
At last, however, He did break through His reserve and cease to make any secret of His claims. His triumphal entry into Jerusalem was an offer of Himself to His countrymen as their Messiah, the do7ia fides of which it would be unreasonable to doubt. Yet it is an incident surrounded with tragic mystery. He Himself can have had little hope. In fact, He had so little that in the midst of His triumph He burst into tears ; and, after entering the city, He allowed the crowd to disperse with nothing done. It was, indeed, only a crowd of Galileans, whose shouts of, " Blessed be the Son of David, who cometh in the name of the Lord ! " awakened no echo in the cold and sullen heart of Jerusalem. Still Jesus had given to His hard-hearted and guilty countrymen their last chance, leaving no mistake as to the character in which He claimed their homage ; and it was by them, not by Him, that the nation's
THE MESSIAH i53
charter of promise was torn up and nailed to a tree — an act to which, however, destiny affixed its seal, when, a few years afterwards, the Jewish state finally perished and Jerusalem was razed to the ground.
Such was the issue of laying the emphasis of the Kingdom of God on the first member of the phrase. Meantime, however, Jesus had been working out His own conception of it, laying the accent on the second member.
In the first place. He insisted on Repentance as a preparation for the kingdom. This was the very first word of His preaching ; and it was a word which never disappeared. A great proportion of His recorded sayings consists of denunciations of sin. He denounced especially the sins of the upper and ruling classes ; and, if He did not in an equal degree denounce the sins of the poor and the outcast, it was because it was unnecessary, as these came weeping to His feet, confessing their own sins.
To such penitents He conveyed the assurance of Pardon, claiming that He had power on earth to forgive sins. And undoubtedly His meaning was that forgiveness was even more needed by the hard and haughty hearts of Pharisees and scribes. Indeed, He told such that, unless they came down
IS4 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
from their arrogance and became as little children, they could not enter the kingdom of God,
Inwardly the kingdom is one of Righteousness : this is its outstanding character. The greatest discourse of Jesus is wholly occupied with this theme, developing the conception of righteousness in contrast not only with current habits of living, but also with traditional maxims, and even the commandments of Moses.* Through the Sermon on the Mount, from first to last, there runs a strain of the most passionate moral earnestness. Never elsewhere in the world has there been taught so inward or difficult a morality ; but it was to be the high prerogative of the kingdom of God to realise it.
The kingdom had, however, another side besides this stern one : it was Blessedness as well as righteousness. This side of it is developed with a graciousness which charms the heart as well as an originality which excites the intellect in the
* Matt. V. 17 — " Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter the kingdom of heaven." The rest of the Sermon on the Mount is an exposition of this text, the righteousness required of Christians being contrasted first with that prescribed in the Mosaic law and the traditional exposition of the same (to the end of chapter v.), secondly with contemporary Pharisaic custom (vi. 1-18), and thirdly with the ordinary course of this world (from vi. 19 to the end).
THE MESSIAH 155
Beatitudes. Each beatitude is a paradox ; because that in which blessedness is said to consist is a minus quantity. This defect, however, is only the empty place into which the positive blessing can rush ; and the sum of the minus and the plus together is a divine overplus of blessedness. It is, indeed, happiness of a high order, consisting in such blessings as the vision of God and divine sonship * ; but it is only of such as are capable of these aspirations that the kingdom of God is to be composed.
Thus it is manifest that the good things of which the kingdom of God was the sum, as they presented themselves to the mind of Jesus, were totally different from those dreamed of by political and revolutionary zealots. And this was made still more evident when He summed them up, as He sometimes did, in such terms as " peace " and " rest." Again and again, where His ordinary usage would lead us to expect " the kingdom of God " in His sayings, there is substituted for it " life " or " eternal life."f And nothing could be a more significant indication of the intense religious pre- occupation of His mind. To Him existence without God was not life, but death ; but to live in God —
* Matt. V. 8, 9.
t Luke xix. 42 ; Matt. xi. 28, 29 ; Mark ix. 47 ; x. 30.
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thinking His thoughts, doing His will, enjoying His fellowship — was the sum of blessedness ; and such was to be the blessedness of the kingdom of God.
In short, the thought of Jesus is prevailingly moral and religious. He began with the conceptions and the phraseology of the time, but He naturally and gradually drew away from them, out into the broad ocean. A glance at His parables makes this manifest. While some of them, like the Barren Fig Tree and the Wicked Husbandman, have a strongly Jewish flavour, others, like the Talents and the Rich Fool, belong to the realm of religion pure and simple ; and many of the greatest, like the three of the fifteenth of Luke, while retaining marks of their Jewish original, have the most obvious application to the whole of humanity. So, when Jesus says that He has come to seek and to save that which is lost, we remember, indeed, that there is an allusion to the prodigal and abandoned classes of His own day, but the glory of the saying lies in its application to lost men everywhere. When He says, " Come unta Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest," He has, no doubt, in view His contemporaries groaning under the traditions of the elders, but His words have, beneath this surface meaning, a universal application to all forms of spiritual unrest and anxiety. In short, as Jesus
tllE MESSIAH 157
followed the guidance of His genius along this line, He passed from being the Messiah of the Jews to be the Saviour of the world.
The entrance to the kingdom is, according to the mind of Jesus, a strait gate. Indeed, it admits only one at a time : everyone, be he Pharisee or publican, must go through the ordeal of repentance. Jesus was well aware how unattractive such a rule would be ; and much of His teaching is occupied with the difficulties of those who, for one reason or another, found it hard to take His yoke upon them. This was undoubtedly the chief offence to the contem- porary Jews, who expected to enter the kingdom in a body, without questions asked, and disdained to do so in the company of sinners. But this in- dividualism of Jesus was at bottom identical with universalism ; because the conditions which He imposed might be accepted by anyone, whatever his previous history. They concerned man as man, not man as belonging to any race, caste or creed. The gate, though narrow, excludes no child of Adam who is willing to repent. During His earthly career, indeed, Jesus felt Himself restricted to the lost sheep of the house of Israel ; but the mission work of St. Paul and the other apostles was in the direct line of His principles ; and it is entirely credible that He foresaw a time when many would come
158 THE CHklSTOLOGY OF JESVS
from the east and the west, to sit down with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the children of the kingdom would, through their own impenitence, be doomed to outer darkness.
A point about which there has of late been hot discussion, and which is more important than it looks, is the question, whether or not Jesus thought and spoke about the kingdom as already come. It is allowed that, when He began to preach, He announced it as on the point of coming ; and He often spoke of it as lying in the future — perhaps in heaven — but did He look upon it as already estab- lished on earth by means of His ministry?
In support of the position that He did. His saying may be quoted, " If I by the finger of God cast out devils, then is the kingdom of God come upon you."* Jesus regarded the coming ot the kingdom of God as an invasion of the realm of evil, over which Satan rules ; and, when the strong man armed was driven out in the cases of dispossession, the invading kingdom occupied the ground. In the same sense, when the Twelve returned and reported that they had cast out devils on a large scale, Jesus exclaimed, " I beheld Satan as lightning falling from heaven."t
* Luke xi. 20. t Luke X. 18.
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He meant that the frequent dispossessions were equivalent to the downfall of the prince of the empire of evil. It was the empire of sin, not the empire of Rome, that stirred the heart of Jesus — a striking proof of the spirituality of His aims, but also no doubt a cause of offence to those who thought that the first duty of every patriot was to get rid of the foreign yoke.
Another remarkable saying, " The kingdom of God is within you,"* would be more conclusive if it were certain that the preposition meant "within" and not " among." But probably it does mean " within " ; for, apart from purely linguistic con- siderations, this meaning agrees well with the context: "When He was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, He answered them and said. The kingdom of God cometh not with observation ; neither shall they say, Lo here, or, Lo there ; for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you." They evidently expected it to come apoca- lyptically, at a certain moment and at a certain place, and in full-grown completeness, like a city let down to the earth out of heaven ; but He taught that the methods of God are the very reverse — inward, unobserved, gradual. Very similar is His
* Luke xvii. 21.
i6o THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
parable of the Seed Growing Secretly, " first the blade, then the ear, afterwards the full corn in the ear," — one of the most characteristic of His sayings. And of kindred import are such parables as the Leaven and the Mustard Seed, both describing the growth of the kingdom from small beginnings to the perfect form.
In spite of such testimonies there are those who hold that Jesus' own view was apocalyptic. He believed, they contend, that the kingdom, being entirely a divine creation, was to appear in a moment, and He was waiting for it all the time. But this is simply an importation into modern scholarship of the view of the kingdom which deceived the Jews ; and it converts Jesus Himself into a fantastic and disappointed dreamer, whom it would be impossible to accept as the Saviour of mankind.*
Jesus Himself was there ; and the kingdom had already come in His person, even if it had had no other embodiment. But round Him there sprang up a body, consisting first of the Twelve, then of
* This applies to the work of Schmoller entitled Das Retch Gottes and to that of Johann Weiss entitled Die Predigt Jesii "vom Reiche Gottes. In spite of the cleverness of Weiss' exegesis in detail, the picture of Jesus which he draws is an unintentional caricature. This fantastic figure is not the Saviour and Lord of men, but only " a dreamer of the ghetto."
THE MESSIAH i6i
larger numbers, in whom all the blessings which the kingdom comprised, such as repentance, righteousness, sonship, rest and life, were realised in growing measure.
In the Gospels nothing is more remarkable than the perseverance with which, in spite of the solicitation of other kinds of work, Jesus devoted Himself to the Twelve, evidently looking upon their training as one of the prime objects of His ministry.* But the organization of the wider circle of His disciples cannot but have also held a prominent place in His thoughts. The statements on this subject attributed to Him in the Gospels have been much called in question ; f but it is more likely that He both thought and spoke more on the Church and the sacraments than He is represented
* " Unabtrennbar von seinem Lebensbilde ist die Thatsache dass Jesus Jiinger um sich sammelte. Das ist zunachst keine Besonderheit, auch von einigen Propheten und von dem Taufer vvird dasselbe berichtet. Aber durchaus etvvas neues und eigenthiimliches ist as, dass diese Seite des Lebens Jesu so stark, ja fast ausschliesslich hervortritt. In der That in diesem kleineren, bescheidenen Kreise, in der Enge und Stille, hat sich die Hauptsumme der Wirksamkeit Jesu voUzogen, in dieser direkten, unmittelbaren Arbeit von Person zu Person hat er sein Leben gelebt. — Bousset, Jesu Predigt in ihreni Gegensatz zum JucieHthum, p. 55.
t That Jesus can ever have spoken of the Church is denied by Holtzmann ; but Ritschl, Beyschlag, KostHn are on the opposite side. Cf. Holtzmann N. T. Tkeologie, p. 210, note.
I I
i62 THE CHRISTOLVGY OF JESiJS
to have done than that He spoke less. The history of religious movements proves that, with whatever energy and spirituality they may be initiated, they soon disappear, unless channels are provided in which their currents may be carried down to subsequent times ; and a religious genius of the first order must be an organizer as well as a thinker.* It is certain that Jesus did not work out the details of the creed, doctrine or discipline of the Church ; but it is just as certain that the institution itself is His creation.
When Jesus was crucified, the Jews, no doubt, believed that His movement, which had seemed to them moonshine, was at an end ; but, fifty years afterwards, when their political existence was blotted out, there had sprung up, all over the known world, countless communities, which, without any earthly centre — without capital, court or army — yet acknow- ledged one heavenly King, obeyed the same code of laws, partook of the same blessings, pursued the same objects, and were united among themseh'es more closely than the subjects of any earthly sovereign. And from that day to this the kingdom of God has never ceased to grovv.f
• Contrast, as respects permanency, the influence of Whitfield, the orator, and Wesley, the organizer.
t Several chapters of Ecce Homo are occupied with showing in what sense Christ is a King and Christianity a Kingdom,
THE MESSIAH 163
Robert Browning, in the opening pages of The Ring and the Book, compares the poet's art to that of the goldsmith, who, when he is working with the finest gold, has to make use of an alloy, in order to give the precious metal sufficient consistency to enable it to stand the action of his tools and assume the shapes which he desires. But, when the form is complete, he applies an acid, which evaporates the alloy and leaves nothing but the pure gold of the perfect ring. The poet's ingenious application of this image to his own art we need not follow at present ; but the image seems to admit of being applied to the difficult subject which we have on hand. The popular conception of the kingdom of God was the alloy with which Jesus had to mix His teaching, in order to make it fit to mingle with the actual life of the world of His day. Without it His thought would have been too ethereal and too remote from the living hopes of men. He had to take men where He found them, and lead them step by step to the full appreciation of His sublime purpose for the world. He was not to be the king of the Jews, but King of an infinitely diviner realm, yet it was by aiming at the throne which
What they offer is the speculation of a modern philosopher rather than a transcript from the mind of Christ ; yet they are full of su"gestiveness.
i64 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
He missed that He reached the throne which He now occupies.
And shall we say that in His case, when the ring was perfected, the alloy was blown away ? was it fated that the idea and the name of the kingdom of God should fade from the minds of men ? It looks as if this had been the intention ; for, whereas in the Synoptists we find the phrase everywhere, it is infrequent in the Gospel of St. John, and it does not appear at all in his Epistles ; in all St. Paul's Epistles it does not occur as often as in the briefest of the Gospels ; and in St. Peter's Epistles it is found but once. This is a remarkable phenomenon. Does it indicate that the apostles had forgotten the doctrine of their Master 1 or is it an instance of the freedom with which in that creative age the ideas of religion were grasped and its phraseology altered } The apostles were too thoroughly alive to repeat the words of others, even those of their Master, by rote. Each of them, according to his own genius and his own circumstances, expressed what the Holy Spirit had revealed to him in language of his own. After the fall of Jerusalem, Christianity had to go away among peoples to which a phrase like " the kingdom of God " would have been novel and confusing ; and, therefore, the missionaries wisely avoided it, finding more appro-
THE MESSIAH ,6?
priate phrases to take its place. Even Jesus, before the close of His life, outgrew it ; and His teaching seems always striving to escape from it as from a fetter. It is impossible to subsume under it the very finest of His sayings. The phrase belongs, in short, to the " body of humiliation " * which for a time He had to bear, but from which He was destined to be liberated.
This is not, however, an opinion universally accepted. Far from it. Some of the most vigorous thinking of our century is associated with the pro- posal to revive the phrase as the supreme category of theology, as it was the title of the teaching of Jesus. In Germany it has long been a favourite expression. The Pietists spoke of their philan- thropic and missionary endeavours as work for the kingdom of God ; and the Ritschlians at the present day have given it as supreme a place in the realm of thought.! Among ourselves some are disposed to follow in the same track for various reasons. Among English Nonconformists the phrase finds a welcome, as a rival to " the Church," on which, it seems to them, too much emphasis is laid by
* To (Tafia TTis TaireivaOeas — Phil. iii. 21.
t I sometimes wonder whether the force of this tendency has been due in any degree to the imperial ideas dominant in that country since the great victories ot the Franco-Prussian War
i66 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
churchmen. But the strongest influence is the growth among us of social and patriotic sentiment in connexion with religion. To be a Christian is not merely to save one's own soul, but to discharge one's duty to the world ; it is to be part of an organism, with which we suffer and with which we triumph ; it is to be an adherent of a great cause and to prove loyal to a divine Leader. It is evident that many such ideas and aspirations may be con- veniently gathered together within such a phrase as the kingdom of God. Indeed, I have known those to whom this name has appeared to make everything new ; and, when a watchword is capable of doing this, it cannot be looked upon with anything but respect. On the whole, however, the attempt to revive this term seems to be mistaken. We are very remote now from the world to which it belonged. To many Christians, living under repub- lican forms of government, the very name of a king or a kingdom is something foreign and out of date. Whatever may be the case in Germany, to our ears the phrase as a name for Christianity has a sound of preciosity and make-believe ; and there are far better names for the same thing. The attempt to revive it is due to a mistaken reverence for Christ, as if the repetition of His mere words were obli- gatory upon Christians ; it is a return from the
THE MESSIAH 167
spirit to the letter, an attempt to force thought back into a form which it has long outgrown.
Nevertheless, there are two words of our Lord which will always keep this phrase fresh and sweet in the mouth of Christendom : the one the second petition of the Lord's Prayer— " Thy kingdom come"— and the other the text, "Suffer the little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of heaven."
THE REDEEMER
»«9
Passages in which Jesus refers to His own death : —
Matthew ix. 15; xvi. 21 ; xvii. 9, 12, 22, 23; xx. 17-19, 22, 23, 28 xxi. 39, 42 ; xxvi. 2, 12, 18, 24, 26, 28, 31, 38, 39, 42, 45.
Mark ii. 20; viii. 31 ; ix. 9, 12, 31, x. 32-34, 38, 39, 45 ; xii. 8, 10; xiv. 8, 21, 22-24, 36, 39, 41.
Luke V. 35 ; ix. 22, 31, 44 ; xii. 50 ; xiii. 32, 33; xvii. 25 ; xviii, 31-33 ; XX. 9-18 ; xxii. 14-22 ; xxiv. 7, 26, 46.
V
THE REDEEMER*
T T is well known that, after the death of our
A Lord, the later scenes of His career took
peculiar possession of the mind of the Church, and
• Weiss: Lehrbuch derbiblischen Theologie des neuen Testaments
§ 22. Beyschlag: Neutestaynentliche Theologie, I. pp. 126 if. HoLTZMANN : Neutestante?iiliche Theologie, I. 284 ff. Stevens: The Theology of the New Testament, Chapter X. Bruce : The Kittgdofn of God, Chapter X. Wendt: Die Lehre Jesu, II. 504 ff. Baldensperger : Das Selbstbewusstsein Jesic, c. VI. Smeaton : Our Lord's Doctrine of the Atonement. RiTSCHL: Die Christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und
Versohnung, 1882, especially vol. II, cap. II. Kahler: Zur Lehre von der Versohmmg, 1899. Dale: The Atonement, 1 881, especially Lecture III. Denney: Studies in Theology, 1895, cc. V., VI. Fairbairn : Christ's Attitude to His own Death, a series of
articles in The Expositor, beginning October, 1896. Schaefer : Das Herrenfnahl nach Urspriing und Bedeutung,
1897 Babut : La Pensee de Jesus stir Sa Mort, \ 897. For the literature of the Atonement see the article in Hastings'
Dictionary of the Bible.
172 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
that in the apostolic writings His death and re- surrection figure far more prominently than His miracles or His teaching. In fact, the apostolic theory of Christianity is built upon His death, resurrection and ascension. His death, especially, occupies a vast space in the apostolic field of vision : it is by His death that He is the Saviour of the world. Now, it is sometimes contended that in this respect there is a striking discrepancy between the teaching of the apostles and that of Christ Himself ; because in the Synoptists there are not more than a couple of sayings of His about His death which are of capital importance; and He builds Christianity upon a totally different foundation. It is with the truth or falsehood of this contention that we have to occupy ourselves in the present lecture.
It must be confessed, that, at first sight, there does not seem to be much in common between the announcement of Jesus, that the object of His earthly mission was to set up the kingdom of God, and the statement of the apostles, that He came to die for the sin of the world. But in the last chapter we saw, that, while starting from the political hopes of His countrymen, Jesus, as soon as He began to speak what was distinctively His own language, employed " the kingdom of God " as a comprehensive term for the noblest blessings of life,
THE REDEEMER 1 73
such as repentance, forgiveness, the vision of God, communion with God and eternal life ; and between this circle of ideas and the benefits associated by the apostles with the death of Christ the interval is not appreciable.
The impression that Jesus referred but little to His own death is due to a superficial reading of the Gospels. A closer acquaintance with them reveals the fact, that at no period of His ministry was the thought of His death foreign to Him, and that during the last year of His life it was an ever- present and absorbing preoccupation.*
In spite of the joy springing from His own enthusiasm and His early successes, His career was from the very commencement crossed by dark shadows. From the first the religious authorities were against Him, and it could not be long before He had forebodings of how far their malevolence might be carried. He reckoned Himself to be in the line of the prophets, and He knew too well what kind of fate they had encountered at the hands of Jerusalem. The premature end of His forerunner was a prophecy of what His own was likely to be.
* I have not anywhere else seen the extent of space which this subject occupied in the consciousness of Jesus so finely brought out as in the articles by Principal Fairbairn referred to above.
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He never spared his would-be followers the know- ledge, that their adherence to him would imply sacrifice — perhaps even the sacrifice of life itself — and He adopted as a kind of technical term for what they would have to endure for His sake the significant name of " the cross." But, if even the disciples were to excite to this extent the hostility of the world, what could the Master expect for Himself? He kept back as long as He could from the Twelve His anticipations of His own fate ; but, when He did begin to speak, it was manifest that what He had to communicate had long been in His mind, craving for utterance.
It was not till they had confessed at Caesarea Philippi, that he was Christ, the Son of God, that He considered them mature and established enough to be able to bear the terrible secret ; but " from that time forth began Jesus to show unto His disciples, how that He must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day." Having once broken the ice. He returned again and again to the subject. Thus : " And Jesus, going up to Jerusalem, took the twelve disciples apart on the way, and said unto them, Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, and the Son of man shall be betrayed unto the chief priests and unto the
The redeemer 175
scribes, and they shall condemn Him to death, and shall deliver Him to the Gentiles, to mock and to scourge and to crucify Him ; and the third day He shall rise again." As occasion offered, He added trait after trait, to sharpen the outline of the tragic picture ; and all the Synoptists mark with the utmost care the steps of this gradual unveiling of the future.*
But, although He pressed the subject home so deliberately on the attention of the apostles, they were totally unable to receive it. The first time He broached it St. Peter "took Him and began to rebuke Him,"t as if He were losing His mental balance, through melancholy, and allowing Himself to say things which would be injurious to the cause — a reply which appeared to Jesus such an immediate suggestion of the spirit of evil that He turned on St. Peter with "Get thee behind Me, Satan." Indeed, between all the disciples and their Master there sprang up at this time an alienation such as had never previously existed. They continued to dream of the thrones which they were about to ascend, and they disputed with one another which should be the
* See these series of texts in the different Gospels— Matt, xvi. 21; xvii. 22, 23; XX. 17-19; xxvi. 2, 21-24; Mark viii. 31 j X. 32-34 ; Luke ix. 22, 44 ; xvii. 25 ; xviii. 31-33.
t Matt. xvi. 22.
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greatest in the forthcoming kingdom, while clouds of disaster were accumulating on the horizon of His mind in darker and darker masses. Their minds were distracted with ominous suspicions, and He was tragically alone — " They were in the way going up to Jerusalem ; and Jesus went before them ; and they were amazed, and as they followed, they were afraid."* The misunderstanding on their side culminated in the treachery of Judas, and the loneli- ness on His in Gethsemane.
That the subject which occupied His thoughts in these solitary musings was His death admits of no doubt. It grew upon Him from day to day and from month to month. He had to master the mystery and penetrate its secret. Sometimes it rose upon Him as an overwhelming horror, at other times He saw beyond it and could almost welcome it. This double point of view is expressed in a characteristic saying of the period : " I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straitened till it be accomplished." Many features of the approaching catastrophe — as, for example, that it was to take place through the treachery of an apostle, that it was to be at the hands of His own countrymen, that it was to interrupt His mission in
* Mark x. 32.
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the midst of happy labour, that it was to bring ruin to H,s native land-were revolting, and could not be contemplated without torture; yet, on the other hand He knew that the dark providence must conceal a divine purpose-a purpose all the more charged with concentrated and complicated good to both Himself and others, the darker was the shape in which It was enveloped. His enemies might kill H.m, but He could say to them, "Did ye never read in^ the Scriptures. The stone which the builders rejected is become the headstone of the corner • this IS the Lord's doing and it is marvellous in our eyes"?*
What was this prospect of ulterior good which enabled Jesus to triumph over the prospect of sufienng ? To discover this, we must scrutinise the sayings in which He most distinctly gives expression to His consciousness of what His death was to effect for mankind. Of these there are only two in the Synoptists ; but they well deserve the most careful and exhaustive study we are able to bestow upon them. The one is the saying, "Even the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister and to give His life a ransom for many;" and the ''_^!^!J^_^^-'j^j^c^^MA^^ instituted the * Luke XX. 17.
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last Supper, " This is the New Testament in My blood."
The first of these sayings sprang out of one of the most characteristic incidents of the tragic period just described. Two of the Twelve came to Him requesting through their mother, Salome, that they might sit the one on His right hand and the other on His left in His kingdom. Nothing could show more nakedly how far apart from His were at that time the thoughts of His followers than the fact that these two, belonging to the very innermost circle, should have made such a request ; and the indignation aroused by their conduct in the rest of the Twelve betrayed too clearly that they had only given expression to ambitions with which all were palpitating. Jesus did not, in His reply, deny that there was to be any earthly kingdom, but He showed them how diametrically opposite to His was their estimate of what it was to be like. Their thoughts were frankly those of the world — that to be a king was to lord it over numerous subjects, and that to be great was to be served by many slaves — but His conception was precisely the reverse — " Whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister ; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant." Such was to be the rule in His
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kingdom ; but the first to obey it was Himself, and He was to obey it to the uttermost — " For even the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister and to give His life a ransom for many." Here was the key to His entire career : He had always found His happiness and His honour in serving others and doing them good ; but the supreme illustration of the principle on which he conducted His life was still to come — His final service was to consist in giving His life a ransom for many.
This image of a ransom does not appeal to our minds as forcibly as it would to those of the disciples, because the experience of being ransomed, in the natural sense, is much rarer in modern than it was in ancient times.* In the British Isles at present there do not probably exist a hundred persons who have ever been ransomed, whereas in the ancient world there would be such wherever two or three were met together. War was never a rare experience to the countrymen of Jesus, and in war the process of ransoming was occurring continually, when prisoners were exchanged for prisoners, or captives were released on the payment by themselves or their relatives of a sum of money. Similarly, slavery
* My friend, Dr. John C. Gibson, of Swatovv, has told me that it is very common at the present day in China ; he has himself ransomed a man.
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was a universal institution, and in connexion with it the process of ransoming was common, when, for a price paid, slaves received their liberty. The Jews had, besides, numerous forms of ransoming peculiar to their own laws and customs. For example, the firstborn male of every household was, in theory, liable to be a priest, but was redeemed by a pay- ment of so many shekels to the actual priesthood, which belonged exclusively to a single tribe. A person whose ox had gored a man to death was in theory guilty of murder, but was released from the liability to expiate his guilt with his life by a payment to the relatives of the dead man.*
Such cases show clearly what ransoming was : it was the deliverance of a person from some misery or liability through the payment, either by himself or by another on his behalf, of a sum ot money or any other equivalent which the person in whose power he was might be willing to accept as a condition of his release. It was a triangular transaction, in- volving three parties — first the person to be ransomed, secondly the giver, and thirdly the receiver of the ransom.
As regards the first of these parties, in the case of the ransom of Christ, the most important question
* Num. xviii. 15 ; Exod. xxi. 30.
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is, what they are ransomed from. What is the nature of the misery or h'ability in which they are involved, and from which they require to be delivered ?
Our Lord seems to have had in His mind a passage in the forty-ninth psalm.* This psalm is one of those, of which there are several in the Psalter, dealing with the mystery of life, especially as this is exhibited in the inequalities of the human lot. For the purpose of lightening the burden of this mystery, it sets forth, with rare poetic power, the things which wealth cannot do ; and the chief of these is, that it cannot keep off the approach of death —
"None of them can by any means redeem his brother, Nor give to God a ransom for him: (For the redemption of their soul is costly, And must be let alone forever:) That he should still live alway, That he should not see corruption.
On account of this reference it has been argued that the evil from which Christ redeems us is death, or the fear of death. But, in point of fact. He does not redeem from physical death.
There is another saying of Jesus, also apparently occasioned by the same passage of the same psalm, by which we are led nearer to His meaning. It is the well-known question, " What shall a man give in
* Especially vv. 7, 8, 9, 15. I quote from the Revised Version.
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exchange for his soul ? " As " soul " is the same as " life," Jesus may seem in this saying simply to be supplementing the statement of the psalm, that none can redeem his brother's life from death, with the further reflexion, that no man can redeem his own ; but it is proved by the connexion that He means more. Between the date of the psalm and the date of our Lord's utterance, the whole conception of death, and of what ensues after death, had deepened ; and this deeper note enters into our Lord's words. The connexion in which the verse occurs is this : " And when He had called the people unto Him, with His disciples also, He said unto them. Whosoever will come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me ; for whosoever will save his life shall lose it ; but whosoever shall lose his life for My sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it ; for what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul ? or what shall a man give in ex- change for his soul .-' Whosoever, therefore, shall be ashamed of Me and of My words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed, when He cometh in the glory of His Father, with the holy angels." Here we are among a far more solemn order of ideas than that of the psalm. The death contemplated is not
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that of the body but of the soul, and the danger is tliat of an unfavourable verdict at the final judgment. That from which Christ ransoms may be called the fear of death, but, if so, it is the fear of death eternal ; and the only method of taking this away is to take away sin, which lends to death its terror. From this no man can ransom himself, neither can any man ransom his brother, but the Son of man came to give His life a ransom for many.
Turning now to Him who pays the ransom, we observe that Jesus describes the payment of this ransom as the culminating purpose of his whole life — He " came " to minister and to give His life a ransom. In the circumstances in which this was spoken the reference could only be to a violent death — in fact, to the shedding of His blood. But it is to be observed that He does not here say, as He does elsewhere, that they would take His life, but that He would give it. His death was to be His own voluntary act. Service extorted by force is not greatness, but slavery. It was not as a slave that Jesus lived, and it was not as a slave that He died. No doubt wicked men took his life, as they had previously taken His ease, comfort and honour ; but He put so much magnanimity, at every crisis, into the surrender that the sacrifice was His
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own act, and He remained master of His fate. When He was nailed to the tree, He was not a mere martyr suffering what others inflicted on Him, but He was paying a ransom.
The dignity of the act is, however, chiefly brought out in the claim that He gave His life " for many." When prisoners were bartered at the conclusion of a war, the exchange was not always simply man for man. An officer was of more value than a common soldier, and several soldiers might be redeemed by the surrender of one officer. For a woman of high rank or extraordinary beauty a still greater number of prisoners might be exchanged ; and by the giving up of a king's son many might be redeemed. So the sense of His own unique dignity and His peculiar relation to God is implied in the statement that His life would redeem the lives of many. St. Paul expresses the truth still more boldly when he says that Jesus gave His life a ransom " for all " ; * but the two phrases come to the same thing ; because the " many " spoken of by Jesus really include " all " who are willing to avail themselves of the opportunity.
The third party to the transaction is the one to whom the ransom is paid. It is obvious that in any
* I Tim, ii. 6.
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transaction deserving the name of ransom this third party was in some respects the most important of all. He held the prisoner in custody, and, while others might offer a ransom, it was his to say whether or not he would accept of any, and whether he was satisfied with the terms proposed. In spite of these considerations, there are interpreters of this great saying of our Lord who ignore this aspect of the truth altogether, holding that only two things are essential in the case — namely, the misery of those who need to be redeemed and the price paid by the Redeemer. Everyone, however, can judge for himself whether or not this satisfies the conditions of the metaphor. For a situation in which only the two things just mentioned — misery and deliverance — require to be considered, there are many other meta- phors which might have been employed ; but this one, of a ransom, naturally suggests something more. And that Jesus was thinking of something more seems to me to be especially implied in the words " tor many." In whose eyes is it that Jesus be- lieves His life will be regarded as an equivalent for the lives of many ? Not His own merely — in that case His claim would be a vainglorious boast — but primarily God's. Unforgiven sinners may no doubt be said to condemn themselves to death and to descend to their doom with the force of natural
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law ; yet they are in the hands of a just and holy God, and their doom is His sentence. It was to avert this and to turn it into a sentence of acquittal that Jesus gave His life.
It is true the death of Christ has a profound and manifold effect on the mind of man. The tranquillity with which He met a death of unparalleled atrocity has set an example fitted to soothe the feelings of all who in the last agony remember Him, and to deliver them from the fear of death ; * His faith, that death was not the end of existence but only a stage of transition to a higher form of life, breathes into our hearts also the assurance that death is the gateway of life ; f and the sight of what sin inflicted
* This is Wendt's explanation.
t "Est kann nicht gemeint sein, dass dieselben von dem Tode als dem Schicksal aller geschaffenen Wesen ausgenommen werden sollen ; denn die Untervverfung unter dieses Geschick fordert Jesus im bestimmten Falle gerade als die Probe der Anhanglichkeit an ihn (8 : 35). Also ist die Meinung die, dass indem auch die Genossen der Gemeinde Jesu dem Tode verfallen, sein freiwilliges von dem bestimmten Zweck geleitetes und zugleich unverschuldetes Sterben ihnen zum Schutze dagegen dient, dass sie im Tode die voile Vernichtung und Zvvecklosigkeit erfahren ; vielmehr soil ihnen jene Leistung Jesu dazu dieuen, dass sie aus dem bisber geltenden gottlichen Verhangniss der endgiltigen Lebensvernichtung eriost werden, dass sie eine andere Beurtheilung des Todes gewinnen, als unter dem Alten Testament mOglich war, uiiJ dass sie den Tod nicht mehr fiirchten." — Ritschl, Rc-'.ilfertigtiug nnd VersdJmufig, II. 87, 88.
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on the Holiest and the Noblest is fitted to arouse in the mind a revulsion from sin and a passion of indignation against it. But by far the most im- portant effect of the death of Christ was its effect on the mind of God.* To define precisely what this was may be impossible, and theologians may have made great mistakes in attempting to define it ; yet we are safe in saying that it altered the relation of God to sinners. It did not make Him love them, for this He had always done; indeed, it was His immemorial love which gave Christ to His mission ; but it removed an obstacle to the free outflow of the divine love. It effected this by annihilating sin ; and this is what is implied in the idea of ransom.
I am very desirous not to put anything into this saying which docs not belong to it ; but I find it hard to believe that in the " many ' here mentioned there is not an echo of the phrases of the last two verses of the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, " He bare the sin of many," and, " By His knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many." So, "to give His life a ransom" sounds uncommonly like a
* Nine-tenths of the modern books on the Atonement are occupied with its effects on the mind of man, but nine-tenths of the Bible statements are concerned with its effects on the mind of God. All modern writers are aware that Jesus came to make good men better, but comparatively few have any idea that He came to make bad men good. Yet this is the Gospel.
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reminiscence of the words in the same chapter, " Thou shalt make His soul an offering for sin." If this be correct, Jesus must have thought of Himself as the Servant of the Lord, about whose substitution for sinners such wonderful things are said by Isaiah ; and, in that case, we need not have any doubt what is intended when we are told that after His resurrec- tion. He expounded unto the disciples in all the Scriptures " the things concerning Himself." * At all events the earliest Christian preaching applied Isaiah's picture of the Man of Sorrows to Jesus, and it did so expressly because the subject of the prophetic picture took away the sin of others by the sacrifice of Himself.f It is beyond question that this was the faith of the Church immediately after our Lord's departure. St. Paul mentions as the very first article of the common tradition of Christianity, that " Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures ; " ^ so that the doctrine was no invention of his. He made it his own, indeed, by the intense conviction with which he grasped it and the thorough- ness with which he expounded it ; but it was equally the doctrine of St. Peter, St. John and the author ol the Epistle to the Hebrews.
I am sticking rigidly, in this course of lectures, to
* Luke xxiv. 27. t Acts viii. 32-35.
X I Cor. XV. 3.
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the exposition of the words of Jesus Himself, without adding or subtracting ; and yet there are points at which we cannot escape the question, whether the best guide to the meaning of His words be not the central beliefs of His first followers. When the first Christians knew that their Lord was risen and glorified, they knew also that their conception of His death, as the mere act of wicked men and as the termination of His career and His cause, was mistaken. They had still, however, to find an explanation of the mystery, and they found it in the belief that His death was a sacrifice by which He expiated the sin of the world. This was a concep- tion of incomparable originality and grandeur, revo- lutionising the whole doctrine of both man and God. Is it likely that it was an invention of theirs ? *
* This is powerfully put by Principal Fairbairn : — " We have to consider both the apostles and the theory. It was a belief of stupendous originality ; they were persons of no intellectual attainments and of small inventive faculty. So far as the Gospels enable us to judge, they were curiously deficient in imagination and of timid understanding. They were remarkable for their inability to draw obvious conclusions, to transcend the common- place, and comprehend the unfamiliar, or to find a rational reason for the extraordinary. Such men might dream dreams and see visions, but to invent an absolutely novel intellectual conception as to their Master's person and death — a conception that changed man's view of God, of sin, of humanity, of history, in a word, of all things human and divine — was surely a feat beyond them." — Expositor, 1896, p. 282.
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Is it not far more likely, that this was the way which Jesus Himself found of solving the dark problem of His death and of seeing beyond it into regions of illimitable hope ; and that He found it because it was true ?
The other great saying of Jesus on this subject is the one emitted at the Last Supper. It is given by St. Paul, in the account of the scene which, he says, he "received of the Lord," in the following form, " This cup is the new testament in My blood " ; St. Mark's form is, " This is My blood of the new testament, which is shed for many " ; and St. Matthew's, " This is My blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins." These different accounts have of late been not so much tested as tortured for the purpose of bringing out discrepancies and eliciting a meaning free from distinct theological colouring ; but at least these three are substantially identical ; that of St. Luke being less definite.* Whatever St. Paul may mean
* Since 1891 a controversy on the Lord's Supper, which has swelled to extraordinary dimensions, has been going on in Germany. It was begun by Harnack, who published an essay on " Bread and Water the Eucharistic Elements according to Justin," in which he contended that the institution was originally so understood that its blessing was not legally confined to bread and wine, but only to eating and drinking, that is, a
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by saying that he " received " the account which he gives " from the Lord," he may at least be trusted to have satisfied himself that his report was accurate. It is contended that the theological colouring of the phrases is due to him ; but may the influence not have acted in the opposite direction ? The apostle quotes the words of his Master remarkably seldom ; but there is no reason to suppose that he was either ignorant of them or indifferent to them ; and a saying of Christ's like this, embodied in the most distinctive rite of His religion, was one likely to receive the keenest attention from such a mind. If the meaning of the death of Christ is a leading element of St. Paul's theology, it may very well be, that we are here at the fountain-head from which this element of his doctrine was derived.
It is nothing less than a calamity to the English- simple meal. This was opposed by Th. Zahn and Jiilicher, the latter of whom, however, gave the controversy a new start by raising the question whether Jesus was really the Author of the institution, or whether He merely, in a moment of genial inspiration, conjured up the beautiful situation, without any ulterior design. The subsequent contributions to the contro- versy have come from Spitta, Haupt, Brandt, Grafe and many more ; and every conceivable phase of the subject has been brought into view. An ample account of the whole will be found in the work of Schaefer cited at the head of this chapter, and brief accounts in The Expositor for July and August, 1898, by the Rev. G. W. Stewart, and in the second number of Samt Andrew by Professor Menzies.
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speaking world that this saying of our Lord, heard at every celebration of the communion, is marred by a serious mistranslation — Jesus being made to say, " This is the blood of the new testament," when what He did say was, " This is the blood of the new covenant."* It is the same mistake which makes us, to our loss, call the two halves of the Bible the Old and the New Testaments — names which have scarcely any meaning — instead of the Old and the New Covenants — names which are full of meaning.
A covenant is a transaction between two parties, each of which gives something to the other and receives something in return. This exchange is the essence of a covenant ; and covenants are ot all degrees of dignity according to the value of the objects exchanged. The most ordinary bargain, in which the buyer hands a coin across the counter and the seller an article of merchandise, is a covenant ; but the word is generally reserved for transactions of greater moment, such as leagues or alliances between nations. The most solemn cove- nant between human beings is marriage ; and the solemnity consists in this, that, whereas in other covenants the parties exchange things more or less valuable, in marriage they give themselves. This
* The Revised Version corrects this.
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instance flashes light on the reh'gious use of the term ; for, as in marriage man and woman, so in religion God and man give themselves to each other. This is the essence of religion, and the v^oxd " religion " itself, though of uncertain derivation, signifies in all probability nothing else. This, at all events, is the signification of the word " covenant " in Scripture, where it is often explained by the words of Jehovah, " I will be their God and they shall be My people." It is a remarkable fact that in the Old Testament the word " religion " never occurs. Its absence can only be due to the fact that other equivalents are employed in place of it : and of these the commonest is " covenant," which occurs about three hundred times. This shows how near to the very heart of Biblical thought Jesus was when He called the Last Supper a covenant, indicating that the essence of this ordinance is the same as that of all religion — God giving Himself to man and man giving himself to God.
Another unhappy result of the mistranslation above referred to is, that it obliterates the reference in this communion formula to one of the most remarkable predictions of the Old Testament — that in which Jeremiah says : " Behold the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new convenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of
13
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Judah : not according to the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt ; which My covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the Lord : but this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel : After those days, saith the Lord, I will put My law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts ; and will be their God, and they shall be My people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, 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 I will remember their sin no more."* When our Lord, lifting the cup in the upper room, said, " This is the new covenant," His meaning was, that this prediction of Jeremiah was fulfilled.
If it be remembered, that in the Old Testament the word " covenant " is equivalent to " religion," it will be felt how daring was the prediction of Jeremiah — nothing less than the abolition of the religion under which he himself lived and the sub- stitution of a new one in its place — and the same reflexion brings out the fundamental character of
* Jer. xxxi. 31-34.
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the statement of Jesus ; for He was designating Himself as the founder of a new reh'gion. Of course the new was not to be wholly new — neither Jeremiah nor Jesus intended this. The Deity was not to be changed ; for Jehovah was the one living and true God ; and there were to be innumerable other points of connexion. Still the changes were to be great enough to justify the designation of the principal rite of Christianity as a new covenant.
The points of difference are indicated by Jeremiah with singular precision. First, the law was to be written on the heart. In the old religion the law was written on stone. It was external. It was the commandment of a distant Deity, imposed from without on the human will. Therefore, it was a yoke, harsh and hard to bear. But a law written on the heart is a light burden and an easy yoke. It is obedience to the will of One who is loved ; and love makes duty easy. But how was love to be evoked more fully under the new covenant than the old } It could only be by a fuller revelation of the nature of God. This, therefore, is the next member of the promise — " They shall teach no more every man his neighbour and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord ; for they shall all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them." At first sight, this seems to refer to the universality
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of the knowledge of God ; and it might be sup- posed to be a prediction of the extension of the knowledge of God to all men, Gentile as well as Jew, which was, indeed, to be one of the prominent features of the new religion. But it refers rather to the thoroughness of the new knowledge than to its universal diffusion. It is not a prediction that there will be no need of religious education, but that there will be no need of urgency in pressing it on the unresponsive, because God will appear in an aspect so attractive as to draw the hearts of small and great. In short. He will be revealed as the God of love. The love of God would, however, reveal itself specially in one way — in a much more thorough removal of sin than was possible through the sacrifices of the old covenant. And, therefore, the prophet gives this as the climax of the promise, " I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sins no more."*
* " Observandum, ilia tria apud prophetam proponi inverse ordine. Naturalis autem ordo hie est, quod primo omnium Deus electis reraittit peccata propter satisfactionem Christi, deinde donat eis Spiritum Sanctum, qui primum illuminat mentes eorum cognitione gratlae Dei per satisfactionem Christi acquisitae, deinde vero renovat voluntatem ad studium grati- tudinis pro beneficio liberationis seu redemptionis per Christum. Etsi enim remissionem peccatorum postremo loco commemorat, tamen illam praecedentibus annectit per conjunc- tionem causalem.'' — Piscator, qvioted by Smeaton, Our Lord's Doctrine of the Atonement.
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This brings us to tlie most mysterious phrase in our Lord's saying — " the blood of the covenant."
If our Lord's words about the new covenant carry us irresistibly back to Jeremiah, the words of Jeremiah carry us back as irresistibly far beyond his day; for, if there is to be a new covenant, there must have been an old one, and we naturally ask when and where the old one was made. As to this we are left in no doubt ; because in the very opening of his prediction, the prophet introduces Jehovah as saying, " I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah : not accord- ing to the covenant that I made with their fathers, in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt." So that it was at the era of the Exodus that the first covenant was made.
The scene is given in the twenty-fourth chapter of the Book of Exodus ; and there is no more fundamental passage in the entire Old Testament ; though, perhaps, its details are not stamped as distinctly as its importance would render natural on the memory of even careful students of the Bible.*
* "And He said unto Moses, Come up unto the Lord, thou, and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel ; and worship ye afar off: and Moses alone shall come near unto the Lord ; but they shall not come near ; neither shall the people go up with him. And Moses came and told the people
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What is popularly remembered about the Exodus is the deliverance at the Red Sea or the giving of the law at Sinai ; but both of these were only pre- liminaries to the making of the covenant. The formation of this union between Jehovah and His people was the real purpose for which the enslaved nation was delivered from bondage ; and the law was only the enumeration of the conditions laid down by Jehovah with a view to this transaction. In the passage quoted from Jeremiah Jehovah says, " I was an husband unto them " ; and this is looked
all the words of the Lord, and all the judgements : and all the people answered with one voice, and said, All the words which the Lord hath spoken will we do.
" And Moses wrote all the words of the Lord, and rose up early in the morning, and builded an altar under the mount, and twelve pillars, according to the twelve tribes of Israel. And he sent young men of the children of Israel, which offered burnt offerings, and sacrificed peace offerings of oxen unto the Lord. And Moses took half of the blood, and put it in basons ; and half of the blood he sprinkled on the altar. And he took the book of the covenant, and read in the audience of the people : and they said. All that the Lord hath spoken will we do, and be obedient. And Moses took the blood, and sprinkled it on the people, and said. Behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord hath made with you concerning all these words.
"Then went up Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel : and they saw the God of Israel ; and there was under His feet as it were a paved work of sapphire stone, and as it were the very heaven for clearness. And upon the nobles of the children of Israel He laid not His hand : and they beheld God, and did eat and drink."— Exodus xxiv. i-l I (R.V).
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upon as the occasion when this relationship, so fundamental and so familiar to all the prophets, was formed.
In examining more closely the details of the grand historical picture unfolded in Exodus, we must fix attention specially on the part played in it by blood ; for therein is to be found the key to the phrase of Jesus, " the blood of the new covenant."
As a preliminary observation it may be remarked, that blood has always played a prominent part in the formation of covenants.* When those who are remembered in our own history by the name of the Covenanters signed the solemn league, in the Greyfriars Church at Edinburgh, by which they were banded together, numbers of them opened a vein and subscribed the document with their own blood instead of with ink. What led them to do so was the natural conviction or instinct of man, that his blood is his life : they meant to say,
* " An absolute merging of two personalities into one, in this union of friendship, has been sought, among primitive peoples everywhere, by tlie intermingling of the blood of the two, through its mutual drinking or its inter-transfusion ; with the thought that blended blood is blended Hfe. Traces of this custom are found in the traditions and practices of the aborigines of different portions of Asia, Africa, Europe, North and South America, and the Islands of the Sea. Nor is there any quarter of the globe where traces of this rite, in one form or another, are not to be found to-day." — Trumbull : Friendship, p. 70.
THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
that they would stand to what they had done with their Hfe, This principle, which is at the root of all the solemn statements of Scripture about blood, is put into words in the Mosaic law : " The life of the flesh is in the blood ; and I have given it to you upon the altar, to make an atonement for your souls ; for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul."* In Homer, at the making of an agreement between the rival armies beneath the walls of Troy, king Agamemnon recites the terms of the compact, and then the story proceeds as follows : —
" He said and pierced the victims ; ebbing life Forsook them soon ; they panted, gasped and died. Then, pouring from the beaker to the cups. They filled them, worshipped the immortal gods In either host, and thus the people prayed : All glorious Jove, and, ye, the powers of heaven, Whoso shall violate this contract first. So be their blood, their children's and their own, Poured out, as this libation, on the ground." t
Here the blood to be shed in case of unfaithfulness is compared to the wine which accompanied the offering ; but in Livy, the Roman historian, we find the more original idea, that the shedding of the victim's blood was the symbol of what was to be done with the life of the violator of the compact. He mentions, that at the ratifying of a treaty the
* Lev. xvii. ll. f Iliad, III. 292 ff.
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priest used to pray as follows: — "Hear, O Jupiter, that the Roman people will not under any circum- stances first swerve from this treaty ; and, if they do, then strike them on that day as I here strike this animal."* In terms extremely similar Jeremiah men- tions that, when a treaty was formed, the sacrifices were divided into two halves, between which the con- tracting parties walked, offering, as they did so, the prayer that the same fate as had befallen the victims might be the lot of the one that broke the covenant first. The idea at the root of all these customs is the same ; but in the making of the covenant between Jehovah and Israel at Sinai it received a still more graphic and pointed application.
Early one morning, after the giving of the Law, the people were assembled, by the divine command, round a conspicuous plateau, on which was erected an altar, with twelve standing stones round about it. The altar suggested the divine presence, and, of course, the twelve stones stood for the twelve tribes ; so that the objects before their eyes re- minded the people that they were standing in the presence of Jehovah, with whom they were about to enter into covenant. The union did not, however, take place forthwith ; because the people
1.24,
202 The CHRiSTOLOGY OF JESUS
were not yet fit to be united to the Most Holy. On this account victims were sacrificed ; the work being done by the hands of chosen young men, because as yet there were no priests. The young men typified the fresh strength of the community ; for the act in which they were engaged had to be performed with their whole soul. The blood, thus shed, was caught in basons and divided into two parts. The one half was thereupon sprinkled on the altar. That is to say, it was given to God, as an acknowledgment that their life had been forfeited to Him. This was a symbolical con- fession, that, as the blood of the victims had been shed, their own life might, in strict justice, have been taken. When, thus, by sacrifice and by the confession which it symbolized, they were purged from sin, they were fit for union with God ; and, accordingly, at this point the law was recited, which Moses had written in a book, and the people, having heard it, responded, " All that Jehovah hath said will we do and be obedient." That is, they accepted and subscribed the conditions of union. Then, the other half of the blood, which had meantime been kept in readiness for the purpose, was sprinkled upon the people — whether on their persons, or on the stones surrounding the altar, which represented them, is not made clear. In
THE REDEEMER 203
either case the meaning was, that the life which they had given away to God, as lost and forfeited on account of sin, was, now that sin had been removed, given back to them purified and re- invigorated, to serve as the force with which they should pursue a new career of obedience and
fellowship.
Such, as nearly as we can make it out — though, in trying to reproduce experiences so ancient, it is easy to stumble— were the thoughts and emotions of this remarkable occasion ; and they bring out the force and meaning of the blood of the new covenant. When, in the communion, we approach God, seeking union and alliance with Him, we have to pause; for we are not fit to come so close to the Most Holy. We have to turn our eyes to the cross of Christ and fix them on Him. And, as we do so, we feel, as they felt that day, when they saw the blood of the sacrificial victims poured on the altar, that, in strict justice, we ought to be in His place : we deserve to die, because we have forfeited our life through sin. The moment, however, we make this confession from the heart, we are freely and fully forgiven, and are ready for union with God. And, as the other half of the blood was sprinkled on the people, to signify that their lost life was restored, so is our life given
204 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
back, potentiated with the virtue necessary for communion, holiness and usefuhiess.
Wendt, while admitting that the reference in our Lord's words, " in My blood " is to this scene at Sinai, denies that the sacrifice offered on that occasion had any reference to sin. But how does this harmonize with the description in Exodus of the sacrificial feast with which the making of the covenant wound up ? Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel — that is, a large and dignified delegation representing the whole people — went up to the knoll where the altar stood, and there they did eat and drink. No doubt their food was the flesh of the sacrifices, the blood of which had been disposed of as we have seen ; but the peculiarity of the feast was that it was a feast with God. Not that He partook of their food : no such crude idea is hinted at : but in some mysterious way they were made overwhelmingly certain of His nearness. It is said, " They saw the God of Israel, and there was under His feet as it were a paved work of sapphire stone, and as it were the very heaven for clearness." As they ate, the cloud opened above them, and the view upward became clear — up to the blue sky. But it was more than sky — a deeper, yet more pellucid blue than mortal eye
THE REDEEMER 205
had ever beheld — a pavement of sapphire, like the very heaven for clearness ; and above it, using it as the footstool of His throne, a Presence ineffable made itself felt, not visible to the bodily eye, yet thrilling the soul with the consciousness of its proximity. " And," it is added, " on the nobles of Israel He laid not His hand." This is the word which shows the heart of the whole transaction.* That no man can see God and live, is a principle of the Old Testament throughout ; yet here the divine presence was so shrouded in love and reconciliation that, instead of producing annihilating horror, it communicated only peace and delight. The picture is highly symbolical ; but its intention is not difficult to trace. It describes the experience of consciences at peace with God through the blood of atonement, and of patriots rejoicing in the new career on which their nation had been launched through the re- ception of a new, purified and consecrated life.f
* " The sacrifice, being an offering to Jehovah, was piacular, atoning for and consecrating the people on their entering upon their new relation to Jehovah." — Professor A. B. Davidson, D.D., article " Covenant," in Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible, 1898.
t The above exposition is the result of long pondering on a scene the importance of which I discovered for myself; but it agrees closely with that given by Kurtz in his History of the Old Covenant and his Sacrificial Worship of the Old Testament.
2o6 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
Thus I have endeavoured to analyze the words of our Lord on this great subject ; and, although they are fewer in number than might have been anticipated, yet, if we weigh instead of counting them, we cannot complain that He has said too little. He speaks like Himself — not in abstract terms and doctrinal propositions, but in metaphors and images borrowed from life and histor}'. But His figures of speech are the imaginative equivalents of the doctrines of the apostles and the dogmas of the Church.* Perhaps, indeed^ the Church might have remembered with advantage the proportion
* Compare the weighty words of Kahler : Der sogcnaimte historische Jestts und der geschichtliche, biblische Christus, p. 94 : " Wir fassen die Surame unseres Glaubens, die Summe der neutestamentlichen Offenbarung gem in das Wort zusam- men : ' Gott ist Liebe.' Wann hat man das bekennen gelemt ? Nicht durch die Predigt welche vom Berge am See erscholl und von den Boten durch die Stadte Israels getragen wurde, durch die Predigt vom Reiche Gottes, soviel in ihr auch davon enthalten sei ; jenes dunkle Bildwort sollte erst durch Christi Thun und Erleben seine voile Deutung erhalten. ' Darum preiset Gott seine Liebe gegen uns, dass Christus fiir uns gestorben ist' (Rom. V. 8, vgl. viii. 32-39), erinnert Paulus. Und woher Johannes jene Erkenntnis gewonnen, sagt er sehr deutlich : ' Darinnen stehet die Liebe : nicht dass wir Gott geliebet haben, sondern dass er uns geliebet hat und gesandt seinen Sohn zur Suhne fur unsre Siinden. Daran haben wir erkannt die Liebe, dass er sein Leben fiir uns gelassen hat (i Joh. iv. 10; iii. 16.).'" The whole book is a defence of the thesis that not the Jesus of the Gospels, but the Christ of the whole Bible is the true object of faith.
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observed by her Master in the teaching of this side of the truth ; for there has sometimes been a disposition to speak as if the death of Christ were the whole of Christianity, to the neglect of His life — His earthly life, which is our example, and His present mystic life in believers through His Spirit.
On the other hand we shall not estimate correctly the place which Jesus intended such subjects as sin, repentance and justification to hold in our thoughts, unless we bear in mind the place He has given in Christian worship to the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord's Supper, both of which are intended to keep these solemn facts continually before the consciousness of His people.
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MS 14
The Prophecies of Jesus :—
Matthew vii. 21-23 '> ^"iii- 12, 13 ; x. 15, 23, 32-42 ; xi. 20-24 ; xii. 32,
36, 40-42; xiii. 30, 37-43, 49, 50 ; xvi 18, 21, 27, 28 ; xvii. 9, 22,
23 ; xviii. 8, 9 ; xix. 28-30 ; xx. 19, 23 ; xxi. 43, 44 ; xxii. 1-14 ;
xxiii. 34-39; xxiv. ; xxv. ; xxvi. 12, 13, 29, 31, 32, 34, 64 ; xxvii.
63 ; xxviii. 10. Mark iii. 29 ; vi. il ; viii. 31, 38 ; ix. i, 9, 31, 41-49 ; x. 30, 31, 34, 40 ;
xii. 9 ; xiii. ; xiv. 8, 9, 18, 27, 28, 30, 62. Luke vi. 22,23; ix. 26, 27; x. 12-1$; xi. 29-32, 49-51; xii. 8-12,
35-59 ; xiii. 23-35 ; xiv. 15-24 ; xvii. 22-37 ; xviii. 8, 29, 30, 33 ;
xix. 11-27, 41-44; XX. 9-18; xxi. S-36; xxii. 18, 21, 29, 30, 34,
69 ; xxiii. 43 ; xxiv. 49.
I
VI
THE JUDGE*
T TP to this point I have said nothing of a possible ^^ development in the mind of Jesus. Did His views alter as His life went on ? The declaration about His childhood, that He increased in vi^isdom and stature and in favour with God and man,
* Weiss : Lehrbiich der biblischeti Theologie des neuen Testaments,
§33-
Beyschlag: Netitestamentliche Theologie, I. 183 ff.
HoLTZMANN : NeutestamefitUche Theologie, I. 305 ff.
Stevens: The Theology of the New Testament, chapter XII.
Bruce : The Kingdom of God, cc. XII and XIII.
Wendt : Die Lehre Jesic, II. 542 ff.
Baldensperger : Das Selbstbewusstsein Jesii, cc. VIII. and IX.
Weiffenbach : Der Wiedcrkunftsgedanke Jesu, 1873,
Russell: The Parous ia, 1887, pt. I.
Haupt : Die eschatologischen Aussagen Jestc in den synoptischen Evangelien, 1895.
ScHWARTZKOPFF : Die WeissagU7igen Jesii Christi von seinem Tode, seiner Auferstehung und Wiederkunft, 1895.
McCheyne Edgar: The Gospel of a Risen Saviour, 1892.
S ALMOND : The Christian Doctrine of hnmortality, 1898.
Mackintosh : Essays towards a New Theology, 1889. Second Essay : The Biblical Doctrines of Judgment and Immor- tality.
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justifies us in looking out for the signs of such a development. Time and circumstances acted on Him as they do on all men, widening the horizon of knowledge and making clear the path of duty. Even His comprehension of Himself had its human limitations.
I do not, indeed, believe that it is possible to fix definite points in His life and to say, that up to these junctures He had never thought or spoken about certain aspects of His person or work, and that everything which the Evangelists represent Him as saying on these topics before the assumed dates must be treated as misplaced. By such arbitrary assumptions not only have the records been cruelly distorted, but an image of Jesus has been constructed as untrue to psychology as it is unjust to the testimony of those who knew Him best. All we can do is to note the great turning- points of His experience and the predominant characteristics of the sections of His life thereby marked out. We can say for certain that at such- and-such a period His mind was possessed with this or that aspect of His mission ; but to affirm that anything essential was at any stage altogether absent from His consciousness is to abandon the terra finna of evidence and let ourselves go adrift on a sea of mere speculation.
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There are five conspicuous summits of His ex- perience, with which we may connect the different epochs of His internal history — His First Visit to Jerusalem, His Baptism, the Great Confession of the Twelve at Cajsarea Philippi, the Transfiguration, and the Agony of Gethsemane.
I. The first epoch is that of His first thirty years. It lies beneath a thick covering of silence, but it must have contained everything. Like musical genius, the religious faculty matures early. " Heaven lies about us in our infancy," it has been said ; but it lies far more about us in boyhood and youth. The intuition of God in the opening dawn of intelligence is extraordinarily clear, as is also the intuition of right and wrong ; there is no problem of religion which has not presented itself to the questioning mind of a sharp-witted lad ; there is no criticism of the world's institutions and practices so keen as that of youth, before its own time for action has arrived ; and every possibility of subse- quent achievement is dreamed about by a man before he is thirty. " What is a great life ? It is a thought conceived in the enthusiasm of youth and carried out with the strength of maturity." *
Only one incident of this period in the life of
* Alfred de Vigny.
214 T^tiE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
Jesus has been preserved ; but it is sufficient to suggest all. It reveals a mind happy, on the one hand, in the consciousness of God and, on the other, reverently inquisitive at the oracles of human authority. Already Jesus called God "My Father"; and, although we must beware of reading too much into this primary confession, there lies in it the germ of all that was most original in His subsequent doctrine. On the other hand. His ardent attachment to the temple and His thirst for instruction from the custodians of the oracles of God were fore- shadowings of the opposite quality of His mind — His reverence for the institutions and traditions of the past. Thus, in miniature, are the two outstanding features of His ministry already discernible — His incomparable originality and His adherence to all that was true and sacred in the history of His native land.
2. The second epoch is introduced by the three- fold crisis of the preaching of John, the baptism of Jesus, and the temptation. It is generally assumed that at His baptism Jesus first became aware of His messiahship ; but of this it is impossible to be sure. The only thing certain is, that He then received the signal that the time was fulfilled, along with the final qualification for His public work imparted through the descent on Him of the Holy
THE JUDGE 215
Spirit.* But He may long have been waiting for the striking of the hour of destiny. At all events, when it came, it produced a prolonged access of emotion and thought, as is indicated by His being driven by the Spirit into the wilderness. The struggle which there took place in His soul was a conflict between traditionalism and originality ; but it ended in the clear and unalterable resolution to follow His own genius. This, He well knew, would arouse the opposition of the representatives of religious and political authority ; but He was far too full of divine enthusiasm for His great task to stand in dread of obstacles. It was with a rush of joy and hope which carried all before it that His ministry began. His own state of mind at this period stands forever embodied in the Beatitudes, which are a description not only of the character which He desired to produce in others but first of all of His own. They betray a mind so full of a blessedness springing from inexhaustible sources that it longs to assemble round itself the whole world of weary and suffering humanity, in order to make it happy by the communication of its own secret. Such was the character of the opening months of
* It is astonishing how the best results of modern inquiry into this crisis in the experience of Jesus are anticipated in Owen's great work on The Holy Spirit,
2i6 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
His ministry : He was happy in proclaiming the message with which He was charged and in per- forming the works of mercy which the Father had given Him to do ; and the images which floated before the eyes of His spirit were irradiated with the hues of hope.
3. This epoch was followed by one of a totally different character, when the opposition which He had to encounter assumed such dimensions that He was compelled to see, rising to block His pathway in the distance, the image of the cross. In the Evangelists this third epoch is dated from the great confession at Ceesarea Philippi, although that event only brought to light a condition of the mind of Jesus which must already have been for some time in existence. The great confession was, indeed, much more an epoch in the development of the disciples than in that of Christ Himself ; and the failure to note this has led to much confusion of thought. It has even been contended that up to this point He was not fully conscious Himself of His messiahship ; and it is assumed that at least He cannot have mentioned it before this, even to the extent of calling Himself the Son of man. Much more is it held to be evident that the disciples can never previously have acknowledged His messiahship in any shape or form. To support
^
I
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these assumptions the most violent measures have to be taken with the evangelic records ; and the true nature of the great confession is mistaken.
It was, in the first place, in the fullest sense the testimony of the Twelve themselves. Herein lay its value. It was not something which others had suggested to them and which they accepted on external authority, whether from the Baptist, or from the demoniacs, or even from Jesus Himself, but the spontaneous expression of their own conviction, matured by long association with Him and by daily observation of His life. The suggestion, that He was the Messiah, had long been in the air ; they had heard it from several quarters ; but to every such witness they could have said at Czesarea Philippi, as the Samaritans did to their country- woman, " Now we believe, not because of thy saying ; for we have heard Him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world." Secondly, it was a great religious act. It was not the cold drawing of a logical conclusion, but an uprising of conviction and devotion, in which they avowed that they would stand by the truth in face of contradiction, whatever might happen ; and, therefore, Jesus traced it back to immediate in- spiration from above. Such an act is a totally different thing from a mere expression of opinion,
2i8 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
and does not of itself determine whether or not the same persons may have previously held the opinion now transmuted into an act of witness- bearing. Jesus had not imposed His belief on the disciples : He waited patiently till the conviction should arise in themselves of its own accord ; and it was because this stage of maturity had been reached that He considered it judicious to com- municate to them the conclusion at which He had arrived as to His own fate — '•' From that time forth began Jesus to show unto His disciples, how that He must go unto Jerusalem and suffer many things." *
4. I have said that the great confession was more an epoch in the experience of the disciples than of their Master ; yet to Him also it must have been an event full of satisfaction and joy ; and it paved the way for the next epoch of His development, which consisted in the victory of His mind over the awful prospect of death. The maturity of the faith of the disciples, which ex- pressed itself in their confession, caused Him to feel that He had something solid beneath His feet, which would not give way, whatever might be the changes or chances of the future, because it
* Matt. xvi. 21,
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was the work of God in the hearts of the disciples. An early death seemed, indeed, to be the end of everything for one who professed to be the Messiah ; because the Messiah was not to die but reign for evermore. It seemed the complete falsifi- cation of His faith in Himself. Certainly it appeared so to every Israelite, even to the most instructed of the Twelve. But Jesus saw over and beyond the awful terror ; and the event which discloses the definite surmounting of this stage of development is the Transfiguration. On the Holy Mount joy and insight had obviously over- come all obscuration and eclipse ; in the brightness in which His person was enveloped His glorification was anticipated ; and again the voice from heaven, which had sounded at His baptism, ratified His consciousness of Himself. We now know the solution of the enigma : His death was to be the atonement for the sin of the world ; and, as a reward for His uttermost humiliation, God was to raise Him to the throne which He now occupies. And that this was the solution presented to Himself is indicated by the representation that Moses and Elias talked with Him about the decease which He was to accomplish at Jerusalem. These were the representatives of law and prophecy ; and the death of Christ was to be the glorious end of the
THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
law, as His exaltation was to be the fulfilment of all prophecy.*
5. The victory of the Transfiguration was not, however, a final and conclusive one. It astonishes us to come, so long afterwards, upon the scene of Gethsemane, with which we connect the fifth and last stage of His development. Gethsemane looks like a lapse back into the darkness of the third stage, out of which in the Transfiguration He had emerged. It may be taken to indicate that during the later months of His life there had been alternations in His soul between the terror of death and the sense of victory ; and many things indicate that this supposition is not mistaken. Especially as death itself drew near and the horrors of desertion and betrayal, injustice and hatred, with which it was to be accompanied, began to accumulate before His eyes ; as human sin, directed against Himself, disclosed its uttermost malignity and hideousness ; and as the iron of his position, in the character of representative before God of this guilty humanity, entered into His soul, the darkness
* The presence of these two may also be intended to suggest the means by which His mind attained to the position of mastery over His fate ; as, after His resurrection, in His intercourse with the disciples, "beginning at Moses and the prophets, He expounded to them in all tlie Scriptures the things concerning Himself,''
THE JUDGE ^21
enveloping His mind intensified, till the sense of it grew to be an agony. But it must not be forgotten that Gethsemane was a victory and not a defeat. He overcame the horror and despair, and emerged calm and confident, ready to face the very worst. Once again, indeed, as He hung on the cross, the refluent wave swept over His soul, till He cried out, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me.?" but again the access of troubled feeling was transitory; and it was with a strong voice and in perfect peace that at last He gave up the ghost. He knew that He was not dying in vain ; nor were wicked men merely taking His life from Him : but, with prophetic eye. He already saw of the travail of His soul and was satisfied.
Both the interest and the difficulty of the development of the thoughts of Jesus about Himself concentrate themselves in His utterances about the portion of His destiny which was to come after His death. Those of His contemporaries who waited for the kingdom of God never thought of more than one appearing of the Messiah. The conceptions of the immediate followers of Jesus were similar ; and during the first period of His ministry it seemed as if His destiny were to consist
222 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
in a continuous and culminating series of successes. But gradually there disclosed itself, lying across His path, a dark gulf of misfortune, defeat and death, into which He and His fortunes were to be precipitated. To all others this disappointment was final ; even His disciples could not understand that it was possible for His cause to disappear at this point and ever emerge again. But His eye saw farther, and He was able to accept death as the will of God, and yet look forward to a new career on the opposite side of it.
He foresaw and foretold especially three events — His Resurrection, His Coming-again, and the Judgment.
That He foretold His rising from the dead the third day is one of the facts most distinctly and unanimously testified by the Evangelists. They connect His announcement of this event with the first announcement of His death, and on every occasion when the latter occurs the former occurs likewise. Nor is there any chance in this : it belongs to the reason of the case ; for what a dismal and meaningless prediction would His death have been, unless He had been able to accompany it with the assurance that He was to rise again.
In the whole field of the modern interpretation of
THE JUDGE 223
the past I do not remember anything less creditable than the manner in which this prediction is dealt with by large sections of contemporary scholarship. Fixing on a prophecy of Hosea in the mere sound of which there is a superficial resemblance to the words of Jesus — " After two days will He revive us ; in the third day He will raise us up ; and we shall live in His sight " — they assume that Jesus had this passage in His mind, and that, as Hosea meant by "the third day" a brief but indeterminate period, therefore Jesus intended no more than to intimate that after a vague but brief interval of eclipse His cause would revive. The supposed reference to Hosea is so dubious, and the ignoring of the actual place which this prediction holds in the history of Christianity is so complete, that it is difficult to treat such an interpretation seriously.
The " third day " may be objected to because it is a specific prediction. Prophecy, it is contended, is not of events or dates, but of general principles, the view of prophecy being antiquated and exploded which found in the prophetic writings history written beforehand. This is very true ; and it applies specially to the prophecies of Jesus, beneath which there lie always deep and broad religious principles ; even this prophecy of His own resurrection is founded, as we have just seen, in the nature of the case. Yet
224 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
there is another aspect of prophecy which ought not to be forgotten, and which is, indeed, at the present moment successfully challenging the attention of Old Testament students : * wherever there is prophecy of the more general kind, there is, though in much smaller quantity, prediction of the specific kind. This can easily be proved in the books of the Old Testament ; and it is conspicuous in the words of Christ. Towards the close of His life especially we find such specific predictions as the treachery of Judas and the fall of Peter ; and the day of His own resurrection is a prophecy of the same kind.
The real objection, however, to the third day is the disbelief that any such event as the bodily resurrection of our Lord actually happened. The spread of scepticism on this point in the theological schools of the Continent is by far the most serious feature of the history of religious opinion during the last decade of the nineteenth century ; and, as it has become the fashion, it may spread much farther. Its fruits have still to be seen in the practical life of the Church. My own belief is, that, were it to
* See Giesebrecht, Die Bcrufsbcgabung der Prophcten, 1898, where the author, who was an adherent of the more extreme school of Old Testament criticism, gives a most interesting account of the process by which he was convinced of the presence, in considerable quantities, in the Prophets of specific predictions which were fulfilled.
THE JUDGE 225
become general, Christianity would wither at its very root.
What is maintained is, that Jesus only foretold in a vague and general way that His cause would revive in a short time. And this, it is held, was what happened. After the first stupefaction was over, the disciples awoke to realise that their Master, though His body was in the grave, still existed in another state of being ; and so by degrees they got over their depression and resumed the work which He had dropped. Of course this is in open and violent contradiction to the story which the apostles told and which from their day to this has been at the heart of the creed of Christendom. Though their story is beset with many difficulties, yet it has a wonderful verisimilitude. It is supernatural, and yet most natural. Could anything bear the print of nature more legibly than the interview between Mary and Jesus at the sepulchre, or the twin scenes in which St. Thomas appears first as a violent doubter and then as a believer crying, " My Lord and my God"? Yet it is not by its contradiction to the evangelic record that the theory is condemned, so much as by its failure, from the psychological and historical point of view, to give an adequate explana- tion of the origin of Christianity. By those who deny the facts of the resurrection it is constantly
15
^26 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
taken for granted that the apostolic circle was in tremulous expectation of something extraordinary happening, and that the miracle was believed to have taken place because it answered to this ex- pectatiMi. Nothing, however, could be more com- pletely the reverse of the truth, if any credit whatever is to be given to the records; for, according to them, the faith of the disciples had been stricken dead. The two travellers to Emmaus spoke of their hope as something which the death of their Master had utterly destroyed. The tale of the holy women seemed " idle " to those who heard it, " and they believed them not." Even of the five hundred who saw Jesus on the mountain of Galilee "some doubted."* To all appearance, in short, the move- ment of Jesus was completely at an end ; His pretensions had been falsified by death — the last of all arguments — and nothing was left to His followers but to return to Galilee and hide their heads in shame and sorrow as mistaken and dis- appointed men. Such was the condition of the disciples when their Master died ; yet within six weeks they were completely transformed : their faith in Christ and Christianity had revived ; they were united and resolute, overflowing with enthusiasm
* Luke xxiv. 21, 11 ; Matt, xxviii. 17.
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and eager for action ; and they were ready to lay down their lives for the testimony which they bore to Jesus. Between the death of Jesus and the day of Pentecost some event must have happened sufficient to account for such a transformation ; they say themselves that it was the bodily resurrection and the ascension of their Master, and this would account for it ; but the wit of man will never be able to devise another explanation which has even the appearance of likelihood. If Jesus had not risen, there would never have been a resurrection of Christianity.
The second event predicted by Jesus was His coming-again ; and it is in connexion with this that we meet with the most perplexing of His sayings. These are seized upon with avidity by unbelievers as affording conclusive disproof of His authority ; and many who love Him have felt with pain how difficult it is to reconcile them with absolute faith in His wisdom. The latest commentator on them, indeed, Dr. Erich Haupt, of Halle, concludes a detailed and careful examination with the assertion, that " we do not require to excuse Christ for His eschatology : in this region also He stands above His age, and what He has said fully participates in the authority of His words as well as of His person";
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but he reaches this result only by the use of critical processes of elimination to which in this country we are not accustomed ; and most of his readers will probably feel that he carries a figurative method of interpretation somewhat to excess.
There is one saying of Jesus on this subject to which we cannot be wrong in attributing cardinal importance. It is that in which He says that He is Himself ignorant of the day and the hour.* So utterly unlike is this to anything which a dogmatic Christianity would have been likely to attribute to Him, if He had not said it, that it may not only be reckoned among the most certain of His utterances, but allowed a regulative authority in the interpreta- tion of others.
The chief difficulty is, that in other passages He does seem to fix the day and the hour. In His address to the Twelve, as He sends them forth on their mission, He says, that they will not have gone over the cities of Israel before the Son of man be come ; on another occasion He says, " There be some standing here which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in His kingdom ; " and — most important of all — in the great eschatological discourse of the twenty-fourth of St. Matthew, after
* Matt. xxiv. 36.
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describing what appears to be the end of the world, He adds, " Verily, I say unto you, This generation shall not pass till all these things be fulfilled."* Such passages appear to stand in direct contradiction to the one already quoted as cardinal and regulative ; but, unless we are to suppose either that Jesus contradicted Himself or that He has been misreported by the Evangelists, a meaning must be found which does not involve the fixing of the day and the hour.
Haupt contends that the " coming " of which Jesus speaks is not always to be understood as the final one. Any conspicuous event in the history of Christianity may be spoken of under this designa- nation ; which might, for example, be applied to His own resurrection, or to Pentecost, or to the destruction of Jerusalem. The destruction of Jerusalem, especially, bulked largely in Christ's view of the future ; there is no reason to doubt that He foretold it ; and there were very good reasons why He should even predict its date. To one or other, therefore, of these events His references to the immediate future must belong.f The most difficult passage to reconcile with this view is the one
* Matt. X. 23 ; xvi. 28 ; xxiv. 34.
t Russell, in The Paroiisia, argues ably that all the prophecies of Jesus were fulfilled in a single generation.
230 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
already mentioned in the twenty-fourth chapter of St. Matthew ; but it is worth noting that this verse is almost identical with one in the preceding chapter,* where the reference manifestly is to the destruction of Jerusalem ; and it is possible that there may have occurred an accidental reduplication. It cannot be denied that in the twenty-fourth of St. Matthew, and the corresponding passages in the second and third Gospels, there is a strange mixing- up of what looks like the prediction of the destruc- tion of Jerusalem with what looks like the description of the end of the world ; and the one is represented as ensuing immediately upon the other. Beyschlag proposes here to apply the law of what is known in the interpretation of prophecy as Timelessness, the meaning of which is, that in the Prophets the sheet of the future is not outspread in such a way that the distance from point to point can be measured upon it, but is folded up in such a way that only a few successive outstanding events appear, while the spaces of time that are to intervene between them disappear.f Weiss applies the still more important principle, that prophecy is always conditional. God never says, through the lips of any prophet, what is
* xxiii. 36.
t Compare Salmond, The Christian Doctrine of Immorfalitf, P- 304.
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to happen, whether in the form of weal or woe, without a reference either expressed or understood to human conduct. On the contrary. He even runs the risk of appearing to contradict Himself by leaving prophecies of good unfulfilled, when men sin, and of evil unfulfilled, when they repent. The great purpose of Jesus in all He says about the future is not to satisfy curiosity but to direct conduct, the sum of His teaching being an urgent admonition to watchfulness. Whether or not He represented the end as near. He certainly never intended it to be thought of as distant ; and He does not intend it to be ever thus thought of. Christians can hasten it by their activity or post- pone it by their negligence ; and, however long He may delay His coming, the proper attitude of the Church will always be to be ready to receive Him every moment.
There are, besides, many other sayings of Jesus about the future which seem to reveal His deeper mind, and in which He appears to contemplate for Christianity a prolonged earthly history. Such is the passage in which He says that, before the end come, the Gospel shall be preached through all the world as a witness unto all nations ; and side by side with it may be placed the saying about the woman who anointed His feet, that wheresoever the
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Gospel was preached in the whole world, her act would be repeated as a memorial of her love.* There is a whole series of parables in which He speaks of His kingdom as passing through a gradual development ; and there are others in which He speaks about it as being taken from the Jews and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof. Those who were first invited to the banquet of the Gospel refused the King's invitation with scorn, and on their heads had to descend the retribution they deserved ; but still the wedding was to be furnished with guests : the servants of the king were to be sent into the streets and lanes of the city, and, when, after that, there still was room, they were to be sent farther off, to the highways and hedges. These parables reveal the most profound conscious- ness both of the real nature of the Gospel and of the actual course of human history, as time has revealed it ; and it is not fair to the record either to leave them out of account or to attenuate their importance.!
The method of interpreting the consciousness of
* Matt. xxiv. 14; xxvi. 13.
t Titius draws attention to the fact that Jesus' views of married life, riches and poverty, and similar matters, are not influenced by reference to the nearness of the end of the world. — Die N. T. Lehrc von der Seligkett, I. 72, 75, 80.
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Jesus which has of late secured most favour among the younger theologians of Germany is that which accords a predominant influence in the formation of His ideas to the environment in which He grew up ; and the account given by this school of the development of His thoughts about Himself is determined by this point of view. The knowledge that He was the Messiah came to Him, it is sup- posed, suddenly at His baptism ; and, as His conception of what the destiny of the Messiah was to be agreed in general outline with that entertained by His contemporaries, He expected the will of God to be fulfilled for Himself in the catastrophic forms of the Jewish apocalyptic lite- rature, one grand event succeeding another as in the popular programme. The city of God would descend from heaven in a visible shape ; all opposi- tion would be swept out of the way by omnipotent force ; and the end of the world would ensue. As the miracles of Jesus are not estimated highly by this school, being supposed to have consisted in a few simple cures, it is held that they cannot have answered to the expectations entertained by Him of what the Father was to do for His chosen agent. All the time, accordingly. He was waiting for a manifestation of omnipotent power which never came. At length His popularity declined, opposition
234 THE CH HISTOLOGY OF JESUS
grew irresistible, and death stared Him in the face. How was the mystery of delay to be inter- preted ? At this point occurred to Him the solution offered by a division of the messianic programme into two parts : die He must, but after death He would return again, when all the glory would be given Him which He had waited for in vain ; and this second coming He believed would take place within a generation.
Fascinating as this reading of the history is, especially when set forth with the literary skill of a writer like Baldensperger, it does not present an image of Christ which can satisfy those who seriously accept Him as the final Revealer of truth and the Saviour of the world ; for it is the picture of One who lived in an atmosphere of illusion and bequeathed to His followers something very like a delusion. It is not so intended, but it really revives the situation in which Jesus was placed by His enemies when they applied to Him the standard of their own messianic programme and rejected Him because He did not fulfil it. So, this modern theory imputes to Him a programme which was not fulfilled, and the inevitable inference against Him will not fail to be drawn by the general mind, however scholars may attempt to ignore the logic of their own position.
No doubt all the thoughts of Jesus were coloured
THE JUDGE *3S
by the atmosphere in which He grew up ; but it was not by apocryphal literature but by the Law and the Prophets that the substance of them was determined ; and His whole life, from the tempta- tion in the wilderness to the death on the cross, was a polemic against contemporary Jewish thought. Rejecting the popular Messianic ideals, He remained true, at the risk of His life, to His own deep and spiritual conception of His vocation. And, since in life He so severely adhered to His own vision, is it credible that in His hopes for the future He aban- doned Himself to the fantastic and deceptive imagery of Jewish apocalyptic .'' This would lower Him to the level of His contemporaries, and would be a fatal flaw in His character.
There is one circumstance the bearing of which on this question is of great importance, though it has been little adverted to. It is not denied that Jesus had in His mind a somewhat extended programme of what was to happen to Himself after his death. Not only was He to rise again, but a number of other events were to follow one another, to the extent of at least a single generation. Now, if the catastrophic conception of His second coming was the one which He entertained, it is not easy to see any reason for thus lengthening out the programme of the future. The natural thing would have been
236 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
that the resurrection and all the other items should be compressed into a single event. Why should there be any delay ? He had been tried by delay too long already. Had His thoughts of the future been shaped by His own disappointment, the stupendous hope of His resurrection would have been identified with the complete realisation of all His hopes. But the fact that in His prophecies of the future His resurrection is to be followed by the ascension, and that His second coming is to take place from heaven, points strongly to the conclusion, that His expectations of the future were of the same sober and spiritual order as His thoughts about the present.
The third and final prophecy of Jesus, as far as His doctrine concerning Himself is concerned, is that of the last judgment.
Although the catastrophic ideas of the Jewish Messianic programme were alien to the mind of Christ, He yet looked forward to one catastrophe : in all His teaching about the future the terminus is a final judgment, by which men are to be separated according to character and assigned their respective destinies. Thus in the parable of the Tares and the Wheat, after the long period of uncertainty during which they grow together, there comes a day when
THE JUDGE 237
the field is reaped and the tares are bound in bundles to be burnt ; and in the parable of the Drag-net after the long labour of enclosing the fishes, there comes the moment when they are separated into good and bad. The most grandiose tableau of the judg- ment is the scene in the twenty-fifth of St. Matthew, in which the nations of men are represented as sheep and goats, which are to be separated into two vast flocks. So marked a feature in the teaching of Jesus is this final day of decision that He refers to it as " that day," without considering it necessary to specify the purpose to which it is devoted.
Now, in this scene of sublime and universal judgment Jesus is Himself the Judge. There is no thought in His teaching more frequent than this. Across the dim and conflicting images evoked by His other teaching about the future this one point shines with a steady and unchanging light. The writers of the New Testament repeat the fact ; but it has its original seat in His own words. Even in the Sermon on the Mount, from which, it is supposed by the ignorant, all reference to the dogmas of Christianity is excluded, He says, " Many will say to Me in that day. Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Thy name? and in Thy name have cast out devils ; and in Thy name done many wonderful works ? And then will I profess unto
238 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
ihem, I never knew you: depart from i\Ie, ye that work iniquity." In the parable of the Tares it is the Son of man who sends forth " His angels to gather out of His kingdom all things which offend, and them which do iniquity." On another occasion He says, " The Son of man shall come in the glory of His Father with His angels ; and then shall He reward every man according to his works;" and in yet another, "Whosoever shall be ashamed of Me and of My words, in this adulterous and sinful genera- tion, of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed, when He cometh in the glory of His Father wnth the holy angels."* Nowhere, however, is His position in this great scene so imposingly set forth as in the passage of the twenty-fifth of St. Matthew already alluded to — " When the Son of man shall come in His glory, and all the holy angels with Him, then shall He sit upon the throne of His glory: and before Him shall be gathered all nations; and He shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats : and He shall set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left." The next words of this description are " Then shall the King say " ; and this description of Jesus as "King" — which is unique among His
♦ Matt. vii. 21-23 ; xiii. 41 ; xvi. 27; Mark viii. 38.
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utterances, though the designation is closely akin to "Messiah" — rises spontaneously out of the situation; for the royal glory of the Saviour is nowhere else so impressively revealed. The presence of the angels is especially deserving of notice. They attend Him as a king is surrounded by his courtiers, and they are obviously subordinate ; in fact, as they are called in another passage just cited, they are " His " angels.
An important question is, the relation which, in the position of Judge, Jesus is conscious of holding to the Father. The doctrine of the whole Bible is that God is Judge ; and certainly it would be in accordance with the general body of Christ's teaching to assume that He thought of Himself in this character as the Vicegerent of God ; for in all His works it was His pride to perform what the Father had given Him to do. This point of view, however, retreats into the background in these descriptions of the judgment, and no pains are taken to cause it to be remembered. Much more prominence is given to the fact that it is through Him that God judges the world than to the fact that it is God who judges the world through Him, In short, Jesus as Judge occupies a position of relative independence ; and the spirit of the synoptic representations corresponds exactly with the statement in St. John, that "the
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Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son." *
Dr. Wendt, following his usual habit of reducing the grander utterances of Jesus to the lowest possible terms, attempts to destroy the force of these state- ments by referring to the fact, that the apostles are also said to judge : " In the regeneration, when the Son of man shall sit in the throne of His glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel." f Manifestly, however, no relative independence is ascribed to them ; their presence is entirely subordinate and ministerial. What is said about them has its counterpart in a statement like that of St. James, " Brethren, if any of you do err from the truth and one convert him, let him know, that he which converteth the sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall hide a multitude of sins" J — where the ordinary Christian is spoken of as if he could convert and save the soul, although the Scripture is unanimous in ascribing salvation to God alone. It may even be questioned whether in what is said about the apostles there is any reference to the last judgment at all. In ancient times to judge was one of the recognised functions of the king, and in the Old Testament it is frequently
* V. 22. t Matt. xix. 28.
J V. 19, 20.
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used as equivalent to kingship, the part being put for the whole. When, therefore, it is said that in the regeneration the apostles will sit on thrones and judge, this may only mean that they will be the rulers of the future ; as we say of other great figures of the past, that they now rule the world from their thrones.
The place assigned in the last judgment to Him- self in the words of Jesus is recognised by all interpreters to imply that the ultimate fate of men is to be determined by their relation to Him. He is the standard by which all shall be measured ; and it is to Him as the Saviour that all who enter into eternal life will owe their felicity.* But the description of Himself as Judge implies much more than this : it implies the consciousness of ability to estimate the deeds of men so exactly as to determine with unerring justice their everlasting state. How far beyond the reach of mere human nature such a claim is, it is easy to see. No human being knows another to the bottom ; the most ordinary man is a mystery to the most penetrating of his fellow-creatures ; the greatest of men would acknowledge that even in a child there are heights
* This is most remarkably emphasized in the twenty-fifth of St. Matthew, where even the deeds by which the fate of the heathen is determined are reckoned as done to Him.
l6
242 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JESUS
which he cannot reach and depths which he cannot fathom. Who would venture to pronounce a final verdict on the character of a brother man, or to measure out his deserts for a single day ? But Jesus ascribed to Himself the ability to determine for eternity the value cf the whole life, as made up not only of its obvious acts but of its most secret experiences and its most subtle motives. The sublime consciousness of Himself which this involves is not to be mistaken. Yet it is no more than is implied in the daily necessities of the Christian life. If anything is Christian, it is the habit of praying to the Son of God. As soon as the Church began to live, it began to pray to its ascended Lord. St. Paul speaks of the whole body of believers as those who call upon the name of the Lord Jesus Christ ; and in the Book of Revelation glory and dominion are ascribed by all saints to Him who hath loved them and washed them from their sins in His own blood. Even the heathen identified the early Christians by this mark, that they met to sing hymns to Jesus as God ; and, in every century since, Christians have been the more distinguished by the same practice the more they have been Christian. Everyone remembers how the heart of Samuel Rutherford pours itself out to the " sweet Lord Jesus " ; but a cavalier like Jeremy Taylor prays
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directly to Christ with not a whit more of reserve. The finest hymns of Christendom are nothing but prayers to Christ clothed in the forms of poetry ; and in these, every day, tens of thousands confide the secrets of their hearts to what they believe to be a comprehending and sympathetic ear. Does He hear these prayers .-' does He know His worshippers } is He acquainted with the griefs they lay before Him and with the raptures occasioned by His love } The very existence of Christianity depends on the answer given to this question ; and nowhere is it answered more convincingly than in those sayings in which, by calling Himselt the Judge of men, Jesus claims to have a perfect acquaintance with the secrets of every human heart.
APPENDICES
245
APPENDIX A
WENDT'S UNTRANSLATED VOLUME ON THE TEACHING OF CHRIST
WENDT'S well-known book is at present our most detailed and handy account of the teaching of Jesus. But, in true German fashion, the author began with a thorough investigation of the record of our Lord's teaching in the Gospels, proceeding on the maxim that you cannot be sure what ideas are to be attributed to anyone till you have ascertained the amount of credit due to the documents in which these are contained. This pre- liminary volume has not been translated — the pub- lishers apparently believing, perhaps with wisdom, that it would not be acceptable to the British public. But it is a book of three hundred and fifty closely printed pages, and a sketch of its contents will show, perhaps more clearly than anything else, where advanced scholarship stands at present in relation to this question.
Wendt begins with a description of what he obviously believes to have been the course of the life of Jesus. He says it forms the framework of St. Mark, the oldest of our Gospels.
248 IVEKDTS UNTRANSLATED VOLUME
It is as follows ; Jesus at first was neither recog- nised by others as the Messiah nor expressly known to be such by Himself. He deliberately held back the public proclamation of His messianic title, and only at a comparatively late period of His career received from His disciples an acknowledgment of His dignity. Not till the very end was at hand did He permit the open acknowledgment of the fact or come forward with a claim to it Himself St. Mark gives no hint that the Baptist knew or pointed out Jesus as the Messiah. According to his account, John indeed made known that the Messiah was about to appear, but not that Jesus was the Messiah ; and at the Baptism the vision of the dove was seen by Jesus alone, as He alone heard the voice by which he was designated the Son of God. St. Mark then describes how, on commencing His public work, Jesus was recognised as the Son of God — that is, the Messiah — only by the demoniacs, whom, how- ever, He sternly forbade to make Him known. The rest of the people, on the contrary, when they beheld His extraordinary works, at first inquired in bewilderment what was the significance of His activity and His person ; and then, when they had had time to think, formed and uttered their opinions about Him — these, however, being such as involved a complete denial of His messianic dignity or, while acknowledging that He was sent of God, yet with- held the full acknowledgment. St. Mark gives prominence to the scene in which, in contrast with this behaviour of the multitude, the apostles, through
O^V THE TEACHING OF CHRIST 249
the mouth of St. Peter, gave expression to their conviction that He was the Messiah ; and he sets in the fullest light his sense of the importance of this epoch-making incident by making Jesus, from this point onwards, introduce a new element into His teaching — the prediction, namely, of His own suffer- ings and the sufferings of those who confessed Him. Meantime, however, he sternly forbade the Twelve to make known the conclusion at which they had arrived ; and, in accordance with this, the first out- side the circle of the Twelve who publicly named Jesus the Son of David — the blind beggar, Bartimaeus, at Jericho — was commanded by the apostles to hold his peace. At this point, however, Jesus withdrew the seal of silence and immediately thereafter ac- cepted the messianic homage of the pilgrims, as He entered Jerusalem. This decided His fate with the hierarchy ; and at last, in presence of the high priest, Jesus solemnly claimed the messianic dignity. St. Mark closes his account of the life of Christ with the story of how the heathen centurion, seeing His behaviour on the cross, exclaimed, " Truly this was the Son of God."
This, according to St. Mark — and Wendt enthu- siastically adopts it — was the outline of Christ's life ; but, strange to say, the evangelist does not adhere to it himself. It is only by piecing certain parts together from his Gospel that you ascertain that this was the real course of events. These pieces, we can yet see, were originally joined ; for the ending of one runs into the opening of the next
250 IVENDT'S UNTRANSLATED VOLUME
when what comes between in the actual St, Mark is removed. The evangeh'st has allowed the historical outline to be crossed and blurred by a series of accounts of conflicts between Jesus and the hierarchy. This section also is cut up into fragments, which are scattered over the Gospel ; but in the same way we can see, from the endings and beginnings of the different parts, that they originally formed a single whole. There is a third series, treated in the same way, which consists of passages setting forth the necessity and the value of suffering. And there are two other smaller series, which need not be further particularised.
Wendt does not hold that these different series of passages were different documents, which St. Mark incorporated in his narrative : the stamp of the same authorship is too unmistakably on them all for this. He falls back on the old statement of Papias, that St. Mark derived his information from St. Peter : and he believes that these series represent different discourses of St. Peter, or different groups of reminis- cences, which the apostle was in the habit of delivering together in St. Mark's hearing. Thus there was one discourse in which St. Peter used to give the historical framework of Christ's life ; then there was another in which he used to give a collec- tion of anecdotes illustrative of the witty and pithy replies wherewith Jesus confounded opponents ; and there was a series of sayings, enclosed within an outline of incident, in which were predicted the sufferings certain to follow the confession of Christ ;
ON THE TEACHING OF CHRIST 251
and so on. St. Mark had these separately in his mind, but he had to combine them into a book ; and, not being a man of letters, he did it clumsily ; and criticism has to take the patch- work asunder ai d restore the pieces to the places which they occupied as they came from the lips of St. Peter.
Observe this, however : these Petrine reminis- cences do not make up the whole of St. Mark's Gospel. The evangelist incorporated other materials, derived from sources to us unknown but scarcely likely to be of the same dignity. And it is note- worthy that among the additions Wendt reckons some of the greatest miracles of our Lord — such as the Stilling of the Storm and the Feeding of the Five Thousand.
Wendt's treatment of the Gospel of St. John is of a startling character, but it is carried through with great boldness and ability. He discerns in this Gospel two totally distinct hands, not to speak of a third, to which the last chapter is due.
One of the writers is St. John himself. Wendt believes that the apostle was persuaded in his old age to collect his reminiscences, and these form the substance of the present Gospel. They consisted chiefly of sayings and discourses, perhaps bound together by a few slight threads of narrative ; but no attempt was made by the apostle to give a connected life of Christ. This attempt was, how- ever, made and carried through by a disciple of St. John, who incorporated the reminiscences of his
252 WENDY'S UNTRANSLATED VOLUME
master with his own ideas and fitted the whole within a historical framework.
In proof that the bulk of the Fourth Gospel is due to St. John, Wendt adduces the words of the Prologue — which, by the way, is not the work of the editor, but the apostle — " And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father) full of grace and truth." Further, the language throughout is that of a Hebrew, who had been brought up on the Septuagint. Especially by the sovereign way in which he makes Jesus handle the Old Testament the writer shows that he must have been in the closest touch with the Lord. It is true, there is a wide discrepancy between the language in which he makes his Master speak and that in which Jesus is made to speak in the Synop- tists ; but this is sufficiently accounted for by the powerfully developed spiritual individuality of the apostle ; and the difference is confined to the form of Christ's words : it does not extend to the sub- stance, which is identical with that found in the Synoptists. Of this Wendt has given detailed proof in the second — that is, the translated — part of his work. St. John has a peculiar vocabulary ; but its leading catchwords are simply equivalents for the leading catchwords of the Synoptists ; and the circle of Christ's teaching in St. John, when laid above the circle found in the Synoptists, corresponds with it point by point, although, of course, at some points St. John is more expansive and goes deeper.
ON THE TEACHING Oh CHRIST 253
Wendt's account of the other writer whose hand is discernible in the Fourth Gospel is a severe one. He expressly exonerates him, indeed, from deliberate falsification ; but short of this there is nothing of which the bungler is not capable.
He has entirely obliterated the historicity of the career of Jesus, as criticism is able to exhibit it by judicious excerpts from St. Mark. This career began in obscurity ; for a long time Christ performed His acts of healing in secret and suppressed every allusion to His messiahship ; the confession of the Twelve that He was the Messiah was the great crisis ; thereafter, only, did Jesus venture to speak of His sufferings and death ; and only towards or at the very end did He permit the messianic dignity to be ascribed to Him or claim it Himself. The author, however, of the Fourth Gospel in its present form introduces allusions to Christ's sufferings and death from the very first, and takes every opportunity of asseverating that Jesus knew from the beginning that He was to be betrayed by one of the Twelve. In like manner he makes the Baptist recognise Jesus as the Messiah, clean against the representation of St. Mark ; and as early as the fourth chapter he makes Jesus Himself say in so many words, " I am the Messiah," to a Samaritan woman. Many, indeed, are represented as denying that He is the Messiah ; but allusions to the fact that this is His destiny are numerous from the very commencement of His career.
Even this total oblivion of the true course of the history of Jesus is. however, not the worst. This
254 IVENDT'S UNTRANSLATED VOLUME
editor's very conception of Christianity is widely different from that of Christ, which is faithfully reproduced in his own peculiar dialect by St. John. The latter is deep, inward, mystical ; the editor's is external and mechanical. For example, in the portions of the Gospel due to the apostle " eternal life" is a present possession of everyone who believeth on the Son of God ; but to the editor it is a possession which is to begin in the next world. And, in the same way, "judgment" is in St. John's mouth or Christ's a process which is proceeding now — everyone who comes into contact with Christ is ipso facto judged — but to the editor judgment is a public scene, which will take place at the end of time. The same habit of mind is displayed in the way in which the editor relies on external proofs of the divine origin of Christianity. Jesus Himself rebuked the desire of the Jews for signs and refused to give them ; but to the editor the miracles are the commanding evidence, and he has a kind of craze for emphasizing the importance of the testimony of the Baptist.
Unfortunately the editor has mixed up his own additions with the material derived from the apostle so closely that it is no easy task to separate the gold from the alloy. He has even intruded into the Prologue, interrupting its glorious march with two or three irrelevant remarks on his favourite topic of the testimony of John. But Wendt is not dis- couraged. He goes resolutely through chapter after chapter, excising now a long paragraph, then a
ON THE TEACHING OF CHRIST 255
verse or two, here a line and there a word ; and he seldom has any hesitation. In the first chapter, for example, he cuts away the whole passage in which the Baptist bears testimony to the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world, together with the passages thereon ensuing in which St. John and others have their first interview with Jesus amid circumstances which have been supposed to bear marks, tender and unmistakable, of personal recollec- tion. A curious specimen of the results of Wendt's method is found in the eleventh chapter — the account of the raising of Lazarus. Something proceeding from St. John is here the substratum, but verse by verse it has to be disentangled from the editor's additions. Lazarus had died, and Jesus came a long distance to console the sisters. He naturally talked with them of the certainty that their brother would rise again in the resurrection at the last day ; and out of these remarks a story gradually span itself of a resurrection effected by Jesus on the spot ; but no such thing really took place.
Wendt is by no means unaware of the reluctance which will be felt by all who are acquainted with the spell of St. John, which appears to pervade every page of the Gospel and lends it a character so unique, to accept the theory of a twofold authorship ; but he maintains that only on these terms is it possible to retain the apostolicity of the Gospel as a whole ; for the historical framework is such as could have been constructed by no one acquainted at first hand with the course of Christ's career.
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Perhaps Wendt's discussion of the First and Third Gospels is the most valuable part of his book.
He holds that both St. Matthew and St. Luke made use of St. Mark as we now have it — the last few verses of the last chapter of course excepted — and on this framework constructed their own narratives. Neither, however, had the discernment to excerpt, as criticism is now able to do, the real course of the history ; and, therefore, they also, like the editor of the Fourth Gospel, let the Baptist recognise Jesus as the Messiah ; they make Jesus perform miracles from the first in great publicity ; and, while retaining the scene in which the Twelve acknowledged the messianic dignity of their Master, and other scenes in which He forbade them and others to make Him known, they do not recognise the true place and import of these incidents.
St Matthew and St. Luke, however, display an agreement in incident and expression in the portions of their narratives not derived from St. Mark which requires explanation , and this is not to be found in the supposition that the one borrowed from the other, because St. Luke, the later of the two, is particularly shy and suspicious of St. Matthew. The explanation then must be that, besides the Gospel of St. Mark, they made use of another common source ; and, going back on the old tradition of Papias, Wendt supposes this to have been the Logia of the apostle Matthew ; for the author of our First Gospel is not this apostle, though it bears his name. Just as St. John made a collection of the sayings of the
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Master, his brother apostle had done the same before him ; and, as St. John's editor trans- formed his reminiscences into a history of Christ, the authors of the First and Third Gospels did the like with the Logia of St. Matthew. Only, while the editor of St. John derived his frame- work from the tradition of the life of Christ current in the neighbourhood of Ephesus at the close of the first century, the other two evangelists derived theirs from St Mark.
The first and third evangelist made their excerpts from the Logia somewhat differently. The writer of the First Gospel, following his plan of grouping miracles, parables, etc., together, attached as many of them as he could, on this principle, to the materials which he borrowed from St. Mark. St. Luke, on the contrary, interpolated them in the form of two long connected narratives into St. Mark's framework. The reproduction was further modified in each case by the pDint of view and purpose of the writer ; and from the fact that the Logia were not written, but handed down orally, it will be understood that both evangelists exercised consider- able freedom. Although, therefore, there is a great deal of agreement between them, yet there are differences smaller and greater ; and, by comparing them closely, it is possible to judge with a good deal of confidence in every case which reproduction is the more exact.
Wendt undertakes the task of reproducing the Logia word for word out of St. Matthew and St.
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Luke ; and he prints the entire document in Greek, thus giving us what even the apostolic Church did not possess. It is a bold undertaking, and, however much we may differ from him, hearty gratitude is due to him for it. He thinks he is able in many cases to make one of the evangelists correct the other ; sometimes both are wrong, but, having got the exact words and restored them to their right places, we can correct them both. He makes far too little allowance, however, for modifications in the sayings of Jesus which may have been due to His making the same statements or using the same illustrations on different occasions. An itinerant preacher necessarily repeats himself ; but, if he has any genius, he does not do so slavishly : he gives his illustrations different applications and points the same truths in different directions ; and there is no irreverence in attributing to Jesus a thing so natural. Scholars constantly forget how brief the Gospels are, and how meagre are the fragments preserved to us of what our Lord must have done and said.
Although both the First and Third Gospels are thus mainly derived from St. Mark and the Logia combined, yet both writers have added a good deal, derived from other sources to us unknown. This is especially the case at the beginning and at the end. The narratives of the birth, infancy and youth of Jesus are found in the First and Third Gospels ; but Wendt does not believe that they were in the Logia, and evidently he attaches to them little
ON THE TEACHING OF CHRIST 259
importance. The same is true of many details of the death and resurrection. On the resurrection the author expresses himself with extreme caution. All the length he is prepared to go may be gathered from these words : " That the disciples had the con- viction not only that they had seen the Risen Saviour, but that by means of these appearances they had obtained distinct knowledge of His messianic person and their own apostolic vocation, appears to me, on account of the entirely analogous belief of St. Paul, to admit of no question."
To sum up, Wendt's aim, it will be seen, is to get behind the Gospels, which are secondary or sub- apostolic formations, to the apostolic materials out of which they were constructed with additions. St. Mark is nearest to an original document ; but even it contains secondary additions, and its scheme of Christ's life is confused by the lack of literary skill. Out of St. Matthew and St. Luke another apostolic document can be reconstructed ; but to the apostolic materials less trustworthy information has been added, and already the actual development cf Christ's life has been forgotten. In St. John, also, we have an apostolic document of unique value, but it is hidden in another document, which breathes an entirely different spirit and has no sense whatever for the historicity of Christ's career. Among the secondary additions Wendt would reckon a great many of the outstanding miracles attributed to Jesus — such as the Changing of Water into Wine,
26o WENDT'S UNTRANSLATED VOLUME
the Stilling of the Storm, St. Peter's Walking on the Sea, the Resurrection of the daughter of Jairus, of the Widow's Son at Nain and of Lazarus, and, I suppose, also the bodily Resurrection of Christ Himself.
In the German preface to the second volume of his work Dr. Wendt complains of the slight attention bestowed on his first volume ; but this misfortune has probably been a blessing in disguise ; because, had the contents of the critical volume been well known in this country, the fact would probably have modified the welcome with which the translated volume has been received.
There are those, indeed, to whom such a presenta- tion of the life of Christ may be a godsend. If a man has lost faith in the credibility of the Gospels and thus had his belief in the Son of God shattered altogether, the notion may be a highly welcome one that it is possible to get behind the actual Gospels and find a story, exiguous indeed and lacking in colour, yet apostolic and true ; for this may seem to give him Jesus back again and to relight the lamp of religion. Accordingly, this critical procedure is lauded in certain quarters as being not the destruc- tion but the restoration of belief. The meaning, however, of such a claim requires strict definition. To anyone who has a full-bodied faith in Christ and confidence in the Gospels such a scheme of the life of Christ as is supplied by Wendt is pure loss. To the common man it is disastrous in the highest
ON THE TEACHING OF CHRIST 261
degree, because it means that, when the Gospels are opened and the most affecting words of Christ read, there cannot be the sh'ghtest certainty whether or not these sayings actually emanated from Him or were secondary formations due to minds which only partially comprehended His spirit ; this cannot be decided before the termination of a critical process, in which no two of the learned entirely agree. The question is not one of whether or not perfect accuracy is to be found in every detail of an incident, or whether the precise force of every saying of our Lord has been comprehended by the reporter : it is whether the greatest of the miracles attributed to Him were actually performed, and whether a con- siderable proportion of the words put into His mouth ever came from His lips at all.
It may be that there lies before us a period in which the whole question will be thrashed out among ourselves on the lines on which it has been discussed in Germany. The impression, indeed, prevails in this country, even among the educated, that, the Tubingen theory being exploded, the credibility of the Gospels has been settled forever. This, how- ever, is an over-sanguine view, and does not at all correspond with the state of opinion abroad. Wendt, on the contrary, is a moderate representative of a large and extremely able set of German critics. The growing familiarity of the public mind in this country with the theories of Old Testament criticism may pave the way for a similar treatment of the Gospels ; and the theories, backed by great
262 IVENDTS UNTRANSLATED VOLUME
accumulations of learning, are ready to the hand of anyone who may wish to distinguish himself by giving a shock to orthodoxy. The process, once begun, would not be easily brought to a termination ; for there is no end to the combinations which are possible when once it is taken for granted that the representations of the Gospels are not the actual facts, but creations of the imagination which have grown out of them.
Still there arc aspects of Wcndt's performance which are reassuring, even in view of such con- tingencies. Although to our insular notions his position appears extreme, he would be reckoned in the circle to which he belongs in a high degree con- servative. He stands as the last term of a gigantic course of investigation, and, when his results are compared with the wilder ideas of the Tubingen school, the contrast is great. Even as they stand, the Gospels all belong, according to this author, to the first century, and in everyone of them there is a large kernel proceeding directly from the apostolic circle. Wendt's detailed comparison, in his trans- lated volume, of the teaching of Christ as reported by St. John with the same teaching as reported by the Synoptists, in order to prove their identity, is one of the most striking things in recent theology. The attempt to bring the Gospels far down and away from immediate connection with Christ has apparently failed. To use an illustration of Principal Rainy, the Gospel narrative, like a living creature, after being forcibly stretched away down into the
ON THE TEACHING OF CHRIST 263
second century, has drawn itself together again right back into the heart of the first century. The question is thus very much narrowed. Was it possible in so short a time, within the memory of men who had lived with Jesus, for the history to be so transformed ? Could the course of Christ's career be so speedily forgotten ? Could so many wonders, adorned with minute and lifelike details, be attributed to Him which He never performed ?
It cannot be denied that there are some great difficulties in the Gospels, and we are indebted to Wendt for showing so clearly what these are. One thing, however, which makes one distrust his mode of approaching them is the stupidity which he is constantly attributing to the Evangelists. They have misunderstood Christ, according to him, where His drift is perfectly obvious ; they have overlooked the connexion of this and that, when it might have been seen with half an eye. This reaches a height in the case of the Fourth Evangelist, who simply peppers the noble narrative of St. John with wrong-headed remarks and disquisitions. Leaving the reverence aside which may be due to holy men who spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost, I am always suspicious of any theory which makes the writers of Scripture talk downright nonsense.
The truth is, Wendt's work is dominated from first to last by a theory. He makes no secret of it : on the contrary, he states it in the very first pages
264 IVENDTS UNTRANSLATED VOLUME
of the volume under review, and he makes it the standard for judging every statement in the Gospels. This theory is, that the life of our Lord pur- sued the course, already described, which he finds indicated in St. Mark — although even St. Mark is not true to it, St. Matthew and St. Luke are unaware of it, and the Fourth Gospel clean contra- dicts it.
The outline of the life of Christ, which Wendt thus makes the standard for testing the Evangelists, contains, indeed, a great deal to which no objection need be taken ; but the denial that the Baptist acknowledged Jesus as the Messiah has very little to rest on. St. Mark, indeed, says that at His baptism Jesus saw the heavens rent asunder and the Spirit descending ; but he says not a word to indi- cate that He alone saw this vision and heard the voice which acknowledged Him as the Son of God. The whole scene has the appearance of being in- tended for others rather than for Him — the con- sciousness of Jesus did not require such external demonstrations to assist its operations.
But, asks Wendt, if the Baptist thus acknowledged the messiahship of Jesus, and if other testimonies to it arose here and there from the first, what import- ance was there in the great confession of the Twelve through the lips of St. Peter } This seems a formid- able difficulty ; but, when this question is asked, are we not overlooking the religious character of the confession of the Twelve ? Their confession was not a dry inference from the observation of facts : it
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was an outburst of religious conviction, and a solemn vow by which they were prepared to stand. And truth, when it is realised and acknowledged in this way, has all the force of novelty, although it may have been heard long before by the hearing of the ear.
I have never been able to feel any force in the assertion, which Wendt repeats, that, if at the Baptism John had acknowledged the messiahship of Jesus, he could not afterwards have sent his message from the prison. The most elementary acquaintance with the psychology of religion ought to enable us to understand how a man who was in the Baptist's circumstances and had passed through all that he had undergone might come to doubt what he had once firmly believed.
Christ's practice of requesting those whom He healed not to make Him known, and of enjoining His apostles not to reveal His messiahship, is a perplexing trait ; but I am not satisfied that Wendt's explanation is the correct one. St. Matthew quotes in explanation of it an ancient prophecy to the effect that the Messiah would not strive or cry or cause His voice to be heard in the streets ; and this may be the true explanation — that it was due not to policy and deliberation, but to a subtle and delicate peculiarity of the tem.perament of Jesus. When it is recorded that Jesus enjoined one whom He had cured to tell no man, but that, in the ecstasy of restored health, the man blazed abroad the matter, are we quite certain that Jesus was displeased ? We
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ourselves read the statement with an amused gratifi- cation, and I am by no means certain that this was not the effect on Jesus Hkewise.
If Jesus had kept Himself as obscure as Wendt represents Him to have done, and held back so long any hint of His messiahship, it is a question how far the public and the authorities would have been responsible for at last refusing to acknowledge His claim.
But the final question is, whether this figure pre- sented by Wendt, and presented confidently by an increasing school in Germany, can be the veritable picture of Christ — the figure of One who had no pre-existence, but was the son of Joseph and Mary ; who knew some secrets of the medical art and by means of these healed the sick, but did not raise Jairus' daughter, or the widow's son, or the brother of the sisters of Bethany ; who taught the words of eternal life, but was not Himself rescued from the power of the grave ? Is this the authentic portrait of Jesus Christ ? It is totally unlike the image presented by the Gospel of St. Mark as a whole. But, even if St. Mark did offer it — or any skilfully excerpted section of St. Mark — would it be credible .? In my opinion it would be utterly incredible. We do not know for certain the dates of the Gospels ; but we do know, almost to a year, the dates of the great, universally recognised epistles of St. Paul. This apostle was of almost the same age as Jesus, and he was at the full height of his powers when he applied his mind to the scrutiny of the life of Jesus.
ON THE TEACHING OF CHRIST 267
Now, what is the image of Christ presented in St. Paul's writings ? Christ is the Judge of men, and, therefore, he must have a supernatural know- ledge of their hearts ; He is the Saviour of the world, on whom the burdened conscience can lay the whole weight of its sin and the immortal spirit the whole weight of its destiny ; He was before all things, and He now lives as the ascended Lord at the right hand of God ; His name is above every name, and to Him every knee shall bow. This was not the faith of St. Paul alone : it was notoriously the faith of the whole Church within a single generation of Christ's death ; for on this subject there was no difference of opinion among the first witnesses of Christianity. Now, is there any resemblance between this image and that which Wendt proposes to put in its place ? It is true that, with the great exception of the resurrection, St. Paul does not mention the miracles of our Lord ; but the entire image of the Saviour presented in the Pauline writings — and the same is true of all the writings in the New Testament — is congruent and harmonious with a birth, a life and a death such as the actual Gospels depict, and it is utterly incongruous with such a history as Wendt puts together from the gospel within the Gospels. If Christianity from the very start was founded on a huge falsification, to however innocent causes the distortion of facts may have been due, it is vain at this time of day to attempt to begin it over again. Besides, if Christ was not the glorious Son of God whom the evangelists and
268 WENDTS TEACHING OF CHRIST
apostles represented Him to be, but only this figure to which those who agree with Wendt would reduce Him, then it is far more evident that it is hopeless to redintegrate the Christian religion upon these terms ; for this is not the kind of Saviour that the world requires.
APPENDIX B
THE BOOK OF ENOCH
OF late this ancient document has again been attracting attention to itself. A lengthy fragment of it in Greek, comprising about a third of the entire book, and forming part of an important find of manuscripts made a few years ago at Akhmim, has been published by M. Bouriant ; and a monograph on this discovery, from the pen of Dillmann, the great authority on the Book of Enoch, has appeared in the shape of a communication made by the late professor to the Academy of Sciences at Berlin. An annotated French version of the Greek fragment has come from M. Lods ; and, most important of all for us, Mr. R. H. Charles has published a new translation of the whole book in English, with introduction, notes, appendices and indices, from which everything can be learned which is known on the subject up to date.
Perhaps it may be well to begin with briefly recalling its history.
In early Christian writings reference is made to a book bearing the name of Enoch, which is seriously accepted as the work of the patriarch and referred to
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as Scripture. These references are not, however, numerous ; and soon the Fathers began to express themselves doubtfully, till at length Augustine gave the finishing stroke by rejecting it altogether. Thenceforward it disappeared, although one writer, Syncellus, about A,D. 800, makes a long quotation from it. In the year 1773 Bruce, the traveller, brought from Abyssinia three copies of an ^thiopic manuscript, which proved to be the lost book. Of this an English translation by Lawrence, which is now quite obsolete, appeared in 1821. Other copies from Abyssinia dropped into European libraries from time to time ; and in 1851 Dillmann published the i^thiopic text from five manuscripts, supplement- ing this service in 1853 with a German translation, which has ever since been the basis of all scholarly investigations. At the conclusion of the British war with King Theodore of Abyssinia, a number of additional manuscrip!:s found their way into the libraries of Europe, especially into the British Museum. These Mr. Charles has made use of in compiling his new edition. He has also, of course, incorporated the results of the splendid labours of Dillmann. His work is an able performance, and highly creditable to English scholarship ; he ex- presses his own views with conciseness and decision ; and, although the problems of the book are far from being settled, the materials are now accessible, and everyone can judge for himself what is the value of this relic of the past It is, however, to be remembered that, in the English or German, we have it only
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at fourth hand ; for the iCthiopic is a translation from a Greek version of a Hebrew original. There are ample indications in the book itself that it was originally written in Hebrew, and also that it originated in Palestine, probably in Galilee. It is about as large in bulk as the Book of Genesis, and is filled with a strange variety of material.
The entire book rests on a peculiar interpretation of the verse in Genesis which says that " Enoch walked with God, and was not, because God took him." The final clause is understood in the ordinary sense of a translation of Enoch similar to that of Elijah ; but the first clause — that he " walked with God " — is taken to imply that he was favoured with excursions, in the company of God, or rather of the angels, into remote regions of the universe, where wonders and mysteries of all kinds were revealed to him, along with copious disclosures as to the future course of the world.
Such a conception, it will easily be perceived, opened immense imaginative opportunities ; for on such a journey, under such guidance, what corner of the universe might not be visited, and what secret might not be explored ? From such a stand- point, near the very commencement of human history, a bird's-eye view might be given of the whole course of the ways of God with men. Such a task would, however, have required the greatest powers. A Dante or a Milton would have been needed to sustain the toilsome journey and make
272 THE BOOK OF ENOCH
the vast survey, and then to shape the whole into one continuous and consistent picture. The author of the Book of Enoch has, indeed, been called the Hebrew Dante, and his undertaking has been com- pared to that of Milton. But one is reminded of someone who was spoken of as a Carlyle with a wooden leg stumping down through the Puritan period. On the shoulders of Enoch there are, unfortunately, no " mighty pens " like those which bore up Dante or Milton on his divine path ; if he may be said to possess wings at all, they are at most the leathern wings of a bat, capable only of brief and intermittent flights.
He never proceeds far on his way in one direction before he stops, and then he begins again at a totally different point. The book is not a whole in any artistic sense, but a series of fragments, glued together in anything but artistic fashion. When Dillmann issued his translation forty years ago, he persuaded himself that it was a continuous whole, the work of a single author, with only a few inter- polations, which could easily be removed. But he subsequently reversed this opinion. And Mr. Charles, following Ewald, looks upon Enoch as being not so much an actual book as a collection of the fragments of an Enoch literature. At one period in the history of Hebrew literature, it seems, Enoch was a name round which literary activity revolved, as at an earlier period it revolved round David ; and, as the surviving fragments of lyric poetry collected themselves under the name of
THE BOOK OF ENOCH 273
David, so the apocalyptic fragments which survived were gathered under the name of Enoch.
According to Mr. Charles, there are half-a-dozen or more authors ; but unfortunately, their works are far from being in the condition in which they left them. Nearly everywhere there are signs of alteration and mutilation. Worst of all, the final editor seems to have had in his hands a Noah apocalypse, purporting to give revelations made to Noah of a kind similar to those made to Enoch ; and he thought fit to combine the two into a single book. Instead, however, of doing so in a rational manner, he simply chopped the Noah production into a mass of fragments, and sprinkled them pro- miscuously all over the original work. They turn up in every other page without rhyme or reason, rendering it exceedingly difficult to get any continuous sense, and sorely trying the editorial temper.
Whether or not this may have been the way in which the book came into existence, it is certainly true that there are several separate masses in it easily distinguishable ; and it will be well to indicate briefly what these are.
The book opens thus : " The words of the blessing of Enoch, wherewith he blessed the elect and righteous, who will be living in the day of tribu- lation, when all the wicked and godless are to be removed. And Enoch answered and spake, [Enoch] a righteous man, whose eyes were opened by God, that he might see a vision of the Holy One in the
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heavens, which the angels showed me ; and from them I heard everything, and I understood what I saw, but not for this generation, but for the remote generations which are to come." There follows a theophany, in which God comes forth to judge the world, ending with the verse which appears in St. Jude, " Lo, He comes with ten thousand of His holy ones to execute judgment upon them, and He will destroy the ungodly, and will convict all flesh of all that the sinners and ungodly have wrought and ungodly committed against Him." Then suddenly the writer wanders off into a description of physical phenomena, such as the regularity of the seasons and the like, the slender thread of connection being the contrast between the order of nature and the disorder of the life of sinners. This feeble transition is characteristic ; and very often there is not even as much connexion as here.
After this introduction, we come to the first long section of the book, which is a comment on the paragraph in Gen. vi. on the mixing of the sons of God with the daughters of men. Not only is this theme here handled at great length, but it recurs again and again throughout the subsequent book, forming one of the leading topics. The interpretation given is that the sons of God were angels ; and this occurrence was both the fall of the angels and the origin of evil on earth, though these points of view are not always consistently maintained. The author knows the fallen angels so well that he gives the names of a score or more
THE BOOK OF ENOCH 275
of them ; and, indeed, his acquaintance with angels, both good and bad, is everywhere most intimate, and he displays great inventiveness in supplying them with names. The fallen angels corrupted the inhabitants of the earth by communicating to them evil secrets, such as witchcraft, the use of arms, the painting of the eyebrows, the use of pen and ink, and many other nefarious practices. Their offspring consisted of a race of giants a thousand ells high. Of course, the poor inhabitants of the earth could not long stand the proceedings of such Brobdingnagian neighbours ; and a great cry rose to heaven, in answer to which the archangels were despatched to slay the monsters. The fallen angels were bound down beneath the mountains, to await a more condign punishment at the consummation of all things. The spirits, however, of the giants escaped into the atmosphere, and these are the demons who now roam at large over the earth, plaguing the lot of man ; but their time will also come.
Enoch, to whom the entire invisible world is as open and familiar as a man's own garden to himself, is thrown into contact with the imprisoned angels, who send him as their intercessor to beg for them the pity of Heaven. He draws up their petition in a regular document ; for, though he enumerates the use of pen and ink among the evil arts taught by the fallen angels, he has great faith in his own powers of composition. In describing his journey to the palace of heaven, as the bearer of this
2-6 THE BOOK OF ENOCH
document, the author unfolds all his rhetorical resources :
" And the vision appeared to me thus : behold, in the vision, clouds invited me and a mist invited me ; the course of the stars and the lightnings drove and impelled me : and the winds, in the vision, gave me wings and drove me. And they lifted me up into heaven, and I came till I drew nigh to a wall which is built of crystals and surrounded by a fiery flame ; and it began to affright me. And I went into the fiery flame and drew near to a large house which was built of crystals ; and the walls of that house were like a mosaic cr>'stal floor, and its groundwork was of crystal. Its ceiling was like the path of the stars and lightnings, with fiery cherubim between, in a transparent heaven. A flaming fire surrounded the wall of the house, and its portal blazed with fire. And I entered into that house, and it was hot as fire and cold as ice ; there were no delights of life therein ; fear covered me and trembhng gat hold upon me. And, as I quaked and trembled, I fell upon my face and beheld in a vision. And lo ! there was a second house, greater than the former, all the portals of which stood open before me, and it was built of flames of fire. And in every respect it so excelled in splendour and magnificence and extent, that I cannot describe to you its splendour and its extent. And its floor was fire, and above it were lightnings and the path of the stars, and its ceiling also was flaming
THE BOOK OF ENOCH 277
fire. And I looked and saw therein a lofty throne ; its appearance was as hoarfrost ; its circuit was as a shining sun amid the voices of cherubim. And from underneath the great throne came streams of flaming fire, so that it was impossible to look thereon. And the Great Glory sat thereon, and His raiment shone more brightly than the sun, and was brighter than any snow. None of the angels could enter and behold the face of the honoured and glorious One, and no flesh could behold Him. A flaming fire was round about Him, and a great fire stood before Him, and none of those who were around Him could draw nigh Him. Ten thousand times ten thousand were before Him, but He stood in no need of counsel. And the holiness of the holy ones, who were nigh to Him, did not leave by night nor depart from Him. And until then I had had a veil on my face, and I was trembling. Then He called me with His own voice, and spake to me, * Come hither, Enoch, and hear My holy word.' "
I have made this lengthy quotation in order to convey a notion of the writer at his best. The intercessory embassy, however, undertaken at so much peril, was in vain ; and Enoch had to return and make known to those who had constituted him their patron that their case was hopeless.
Now follows another lengthy section, the character of which seems to be partly determined by what has just been described. Once having set out on his celestial travels, Enoch makes a peregrination
278 THE BOOK OF ENOCH
of the universe ; and its different localities are described, with the wonders and secrets which they contain. Here is unfolded a kind of universal panorama, in which such places and objects are described as Chaos, Hades, Gehenna, the stream out of which the heavenly bodies daily renew their fires, the tree of life, the windows of the winds, and so forth. All through the book this affectation of revealing physical and metaphysical secrets is an ever-recurring feature. It is especially characteristic of the fragments of the Noah book, which, as has been already indicated, are scattered, as if from a pepper-castor, over the Enoch composition. The principal effort of the kind is found in the latter half of the book, where there occurs a section entitled by Mr. Charles the Book of Celestial Physics. It is a long-winded but clear and compact piece, which ought to be interesting to scientific antiquarians, as giving a fair idea of the astronomical notions of the period. It embodies a complete theory of the sun and moon, of the year, day and night, the seasons, and the winds. The winds drive the heavenly bodies, which issue from different doors in the firmament at different seasons. The sun is of the same size as the moon, but contains seven times the amount of fire. The year consists of three hundred and sixty-four days, neither more nor less. On this the writer is most peremptory, and appears to be conducting a polemic against a profane and innovating notion that it contains three hundred and sixty-five.
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After this comes a section consisting of two visions — tlie one a brief but vivid vision of the Noachic Deluge, seen by Enoch ; the other a symboHc history of the world. The latter is an astonishing performance. It opens in this way : " Behold, a ball came forth from the earth, and that bull was white ; and after it came forth a heifer ; and along with this came forth two bulls, one of them black and the other red. And that black- young bull gored the red one and pursued him over the earth, and thereupon I could no longer see that red young bull." This white bull is Adam, the heifer Eve, the black and red bulls Cain and Abel. And so the history goes on remorselessly from century to century, men and nations being represented by different animals. The Egyptians are wolves ; the Midianites wild asses ; and so on ; and of course the Hebrews are sheep or lambs. Difficulties, however, occur. Noah is a sheep ; but how can a sheep build an ark 1 He has to be transformed into a man for the nonce. And the same metamorphosis happens to Moses when he goes up to the mount to receive the Law. The execution is, however, carried through with courage ; and, though it is tedious, yet, when the eagles, vultures, kites and ravens swoop down on the sheep and pick out their e}'es, it is not without picturesqueness.
The next section is again an attempt to set forth the history of the world. It may be called the Apocalypse of Weeks, because in it the entire
28o THE BOOK OF ENOCH
history of man appears, from the standpoint of Enoch, as a series of ten weeks, each of which is characterized by some striking feature, such as the appearance of Noah or Abraham or Moses. But the section soon loses itself in eschatological de- clamation, especially concerning the woes which are to overtake the wicked in the latter days.
One or two fragments are tagged on to the end of the book which would hardly be worth men- tioning but for a pretty description which one of them contains of the birth of Noah. At his birth " his body was white as snow and red as a blooming rose, and the hair of his head and his long locks were white as wool, and his eyes beautiful. And, when he opened his eyes, he lighted up the whole house like the sun, and the whole house was very full of light." Then it wanders off into grotesquery.
Thus I have as briefly as possible characterized the different sections, with the exception of one, which is the most important of all, because in it occur most of the passages which are supposed to have influenced the New Testament. This section appears near the centre ; it is long, and it may be called the Book of Similitudes, because it consists of three pieces which call themselves by this name. They are all of eschatological import : the first being a picture of heaven ; the second an account of the events which will befall the earth when God visits it in the latter days, to clear out of it the sinners and inaugurate the millennium ; and the third treating the same theme in a more hortatory
THE BOOK OF ENOCH 281
style. As, however, we shall have to come back on this section, it need not at this point be further characterized.
A few words now about the date. Unfortunately, this is exceedingly obscure. Mr. Charles arranges the different compositions, with great confidence, in chronological order, and his various dates cover about a hundred years — from B.C. 170 to 64, But the criticism passed on Mr. Charles's book by Dillmann * touches this point with telling effect, and has, besides, a wide application to other scholars at the present time : " The practice of arranging the varying ideas or representations of anything in a straight line of chronological and genetic develop- ment, and thereby constructing a history of the subject, is very popular v;ith certain recent schools ; but he who has observed how old and new, even when, strictly considered, they are mutually ex- clusive, may yet coexist in one and the same brain, will always regard such constructions with suspicion."
There are several passages which, at first sight, appear hopeful in determining the date. There is the division of the world's history into ten weeks, each of which is characterized by some outstanding event. The outstanding event of the seventh week appears to be the publication of the Book of Enoch itself: "And after that, in the seventh week, will a
* Theohgische Literaturzeitung, 2nd Sept., 1893.
282 THE BOOK OF ENOCH
generation arise, and many will be its deeds, and all its deeds will be apostate. And at its close will the elect of righteousness of the eternal plant of righteous- ness be elected to receive sevenfold instruction con- cerning the whole creation." Here " the plant of righteousness " is the Jewish people, as we learn also from other passages ; " the elect of righteousness " are the Pharisaic party, to which the writer belonged ; and the sevenfold instruction " concerning God's whole creation " is a name for his own invaluable lucubrations. Unfortunately, however, the weeks are very indefinite periods ; and all we really learn is that the author lived after Elijah, who is the out- standing figure of the sixth week. The events of the three weeks after the seventh are, of course, purely conjectural, and do not help us at all.
In the other programme of the world's history — that in which men and nations are represented by different kinds of animals — we seem to be certainly on the track, because the characterization is both copious and minute ; but just at the critical point, although growing more minute than ever, it becomes unintelligible, as it is impossible to identify with their counterparts the different animals which are brought upon the stage.
Unfortunately, it is about the date of the Book of Similitudes, which, as I have already said, is the most important part, that the greatest doubt exists. Here there is a reference to an attack on the Holy Land by the Medes and Parthians, which .seems a hopeful chronological datum, but it turns out to be
THE BOOK OF ENOCH 283
capable of all sorts of interpretations ; and, besides, according to Mr, Charles, the passage in which it occurs is an interpolation. Most hopeful of all, perhaps, appears at first sight a reference to the visits of "the kings and the mighty and the exalted" to certain sulphur springs " in the west, among the mountains of gold, and silver, and iron, and soft metal, and tin ; " but, while Hilgenfeld understands this of the congregating of the Roman nobility in the neighbourhood of Vesuvius, Mr. Charles is positive that these springs must be sought in Palestine. And besides, according to him, the words occur in a passage inserted by an interpolator so stupid that what he says does not, perhaps, mean anything at all. Mr. Charles does not believe that there is in the book any reference whatever to the Romans, and therefore his lowest date is B.C. 64 — the year in which Rome laid its grasp on Palestine. Baldensperger, on the contrary, feels the atmosphere of the irresistible, illimitable Roman rule everywhere in at least the Book of Similitudes— an opinion in which I agree with him, because Mr. Charles's explanation of the constantly recurring phrase, " the kings and the mighty," against whom the woes of the Book of the Similitudes are launched, as a designation of the Asmonean kings and their backers, the Sadducees, goes to pieces on the fact that they are characterized as worshippers of idols. The mode in which he explains this away is really an illustra- tion of a style of interpretation by which anything can be made to mean anything.
284 THE BOOK OF ENOCH
We turn now to the most important aspect of the subject — the influence of the Book of Enoch on the New Testament.
Mr, Charles gives in parallel columns a long list of coincidences of expression, amounting in all to about a hundred; and, besides, he enumerates several New Testament doctrines which may be supposed to have been modified by the teaching of Enoch. The quotations will strike different persons differently. Of the twenty, for example, found in the writings of St. Paul I should not consider a single one to be indubitable, while some are very far-fetched indeed.* Besides, it is to be noted that about a third of all the supposed quotations are from the Book of Similitudes, about which it is doubtful whether it does not quote the New Testament. But I wish to look at the subject from a viewpoint of my own, and investigate rather the influence of the book as a whole, and of its several masses, than enter minutely into the criticism of detached verses and phrases, about nearly everyone of which opinions will differ.
When Enoch is spoken of as one of the books which may have influenced our Lord and His apostles,! we naturally inquire first of all what its spirit is — whether it is an inspiring production, which could have communicated tu our Lord and to the Vvriters of the New Testament something of the
* The most striking, perhaps, is " King of kings and Lord of lords;" but see Deut. x. 17 and Ps. cxxxvi. 3, to which Mr. Charles gives no reference.
t This is the title of a book by Mr. Thomson on these pseudepigrciphic writings.
THE BOOK OF ENOCH 285
power with which they spoke and wrote. I have quoted already the characterization of the author as the Hebrew Dante or the Hebrew Milton. In my opinion, Baldensperger is far nearer the mark when he calls him " the patron of the scribes." Again and again in the book itself the hero is called " Enoch the writer " ; and we saw how he edited the petition of the fallen angels. He is an idealized scribe ; and his writing is precisely on the level of the hagadoth of the rabbinical schools. Though the book is as long as the larger books of the Bible, there is hardly a verse in it, from beginning to end, on which one would linger with pleasure or which one would delight to recall. Once, indeed, it says beautifully of the stars that they give thanks and praise, and rest not ; " and to them their thanks- giving is rest." And not far from this there is a striking little paragraph, standing quite alone, without any connexion with what goes before or what comes after, which reminds one of a famous passage in a Latin poet : " Wisdom came to make her dwelling among the children of men and found no dwelling- place ; then Wisdom returned to her place, and took her seat among the angels. And Unrighteousness came forth from her chambers ; and she found those whom she sought not, and dwelt with them, being welcome to them as rain in the desert and dew on the thirsty land." But with these exceptions, and one or two passages already quoted, there is hardly a touch of originality or tenderness or power, while page follows page of the most barren and tedious
286 THE BOOK OF ENOCH
commonplace or even nonsense. If the prevailing characteristic of the New Testament be the spirit of power and of love and of a sound mind, I should say- that the spirit of this book is exactly the reverse.
The entire production is a glorification of Enoch. Around this hero of the schools not only these writings gathered, but others which are not included in this book but heard of in ancient literature. In the New Testament, however, there is not a trace of hero-worship bestowed on Enoch. Except in its place in the genealogy of Christ in St. Luke, even his name is not once mentioned in the Gospels or the writings of St. Paul. There is one remarkable passage in the Book of Enoch where the hero seems to be identified with the Messiah ; and Baldensperger mentions that in the rabbinical writings there are passages where he is placed side by side with the Metatron, a hypostasis of the Divine similar to the Messiah. Had such notions had any place in the circle about Christ, Enoch would have been one of the first names suggested when the minds of men were occupied with the question who Jesus was, and they were making every kind of guess. Elijah was the favourite conjecture, and he would at once have suggested Enoch, as both were taken to heaven without tasting death ; but never once was the suggestion breathed that Jesus might be Enoch.
No element in the Book of Enoch is more per- vasive than the story of the sons of God and the daughters of men, interpreted in the sense already indicated. It is a disagreeable story, and it stains
THE BOOK OF ENOCH 2S7
the book through and through. In one or two out- lying parts of the New Testament there may be references to certain elements of this conception. There is the reference in Judc to the angels who kept not their first estate, and are reserved in chains, under darkness, against the judgment of the great day ; and there is the similar statement in 2 Peter * ; but the myth in its great features is not only avoided in the New Testament, but, consciously or uncon- sciously, opposed. The New Testament writers, and especially St. Paul, have to deal with the origin of the corruption and misery of mankind ; but they go back, not to the sixth chapter of Genesis, but to the third.
In connection with this, reference may be made to the enormous development of demonology and angelology in the Book of Enoch, which displays the utmost familiarity with the orders, functions and names of the angels fallen and unfallen. The New Testament also has a copious angelology, but it is based on the Old Testament, and not on Enoch, whose extravagances it avoids. Mr. Charles points out two New Testament notions about angels which appear to be borrowed from Enoch. The one occurs in our Lord's debate with the Sadducees about mar- riage, when He says that in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God. Incidentally, in addressing the fallen angels, in Enoch, God speaks of marriage as
* Possibly the much-discussed passage about Christ preaching to the spirits in prison may refer to this.
288 THE BOOK OF ENOCH
something unnatural to them, though natural to men. The other case is the cry of the evil spirits in the Gospels not to torment them before the time. In Enoch the demons have permission to range at large till the final judgment. In both these cases we per- ceive, I should think, the influence of Enoch ; but it is less likely that they are direct quotations from Enoch than references to popular conceptions which may at first have owed their origin to this book.
Another enormous clement in Enoch consists of descriptions and explanations of physical phenomena, such as the sun, moon and stars, winds, thunder, mists, dews and the like. This part of his task is taken by the author very seriously, and he attaches to his explanations a sacred value. But, happily, this entire domain is ignored by the New Testament.
Nor does it indulge in programmes of the course of the world, like the animal history to which refer- ence has been made. The only thing possessing any resemblance to this of which I can think is the division of mankind into sheep and goats in our Lord's parable of the Last Judgment ; but it is with contrast rather than similarity that in this case we have to deal. In the Book of Revelation there are passages resembling the Ten Weeks of the world's history ; but this resemblance is due to the fact that Enoch and Revelation arc both founded on the Book of Daniel.
This estimate of the extent of the influence of the book as a whole, and of its great masses, on the New Testament is, in my opinion, of importance,
THE BOOK OF ENOCH 289
not only in itself, but on the question, to which we now turn, of the relation of the Book of Similitudes to the New Testament.
Here there is not only undoubted, but extensive, dependence either on the one side or the other. The more striking passages have been already quoted on pp. 61-62 of the text, and one more may be added : —
" And in that place mine eyes saw the Elect One of righteousness and of faith, and how righteousness shall prevail in his days, and the righteous and elect shall be without number before him forever. And I saw his dwelling-place under the wings of the Lord of spirits, and all the righteous and elect before him are beautifully resplendent as lights of fire, and their mouth is full of blessing and their lips extol the Name of the Lord of spirits, and righteousness before Him never faileth, and uprightness never faileth before Him." Several of the titles applied in the New Testament to Christ are given to this being, as the Anointed, the Elect One, the Righteous One, and, very frequently, the Son of man. He has existed, " under the wings of the Lord of spirits," from before the creation of the world ; and He is to be the Judge of men and angels at the con- summation of all things.*
These are remarkable statements, and, if we could be sure that they are of pre-Christian origin, they
* Mr. Deane's statement {Pseudepigrapha, p. 92), that this idea does not occur in the Book of Enoch, is unintelligible.
19
THE BOOK OF ENOCH
would raise questions about the originality of the New Testament writers, and even of our Lord Himself. They would show at least that, in the period between the Old Testament and the New, the religious mind, working upon the messianic elements in the Old Testament, had in several important respects come marvellously near to the actual image of the Messiah as it was to be re- vealed by our Lord,
Mr. Charles almost takes the pre-Christian origin of the Book of Similitudes for granted ; and this has of late been the prevailing tone of German criticism; but I have seen no arguments advanced in favour of this view which appear to me nearly as strong as those of Drummond * and others on the opposite side, while the impressions made on my own mind by the study of the book are not favourable to its originality.
Everyone, even at the first reading, must be sensible of the strongly Christian flavour of the quotations just made ; and the pervasive character of this element in the Similitudes is in the strongest contrast to the microscopical similarities between the rest of the book and the New Testament.
Drummond has shown, in detail, that the passages which refer to the Messiah in terms strikingly re- calling the New Testament might be excised from the text, not only without mutilating it, but with the result of improving it. Moreover, the intro-
* In The Jewish Messiah.
THE BOOK OF ENOCH 291
ductory words of the second Similitude, in which the argument is announced, are not in the least con- sistent with the contents of the subsequent pages as they now stand ; and it is in these pages that the most important messianic passages occur. The Book of Jubilees, a Jewish production, dating from about the middle of the first century B.C., quotes the Book of Enoch eighteen times, but it contains only two doubtful quotations from the Book of Similitudes, and neither of these is messianic, the inference being that the Book of Similitudes, or at least the messianic paragraphs in it, must have come into existence at a later date.
The argument, however, which, in my mind, carries most weight, is that the Book of Similitudes is, obviously and confessedly, a perfect patchwork of interpolations. It is sprinkled all over with fragments from the Book of Noah ; and it exhibits also additions from other quarters. Indeed, it is of such a nature that it must always have invited interpolation. I have already said that it is apoca- lyptic, and have tried to define the subjects of the various Similitudes. But the truth is, the Book of Similitudes belongs to that species of religious litera- ture, unhappily not extinct even in modern times, which, properly speaking, is about nothing. It is a mere haze and welter of words, surging uneasily round dim images of the future and the common- place contrast of the righteous and the wicked. Legitimate doubt might be entertained as to whether the messianic passages belong originally
292 THE BOOK OF ENOCH
to the places where they are found, merely on account of the fact that, in idea and language, they have a certain amount of consistency and dignity.
The strongest argument on the opposite side is that, if these had been Christian interpolations, there would have been more Christianity in them — more definite references especially to the facts of Christ's life and death. This would be a good argument if it were contended that the interpolations were de- liberately made for apologetic ends. It was common enough in the earliest Christian ages to make inter- polations of this sort, as may be seen in other apocalyptic books of the period, like, for example. The Testaments of the Tzvelve Patriarchs. But the argument loses its force if it is supposed that the insertions were made, not deliberately, but naively, the editor working up the substance of a Christian apocalypse along with his other materials. A Christian apocalypse of an eschatological nature need not have contained any more direct references to the history of Christ than are found in the Book of Similitudes.
The conclusion, therefore, to which we seem to be led is that it is hopeless to build any structure of history or speculation on a foundation of this kind. While the possibility of these being anticipations of Christian ideas cannot be denied, the probability lies on the opposite side ; and at all events the literary condition in which they have come to us makes anything like certainty impossible.
THE BOOK OF ENOCH 293
If in any respect the Book of Enoch may be said to form a milestone in the course of development of relicTious ideas between the Old Testament and the Nevv I should say it is in its teaching about the state and 'the fate of the dead. With this subject we know that the human mind was at that period intensely occupied ; and the Book of Enoch shows that, working on the hints supplied by the Old Testament, it had arrived at conceptions on which He who brought life and immortality to light by the gospel subsequently set His seal. The views of the book are by no means consistent throughout ; but, on the whole, its conception of the present state of the dead, as well as of the proceedings in the great crisis of the last judgment and the issues which will follow, are far nearer than those of the Old Testament to the representations of the New Testament ; and, indeed, there is hardly a feature of the New Testament teaching on these subjects, with the exception, of course, of the part played by Christ, which cannot be matched in the Book of Enoch.
For this and other reasons, the Book of Enoch and the other apocalyptic writings derived from the same period are well worthy of study ; although it must be confessed that among all the products of the human mind they are the most unreadable. It is even well, for the sake of science, that nature produces men so constituted that they are able to cast themselves upon such relics of the past with enthusiasm and exaggeration, under the belief that they have discovered a new explanation of the secret
294 THE BOOK OF ENOCH
of the gospel. Their labours will not be in vain ; for the investigation of authentic memorials of human experience is never wholly without reward. The rest of us, however, will probably do well, in the present case, not to pitch our expectations very high. Indeed, on looking closely into the matter, we per- ceive that the mystery of Christ is deepened rather than explained ; because it is more difficult than ever to understand how a plant of such perfect beauty and perennial fruitfulness as Christianity could have sprung out of such a dry ground.
4
INDEX
Adamson, log.
Angels, 274.
Apocalyptic Literature, 65,
269 ff. Appel, 45, 46. Aramaic language, 72, 74. Atonement, 171, 187, 205 Augustine, 270.
Babut, 171.
" Back to Clirist," 3, 123.
Baldensperger, 45, 63, 70,
171, 211, 234, 285, 286. Baptism, 100, 207, 214. Baptist, The, 264, 265. Baur, 49. Beatitudes, 215. Beyschlag, 45, 71, 87, 94
161, 171, 211, 230. Biblical Theology, 8. Biair, Fulton, 35. Blasphemy, 98, 99. Blessedness, 26, 154. Blood, 197. Boehmer, 45. Bouriant, 269. Bousset, 70, 128, 161.
127,
127,
Bo von, 87.
Browning, 163.
Bruce, 7, 45, 109, 127, 171, 211.
Bunyan, 28.
Burns, 66.
Candlish, 127.
Carlyle, 67,
Charles, 63, 65, 269 ff.
Church, The, 28, 30, i6l.
Coming-again of Jesus, 227, 229.
Covenant, 192; the Old Cove- nant, 197 ff. ; the New Covenant, 194 ff. ; the
)lood of -19: ff.
the Covenant,
Dale, .71.
Dalman, 36, 45, 74, 87, 127, 130,
133. 142. Dante, 26. Davidson, 205. Deane, 289. Death of Christ, 18, 172; a
ransom, 179; foreseen and
foretold, 218.
290
INDEX
Denney, 21, 171. Development of Jesus, 211 ff. Dillmann, 269, 270, 281. Dogma, 22, 27, 122. Dorner, 99. Drummond, 290. Duncan, Rabbi, 5.
Ecce Homo, 162.
Edgar, McCheyne, 211.
Ehrhardt, 128.
Enoch, Book of, 60 ft., 94,
269 ff. Ewald, 272.
Fairbairn, 25, 171, 173, 189. Fatherhood of God, 26, 29, 214. Forgiveness, 1 17, 153. Forrest, 81.
GlESEBRECHT, 224.
Gifford, 109. Gore, 87, 109, III. Grau, 45, 87, 127.
Hall, 109. Harnack, 33, 190. Hastings, 65, 171, 205. Haupt, 211, 227, 229. Holsten, 71.
Holtzmann, 9, 45, 87, 98, 103, 105, 120, 127, 161, 171, 211, Homer, 200.
Ignorance, our Lords, 107. Imaginativeness of the Words of Jesus, 39.
Individualism anduniversalism,
157- Inspiration, 14. Ireneeus, 47. Issel, 127, 136.
Jerusalem, destruction of, 229. John, St., 30, 31, 251, 263. Judgment, last, 236. Jiilicher, 41, 191. Justification, 29, 207.
Kaehler, 171, 206.
Keim, 51, 104.
Kenotic theories, 108 ff.
Kingdom of God, 25,29, 136 ff.; the watchword of Jesus, 138 ; history of the idea, 139 ff. ; as understood by the Jews, 143 ff . ; as under- stood by Jesus, 153 fi.
Kostlin, 161.
Krop, 45, 74, 128.
Kurtz, 205.
Laidlaw, 113.
Lawrence, 270.
Lewis, Mrs. Dr., 75.
Lietzmann, 45, 72, 74, JJ.
Life, 155.
Lightfoot, 67.
Livy, 200.
Lods, 269.
Logia, 35, 257, 258.
Luke, St., 34, 256.
Mackintosh, 211. Mark, St., 33, 249.
INDEX
297
Mason, 109. Matthew, St., 34, 256. Messiah, The, 127 ff. ; use of
term in O. T. 1 29 ; in N. T.
127; the Kingdom of God
His realm, 136. Menzies, 191. Meyer, 7. Miracles, 42, 112, 260.
Neander, 48, 51. Nicoll, 22.
N6sgen, 45, 54, 87, 92, 129. Novalis, 5.
Origen, 48. Ottley, 109. Oiven, 215.
Papias, 250.
Parables, 40, 156, 232.
Paul, St., 4, 20, 121, 188.
Peyton, 148.
Powell, 109.
Pre-existence, 76.
Pregnancy of the Words of
Jesus, 38. Privatdocenten, 7, 72. Prophecy, 223 ; its timeless-
ness, 230; conditional, 231. Prophecies of Jesus, 221 ;
about His resurrection, 222 ;
about His coming-again,
227 ; about the judgment,
236.
Rainy, 262, Ransom, 178 ff.
Repentance, 153, 207. Resch, 35.
Resurrection of Jesus, 222 ff. Reticence of Jesus, 151, 265. Righteousness, 26, 154. Ritschl, 25, 161, 165, 171, 186. Rothe, 24. Russell, 211, 229.
Salmond, 211, 230.
Schaefer, 171.
Schleiermacher, 27, 56.
Schmoller, 127, 160.
Schnedermann, 45, 128, 144.
Schurer, 130, 142, 149.
Schwartzkopff, 211.
Scripture and dogma, 29.
Sermon on the Mount, 16, 154.
Shakspeare, 5, 65, 66.
Sieber, 45.
Similitudes, Book of, 68, 282, 289, 291.
Sin, 117, 153, 207.
Sinlessness of Jesus, 79 ft.
Smeaton, 171.
Son of David, 133 ft., 196.
Son of God, in Gospels, 87 ; in O. T., 88 ff. ; applied to Jesus by others, 94 ff. ; by Himself, 100 ff. ; its mean- ing, III.
Son of man, 45 ff. ; origin of term, 46 ; in O. T., 49 ff. ; in Book of Enoch, 60 ff. ; messianic, 70 ff.
Sonship, 105.
Sovereignty of God, 29,
298
INDEX
Stanton, 127.
Stevens, 9, 45. 87, 127, 171,211.
Stewart, 191.
Stier, 18.
Style of Jesus, 38.
Supper, The Lord's, 190, 207.
Syncellus, 270.
Synoptic problem, 32, 247.
Temptation of Jesr.-,, 147 ft. Titius, 26, 128, 232. Tholuck, 109. Thomson, 2S4. Transfiguration, The, 219. Trumbull, 199. Twelve, The, 161.
Ullmann, 83.
Watson, 16, 20, 21, 22, 23.
Weiffenbach, 211.
Weiss, B., 45. 87. 103, 127, 171,
211, 230. Weiss, J., 127, 160. { Weizsacker, 54. j Wellhauscn, 72, 74, 79. Wendt, 7, 31, 35, 40. 45. 87. 120, 127, 171, 186, 204, 211, 240,
247 ff- Wesley and Whitfield, 162. Words of Jesus, 1 1 ff. ; 38 ff.
Zahn, 191.
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CONTENTS.
Temptation. Christ and the Wants of
Conscience, HUiMANirv,
The Religion for To- Public Spirit.
Day. The Evidences of Religion.
Youth and Age.
NOTICES OF THE PRESS.
"When I was in America last year, delivering the Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching in Yale University, the first of these discourses was given at the academic service in the University Chapel on Sunday morning, April I2th, 1891. Mr. D. L. Moody, the evangelist, who chanced to be present, insisted on having it printed, and he sent copies, I believe, to all the students of the University. In the same irresistible way he got the addresses on Te7nptation and Conscience published. As these addresses are in circulation in America, I have thought that they may be useful and acceptable in this country also." — From the Preface.
"As a guide to self-knowledge his book ought to be in the hands of every young man who has not lost faith in religion, and has some aspiration to attain to the highest type of manhood." — Christian.
" There is a manly and godly tone about the teaching of the book which makes it interestuig. Easy to read and likely to be useful. Young men especially would be sure to be captivated by it.'' — Record.
"The subjects are such as attract young men; and it need scarcely be said that they are treated in a lively, lucid, and vigorous manner." — Expositor.
"More thoughtful, suggestive addresses than the eight gathered in the compass of this dainty volume it would be hard to find." — Queen.
BV THE SAME AUTHOR. THE TRIAL and DEATH of JESUS CHRIST.
A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion. CroAvn 8vo, cloth, 5 J. Third Edition, completing 9, coo.
NOTICES OF THE PRESS.
"The author has a thorough hold of the circumstances and their literature ; his style is admirable in its lucidity and simplicity — enriched several times by felicitous images, as, for instance, on page 11 — and his spiritual insight is unerring. No intelligent person can read this book without understanding what happened, and — which is more important — why such things happened. ... It is a noble book." — Rev, John Watson in The British Weekly.
" We may view the book as a series of plain-spoken homilies on topic after topic of the Passion, strikingly told, with a careful dwelling on details and with an earnest telling appeal, on the lessons to be derived. There are some passages of great beauty, as that which dwells on the Saviour's look at Peter after the denial." — Record.
" We have here an exquisitely beautiful picture of the sufferings and death of our Blessed Lord." — The Rock.
"Dr. Stalker's treatment of the Seven Words from the Cross — calm, reverent and impressive— may be compared with the tempestuous but splendid eloquence of Pere Didon's handling of the same theme in his recently published Lent Conferences, as an illustration of two widely contrasted but equally effective styles of religious utterances. We hail Dr. Stalker's work as a noteworthy contribution to what may be called the Bibliography of the Cxo%s." — Christian World.
" It is safe to foretell that Dr. Stalker's latest book will be at least as popular as his ' Imago Christi.' It is a faithful exhibition of the facts themselves, and is therefore of value to the student and incom- parably more helpful in devotional exercises than are some books on the Passion." — Methodist Recorder.
"Dr. Stalker has given us a book which no one can read without profit. ... It is probably the best book we have on the subject." — Rev, Professor Marcus Dods, D.D , in Expositor.
" We have here a piece of honest work ably executed. The author has made an earnest and careful study of the passages under review, and of the literature of the subject, and in this way he has qualified himself to write with fulness of knowledge, and, like a preacher of an earlier day, he has ' so'.ight to find out acceptable words.' He has thus pro- duced a book which may be assured of wide popular acceptance, as well as appreciation, amongst those whose studies lie more especially in this direction. It is stimulating as well as instructive in a high degree, and is the production of the competent student not less than the eloquent preacher, and will, like the author's previous productions, take a pro- minent place among the best popular religious literature of the day." — Scotsman.
WOKKS BY PROF. HENRY DRUMMOND (jthe late), F.R.S.E.
NATURAL LAW in the SPIRITUAL WORLD.
Cheap Edition, 3^. dd.
" This is one of the most impressive and suggestive books on religion that we have read for a long time. Indeed, with the exception of Dr. Mozley's University Sermons, we can recall no book of our time which showed such a power of restating the moral and practical truths of religion so as to make them take fresh hold of the mind and vividly impress the imagination." — Spectator.
THE LOWELL LECTURES on the ASCENT
OF MAN. Cheaper Edition, price 3^. 6d. net. '* Readers who recollect Professor Drummond's article on mimicry in his book on Tropical Africa will expect much from his lectures on the greatest subject in evolution — the 'ascent' of man. Nor will they be disappointed. No less conspicuous are Professor Drummond's powers of illustration. Without being at all superficial, his book is one of the simplest and most popular ever written. He is one of the few who can make a complex scientific subject clear to any ordinary capacity, and attractive to anybody with a glimmer of imagination." — Daily News.
TROPICAL AFRICA. Cheap Edition. With a Map and Illustrations. Crown 8vo, cloth, 35. 6d. "A charmingly-written book." — Saturday Review.
THE NEW EVANGELISM, AND OTHER
PAPERS. Cro\vn 8vo, buckram, price 5^.
THE IDEAL LIFE, AND OTHER UNPUB- LISHED ADDRESSES. With Introductory Sketches by W. Robertson Nicoll and Ian Maclaren. Crown 8vo, buckram, 6s. "Nothing is more instructive about these addresses than their searching and intense style. There burns throughout them a powerful flame that can illuminate or melt, and we cannot believe that any one can study them carefully and rise from the perusal quite the same as he was." — British Weekly.
PROFESSOR DRUMMOND'S BOOKLETS. Cro7vn 8zo, leatherette, \s. ; cloth, gilt edges, is. 6d. each. THE CITY WITHOUT A CHURCH. THE PROGRAMME OF CHRISTIANITY. THE CHANGED LIFE. PAX VOBISCUM.
THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD. BAXTER'S SECOND INNINGS. Fancy boards, is. td leather padded, 2s. 6d.
WOUKS BY GEORGE ADAM SMITH, D.D., LL.D., Professor of Hcbreiv and Old Testament Exega is, Free Church College, Glasgow,
THE HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE
HOLY LAND. With six specially prepared Maps. With Additions, Corrections, and New Index of Scripture References. Crown 8vo, cloth, i^s.
"A very noteworthy contribution to the study of sacred history, based upon the three indispensable conditions of personal acquaintance with the land, a study of the explorations, discoveries, and decipherments, especially of the last twenty j'ears, and the employment of the results of Biblical criticism during the same period. The necessity and importance of such an under- taking need no demonstration, and the results as set forth in Dr. Smith's learned and laborious work will be appreciated by all competent scholars." — Times.
"The book collects together and estimates in a thorough and sure way all the results of research ; it is WTitten with full critical and historical know- ledge ; it describes the physical features in a vivid and clear manner." — Guardian.
THE BOOKS of the TWELVE PROPHETS,
COMMONLY CALLED THE MINOR. In the series of '"The Expositor's Bible." In Two Volumes. Crown 8vo, cloth, Js. 6if. each. Vol. I. — Containing Amos, Hosea, and Micah.
Vol. II. {Recently Published). — Containing Zephaniah, Nahum, Habak- kuk, Obadiah, Haggai, Zechariah I. -VIII., " Malachi," Joel, "Zechariah" IX.-XIV., and Jonah.
" In Dr. Smith's volumes we have much more than a popular exposition ot the minor Prophets. We have that which will satisfy the scholar and the ?tudent quite as much as the person who reads for pleasure and for edifica- tion. ... If the minor Prophets do not become popular reading it is not because anything more can be done to make them attractive. Dr. Smith's volumes present this part of Scripture in what is at once the most attractive and the most profitable form."— Dr. Marcus Dods in the British fVeekly.
THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. In the series of " The
Expositor's Bible." In Two Volumes. Crown 8vo, "js. 6d. each. Vol. I.— Chapters I. to XXXIX. Vol. II.— Chapters XL. to LXVI.
"A work of no ordinary merit; indeed, it is but rare that such exegetical power and mature scholarship are united with an ease of style and a fertility of modern illustration that leave but little to desire." — Speaker.
"This is a very attractive book. Mr. George Adam Smith has evidently such a mastery of the scholarship of his subject that it would be a sheer impertinence tor most scholars, even though tolerable Hebraists, to criticise his translations ; and certainly it is not the intention of the present reviewer to attempt anything of the kind, to do which he is absolutely incompetent. All we desire is to let English readers know how very lucid, impressive — and, indeed, how vivid — a study of Isaiah is within their reach; the fault of the book, if it has a fault, being rather that it finds too many points of connection between Isaiah and our modem world, than that it finds too few. In other words, no one can say that the book is not full of life."— S/i^f /a/or,
FOUR PSALMS. In the series of "Little Books on Religion." Cloth, is. 6J. "These expositions are in every way admirable, and worthy of the highest admiration." — Aberdeen Free Press.
London : HODDER & STOUGHTON, 27, Paternoster Row.
PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE CARDS OR SLIPS FROM THIS POCKET
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY
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