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how easy the first steps would become if He could only make some kind of limited and temporary accommodation with evil. If He could get or take its help in any way it would do so much to clear His path. But He was conscious also that for the ideal King, through whom the reign of God was to be realised, this was impossible. He saw that to negotiate with evil was really to worship Satan, and that no advantage was worth the price. He said to Himself in this temptation what He afterwards said to all, What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose himself?

The interest of the Temptations, in connexion with our subject, lies in this: they show how the Kingdom of God is in the mind of Jesus essentially bound up with Himself. Jesus is often represented now as teaching us things about the Kingdom of God, and then assuming an attitude of pure passivity, simply waiting on God to bring the Kingdom which no action of man, whether His own or another's, can hasten or hinder; but we see here that to His own mind the coming of the Kingdom is involved in His victory over these temptations. His initial triumph, in principle, over all the assaults of Satan-His resolute turning away, from the very beginning, from every false path-the entrance into the world and into the life of man of a Person thus victorious-are a revelation of what the Kingdom is, and a guarantee that at whatever cost it will prevail. This, it will not be questioned, is how Christian faith conceives Jesus all through the New Testament; but it is of supreme importance to notice that it is how Jesus conceives Himself from the opening of His career. His relation to the Kingdom of God is in no sense accidental. It is in His attitude to the possibilities of earth that its true nature is revealed, and with Him it stands or falls. And what was said of the baptism may be repeated here: it is in this character

and in no other that Jesus stands behind every page of the gospel history. It is only this character which makes that history intelligible; and to try to undermine the narrative, only because we do not share the New Testament attitude to Jesus, is as unwarranted historically as it is on all other grounds gratuitous.

THE SELF-REVELATION OF JESUS IN HIS MINISTRY It has been remarked already that no stress can be laid on the chronology of the gospels, but if it is difficult to arrange the matter in order of time, it is fatal to attempt to systematise it. Of all books on the New Testament, those which deal with the teaching and with the mind of Jesus are the least interesting, because they lapse as a rule into this false path. Nothing in the gospels is systematic. There is no set of ideas which recurs, as in John; no succession of questions emerges to be answered by the application of the same principles, as in Paul. Everything is in a manner casual: everything is individual, personal, relative in some way to the moment and its circumstances, though it may enshrine eternal truth. We may say of Jesus, with even less qualification, what has been said of Luther, that He always spoke ad hoc and often at the same time ad hominem. When words so spoken are reduced to a system the virtue has gone out of them; they no longer leave with us an impression of the speaker. But an impression of the Speaker is precisely what the words of Jesus do leave, and what we are in quest of; and consequently, at the risk of being tedious, it will be necessary to trace the self-revelation of Jesus as it is made from one situation to another, in one relation or another, by one significant utterance or another, in the pages of the gospels. Speaking generally, the order followed will be that in which the various passages of Mark and Q occur in Huck's Synopse, and

it must be remembered that it is not on any single passage, but on the cumulative effect of the whole, that the argument depends.

The summary account which Mark gives of the Galilæan ministry (ch. I 14f.) is no doubt to be taken as a summary: we cannot assume that on any given occasion Jesus used these very words. But there is no reason to doubt that they are a true summary, and truly represent the mind and the message of Jesus. With His appearance 'the time was fulfilled': the great crisis had come in God's dealings with men. It is probably a mistake to say that the apocalyptic idea of a predestined course of events underlies this: the apocalyptic way of calculating times and seasons was foreign to the temper of Jesus, and He repeatedly disclaims it (Matt. 24 36; Acts 17). But if anything can be depended upon in the gospels, it is that He had the sense of living in a crisis of final importance: history up to this point had been, so to speak, preparatory and preliminary, but now the decisive hour had come. It was a gracious hour, and the announcement of what was impending was 'the gospel of God'; but it was an hour in which the true decision was a matter of life and death, and we shall sec as we proceed how that decision turned upon a relation to Jesus Himself. The evangelist strikes the true key to the consciousness and the self-revelation of Jesus, when he speaks of the fulness of the time and represents Him as saying, The Kingdom of God has drawn near; repent and believe in the gospel.

JESUS AND THE TWELVE: THE CONDITIONS OF DIS

CIPLESHIP

(Mark 3 12-19; Matt. 10, and parallels in Luke)

The first incident recorded by Mark is the calling of two pairs of brothers, Simon and Andrew, James and

John, to a closer relation of discipleship. This is guaranteed by the inimitable word, Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men. This was His own task, to win and gather men for the Kingdom, and they were to help Him. The ascendency which He exercised in thus drawing men away from their worldly callings and hopes into association with Himself is quite indefinite, and even in yielding to it the four first disciples could have no distinct idea of what it involved. But they did yield. They left their nets and followed Him, and as they lived in His company, heard His words, saw His character and His works, the sense deepened in their hearts of His right to command. It is not, however, until the circle is enlarged by the appointment of the Twelve, and by Jesus' commission and instructions to them, that a vivid light is cast for us on Jesus' consciousness of Himself. Wellhausen has recently attacked the whole narrative of Mark at this point.' The giving of bynames, like Cephas and Boanerges, he argues, is not a historical act; in short, we have no historical act at all in Mark 3 13-19; it is rather a set of statistics, presented as history-an index, in the form of a scene upon a lofty stage. Similarly, of Mark 67-13, which narrates the sending out of the Twelve in pairs, he says that it contains no historical tradition. The passage has great value as showing us the way in which the earliest Christian mission was carried on in Palestine, but it is of no value for the life of Jesus. Both Mark 3 13-19 and Mark 67-13 are editorial sections in the gospel; they reveal something of the author but nothing of the subject.

It is not easy to take this seriously. The Twelve are not to be eliminated from the history of Jesus by any such flimsy devices. There is far earlier evidence for their peculiar standing in the Church than that of Mark. Das Evangelium Marci, 24 ff., 45 f.

In 1 Cor. 15 Paul mentions an appearing of Jesus to the Twelve. This is part of the tradition of the Jerusalem Church about the Risen Saviour which Paul learned when he returned to Jerusalem from Damascus within a few years of the resurrection. The Twelve had not arisen spontaneously and assumed the importance which Paul's language implies. They are mentioned frequently in Mark, quite apart from their formal appointment and mission (4 10, 9 35, 10 32, 11 11, 14 10, 17, 20, 43), and they were known to the other early source used by Matthew and Luke (Matt. 1928, Luke 22 30). Presumably not even Wellhausen intends to deny that Jesus surnamed Simon Cephas, and that He called the sons of Zebedee 'our sons of thunder.' This last particular, which is preserved by Mark alone (317), is usually and properly regarded as a proof of close connexion between the writer and the apostolic circle. But if Jesus gave these names, what is gained by saying that the giving of bynames is not an historical act? The evangelist probably does not mean us to understand that Jesus gave them as part of the formal act by which He 'made' the Twelve; but as He writes out the list of the Twelve, it comes quite naturally to Him to mention these surnames of promise or rebuke. They may have been first bestowed on other occasions-Cephas, for example, at Matt. 16 18, Boanerges perhaps at Luke 954 f.; but to appeal to them to discredit the appointment of the Twelve is beside the mark. There is as little ground for Wellhausen's attack on their mission. He does not believe it to be historical, because though the experiment is successful it is not repeated, and the Twelve are for the future as passive and as wanting in independence as before. We have no such knowledge of the circumstances as enables us to say that this experiment if successful must have been repeated. The fact that a thing is not done twice

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