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from Jesus Himself. Holtzmann' even thought at one time that such passages as Gal. 2 19f., where Paul speaks of being crucified with Christ, were the antecedents of the gospel sayings about the cross. But as Loisy-who nevertheless questions the genuineness of the words ascribed to Jesus-points out, the meaning of Paul is not that of the passage before us. When the true meaning here is fixed, the writer can only say that he sees no difficulty whatever in believing that Jesus spoke in precisely such terms. He was not the first person to be crucified; and though crucifixion was not a Jewish but a Roman punishment, it was one that a hundred years of Roman government must have made sufficiently familiar and terrible even to the Jews. If Jesus could say to His followers, The man who is not ready to face the most shameful death in My cause is not worthy of Me, there is no reason why He should not have said, The man who does not take up his cross and follow Me is not worthy of Me. The fact, which His hearers certainly could not foresee at the moment, that He was Himself to die upon the Cross, would give a singular pathos to His words when they recalled them afterwards; but a knowledge of that fact was not necessary to the understanding of them. The other objection refers to the words vexev èpoú in Matt. 10 39. In what is regarded as the parallel saying in Luke 17 -'Whosoever shall seek to gain his life shall lose it, but whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it'-vexev μo is wanting. Hence Harnack in his restoration of Q would omit them from this saying: he thinks Matthew has introduced them from Mark. On this ground some would object to the use which we make of the words as throwing light on Jesus' consciousness of Himself; what He says of saving the 1 Handcommentar, ad loc. 2 Les Évangiles Synoptiques, i. 895. Sprüche u. Reden Jesu, 63.

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life and losing it (the objection runs) is said with the utmost generality; it is a law of the Kingdom of God, but it has no necessary relation to Him. That it is a law of the Kingdom of God is true, but that it has no necessary relation to Jesus must not be taken for granted; that is the very point at issue. The whole burden of the words of Jesus, as we have read them hitherto, is that He has a relation to the Kingdom of God which makes it possible for Him to say things which no other could say; and it may quite well be so here. Not that we should lay any stress on the occurrence of Evexev èμod in Matt. 10 ". It is quite likely that a saying which Jesus must often have repeated, and which occurs twice in both Matthew and Luke, was not always given in exactly the same words. The principle might sometimes be stated in its absolute generality, and sometimes so as to bring out the peculiar way in which Jesus was identified with the cause for which men were to be prepared to die. That He was identified with it in some peculiar way has been made abundantly clear already, and does not depend in the least on whether ἕνεκεν ἐμοῦ was introduced into Matt. Io by the evangelist or not. The parallel in Luke 17 ", which omits it, is certainly in every other respect secondary and inferior to Matthew: it is the evangelist there who is responsible for περιποιήσασθαι and ζωογονήσει, and who may be responsible for the absence of Eveze pod. In the passage in which Mark preserves this saying, and in which Matthew and Luke repeat it (Mark 85, Matt. 16, Luke 924), all three agree in inserting the words. But, as has already been remarked, the legitimacy of using the passage to illumine the consciousness of Jesus does not depend upon whether on any given occasion he added vexv po when He spoke of saving the life or losing it. The principle of that addition is secured if we admit that Jesus said, He that loveth father or mother more

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than Me is not worthy of Me, and he that taketh not his cross and followeth after Me is not worthy of Me; the evangelist not only acted with a good conscience, he wrote out of the same mind of Christ which is revealed in ver. 39 when he inserted (if he did insert) vexev pod in ver. 40. There is nothing theological in the attitude of Jesus here, no filling of a rôle, whether it be the Messianic or another, but there is the revelation of a consciousness to which history presents no parallel. Consider how great this Man is who declares that the final destiny of men depends on whether or not they are loyal to Him, and who demands absolute loyalty though it involve the sacrifice of the tenderest affections, or the surrender of life in the most ignominious death. It is hard to take it in-so hard that multitudes of minds seem to close automatically against it, and yet there is nothing surer in the gospel record.

The real difficulty in accepting these sayings is the antipathy of the general mind to the supernatural. It is one form of this when people refuse to believe in miracles, and declare that a man who can still a storm with a word, or feed five thousand people with five loaves, or call the dead to life, is a man with no reality for them. The Jesus who lived a historical life must have lived it within common historical and human limits, and when actions are ascribed to Him which transcend these limits, we know that we have lost touch with fact. The same intellectual tendency which leads to this conclusion really, however, pushes much further. Its latent conviction is not only that Jesus must only have done what other people could do, but that Jesus can only have been what other people are. The mystery of personality is admitted and perhaps enlarged upon by those who thus judge, but the measure of Jesus is taken beforehand. A person who seriously says what Jesus says in Matt.

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is a person for whom their world has no room, and they have no disposition to reconstruct it so that it shall have room. Such a person is not one more added to the population, who can be accommodated or can find accommodation for himself, like the rest. He is not another like our neighbours, with whom we can negotiate, and to whom we can more or less be what they are to us. He stands alone. In the strictest sense which we can put upon the words He is a supernatural person. He claims a unique place in our life. As our examination of the New Testament has shown, His followers have always given Him such a place; and what we wish to insist upon is that in doing so they have not propagated a religion inconsistent with His will, but have only recognised the facts involved in His revelation of Himself.

It may quite well be that there are those who do not wish to give Him the place He claimed, and the place He held from the beginning in the faith of His disciples. It is impossible to have a merely intellectual relation to a person: all relations to persons are moral. The person who comes before us speaking as Jesus speaks in this passage is least of all one in whom we can have only a scientific interest. If we admit the reality of the Person, we feel at once that He not only said these things to men in Palestine, but is saying them to ourselves now; and to feel this is to be brought face to face with the supreme moral responsibility. It is not always in human nature to welcome this, and the instinctive desire of human nature to avoid responsibility so exacting and tremendous is no doubt a latent motive in much of the disintegrating criticism of the self-revelation of Jesus. It is not saying anything personal to say this. There is that in man which does not wish to have anything to do with such a person as Jesus here reveals Himself to be; and when that

element in man tells upon the criticism of the gospels, it tells as a solvent on all that gives Jesus His peculiar place. Nevertheless, His place is sure. There are things too wonderful for invention or imagination, things which could never have been conceived unless they were true; and not to speak of the witness of the Spirit, or their historical authentication, the sayings of Jesus that we have just been considering belong to this class of things. We should accept them, were it for nothing else, because of the incredible way in which they transcend all imaginable words of common men.

THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

(Matt. 5-7, Luke 620-49, and other parallels to Matthew) A considerable part of the matter common to Matthew and Luke is found in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7, Luke 6 20-49). This sermon, as it is presented in Matthew, is to a large extent the composition of the evangelist, but it is not an arbitrary or free composition. Comparison with Luke shows that the framework of it was fixed before either evangelist wrote: it began with beatitudes and ended with the parable of the builders on the rock and the sand, and it had as its kernel the enforcement, in the boldest and most paradoxical terms, of the supremacy of the law of love. In all probability, therefore, an actual discourse of Jesus, corresponding to this in outline, lay behind it; and when Matthew, according to his custom-a custom which we have just seen illustrated in His charge to the Twelve-expands this by introducing into it congruous or relevant matter which strictly belonged to other occasions, we have no call to say that he is misrepresenting Jesus. In point of fact, a large proportion of what he does introduce, though not found in Luke's Sermon on the Mount, is found elsewhere in the third evangelist, and is recog