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and the future in the history of the true religion. This is one point: the other is that a Christian who invented such an allegory to justify the death of the Son would hardly have left Him dead. He would have contrived to introduce somehow the resurrection of Jesus, and His entrance into His inheritance in spite of the murderers. It may be said that he does this, in such vague fashion as his literary method admits, in the quotation from the 118th Psalm 'The stone which the builders despised, the same has become head of the corner; this is the Lord's doing, and it is wonderful in our eyes'; but even if this be admitted, we have still to ask why Jesus should not have spoken thus Himself. In point of fact, the whole plausibility of criticism like this depends on the insulation of the passage, and on the legitimacy of treating it as if it stood alone. But it cannot legitimately be treated thus. The Jesus who is represented as speaking in it is the Person whose unique consciousness of Himself and of His relation to God and His Kingdom has already been revealed in ways that cannot be disputed. As the destined Messianic King, He is the Person in whom Israel's history culminates, and it was as certain to Him as prophecy and experience and divine insight could make it, that for Him the history must culminate in a great tragedy. He was the Son, coming after all the servants, but destined to drink a more awful cup, to undergo a more tremendous baptism than they. Not that this was the last reality in His consciousness: the resurrection which annulled death always lay beyond, and He lifts His head in triumph as He points to it in the words of the Psalm. Nor can we say that an allegory like this is a proper enough thing to write, a good subject for private meditation, but that it is not suitable in a concio ad populum: no one could see its bearings. The evangelist expressly tells us that it hit the mark when it was spoken (ver. 12).

But how extraordinary, when we take it as the utterance of Jesus, is that conception of Himself and of His place in the designs of God which it reveals. All God's earlier messengers to Israel are servants; He is not servant but Son. He is not a Son, but the one beloved Son of the Father eis, àɣantós, ver. 6); He is the heir -all that is the Father's is His. To send Him is to make the final appeal; to reject Him is to commit the sin which brings Israel's doom in its train; yet even His rejection by Israel is not for Him final defeat. God will yet exalt Him and put the inheritance into His hands. In the circumstances of the moment it was inevitable that Jesus should reflect upon God's dealings with Israel and His own place in them; and it is no objection to His reflections to say that they represent the mind of Christians generally, who knew He had been crucified yet believed Him to be the Son of God. He believed Himself to be the Son of God, and when He read the history of Israel in His filial consciousness it unfolded itself to Him as we see it in this allegory. The stupendous thing here, in harmony though it be with His self-revelation as a whole, is the place which He assigns to Himself in the story. It justifies the attitude of the New Testament towards Him, but it is gratuitous to say that it is the product of that attitude. The converse is the fact.

DAVID'S SON AND DAVID'S LORD

(Mark 12 25-37)

No critical difficulty is raised about this passage, and the theological discussions to which it has given rise hardly concern us. It will be universally admitted that in the mind of Jesus 'son of David' was at least an inadequate description of the Messiah. David might have many sons by natural descent, but as only one of them could be the Messiah, it must have been something dis

tinct from natural descent which gave Him his title. No doubt those who hoped for the coming of the son of David meant by the term one who would inherit all that David represented to a patriotic Jew-a hero king who would restore the national independence and empire. To Jesus this was as insufficient a title to Messiahship as physical descent itself. Whether He repudiated the physical descent as He repudiated the political ambitions need not be discussed: what is clear from the passage as a whole is that, in the mind of Jesus, Messiahship depends not on a relation to David, but on a relation to God. How this relation is conditioned, physically or metaphysically, we are not told; but the Messiah is the person to whom God says, 'Sit on my right hand, till I make thine enemies the footstool of thy feet.' Jesus did not discuss questions of this kind at random: His interest in the current ways of conceiving the Messiah was connected with the fact that He was Himself fulfilling the Messianic vocation. Of all Old Testament passages, that which is most frequently referred to in the New is the opening verse of Psalm 110, with its mention of the right hand of God; and this way of representing the exaltation of the Messiah goes back, as we see, to Jesus Himself. The heavenly voice which spoke to Him at the opening of His ministry in the words of one Psalm, 'Thou art my Son,' speaks in His soul at the close of it in the corresponding and, if possible, more exalted words of another, 'Sit at my right hand.' This is an immediate inference from the fact that Jesus regarded Himself as Messiah. We cannot enter into the elevation which these words convey. Even the resurrection of Jesus only imperfectly illustrates them. But they are involved in the Messianic consciousness of Jesus, and they justify all that Christians mean when they call Him Lord.'

'If we limited our view to Jesus' criticism of 'Son of David,' as an

THE DATE OF THE PAROUSIA

(Mark 13 32)

We have already referred elsewhere (p. 239) to the well-known word in which Jesus declares that 'of that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father.' It is needless to say that it has been disputed, but it may be worth while to indicate the purely subjective grounds on which this is done. When Jesus was asked about the precise date of the Messianic advent, He declared roundly, says Loisy," that this was the secret of the heavenly Father: all He could guarantee was that the Kingdom of heaven would appear suddenly and unexpectedly; no one would have foreseen it, hardly any one would have given it a thought. This is set down as the declaration of Jesus, and then M. Loisy proceeds: 'In the form which Mark has given it, it seems to suggest an apologetic preoccupation, as though there were a desire to justify the Christ for not having indicated the date of an advent which was clearly being delayed, by alleging that according to Jesus Himself this was a point of which the angels were ignorant, and of which the Messiah might well be ignorant too.' Could arbitrariness be more wantonly arbitrary than this? 'The form which Mark has given' to the utterance of Jesus is the only form in which we know anything about it; to

adequate description of the Messiah, we might say that this passage was on a level with those belonging to our other early source in which He speaks of Himself as 'more than Jonah,' 'more than Solomon,' 'more than the Temple' (see p. 250); but the words in which God addresses the Messiah, and which it is impossible to leave out of account, lift us to a far greater height. One may say this without going as far as Dalman, who (referring to Isaiah 49, Jer. 15) thinks it would only be natural that Jesus being 'the Son,' as distinguished from all servants, should presuppose, not merely selection and predestination, but also a creative act on the part of God, rendering Him what no one, who stands in a merely natural connexion with mankind, can ever by his own efforts become.— The Words of Jesus, p 286.

Les Évangiles Synoptiques, ii. 438.

assume that we know what Jesus meant, apart from this, and on the strength of this assumed knowledge of His meaning to criticise Mark's record of His words, is simply unreal. There is something almost naïve in the assertion that in the circumstances in which Jesus preached the gospel it ought to have been enough (devait suffire) to declare that the date in question was the secret of the Father; there was no need to say more than, No one knows but the Father.' Things do not happen in accordance with our à priori notions of what ought to be adequate in the circumstances; and the real ground on which this saying is rejected is unambiguously given in what follows. 'The use of the term Son, without qualification, to designate the Saviour, does not belong to the language of Jesus nor to that of the primitive evangelic tradition.' This assertion, however, is as unsupported as it is peremptory. If we do not know the language of Jesus and that of the primitive evangelic tradition through Mark and the other document we have examined, we do not know anything about it, and this unqualified use of Son is common to both (see p. 240). To eject it from both is only possible if we reject the historical evidence altogether, and proceed on a dogmatic assumption that Jesus cannot have been conscious of such a relation to God as this use of the term implies. But our whole study of the gospels has brought us into contact with a Person whose consciousness of His relation to God is nothing if not unique; and there is no reason, with the evidence of the two most ancient sources in our hands, to doubt that on occasion He expressed it in this striking way. Nothing, as Schmiedel has insisted, was less likely to be invented by men

1

It is rather curious that Dalman, who also rejects the evangelist's testimony here, and ultimately on the same grounds as Loisy, thinks that the original saying ran: Of that day or hour not even the angels in heaven know'-the words referring to the Father and the Son being added afterwards.-The Words of Jesus, 194.

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