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the near Messianic advent, and this is the token that they are really His. This is the view of Loisy, who admits that while we can see very well how this perspective was broken by what actually happened, it is less possible for us to apprehend clearly the manner in which faith, after the passion, could derive from these eucharistic words the Christian sacrament. It is not only less possible, but quite impossible. If Jesus did not say a word about His death at the Supper, then an ordinance which has its raison d'être in the proclamation of His death cannot by any ingenuity be derived from His words. It could not have occurred to Paul any more than to anybody else. Paul indeed repudiates in the most express terms any suggestion that the ordinance of the Lord's Supper, as he had introduced it at Corinth, owed anything to himself. 'I received of the Lord,' he says, 'that which also I delivered unto you' (1 Cor. II 23). There has been some discussion as to what exactly Paul means by referring to the Lord as his authority here, but surely without much reason. M. Loisy argues that he appeals to the Lord rather than to the apostolic tradition, because he is conscious, undoubtedly, that he is not merely reporting the fact of the institution-his knowledge of which he would owe to the tradition in question-but interpreting it at the same time in the light which the Lord had given him. But the tradition, in what M. Loisy regards as its original form-the only form in which Paul could become acquainted with it--is in no sense interpreted in 1 Corinthians 11 23 f.; on M. Loisy's own showing, it is shunted, and replaced by something which has no connexion with it whatever. Or if we suppose that a faint echo of it remains in 'till He come' (1 Cor. 11 26), this is all that remains: the words which Paul gives as spoken by Loisy, Les Évangiles Synoptiques, ii. 540.

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Jesus, Jesus did not speak, and the words which Jesus did speak contained no suggestion of those put into His lips by Paul. We do not get over these difficulties by suggesting that the fusion (mélange) of history and of Pauline theology in 1 Corinthians 11 23 ff., and thereafter in Mark, took place spontaneously, in the subconscious region of the soul, where dreams and visions are generated; and that the apostle presented a vision which he had had as a reality, without troubling himself about the circumstance that the witnesses of the Last Supper had not attributed to Jesus the words which he now put into His lips. The vision here, we must remark, is a pure hypothesis, excogitated by a modern scholar for the support of another hypothesis; and whether it be true or not that no one thought in those days of keeping two registers of Christian teaching, one for souvenirs évangéliques and the other for révélations de l'Esprita point on which, with both gospels and epistles in our hands, the very existence of which affirms the distinction, we cannot give an unqualified assent to M. Loisy -it is certain that there is a far simpler explanation of Paul's reference to the Lord. It is not the only thing of the kind in 1 Corinthians. The Corinthians, apparently, were disposed to treat Paul's authority rather lightly, and where he can he appeals directly to Christ. In the seventh chapter he does so as explicitly as he does here: To the married I give charge, not I but the Lord' (ver. 10): 'Now concerning virgins I have no commandment of the Lord' (ver. 25). No one talks about visions here: the Lord is referred to as known in the apostolic tradition of His words, which, just because they are His, are for Christians an authority beyond appeal. It is the same in the account of the Supper. The Corinthians were taking liberties with it, perverting it into a celebration of their own, as if Paul had

instituted it of his own motion, and they might treat it as they pleased; and what he says is, It is not my ordinance at all, but Christ's. It is on His authority it rests, and in His dying words its significance is declared. It would be more than extraordinary if, in conditions like these, Paul wrote to the Corinthians in the guise of a historical narrative something which is entirely destitute of historical value. A person who in such circumstances could not or did not distinguish between matter of fact attested by evidence and visions generated in the subliminal self would not be a responsible person. We have no hesitation therefore in holding that Paul reproduces the apostolic tradition at this point, and does so in the full sense of its value as a historical authority connecting the Supper as he observed it with the Lord Himself. To say that 'the perspective of the Messianic festival excludes the memorial of the death,' is obviously to say what the authors of the gospels did not feel, what Paul did not feel, what readers of the New Testament have never felt. There is no reason in the nature of things why Jesus, when He ate the Last Supper with His Disciples, should not have had both His impending death and His ultimate triumph present to His mind, and we need have no difficulty in accepting the evidence that He did think and speak of both. The references to His body and blood do not belong to another stratum of thought, inconsistent with that which speaks of drinking the wine

1 Ce serait méconnaître entièrement l'état d'esprit des premiers croyants que de voir dans cette circonstance une impossibilité, comme si Paul avait dû rejeter sa vision—that is, the vision imagined for Him by M. Loisy-parceque les anciens disciples ne lui avaient pas raconté le dernier repas en cette forme, et comme si le récit de Paul, supposé qu'il soit venu à la connaissance de Pierre ou de quelque autre témoin, avait dû provoquer un démenti formel, qu'on se serait fait une obligation de répandre dans toutes les communautés. Loisy, ii. 532 n. 1.— -The Death of Christ, 112 f.

new in the Kingdom of God; they are part of a whole which filled His thoughts, and which He revealed in pregnant words to His friends. No doubt they could only grasp them imperfectly at the moment, but it is a mistake to say that they can only be understood in the context of Paul's theology. They could arrest, fascinate, move, and stimulate the mind; they were there thenceforth with the authority of Jesus for Christian thought to brood upon. Without discussing their authenticity further, we have now to ask what light they cast on Jesus' consciousness of Himself.

It is the nature of a symbol that it can be set in different lights, and always seems to call for further interpretation. But from the very beginning, the symbolism of the Supper and the words which gave the key to it spoke unambiguously to the Christian mind. They spoke of Jesus giving Himself, in His body and blood, in all the reality of His humanity and His passion, to be the meat and drink of the soul. They spoke of a covenant based on His sacrifice of Himself-not merely a bond in which believers realised their brotherhood, but a new relation to God into which they entered at the cost of His life. They spoke of a transcendent kingdom in which all the hopes and yearnings of earth would be fulfilled, and in which the Master, who was about to die, would celebrate His reunion with His followers in a world where death and sorrow have ceased to be. We cannot think that less than this was in the mind of Jesus when He said, "This is My body-this is My covenant blood-I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine till I drink it new with you in the Kingdom of God.' But no Christian faith ever put Jesus in a more central and commanding place than this. It is not a place which can either be taken or shared by another; it is all His own. This unique and extraor

dinary place is not only given to him, but taken by Him. It is not taken only when it is thrust upon Him; it is assumed in the words He here speaks, and in the symbolic acts which accompany them, before any one has seen what they involve. The experience of the Church for two thousand years justifies the self-assertion, or rather we should say the self-revelation, of Jesus in the Supper, but it is not the Church's experience which is reflected in the narrative. The same wonderful Person whose incommensurable greatness has already flashed upon us in this scene or that of the gospel history here rises as it were to His full stature before our eyes, and shows us the ultimate meaning of His Presence and His work in the world. The revelation is one that justifies all that Christians have ever felt or said of their debt to Jesus; and it is one of the services the Supper does to the Church, that it recalls Christians periodically to the things which are fundamental in their faith-the atoning death of Jesus, fellowship with God through Him, the assurance of immortality. We do not feel it presumptuous to conceive such thoughts or to accept them as true; they are in the mind of Christ before they are in our minds, and we rest on them as realities in Him.

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The trial of Jesus presents many difficulties to the historical student, but it is an excess of scepticism which would question the one reference to be made to it here. As J. Weiss has remarked,' there were ways of knowing what took place at the meeting of the Sanhedrin. Jesus had at least one adherent there, Joseph of Arimathea; and it is simply inconceivable that His friends should

Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments, 197.

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