they were being taught in Christian churches at the very same time and under the very same conditions in which the contents of Mark's gospel were being taught. Luke did not write to the excellent Theophilus to tell him what he had never heard before, but that he might know the certainty about the things in which he had been instructed. Even if we cannot identify the author of this second source, nor fix the very year in which he wrote, we can be confident that it is for all practical purposes contemporary with Mark and equal with it in authority. Both have behind them the authority of the teaching, and of the teachers, who dominated the Church in the 'sixties.

Nor is this authority prejudiced when we admit, as far as we need to admit, that the word of Jesus fructified in men's minds, and that there may be cases in which it is impossible to draw the line between the very words which Jesus uttered and the thoughts to which these words gave birth in the minds to which they were addressed. Wellhausen argues that the spirit of Jesus lived on in the Church, and that the Church not only produced the gospel of which Jesus is the object, but also gave a further development to His ethics. This development took place, no doubt, on the foundation he had laid; and that in which His spirit expressed itself seemed to have intrinsically the same value as what He Himself would have said in similar case. It is not with the idea here that we have any quarrel, but with the inconsiderate application of it. There is no reason to doubt that many of the words of Jesus were preserved mainly by being preached, and that they were liable in this way to a certain, or rather an uncertain, amount of modification. with a view to bringing out the point of them in one or another set of circumstances. Every minister in preaching from a text sometimes expands the text in the person, so to speak, of him who uttered it; and if the original

speaker was Jesus, he puts words into Jesus' mouth freely in doing so. In this sense Wellhausen is right in saying that it is the discourses in the gospels, and not the narratives, that are most liable to 'development' in the course of time; contrary to the older criticism which. held that while legendary stories grew with a rank and marvellous fertility, the discourses of Jesus were comparatively trustworthy. But the modern preacher who 'develops' a word of Jesus in the person of the Speaker knows what he is doing; and it is only natural to assume that the primitive preacher or catechist knew also. He did not mean that the words he used were literally Jesus' words; they were the word of the Lord as he understood it. This, however, is quite a different thing from the wholesale ascription to Jesus in a historical book— and when all is said and done the gospels are meant to be read as narratives of fact-of a great mass of discourses which have no immediate connexion with Him. The result of Wellhausen's criticism, applied as he applies it, is, as Jülicher has said,' that the most profound, simple and moving elements in the gospels are set down, simply because our literary evidence for them is supposed to be later than Mark, as of no historical value. The primitive Church is made to appear richer, greater and freer than its Head. For this, however, analogies are completely wanting; if the gospels as we have them are the fruits of faith, and not a historical testimony to Jesus, they are such fruits as have no example elsewhere. How did it come to pass that these fruits so suddenly ceased to appear on the tree of faith? How did its fertility come to an end? And when Christian faith was yielding such gracious fruits apparently without conscious effort, when it uttered itself spontaneously in the parables of the Kingdom or the Sermon on the Mount, how are we 'Theologische Litteraturzeitung, 1905, col. 615.

to explain the fact that neither Paul nor any other New Testament writer-and surely they all had faith-could ever produce a page which even remotely reminded us of the manner of the Lord? Their whole attitude to the realities with which they deal—to God and man and truth -is other than His, and even when they speak in the power of His spirit it is not in His style and tone. After all, the words of Jesus have a seal of their own, and are not so easily counterfeited. It is true, as Wellhausen says, that truth attests only itself, not its author; but when the various self-attesting truths coalesce into the unity of the Speaker and His life-when, as Deissmann says, they are seen to be not separate pearls threaded on one string, but flashes of one and the same diamond-the truth and its author are not separable. The sum of self-attesting truths which finds its vital unity in Jesus guarantees His historical reality in a character corresponding to these truths themselves, and the more we come under the impression of this character, the less disposed shall we be either to prescribe its measure beforehand, or to assume that vital and conscious relations between it and the Christianity in which it somehow issued are necessarily unhistorical. That Jesus left no written record of Himself is true. It is true also that what He wished to leave behind Him in the world was not a protocol of His words and deeds, a documentary attestation of them such as historians or lawyers might require; what He craved was a spiritual remembrance, a living witness in the souls of men born again by His words of eternal life. But the very men on whom He made the impression which made them Christians, the very men who hung on His lips because His words were what they were, would not easily lose all sense of distinction between His words and thoughts and their own. The very power and wonder of the words would preserve their singularity, and, as has already been re

marked, the conspicuous fact in the New Testament is not the imperceptible way in which the words of Jesus merge into those of Christians, but the incomparable and solitary relief in which they stand out by themselves. The possibility of modification, of deflection, of 'Christianising' even, in applying these words in any given situation, is one which need not be questioned beforehand; the mind is subject to its own laws, and the spirit has its own liberties, even in dealing with the words of Jesus. But the broad contrast which has just been pointed out remains, and it justifies us, not only in examining each instance on its merits, but in approaching the examination with a presumption in favour of the witnesses rather than against them. When we appeal to the discourses of Jesus in Matthew and Luke for testimony to the mind of Jesus regarding Himself or His work, this is the presumption which will determine our attitude.

For the purpose which we have in view it is not necessary to refer further to the critical analysis of the gospels. We shall confine ourselves to the gospel of Mark, and to that second source, common to Matthew and Luke which in accordance with custom will be cited as Q. The limits of Q, as soon as we go beyond the matter which is guaranteed as belonging to it by its occurrence both in Matthew and Luke, are quite uncertain; and therefore we shall confine our investigation to the passages which have this guarantee.1 It is impossible to lay down before

1 This is the course followed by Harnack in his own investigation of Q— Sprüche u. Reden Jesu; and in his review of Weiss's recent works, Die Quellen des Lukasevangeliums and Die Quellen der synoptischen Ueberlieferung (in Theol. Litteraturzeitung, 1908: 460 ff.), though he admits that Weiss gives an essentially correct description of the characteristics of Q, he can lay no stress on those passages in Weiss's reconstruction of it which depend upon one witness only. Weiss is practically certain of these, and of his restoration of them (Aufstellung der Matthäusquelle); to Harnack they are only possibilities. The general impression left on the mind of the writer by the study of all these works is that far greater allow

hand the precise line which the investigation must follow. In the opening sections of the gospel-those which narrate the baptism and the temptation of Jesus-we have both sources to appeal to; when we pass this point it will be convenient to consider first the testimony of Q, and then that of Mark, to the self-consciousness of Jesus. In pursuing this course, the method adopted must be left to justify itself by the result. Though no stress can be laid on the chronology of the gospels, there is an order in them of some kind, and as far as possible that will be followed.

(b) Detailed study of the earliest sources as illustrating the self-consciousness of Jesus.

THE BAPTISM OF JESUS

(Mark 11; Matt. 3 12-17; Luke 3 "1.)

Both in Mark and in Q Jesus is introduced to us in connexion with John the Baptist. He comes upon the stage of history when He presents Himself to John on the banks of the Jordan to be baptized. The synoptic gospels recognise John as the forerunner of Jesus, but they do not record any testimony of John to Jesus as the Christ. John, probably in the sense of his own weakness, ance must be made than is made in any of them for the influence upon the evangelists of other than documentary evidence in the writing of the gospels. Assuming that Luke knew a gospel narrative-say the healing of the paralytic or the parable of the sower-both from Mark and Q, we must remember that as a person living in the Christian Church it is a thousand to one that he knew it by having heard it told independently of either. Even if he tells it in the main on the basis of Mark or of Q, we are not bound to explain his divergences from either by conscious motives discoverable by us; to the writer, in spite of Weiss's claim and of Harnack's assent to it (ut supra, 465), it is as certain as anything can be that thousands of the divergences for which ingenious explanations are given are purely accidental, and have no motive or meaning whatever. In other words, 'oral tradition' is a vera causa operating far more extensively than the criticism of Weiss is disposed to admit.