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 6 7-13, 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. 1 Das Evangelium Marci, 24 ff., 45 f.

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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, 935, 10 32, II 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 (37), 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

is not a proof that it was not done once. When the Twelve returned from their experimental mission, a crisis was at hand in the ministry of Jesus; and from that time He kept them closely by Him, and devoted Himself almost exclusively to preparing them for the dark future which was now impending.

The calling of the Twelve, then, being indisputably historical, what is its significance? It has no doubt a reference of some kind to Israel, the people of God. It hardly matters, for our purpose, whether we think that Jesus had in view the ancient Israel, and expected the Kingdom of God to be realised under its ancient organisation; or whether when He spoke of the Twelve sitting on thrones and judging (that is, ruling) the twelve tribes of Israel, He was quite consciously using imaginative or poetic language, and had in view a new people of God in which the ideal of the old should be fulfilled. In either case, when He chose the Twelve, the new Israel of God was before His mind as something to be constituted round them, and as something, at the same time, in which His own place would be supreme. He saw in His mind's eye, as they gathered about Him, what John saw in the apocalypse-the wall of the city having twelve foundations, and on them twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb. Separated from everything else that is known of Jesus-separated, for example, from what we are told of His baptism, and from what we shall see in more articulate form later-this may seem fanaticism if ascribed to Jesus Himself, and extravagance in an interpreter of the gospels; but taken in its actual historical relations, as the gospels supply them, the writer regards it as simple truth. But what a revelation of the mind of Jesus it gives! He does not call Himself Messiah, or Son of God, or any other lofty name; but He acts, unassumingly so far as the out

ward form goes, yet in a way which indicates His conviction that the fulfilment of all God's purposes-for nothing less is involved in the re-constitution of God's people-is to come through Him.

When Jesus sent out the Twelve on the preliminary or experimental mission to which reference has been made, He gave them a charge or commission. This is summarised in Mark 6 7-11, but what corresponds to it in Matthew fills the whole of a long chapter (ch. 10). There can be no doubt that this chapter, like the Sermon on the Mount, is a composition of the evangelist; he has gathered into it for catechetical or other practical reasons all the words of Jesus to His disciples which have any bearing on their work as missionaries. Some of these words are relevant to the historical occasion on which Matthew represents them as spoken; others are only relevant if the outlook of the speaker is conceived to be not on the Jewish world immediately around him, the Galilæan cities and villages where he was usually so welcome, but on the Jewish world as it was after His death, that Judæan environment which in its representatives was so hostile to the disciples, or even on the wider Gentile world beyond. It does not follow, however, that the words put into the lips of Jesus in Matthew 10 are not genuine, or that they misrepresent His consciousness of Himself. To a certain extent they have parallels in the eschatological discourse in Mark (Matt. 10 being parallel to Mark 139-13), and to a much larger extent in Luke. In Luke, indeed, there is a peculiarity that we have two missionary or apostolic charges of Jesus, one to the Twelve (Luke 91 ff.), and another to the Seventy (Luke 101 ff). It is not necessary here to consider whether the mission of the Seventy has any historical character, or whether it is simply invented or assumed by the evangelist as a counterpart to that of

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the Twelve, a means of justifying, by appeal to Jesus, the Gentile as well as the Jewish mission. Even if this idea were in the evangelist's mind he has made no application of it. The words of Jesus which he gives, whether addressed to the Twelve or the Seventy, are substantially those which we find in Matthew addressed to the Twelve alone; and the Seventy in point of fact never approach Gentiles. They prepare the way of the Lord in Palestine. Considering how little we know of the methods of Jesus, it is probably rash to say that the mission of this larger number of disciples only embodies a thought of Luke, and not a historical fact.

The first point in which the evangelists are agreed is that Jesus in sending out His disciples imparted to them power over evil spirits. The importance which this power had in His own mind will appear later. What is to be observed here is that we see already Him who had been baptized with the Holy Spirit and power baptizing His followers with the same. It was a primary experience of the Twelve that they owed to Jesus such a reinforcement of their spiritual resources as enabled them to vanquish the most hideous manifestations of demonic power and malignity. They could heal those who were under the tyranny of the devil because He had sent and empowered them. It does not matter what theory we hold of demonic possession and its cure-whether we believe, as every one believed then, in bad spirits which invaded and victimised wretched men; or in mental and perhaps moral disorders ranging from hysteria to the wildest forms of madness-some experience of the disciples lies behind the words, He gave them authority over the unclean spirits. They could do what they could not do before because He enabled them to do it, and the sense of this is a rudimentary form of the specifically Christian consciousness. The greatness of Jesus would grow upon