32-38

ΙΟ 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 6 20-49, 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

nised by critics as belonging to the oldest stratum of evangelic tradition. It is impossible to evade the impression that in both evangelists the sermon has the character of a manifesto, and it is the more important therefore to read it with a view to the self-consciousness of the Speaker. It may be alleged, indeed, that this character of manifesto is imposed upon it by the evangelists, and that it is only their conception of Jesus which can be inferred from it, not Jesus' sense of His own position and authority. Perhaps if the Sermon on the Mount stood alone in the gospels the case for this opinion would have more weight, but when we remember the self-revelation of Jesus in such utterances as have already been examined, we shall probably feel that we ought not to be too hasty in declaring that this or that is due not to Him but to the reporter.

There are three particulars which we have to consider in this connexion.

(1) Both in Matthew and in Luke the sermon begins with beatitudes, and though the beatitudes differ considerably both in number and in expression they have this singular feature in common, that at a certain point the address, so to speak, becomes more personal; the beatitude is put with emphasis in the second person, and -what is to be particularly noticed-the personality of Jesus Himself is introduced into it. 'Blessed,' it runs in Matthew, 'are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you and say all manner of evil against you falsely for My sake' (5"). In Luke it reads, 'Blessed are ye when men hate you and when they separate you and reproach you and cast out your name as evil (or: give you a bad name1) for the Son of Man's sake.' When we remember that the words of Jesus were at first preserved

'Wellhausen thinks the Aramaic original had this meaning: Das Evangelium Lucae, 24.

by being preached, we need not be astonished at such variations as the one underlined. To the preacher, Jesus and the Son of Man were one, but the Son of Man was a solemn way of saying Jesus; and it would be natural for him to put this title into Jesus' lips whenever he was reproducing words in which the personality of the Speaker was of signal importance. There is not more in 'for the Son of Man's sake' than in 'for My sake,' but it has a certain rhetorical advantage; there is more in it for the ear and the imagination; and when the word of Jesus was not backed, so to speak, by His bodily presence, but only reported by a preacher, we can understand the preacher's motive for preferring the title to the pronoun. Harnack, however, and many others have argued that here, as at Matt. 109, the words referring to the person of Jesus should be omitted altogether.' The mere fact that Matthew and Luke vary in reporting them, in the way which has just been explained, is certainly no reason for omitting them: and just as little are the other variations which have some MS. support. The old Syriac versions read 'for My name's sake,' which is possibly not a variant, but an idiomatic rendering of evexev pod; and it is only a mechanical repetition from the previous verse when some 'Western' MSS. read 'for righteousness' sake' instead of 'for My sake.' There is no authority whatever for any form of the beatitude which does not represent the reproach and persecution of which the disciples were the objects as taking place on account of something; and if Jesus could speak of Himself as we have seen Him speak in the charge to the Twelve--if He could say, Whoso confesseth Me before men, him will I also confess before My Father in heaven-there is no reason why He should not have said, Blessed are ye when men shall revile you for My sake. The truth rather is that the suffering

1See above, p. 210: Harnack, Sprüche u. Reden Jesu, 40.

which good men always endure in a bad world—that is, suffering for righteousness' sake (Matt. 51o)—becomes, where the disciples of Jesus are concerned, definitely and specifically suffering for His sake. That is not only their consciousness about it, but His; it is not only the mind of the evangelists which we encounter in this vexev pod Οι ἕνεκεν τοῦ υἱοῦ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου; it is the mind of the Lord Himself.1 We cannot measure what it means that a person who lived a human life like others should identify Himself in this extraordinary way with the cause of God and righteousness and should, it is not enough to say claim, but rather assume that He will obtain, that martyr devotion to which only righteousness and God are entitled; but until we see this we do not see Jesus. A beatitude combines the expression of a rare and high virtue with a rare and high felicity: what are we to say of the Person for whom the supreme beatitude is that men should suffer shame for His sake? We may surely say that He is revealing Himself as the Person to whom the only legitimate attitude is the attitude of the New Testament Christians to their Lord.

(2) The second point in the Sermon on the Mount which calls for particular consideration here is what may be described as the legislative consciousness of Jesus. A great part of the sermon in Matthew-that in which Jesus contrasts the new law of the Kingdom with what was said to them of old time-is not reproduced in Luke, but it can hardly have been unknown to him. In ch. 629f. he has a parallel to that critical part of it which is preserved in Matt. 539f., and in ch. 627 the peculiar and awkward expression ἀλλὰ ὑμῖν λέγω τοῖς ἀκούουσιν (but I say unto you that hear) seems most easily explained as due to the influence of the formula which

On the various readings and the interpretations of this passage, v. Zahn, Das Evangelium des Matthäus, 193.