count its importance by literary as opposed to historical considerations. It was apparently current in the second century in a somewhat different form. On the one hand, the present tense (tyάoxet) was replaced by the aorist (vw); and on the other, the order of the clauses was reversed. It might then be rendered: No one has come to know the Father but the Son, nor has any one come to know the Son but the Father, and they (or he) to whomsoever the Son has made (or, willeth to make) the revelation. The doctrinal importance of these changes is supposed to be very great, and has been strongly urged, for example, by Schmiedel." The change of tense is alleged to bring the whole utterance down from the timeless or eternal into the historical world, and the affinity of this passage with the fourth gospel disappears. At the time at which Jesus speaks, He has attained to the knowledge that God is not a Lord inaccessible to men and always in a heat about His honour, but a loving Father. But Jesus is the only person who has yet attained to this insight. Having it, it is natural for Him to think of Himself as God's Son, and so He does think of Himself; but none of His hearers has penetrated His secret. God alone knows, or rather has perceived-because the spiritual history of Jesus has given Him the opportunity of perceiving

1 This is the 'Western' reading as given e.g. in Huck's Synopse on the basis of Marcion, Justin, and the Clementine Homilies: oudeis ĕYVW TOU πατέρα, εἰ μὴ ὁ υἱὸς, καὶ οὐδὲ τὸν υἱὸν εἰ μὴ ὁ πατὴρ καὶ οἷς (ᾧ ἂν ὁ υἱὸς ἀποκαλύψῃ (βούληται ἀποκαλύψαι). Harnack in his attempted restoration of Q (Sprüche u. Reden Jesu, 94, 189 ff.) adopts the change of tense, but not that of order. He is inclined to agree with Wellhausen that the clause 'no one knows the Son but the Father' is an old interpolation: the variation of position itself makes it suspicious, and as we have seen above its relevance is not so obvious. Harnack's text runs: Távтa μoi rapedóßn væò toũ πατρός, καὶ οὐδεὶς ἔγνω [τὸν υἱὸν εἰ μὴ ὁ πατὴρ οὐδὲ] τὸν πατέρα [τις ἔγνω] εἰ μὴ ὁ υἱὸς καὶ ᾧ ἐὰν βούληται ὁ υἱὸς ἀποκαλύψαι. For Weiss's view, which is more favourable to the received text, v. Die Quellen der synopt. Ueberl. 30.

2 Das vierte Evangelium, 48 ff.

-that Jesus' attitude to Him is that of son to father. The change of order, too, is important. In the received text, what immediately precedes the last clause is the assertion that no one knows the Father but the Son, and when it is added, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal,' the object naturally supplied is 'the Father,' or 'the true nature of God.' But in the more ancient text, what immediately precedes the last clause is, No one knows the Son but the Father, and to this the natural supplement can only be, 'and they (or he) to whom the Son reveals Himself.' It is as if Jesus had said to His hearers, 'None of you has yet recognised me: I have to tell you Myself what I am.' It is not the Father whom He reveals, but the Son.

The importance of this, allowing to the 'Western' text any authority it can legitimately claim, is much more apparent than real. To refer first to the difference of order: it is certain that every one who often quotes this utterance of Jesus quotes it with the clauses sometimes in one order, sometimes in the other. Irenæus, who censures those who adopt the 'Western' order as people who want to be wiser than the apostles, sometimes follows it himself; which proves, not that it stood in his New Testament, but that, like other people in ancient and modern times, Irenæus could recall the passage without attaching any significance to the order.1 Then as to the tense: is it quite certain that there is the difference which Schmiedel supposes between the aorist and the present? Even those who read eyva in their text must have felt that it included a present-a historical if not a timeless one; at the moment at which the words were spoken Jesus and the Father had the peculiar, mutual, and exclusive knowledge of each other which is asserted also in the received text. If this is so,

1 Irenæus, Adv. Haer., iv. 6. 2.

nothing is gained for Schmiedel's interpretation by saying that what Jesus revealed was not the Father but Himself. He Himself was Son, and as the knowledge of relatives is one, to reveal Himself is to reveal the Father. It is difficult to understand why a writer who not only accepts as certain, but presents as the very type of certainty, the passage in Mark 13 32 in which there is an absolute correlation of the Father and the Son, should so strenuously object to it here, and argue that Jesus cannot have called Himself Son of God in a sense applicable to Himself alone. If He did it there, why not here? To avoid all misunderstanding, Schmiedel says, we must state as the import of the passage not that Jesus was conscious of Himself as the Son of God, but that He was conscious of Himself as a child of God. That is, we must decline the only expression which is known to the New Testament, and adopt an expression of which the New Testament does not furnish a single example. We must set the whole of the evidence aside, and construct the consciousness of Jesus out of our own heads. It is impossible to regard this as serious criticism.

There is one consideration which of itself is conclusive against all minimising constructions of this passage. It is contained in the words, All things have been delivered unto Me by My Father. (Harnack thinks the original was 'by the Father'; but it makes no difference.) These words are surely not the preface to such a rationalistic commonplace as Schmiedel evolves from what comes after; they imply in Jesus a consciousness of His place and vocation to which nothing but the Christian attitude to Him does justice. It is vain to isolate words like these about the Father and the Son, and then to torture them into agreement with some preconceived idea of what Jesus must have been: they do not stand alone in our evidence, and when we take

them with utterances of Jesus such as have been already examined they refuse to accept any but the highest interpretation. There may be theories of man and the universe which have antecedent antipathies to them; but it is no objection to them, in the eyes of a student of history, that they furnish a historical justification for the Christian faith in Jesus. It may not be amiss, however, to remark that while we accept this justification, we admit that it is idle to ask whether the Sonship of Jesus here spoken of is Messianic or ethical or metaphysical. We gain nothing by separating in thought what cannot be separated in reality. That Jesus was conscious of a unique vocation in connexion with God's Kingdom is true: in that sense He was the Messianic Son of God, and the passage illustrates His Messianic consciousness. But the relation to God which this involved was not 'official'; even in His Messianic vocation His consciousness was filial; the God whose kingdom He was to inaugurate was His Father in a vital and ethical sense-One with whom He lived in perfect mutual understanding, who was loved and trusted by Him without reserve, and to whom He could say in the most disconcerting situations, Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in Thy sight. The least serviceable, however, of all these distinctions is metaphysical. It means something when we say that Jesus was Messianic Son of God-we can put into the adjective all we know of His vocation in God's Kingdom. It means something when we say He was Son of God in the ethical sense: we can fill up the idea of Sonship with the love, trust, and obedience which belong to the filial life. But it does not mean anything which we can correspondingly define if we say He was Son in the metaphysical sense. It is only another way of saying with emphasis that He was Son, and of suggesting that

there was something in His Sonship which goes beyond us.

ISOLATED EXPRESSIONS IN WHICH JESUS' CONSCIOUSNESS OF HIMSELF IS REVEALED

Up till now we have examined passages common to Matthew and Luke in which there was a certain continuity, but it is necessary to look at others in which, though fragmentary and isolated, there is a similar revelation of the mind of Jesus. It is impossible to take them in any chronological order, but the following are the most important.

In Matt. II 20-24, 20-24, Luke 10 13-15 we have the woes pronounced by Jesus on Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum. The mighty works He has done in them are referred to―miracles of healing, evidently, in which the goodness of God was leading them to repentance-and the doom of their impenitence is pronounced. It shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon, more tolerable for Sodom, in the day of judgment than for them. The work of Jesus is connected in His own mind with the last day. Nothing less than the final destiny of men is determined by their attitude to it. This sense of the absolute significance of the manifestation of God's saving power in Him pervades many of the words of Jesus, and is the ultimate basis of what is called faith in His divinity.

Another significant passage is Matt. 1230, which is found verbatim also in Luke 11 23 He that is not with Me is against Me, and he that gathereth not with Me scattereth. This is on the same plane, even if it is not in the same key, as 'he that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me.' It betrays the consciousness in Jesus of a significance attaching to His