own personality and work such as has no parallel in Scripture. What, in His own mind, is the Person who thus summons men to identify themselves with Him, and declares neutrality impossible? Every one feels how weighty His words are if they really express the mind of Jesus about Himself, and though for those who remember other sayings of Jesus with which we are now familiar there is no reason to question them, we need not be surprised to find that they have been assailed from various sides. Wellhausen thinks that, to be relevant to the context-that is, to fit into their place in the argument-they must be capable of being generalised. Jesus is only taking Himself as an example of a principle: He says, He who is not with Me is against Me, but He is not specially thinking of Himself; what He means is that in any battle he who is not a friend is a foe. How any one can say this of a passage in which the standing of Jesus is the very point at issue (notice the repeated and emphatic èrú in Matt. 12 27-28 which immediately precedes, and the saying about speaking against the Son of Man in Matt. 12 32 which immediately follows) it is hard to comprehend. Loisy 2 does not attempt to eviscerate the words, but suggests that they do not come from Jesus. He points to the fact that in Mark 90 and Luke 950 we have a saying in a somewhat similar situation-in both places exorcism is being discussed-but of a different spirit, though an analogous form. In Luke it reads, He that is not against you is on your side; in Mark, according to the generally accepted text, though Wellhausen would make it agree with Luke, He who is not against us is on our side. This is more genial, more tolerant, than the saying in Matt. 12 30, Luke 11 23, and therefore may be Das Evangelium Matthaei, ad loc. 2 Les Evangiles Synoptiques, i. 708.

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assumed to be a word of Jesus. Loisy assumes that it is the only word of Jesus on the subject, but the writer must confess himself quite unable to follow the process by which a rédacteur is conjured up qui aurait cru devoir retourner la sentence: 'Qui n'est pas contre vous est pour vous,' en: 'Qui n'est pas avec moi est contre moi.' Aurait cru devoir is good, but it does not justify M. Loisy in laying on the conscience of an imaginary rédacteur the responsibility of producing the reasons which he himself owes to his readers. There is in fact no reason whatever for this fantastic supposition, except the reason that Jesus must not say things which indicate that He had in His own mind the absolute significance. which He has in Christian faith. The two sayings are quite independent-Luke, as we have seen, gives both -and they are strictly relevant to the context in which they occur. In Matt. 12 30, Luke 11 23 Jesus is discussing exorcism with His enemies, who wish to arrest His beneficent work, and He says naturally, in the tone of warning, He that is not with Me is against Me, and he that gathereth not with Me scattereth. In Mark 940, Luke 950 He is discussing the same subject with His disciples, one of whom has just told Him that he had seen a man casting out devils in Jesus' name and forbidden him, because he did not follow with them. Just as naturally Jesus answers here, Forbid him not: he who is not against you is on your side. There is no reason to doubt either the one saying or the other, and both belong to the oldest stratum of evangelic tradition.

The twelfth chapter of Matthew preserves other words of Jesus in which we hear Him speak of His own greatness. Two of these (in verses 41, 42) are found also in Luke (11 31 f.): Behold, there is more than Jonah here; Behold, there is more than Solomon here. A third occurs in Matthew only (v. 6): I say unto you,

there is something greater than the temple here. In all these passages the words underlined are neuter: Jesus does not say directly, I am greater than the temple or Jonah or Solomon, but He declares that where He is a greater cause is represented, greater responsibilities are imposed, greater issues are at stake, than were involved. by relation to the most sacred institutions or 'the most venerated personalities of former times. It is not necessary to ask how Jesus conceived the temple or Jonah or Solomon to be transcended in importance by Himself: the significant fact is that He did. It is in the same consciousness, though in a different tone, that He speaks in another passage preserved both in Matthew and Luke, and therefore going back to their source, though they give it in different connections: 'Happy are your eyes, for they see, and (your) ears, for they hear. (For verily) I say unto you that many prophets (and kings) desired to see what you see and saw not, and to hear what you hear and heard not.' The revelation made in Jesus not only brings great responsibilities, but rare blessedness. The look which Jesus here casts upon the past is one of the most vivid and beautiful things in the New Testament. He enters sympathetically into the yearnings of good men in distant ages, into the hopes that their eyes grew dim with waiting for; and He is conscious that their long-deferred fulfilment has come at last with Him. Matthew inserts the words just after the first parable of Jesus, or rather after the quotation from Isaiah, in which the judicial blindness of the unbelieving people is foretold: in Luke they stand in immediate connexion with the claim of Jesus to be the Son who alone knows and can alone reveal the Father. In any case, they discover the consciousness of Jesus

1 This is Harnack's reconstruction of the passage: Sprüche u. Reden Jesu, 94.

that in Him the absolute revelation has come: those who know Him have the happiness which can never be transcended. All the hopes and longings of the good are consummated in it. He does not say, Blessed are our eyes, for they see, and our ears, for they hear, as if the blessedness were that of a new era in which He shared only as His contemporaries did; but blessed are your eyes and your ears; for what they saw and heard was seen and heard in Him. It is He Himself-His presence in the world, and the revelation of God He makes in word and deed-which is the ground of His felicitation of the disciples. And this, be it remarked once more, is only another way in which He assumes that the proper attitude of men to Himself is that which is everywhere exhibited in the New Testament Church. He has a place which is all His own as the Mediator of the supreme blessedness for men, and to deny Him such a place is not only to subvert historical Christianity, it is to ignore Jesus' presentation of Himself.

We may now proceed to consider another passage which certainly stood in the source common to Matthew and Luke, and possibly even in that source was a quotation, a passage therefore of high antiquity, yet in many respects hard to estimate. In Matthew it is given continuously in ch. 23 34-39, and forms the climax of the great denunciation of the Pharisees with which Jesus' ministry in Jerusalem closes; in Luke it occurs much earlier, and is broken into two. The first part (ch. II 4951), as in Matthew, closes a series of woes pronounced upon the Pharisees, though the scene is not the temple, but a Pharisee's table somewhere in Galilee or Peræa; the second (ch. 1334 f.) is connected with the saying of Jesus that it is not possible that a prophet should perish out of Jerusalem, but is not spoken in the capital nor at the close of Jesus' ministry. More

remarkable even than differences like these, to which the gospels present many parallels, is the manner in which Luke introduces the words of Jesus: 'Therefore also the Wisdom of God said, I will send unto them prophets and apostles,' etc. There are only two things that can be said of this. Either the evangelist, for no reason we can see, identifies Jesus at this point with the Wisdom of God, and then goes on to report the words which Jesus spoke in this character; or Jesus Himself quotes from some book of Wisdom which has been lost to us, making (as the evangelist understood) the words of the Wisdom of God His own. To this we can certainly provide no parallel, yet we may not be justified in pronouncing it impossible. It is plausible, indeed, to argue with Loisy and others that Matthew is right in giving the passage unbroken, and Luke in representing it as a citation. The point of view is that of an apocalyptic writer, surveying God's providential dealings with Israel, and like all his kind renouncing hope. God has done everything to win them, appealed to them by messengers of every type-prophets, wise men, scribes; but from the beginning of the story to the end, from Genesis to Revelation in the Hebrew Bible,1 the stream of righteous blood has never ceased to flow; the Wisdom of God has been scorned and trampled on in all its representatives. At last the hour of vengeance is at hand, but ere it strikes, the heart of Wisdom and

2

The writer sees no need to depart from the old opinion that 'from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zachariah (the son of Barachiah)' is a way of saying 'from the beginning of history to the end'; the reference in the case of Zachariah being to 2 Chron. 24 20 f. --2 Chron. is the last book in the Hebrew canon. It is not certain that 'son of Barachiah' belonged originally to the text (it is wanting in Luke); but even if it did, it would only be a slip of a perfectly natural kind. As Loisy remarks, it is not easy to see what reason a Christian could have for putting the murder of Zachariah the son of Baruch by the Zealots at the beginning of the siege of Jerusalem on a level with that of Abel.

3 See Matt. 23 35, ἐκχυνόμενον.