of God, is revealed in the thrilling apostrophe, 'O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killeth the prophets and stoneth them that are sent unto her, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her brood under her wings, and ye would not.' This is not (it is argued) the voice of Jesus, referring to such visits to Jerusalem and to such attempts to win her people as we see in the fourth gospel: it is the voice of God; Jerusalem, in this high poetic key, is not materialthe geographical city in which Jesus was crucified; she is the impersonation of Israel, the mother of the children to whom God appeals. All this may be granted-perhaps we should rather say, All this must be grantedyet the question remains, Is it incredible that the application of it to Jesus should have been due to Himself? It is not necessary to enter into the minor changes by which the evangelists adapt the tradition to their audience-Luke, for example, replacing the Jewish 'wise men and scribes' of Matthew by Christian 'apostles'the two main points are the same in both. These are that Jesus identifies Himself with all God's action towards Israel, finding it continued and indeed consummated in Himself, and that He declares the doom of Israel to be involved in the rejection of Himself and His messengers. Now it is not too much to say that these are constant elements in Jesus' consciousness of Himself and of His significance; the last, in particular, has come before us again and again (v. Matt. 10 15, 11 20 ff.), while the first is involved in the simple conception of Himself as the Messiah, the person through whom God's purpose towards Israel is to be accomplished. All that remains then is the question, which is rather of curious than of serious interest, whether Jesus would have borrowed from a book to express elements of His consciousness so moving and profound. Assuming that a book is

quoted, it also must have been moving and profound -wonderfully and divinely inspired in its apprehension of God's relations to Israel. Nothing but the spirit of Christ in the writer (1 Peter 1") could enable him to enter with such profound sympathy into God's dealings with Israel, and so to speak of them in words which Jesus could afterwards make His own. Is it not gratuitous to suppose that the authority lying behind Matthew and Luke-an authority which we have good reason to believe to be that of the apostle Matthew himself-put these words into the mouth of Jesus without ground? If they were incongruous with what we have already seen to be the mind of Jesus about Himself, we might accept this supposition to explain the incongruity; but when there is no inherent difficulty-when the selfrevelation of Jesus here is in thorough harmony with that which we have already seen, on the basis of Matt. x. and xi., with their parallels in Luke, to be truly historical-the supposition is at least not inevitable. It is easier to believe that whatever the circumstanceswhether in Galilee or in Jerusalem, whether with His death imminent or at a greater distance from it-Jesus took these wonderful words to Himself. They open to us the mind in which He lived and died. The presence in the world of a Person who was able to appropriate such words to identify so absolutely the actions and the cause of God with His own cause and actions-is not confined to this passage; it is, as we have amply seen, the signature of the gospels as a whole. It is the token that we have passed from the Old Testament to the New, and that the New is founded not only on the faith of Christians but on the mind of Christ.1

The striking remark of Harnack on the discourse about the Baptist in Matt. xi. (Sprüche u. Reden Jesu, 167) is not inappropriate here: Dass aber der ganzen Rede das 'Ich bin es' zugrunde liegt, ist kein Grund zu Bedenken, oder man muss den Federstrich über ganzen Inhalt der Evan

PASSAGES IN WHICH JESUS SPEAKS OF HIMSELF AS THE SON OF MAN

In view of the doubt which has been cast on the use of this title by Jesus at all, it is worth while to refer to its distribution in the pages of the gospels. As Dr. Armitage Robinson has pointed out,' it occurs in every one of the strata of the evangelic records which criticism has learned to distinguish. It is found in Mark, in the non-Marcan source common to Matthew and Luke with which we are at present concerned, in passages peculiar to Matthew and to Luke respectively, and in John. Be the difficulties what they may, if anything can be established by testimony, it is established that Jesus used this phrase as a designation of Himself. It was indeed so characteristic of Him that no one, apparently, could give any account of how He spoke without making use of it. When we look more closely at the facts, however, it has to be admitted that the testimony as to the occasions on which it was used is not quite uniform. For instance, in the document with which we are dealing, it is sometimes not quite clear whether its presence is due to Jesus or to the evangelist. In Luke 6 22 we have a beatitude on those who suffer 'for the Son of Man's sake,' where the parallel in Matt. 5 12 has 'for My sake'; and similarly in Luke 12 we have 'him will the Son of Man confess,' where Matt. 102 gives 'him will I confess.' Such disagreements, however, are the exception. In the vast majority of cases, where one evangelist has 'the Son of Man,' so has the other; and in view of this fact it seems an overstatement to say with Harnack, that while it is certain that Jesus used gelien ziehen. The admission of this sound principle would draw the pen through an immense mass of what is regarded as historical criticism of the gospels.

1 The Study of the Gospels, p. 49.

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this title we cannot be certain that He used it on any given occasion. The title is a significant one; and if there are occasions on which an utterance of Jesus depends for its point on this significance, and on which the use of the title is attested both by Matthew and Luke, and therefore by their source, we may surely say that on these occasions we have a certainty of it as well assured as anything can be in history. An attempt has been made to discredit the joint testimony of Matthew and Luke to some striking instances of the use of this title by arguing that it is in the strictest sense Messianic, and that Jesus could not possibly have made public and frequent use of it when His Messiahship was not only not proclaimed by Himself, but not even suspected by His most intimate disciples. It is pointed out, too, in this connexion, that in Mark, with the exception of two instances which are susceptible of easy explanation as due to misapprehension by the evangelist (Mark 2 10-28), the title is not used till after Jesus has been confessed as the Christ at Caesarea Philippi; and that when it is used subsequently to this it is in the specifically eschatological sense. That is, it designates Jesus not as actually the Messiah, which would be a contradiction in terms, no actual king being possible till the Kingdom had actually come; but as the Person who is to be the Messiah, and who will come in that character with the coming of the Kingdom.

The evidence of Mark will be considered at a later stage, but the highly problematical treatment of Mark 2 10-28, and the inferences drawn from it, are entirely insufficient to invalidate the witness of an authority which is at least as ancient as Mark, and had as wide a currency in the Church. We must not be too hasty and too precise in defining 'the Son of Man,' especially if Sprüche u. Reden Jesu, 169.

1

the result is that many of the most moving and characteristic sayings of the gospel are obliterated, while those alone are left which perplex or embarrass the ordinary mind. The title, no doubt, goes back primarily to Dan. 7 13. There, however, it is not a title, but an appellative; not a proper name without meaning, but a term with essential significance of its own. What the seer beholds is not the Son of Man, but one like a son of man-that is, a human form, as opposed to the brute forms of the earlier visions. That this human form has 'the Kingdom' given to it-that it is invested with a final, universal, and glorious sovereignty-is true; in that sense the vision is eschatological. This, too, facilitated and made appropriate in the New Testament the use of the title Son of Man in eschatological connexions. But that on which the main emphasis lies in Daniel is the humanity of the form which is invested with this eschatological splendour, and though an apocalyptist might overlook this, it was not likely to be overlooked by Jesus. We do not need to trace the process by which the human figure of Daniel's vision, which originally stood for Israel, 'the saints of the Most High' (Dan. 7 18), was identified with the Messiah, Israel's ideal representative; but we can be sure that in appropriating the title to Himself, Jesus did not lose the consciousness of what originally gave it its meaning. It was always charged with the idea of humanity, as well as with that of final sovereignty, or apocalyptic splendour. The most technical expression would fill with finer import in the lips of Jesus, and admitting the Messianic and eschatological import of this title as it was currently used, we see no reason to question that Jesus may have employed it on occasion with an emphasis which brought out another part of its contents. It is the more natural to think so when we observe that the later New Testament writers