was to restore as that of 'our father David' (Mark 11 1o), but the humble pomp suggested rather a Prince of Peace than the warrior king who had stretched the bounds of Israel from Egypt to the Euphrates. In any case, however, the triumphal entry is the act of One who identifies His own coming with the coming of the Kingdom of God. 'Son of David' may be a misleading description of the Messiah, but it is with the consciousness of being the Messiah that Jesus here passes before us. THE WICKED HUSBANDMEN Of the various utterances of Jesus in Jerusalem, the one which is first reported by Mark is not the least important to our argument. It is usually called the parable of the wicked husbandmen, but it is not really a parable, like those which we find in the thirteenth chapter of Matthew, but an allegory. A parable is independent of its interpretation and application; the parable of the sower, for example, describes what happens in Nature every year, whether we can discern its spiritual teaching or not. But it is otherwise with allegory. Allegory only comes into existence through the application which is to be made of it: to take the case before us, no proprietor and no husbandmen ever really acted as the proprietor and the husbandmen are here represented as doing. The story has no truth of its own: it is only the relations of God and Israel which are represented in this artificial form. This cannot be disputed, but the confidence with which it is inferred that the words are not those of Jesus is more than the writer can understand. Jülicher, for example,' while admitting that Jesus on ex Die Gleichnisreden Jesu, ii. 385. Cf. Loisy, ii. 319: 'Comme beaucoup d'allégories, celle-ci n'a qu'une valeur de conception théorique et théologique.' The theology, of course, is that of the Church, not of Jesus. It is the ceptional occasions may have used allegory, not parable, cannot avoid the suspicion that this 'parable' is due to a believer of the first generation, who, in dependence on Isaiah, chapter 5, and on parables of Jesus to which he already gave an allegorical interpretation, is seeking to justify the death of Jesus to the religious sense. last and highest proof of God's patience, and must be immediately followed by judgment. The whole, he thinks, shows us how the history of Israel was regarded by the average man who had seen the crucifixion of Jesus and yet believed in Him as Son of God. It is a piece of early Christian apologetic in which we see how the Christian consciousness answered, partly to itself, partly to Jewish attacks upon it, the difficulties presented by the death of its Messiah. In a similar line the passage is criticised by Loisy and many others. There are, however, serious objections to this whole mode of treatment. To begin with, there is no reason why Jesus should not have used allegory as well as parable. We may be quite right in thinking that it is an inferior literary genre, but it is not used here for literary but for practical purposes, and what was done by Isaiah, Ezekiel, and the Psalmists, may quite well have been done by Jesus too. Further, if this allegory had been the work of an early Christian apologist, there are two points in which it would almost certainly have been different. The drastic statement in verse 9-'He will come and destroy the husbandmen and give the vineyard to others'-would have been qualified. This answers to Jesus' conception of the destiny of Israel or her rulers, and of the Kingdom of God (cf. Mark 132), but not to that which we can see from Acts prevailed among the early Christians. They had no such sense as He of what Israel had forfeited by rejecting Jesus, and of what a complete breach had thus been made between the past and the future in the history of the true religion. This is one point: the other is that a Christian who invented such an allegory to justify the death of the Son would hardly have left Him dead. He would have contrived to introduce somehow the resurrection of Jesus, and His entrance into His inheritance in spite of the murderers. It may be said that he does this, in such vague fashion as his literary method admits, in the quotation from the 118th Psalm 'The stone which the builders despised, the same has become head of the corner; this is the Lord's doing, and it is wonderful in our eyes'; but even if this be admitted, we have still to ask why Jesus should not have spoken thus Himself. In point of fact, the whole plausibility of criticism like this depends on the insulation of the passage, and on the legitimacy of treating it as if it stood alone. But it cannot legitimately be treated thus. The Jesus who is represented as speaking in it is the Person whose unique consciousness of Himself and of His relation to God and His Kingdom has already been revealed in ways that cannot be disputed. As the destined Messianic King, He is the Person in whom Israel's history culminates, and it was as certain to Him as prophecy and experience and divine insight could make it, that for Him the history must culminate in a great tragedy. He was the Son, coming after all the servants, but destined to drink a more awful cup, to undergo a more tremendous baptism than they. Not that this was the last reality in His consciousness: the resurrection which annulled death always lay beyond, and He lifts His head in triumph as He points to it in the words of the Psalm. Nor can we say that an allegory like this is a proper enough thing to write, a good subject for private meditation, but that it is not suitable in a concio ad populum: no one could see its bearings. The evangelist expressly tells us that it hit the mark when it was spoken (ver. 12). But how extraordinary, when we take it as the utterance of Jesus, is that conception of Himself and of His place in the designs of God which it reveals. All God's earlier messengers to Israel are servants; He is not servant but Son. He is not a Son, but the one beloved Son of the Father sis, àranntós, ver. 6); He is the heir -all that is the Father's is His. To send Him is to make the final appeal; to reject Him is to commit the sin which brings Israel's doom in its train; yet even His rejection by Israel is not for Him final defeat. God will yet exalt Him and put the inheritance into His hands. In the circumstances of the moment it was inevitable that Jesus should reflect upon God's dealings with Israel and His own place in them; and it is no objection to His reflections to say that they represent the mind of Christians generally, who knew He had been crucified yet believed Him to be the Son of God. He believed Himself to be the Son of God, and when He read the history of Israel in His filial consciousness it unfolded itself to Him as we see it in this allegory. The stupendous thing here, in harmony though it be with His self-revelation as a whole, is the place which He assigns to Himself in the story. It justifies the attitude of the New Testament towards Him, but it is gratuitous to say that it is the product of that attitude. The converse is the fact. DAVID'S SON AND DAVID'S LORD (Mark 12 25-37) No critical difficulty is raised about this passage, and the theological discussions to which it has given rise hardly concern us. It will be universally admitted that in the mind of Jesus 'son of David' was at least an inadequate description of the Messiah. David might have many sons by natural descent, but as only one of them. could be the Messiah, it must have been something dis tinct from natural descent which gave Him his title. No doubt those who hoped for the coming of the son of David meant by the term one who would inherit all that David represented to a patriotic Jew-a hero king who would restore the national independence and empire. To Jesus this was as insufficient a title to Messiahship as physical descent itself. Whether He repudiated the physical descent as He repudiated the political ambitions need not be discussed: what is clear from the passage as a whole is that, in the mind of Jesus, Messiahship depends not on a relation to David, but on a relation to God. How this relation is conditioned, physically or metaphysically, we are not told; but the Messiah is the person to whom God says, 'Sit on my right hand, till I make thine enemies the footstool of thy feet.' Jesus did not discuss questions of this kind at random: His interest in the current ways of conceiving the Messiah was connected with the fact that He was Himself fulfilling the Messianic vocation. Of all Old Testament passages, that which is most frequently referred to in the New is the opening verse of Psalm 110, with its mention of the right hand of God; and this way of representing the exaltation of the Messiah goes back, as we see, to Jesus Himself. The heavenly voice which spoke to Him at the opening of His ministry in the words of one Psalm, "Thou art my Son,' speaks in His soul at the close of it in the corresponding and, if possible, more exalted words of another, 'Sit at my right hand.' This is an immediate inference from the fact that Jesus regarded Himself as Messiah. We cannot enter into the elevation which these words convey. Even the resurrection of Jesus only imperfectly illustrates them. But they are involved in the Messianic consciousness of Jesus, and they justify all that Christians mean when they call Him Lord.' 1 1 If we limited our view to Jesus' criticism of 'Son of David,' as an |