passages it has been questioned whether two persons are not meant: does not 'our only Master,' it is said, signify God, in distinction from 'our Lord Jesus Christ'? The same question is raised again in 2 Peter 1', where it is open to discussion whether the writer speaks of 'the righteousness of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ' (one person, as it is rendered in the Revised Version), or of 'the righteousness of our God, and the Saviour Jesus Christ' (two persons, as in margin of Revised Version). The difficulty is the same as in Titus 2 13, where the text of the Revised Version has 'the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ' (one person), and the margin, 'the glory of the great God, and our Saviour Jesus Christ' (two persons). Strict grammar favours the rendering according to which there is only one person mentioned in all these places, Jesus Christ, who is called 'our only Master and Lord,' and 'our great God and Saviour.' There are cases, however, in which strict grammar is misleading, and these may be among them. It is awkward to call Jesus Christ 'our God and Saviour' in 2 Peter 1 1, and then to speak in the very next sentence of the knowledge of 'God, and of Jesus our Lord.' Dr. Moulton thinks that 'familiarity with the everlasting apotheosis that flaunts itself in the papyri and inscriptions of Ptolemaic and Imperial times lends strong support to Wendland's contention that Christians, from the latter part of the first century onward, deliberately annexed for their Divine Master the phraseology that was impiously arrogated to themselves by some of the worst of men." A writer like Jude, however, who is conscious of sustaining a tradition, and exhorts his readers to contend earnestly for the faith once for all delivered to the saints, would hardly have described Jesus as the only deonórns and xúptos merely under constraint from Grammar of New Testament Greek, i. 84.

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the impieties of emperor worship. His divine greatness is realised on independent grounds and represented in independent ways. It is conspicuous in the two passages which always redeem Jude in the common Christian mind from the reproach of quoting Enoch. One is the sublime doxology in vv. 24, 25, in which glory, majesty, dominion and power are ascribed to the only wise God our Saviour through Jesus Christ our Lord': it is this mediation of Christ in Christian worship in which His final significance for faith is expressed. The other is the equally sublime exhortation of v. 20: 'But ye, beloved, building yourselves up on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life.' Here as in so many other passages we are confronted with the Holy Spirit, God, and our Lord Jesus Christ as the total manifestation of that on which our salvation depends. It is in the same region as that in which God and His Spirit work that our Lord Jesus Christ works; it is to that side of reality that He belongs; the whole religious life of men is divinely determined by Him as it could not be by any other; this is His permanent and incomparable place in the faith and life of Christians.

It is not necessary to look for peculiarities which distinguish 2nd Peter from Jude: its dependence can hardly be questioned. It is enough to remark that the writer has a strong partiality for those full descriptions which bring out the importance of Christ to the Christian mind; he speaks three times of 'our Lord Jesus Christ,' three times again of 'our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ,' and once of 'the apostles of our Lord and Saviour.' This fulness does not strike one in reading as an orthodox formalism, but rather conveys a deep sense, on the part of the writer, of the superhuman greatness of the per

son of whom he speaks. It is the oldest, it might be said the only, doctrine of revealed religion, that salvation belongs to the Lord; and when Jesus is habitually confessed as Lord and Saviour, His significance for Christian faith is absolute and divine.

VII

CHRIST IN THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS

When we come to the synoptic gospels, we are confronted with difficulties of a new kind. The synoptic gospels contain not only the testimony of the writers to Jesus, but also (through that testimony) the testimony of Jesus to Himself. It is certain that the writers of the gospels drew no clear and conscious distinction between these two things, and could not have conceived that one of them should ever be used to discredit the other. They never thought that the place which Jesus had in their faith was anything else than the place which belonged to Him, and was truly and rightly His: they never thought they were giving Him what was not His due, or what He had not really claimed: the distinction between the religion in which they lived and the historical support which could be asserted for it in the personality and life of Jesus was one which had no formal existence for them. This may be said quite confidently in spite of all that we hear about the 'apologetic' motives which are alleged to account for so much of what we read in our gospels. Jesus, we are told, had such and such a character or value in the faith of His disciples, and in order to justify this character there must be such and such words or deeds or events in His life. If they were not supplied in tradition they were produced more

or less spontaneously by the Christian consciousness or imagination. There was no sin in this, no intent to deceive either others or oneself; Christ must have said or done such and such things, and of course, therefore, He did say and do them. He is represented in our gospels as so saying and doing them, and that is why it is so difficult to use the gospels simply as historical documents. Their writers have no independent historical interest, and what they give us is not the representation of Christ as He really was, but Christ as to them He must have been, Christ transfigured in the luminous haze of faith. The task of the historian is to dissipate the haze, to see Jesus as He really was, to reduce Him to the historic proportions in which alone He can have lived and moved among men. To faith it may be an ungrateful task, in performing which it is impossible to avoid wounding the tenderest feelings; yet faith in God can have no interest superior to that of truth, and ought to be confident that whatever it may lose in the process the end can be nothing but gain.

At the point which we have now reached in our discussion it is necessary to have the possibilities here indicated in view, but the critical appreciation of them will come later. It will be sufficient for our present purpose to say that while everything that we find in an evangelist concerning Jesus-including all that is said and done by Jesus Himself-must be taken into account in reproducing that evangelist's religion, we shall here confine our attention to that minimum of matter in which the mind of the evangelist can be clearly distinguished from that of his subject. There are characteristics in Mark, in Matthew, and in Luke which belong to each in particular, and in these, though not in these only, we have a clue to what we seek.

(a) The Gospel according to Mark

The oldest of our gospels has a title: 'the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ (Son of God).' It can hardly be doubted that the author uses the term gospel in the sense of the apostolic church. Luke does not use it at all, and Matthew never without qualification (see Matt. 4 23, 9 35, 24 14, 26 13); but Mark has it six times without any qualification, and in two others he has 'the gospel of God' (1), indicating its author, and 'the gospel of Jesus Christ' (11), indicating its subject. He does not call his book a gospel, but to present Jesus as He is presented in this book is to preach the gospel, or at least to exhibit, as Mark understood them, the facts on the basis of which the gospel was preached. For him Jesus is not so much a preacher of the gospel, though he says that He came proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying 'Repent and believe in the gospel'; He is the subject of the gospel and its contents. He is not the first of a series of messengers who all came with the same message, and were all related to it in the same way; the message itself which is called gospel is embodied in Him, and the only way to deliver it is to make Him visible. This is implied in the very use of the term gospel, and it is sufficient to put Mark, as a witness to the place of Jesus in Christianity, in line with those whose testimony we have already examined. Whatever his Christology may be, Jesus has a place in his religion to which there is no analogy. The gospel is the gospel of Jesus Christ as it is not the gospel of any other. Could Mark, or can we, conceive any other figure sharing in the place and the religious significance of Jesus as they are presented to us in his brief and vivid record?

Mark, as his title shows, conceived Jesus as the Christ. What this means has been explained already in the