section on primitive Christian preaching. It means that he thought of Jesus while he wrote as exalted at God's right hand, and ready to come again and to establish the Kingdom of God with power. But the present exaltation of Jesus is not unrelated to his past. The character or dignity or function of the Christ attached to Jesus while He was on earth, though it was known at first only to Himself, and though it only came to be apprehended, fitfully and uncertainly, even by those who knew Him best. This has indeed been disputed and denied in recent times. An acute but unbalanced German scholar, the late Professor Wrede of Breslau, argued that no one ever thought of Jesus as the Christ till after the resurrection, and that many of the difficulties and obscurities in the Gospel of Mark are due to the evangelist's efforts to carry back into the career of Jesus upon earth this conception of Messiahship which is applicable only to the Risen Lord. This, again, we do not need to consider here. Whether he was justified or not in doing so, it is certain that the evangelist does carry back the conception of the Christ into the lifetime of Jesus; he represents Peter confessing Him to be the Christ, and Jesus accepting the confession, and making it the starting-point for teaching those truths about Himself and His work which peculiarly constituted 'the gospel.' As Wellhausen has pointed out, there is a whole section of the Gospel according to Mark, that which extends from Peter's confession (827) to Jesus' reply to the ambitious request of the sons of Zebedee (105), which has a peculiarly 'Christian' character. It is concerned very much with the doctrine of the suffering Christ, the Son of Man, who has come to give His life a ransom for many, and who after His death will come again in the glory of His Father with the holy angels; and whatever its historic relation to Jesus, it certainly embodies the

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convictions of Mark as to the place of Jesus in religion. Apart from this, we are not able to say much. Mark never refers to any fulfilment of prophecy in the life of Jesus, as proving or illuminating His Messianic character; the textual difficulties connected with the quotation of Malachi and Isaiah in chap. 1 2f., make it quite probable that these verses were inserted by another hand. It is more plausible to argue that he thought of the mighty works which he records, works in the main of healing love, as appropriate to the Messianic character; this at least would be in keeping with the line of thought taken in Acts 222, 10 38 by Peter, with whose name the Gospel of Mark is connected in the earliest tradition. In His baptism, Jesus was anointed with Holy Spirit and power, and the manifestations of that power in His lifetime were indications of what He was. The words 'Son of God' in Mark 11 are of doubtful authenticity, and we cannot argue from them. Where they stand, they are probably meant to be taken as synonymous with Christ or Messiah. As far as we can see, it is in His baptism with the Holy Spirit that Jesus, as Mark understood it, became the Christ, the Son of God. From that hour He was all that in the faith and experience of Christians He ever came to be. But He could not tell what He was as one can impart a piece of indifferent information to another. He had to reveal Himself as what He was, in life and word and works; He had to be discovered as what He was by men who associated with Him in obedience, trust, and love. The truncated form in which the gospel has come to us, with no resurrection scene, and no words of the Risen Lord, prevents us from seeing as directly in Mark, as we do in the other evangelists, the full scope of the writer's faith. But we have seen what he means by the term gospel, and we know from words which he ascribes to Jesus that he believed the

gospel to be meant for all mankind (13 10, 14 °). Jesus exalted as Lord and Saviour of all, the Jesus whom the evangelist can exhibit to us in this character even in the days of His flesh, is the same incomparable and incommensurable person whom we have met everywhere in New Testament religion.

(b) The Gospel according to Matthew

In the Gospel according to Matthew it is much easier to distinguish the author from the subject, for there is much more which belongs to the author alone. The first two chapters have no parallel in the earlier gospel narrative, and they show us at once the peculiar place which Jesus held in the evangelist's faith. Like all New Testament writers he conceives Jesus as the Christ. Whether 'the book of the generation' (11) refers to the genealogy and the stories of the birth only, or to the narrative as a whole, it is concerned with Jesus as Messiah, son of David, son of Abraham. The idea underlying the genealogy is that the history of Israel, which means the history of God's gracious dealing with the human race, is consummated in Jesus. He is the ideal Son of David to whom it all looks forward, and it is in Him that all the promises made by God to the fathers are to be fulfilled. The characteristic of the Gospel according to Matthew, or perhaps we should rather say the characteristic interest of the author, is seen in his continual reference to Scriptures which have been fulfilled in Jesus. The proof from prophecy that Jesus is the Messiah preoccupies him from beginning to end: 'that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet' runs through his work like a refrain. It is quite true that many of his proofs are to us unconvincing. We can see no religious and no in

tellectual value in references like those in Matthew 2 15 to Hosea, or Matthew 2 18 to Jeremiah. We do not think of a Messianic programme, set out beforehand in the Old Testament, and carried through by Jesus, with precise correspondence, from point to point; correspondence, we feel, is one thing, and fulfilment another. But this only means that the form through which the evangelist expresses his conviction about Jesus is inadequate to the truth in his mind. What he is assured of is that the whole divine intention which pervades the ancient revelation has been consummated at last, and that the consummation is Jesus. The argument from prophecy that Jesus is the Christ is not for us an argument that this or that detail in the life of Jesus answers to this or that phrase in the Hebrew Scriptures; it is the argument that the Old Testament and the New are one and continuous, and that what God is preparing in the one He has achieved in the other. Imperfect as is the form in which this is occasionally conveyed by the evangelist, it cannot be doubted that this is substantially his thought. The unity of the Old Testament and the New, which makes Jesus the centre and the key to God's purposes, was the core of the evangelist's religious convictions, and it is in harmony with the place assigned to Jesus in the common faith.

In speaking of the title of St. Mark's Gospel—'the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ (Son of God)'— it has been remarked that the bracketed words, which are of doubtful genuineness, are probably to be taken as synonymous with the Christ. Though this is probable, however, it is by no means certain. It is quite possible, if Mark wrote these words, that he understood them as Paul would have done; and that though the narrative part of his gospel, which is included in the limits set in Acts 1 21 f., represents the Divine Sonship of Jesus as in a

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peculiar way connected with His baptism, Mark may have conceived it in a higher and independent sense. In view of the fact that the consciousness of Divine Sonship-in other words, of the Fatherhood of God-is the characteristic mark of the Christian religion, the very God whom Christians worship being the God who is Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, it has always seemed to the writer difficult to believe that Son of God when applied by Christians to Jesus meant nothing but Messiah. It must have taken an effort of which Christians were incapable to evacuate the title of everything filial in the Christian sense, of everything which went to constitute their own religious consciousness, while yet that consciousness owed its very being to the Divine Sonship of Jesus. But be the case as it may with Mark, it is certain that to Matthew the Son of God is more than the Messianic King. It would be inappropriate to refer here to words which the evangelist records as spoken by Jesus; such words will come up for consideration at a later stage. It is enough to recall the story of the birth of the Christ. The evangelist sees in it the fulfilment of the prophecy of Isaiah: Behold the virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel. Attention has usually been concentrated here on the supernatural mode in which Jesus entered the world; but if we wish to see the place he held in the religion of the evangelist, and of those for whom he wrote, the most important word is the name of the child. Immanuel, which is, being interpreted, God with us: it is here his significance lies. The Divine Sonship is something more than is declared with power in the resurrection; it is something more than is revealed to Jesus Himself in the baptism; it is something essential to this person, something which enters into the very constitution of His being, which