They… crucified the Lord of Glory. —I CORINTHIANS ii. 8. Who is this King of Glory? The LORD of hosts, He is the King of Glory.
—PsALM xxiv. 10.
The proper subject of the New Testament is Christ. Every page of it, or perhaps we might better say every line of it, has its place in the portrait which is drawn of Him by the whole. In forming an estimate of the conception of His person entertained by its writers, and by those represented by them, we cannot neglect any part of its contents. We can scarcely avoid distinguishing in it, to be sure, between what we may call the primary and the subsidiary evidence it bears to the nature of His personality, or at least the more direct and the more incidental evidence. It may very well be, however, that what we call the subsidiary or incidental evidence may be quite as convincing, if not quite as important, as the primary and direct evidence. The late Dr. R. W. Dale found the most impressive proofs that the Apostles themselves and the primitive Churches believed that Jesus was one with God, rather in the way this seems everywhere taken for granted, than in the texts in which it is definitely asserted. ‘ Such texts,” he remarks, are but like the sparkling crystals which appear on the sand after the tide has retreated; these are not the strongest—though they may be the most apparent—proofs that the sea is salt: the salt is present in solution in every bucket of seawater. And so,” he applies his parable, “the truth of our Lord’s divinity is present in solution in whole pages of the Epistles, from which not a single text could be quoted that explicitly declares it.”¹
We need offer no apology, therefore, for inviting somewhat extended attention to one of the subsidiary lines of evidence of the estimate put upon our Lord’s person by the writers of the New Testament and by our Lord as reported by them. We certainly shall not, by so doing, obtain anything like a complete view of the New Testament’s evidence for the dignity of His person. But it may very well be that we shall obtain a convincing body of evidence for it. What we purpose to do is to attend with some closeness to the designations which the New Testament writers apply to our Lord as they currently speak of Him. These designations will be passed rapidly under our eye with a twofold end in view. On the one hand we shall hope, generally, to acquire a vivid sense of the attitude, intellectual and emotional, sustained by the sev- —— eral writers of the New Testament, and by the New Testament as a whole, to our Lord’s person. On the other, we shall hope, particularly, to reach a clearer notion of the loftiness of the estimate placed upon His person by these writers, and by those whom they represent. We are entering, then, in part upon an exposition, in part upon an argument. We wish to learn, so far as the designations applied to our Lord in the New Testament are fitted to reveal that to us, how the writers of the New Testament were accustomed to think of Jesus; we wish to show that they thought of Him above everything else as a Divine Person. For the former purpose we desire to pass in review the whole body of designations employed in the New Testament of our Lord; for the latter purpose, in passing this material in review, we desire to order it in such a manner as to bring into clear relief its testimony to the profound conviction cherished by our Lord’s first followers that He was of divine origin and nature. In prosecuting our exposition we shall seek to run cursorily through the entire New Testament; in framing our argument we shall lay primary stress on the Gospels, or rather on the Synoptic Gospels, and adduce the remaining books chiefly as corroborative and elucidative testimony to what we shall find in the evangelical narratives. Thus we hope to take at once a wide or even a complete view of the whole field, and to throw into prominence the unitary presupposition by the entire New Testament of the deity of our Lord.
We turn, then, first to the Gospels, and in the first instance to the Synoptic Gospels. We observe at once that, on a prima facie view, the design-, of Our Lord tions they apply to our Lord fall into in the three general classes. They seem to be oi her purely designatory, generally honorific, or specifically Messianic. Of all purely designatory designations, the personal name is the most natural and direct. We can feel no surprise, therefore, to learn that our Lord is spoken of in the Gospels most commonly by the simple name of ‘ Jesus.” Nor shall we feel surprise to learn that the simplest honorific titles are represented as those most frequently employed in addressing Him,—‘ Rabbi,’ with its Greek renderings, Teacher and ‘ Master,’ and its Greek representative, Lord.’ No Messianic title again is more often met with in the narrative of the Gospels than the simple
‘ Christ,” although on our Lord’s lips the Son of Man is constant. The general effect of the narrative on the reader, who passes rapidly through it, noting particularly the designations employed of our Lordis a strong impression that (Fe is thought of by the writers, and is represented by them as thought of by His _contemporary followers and by Himself, as a person of high dignity and unquestionable authority; and that this dignity and authority were rooted, both in their and in His estimation, in His Messianic character. If we are to take the designations employed in the Gospel narratives as our guide, therefore, we should say that the fundamental general fact which they suggest is that Jesus was esteemed by His first followers as the promised Messiah, and was looked upon with reverence and accorded supreme authority as such. C Whether this impression is fully justified by the evidence when it is narrowly scrutinized; and if so what the complete significance of the fact so established is; and whether more than appears upon the surface of it is really contained in the fact—these are matters which must be left to a closer examination of the details to determine.
In undertaking such a closer examination of the details, it will conduce not only to clearness of treatment, but also to surety of result, to take up the several Gospels separately. And perhaps it may be as well to begin with the Gospel of Mark. It is the briefest and in some respects the simplest and most direct narrative we have of the career of our Lord. It may be supposed, therefore, to present to us the elements of our problem in their least complicated shape.