Indeed, we can demonstrate this without difficulty. For it is easy to show that it is impossible to construct a primitive Mark which will not contain this portrait of a supernatural Jesus. Take what is probably the most irrational hypothesis of the nature of the primitive Mark which has ever been suggested,—that which would confine its contents strictly to the matter common to all three Synoptics, as if each Gospel must be supposed to have transferred into its substance every word which stood in this common source of them all. Even in the broken sentences of the absurd ‘ telegraphese” Gospel,² which on this hypothesis is supposed to represent the primitive evangelical document, the portrait of the divine Christ is ineffaceably imbedded. In it, as in the larger Mark, the stress of the presentation is laid on the Messiahship of Jesus, which is copiously and variously witnessed. Peter in his great confession declares Him the ‘ Christ (8²⁹) and the declaration is accepted by Jesus Himself; as also, when adjured by the High Priest at His trial to say whether He is the ’ Christ,” He acknowledges that He is, in the highest sense (14¹,⁶). The implied claim to kingly estate He also expressly makes (15²,³²); as also the involved claim of being the promised ‘ Son of David (10⁴⁷,⁴⁸), —although His conception of the Messiahship was so little exhausted by this claim that He takes pains to point out that the Messiah was acknowledged by David himself to be his Lord,’ using the term obviously in a high sense. (12³). That He was familiarly spoken of by His disciples as Lord is also made evident (11³); and He Himself asserts that His Lordship is high enough to give Him authority over the religious ordinances of Israel (22⁸). The tradition applies, indeed, the term Lord to Him in citations from the Old Testament, where it stands for Jehovah Himself (1³). The evil spirits greet Him by the high title of Son of God (5⁷), and the same title is suggested to Him as a synonym of the Messiah in His accusation (14⁶¹), and in neither case is it repelled. He Himself indeed in a parable represents Himself as in a unique sense the Son and ‘ Heir of God, differentiated as such from all servants” whatsoever (12⁶,⁷); and receives the testimony of heaven itself that He is God’s Son and His beloved Sen (1¹¹ 9⁷). He speaks of Himself, however, with more predilection as the Son of Man’; and under this self-designation He asserts for Himself power over the religious ordinances of Israel (2²⁸), and even the divine prerogative of forgiving sins (2¹⁰), although He anticipates for Himself only a career of suffering, predicting that He will be betrayed (14²⁰) into the hands of men (9³¹) who shall mock and scourge and kill Him (10³³). Afterwards, however, He shall rise again (10³⁴) and ascend to the right hand of power (14⁶²), whence He shall return in clouds with great power and glory (13²⁶), the glory of the Father and the angels (8³⁸). It is clear that the designation Son of Man is derived from Daniel 7¹³,¹⁴ (13²⁰ 8²⁸ 14⁶²) and the portrait presented under it is that of a being of more than human powers and attributes. In complete harmony with this portrait He is represented as calling Himself also ‘ the Bridegroom (2¹⁹,²⁰), charged as that term was with Old Testament associations with Jehovah (cf. Lord of 1³); and in immediate connection with this high designation, too, He speaks of His death, thus instituting a close parallel between this designation and that of the Son of Man.” In both alike, indeed, He evidently is regarded as presenting Himself as a personage of superhuman, or rather of divine quality, who has come to earth (12¹⁷) only on a mission and who suffers and dies here only to fulfill that mission.³

No doubt there are some striking phrases occurring in our present Mark which are lacking from this series Of broken extracts from it. But the same figure is here outlined. And most ¹⁻¹¹f oven these striking phrases are restored if we will attend also to passages common to Mark and one of the other evangelists, of which it would be hard to deny that they may therefore have had a place in the primitive document underlying all three. Thus, for example, in the fragments peculiar to Matthew and Mark, while Jesus is not addressed as Lord except by the Syro-Pheenician woman (Mk =²⁸8 Mt 15²⁷), and is not spoken of at all by the general Messianic designation, the Christ,’ He yet does call Himself both the ‘ Son of Man,’ and undefinedly, the Son.’ As Son of Man,’ he asserts, He “ came” to execute a great mission, not to be ministered unto but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many (Mk 10⁴, Mt 20²⁸), and therefore has a prospect of suffering before Him (Mk 9¹², Mt 17¹², Mk 14⁴¹,

Mt 26⁴⁵, but dies only to rise again (Mk 9⁹, Mt 17). As Son He represents Himself as of superangelic dignity, and therefore above all creatures, standing next to God Himself (Mk 13³², Mt 24³⁶). In the passages peculiar to Mark and Luke, we find Him testified to as the Messiah by the demons, who, although they know His earthly origin (‘ Jesus of Nazareth’), profess to know Him also to be the ‘ Holy One of God (Mk 1²⁴, Lk 4³⁴) and the ’ Son of the Most High God (Mk 5⁷, Lk 8²⁸). Not only does He not repel these ascriptions, but He speaks of Himself as the Son of Man,’ teaching that He is to suffer many things and be killed, but after three days to rise again (Mk 8³¹, Lk 9²²). A primitive gospel containing all this falls short in nothing of the testimony borne by our present Mark to our Lord’s higher nature.

It is not neccessary for our purpose to expend effort in endeavoring to ascertain the compass most commonly attributed to the second hypothetical document supposed to underlie our Synoptics, the so-called, and let us add, very much miscalled, “” Logia.”⁴ We may as well at once direct our eyes to its minimum contents,—the passages peculiar to Matthew and Luke,—even in the meager compass of which we shall find evidence enough that this document, whatever its extent, presented Jesus as a Divine Being. That He was the Messiah He is represented as Himself indicating by pointing to His works (Mt 11³, Lk 7¹⁹), which, He intimates, evidently on the basis of Isaiah 61¹, accredit Him as the One who was to Come.” It is apparently as Messiah that He is addressed as ‘ Lord (Mt 8⁸, Lk 7⁶), and He is represented as adverting to this customary mode of addressing Him in order to declare that it is not merely verbal recognition of His authority but actual obedience to His words alone which will constitute a claim upon His mercy (Mt 7²¹, Lk 6⁴⁶)—where, it is to be noted, He presents Himself as ‘ Lord of the destinies of men, by their relations to whom men stand or fall. He is accordingly appropriately spoken v to by Satan as Son of Ged (Mt 4³,⁶, Lk 4³,⁹); and currently calls Himself by the great Danielic title of Son of Man.” He explains that this Son of Man has come in the fashion of men, eating and drinking (Mt 11¹, Lk 72⁴), and living a hard Life (Mt 8²⁰, Lk 9⁸)—ending in betrayal and death (Mt 26⁴⁸, Lk 22⁴⁷); but after death is to rise again (Mt 12⁴⁰, Lk 11³⁰). But even while on earth He asserts for Himself an unbroken communion with God, or rather a continuous intercommunion of Himself as Son with the Father (Mt 11²⁷, Lk 10²²); knowing the Father as perfectly as He is known by the Father, and therefore able to make known the Father as His sole adequate revelation to men. In this great passage we have what must be considered the culminating assertion on our Lord’s part of His essential deity.

It is clear, then, that the documents which, even in the view of the most unreasonable criticism, are supposed to underlie the structure of our present Synoptics are freighted with the ¹same teaching which these Gospels themselves embody as to the person of our Lord. Literary criticism cannot penetrate to any stratum of belief more primitive than this. We may sink our trial shafts down through the soil of the Gospel tradition at any point we please; it is only conformable strata that we pierce. So far as the tradition goes, it gives consentient testimony to an aboriginal faith inthe deity of the founder of the religion of Christianity. In these circumstances it is not strange that another mode of analysis is attempted. Literary criticism is abandoned for historical criticism: and we are invited to distinguish in our Gospels not between later and older documentary strata, but between narrative and reportorial elements. We do not wish to know, it is said, what Matthew, Mark or Luke thought, or what was thought by those represented by them or by any predecessor of theirs—the Christian community to wit, even the _primitive Christian community. What we wish to know is what Jesus Himself thought. We appeal from the representation of Jesus given by His followers to the self-testimony of Jesus. Let us have Jesus’ own conception of Himself.

It is not necessary to spend much time upon this demand in its simplest form, that, namely, which would merely separate out from the Synoptic Gospels as they stand the words attributed to Jesus, and seek to ascertain from them Jesus’ witness to the nature of His person and the quality of His dignity. It must have been observed as we ran over the designations applied to our Lord in the Gospels and sought to estimate their significance, that the most remarkable of them are drawn from the words of Jesus. The fact is too patent and striking to have failed to attract attention: the higher teaching of the Gospels as to our Lord’s person is embodied very especially in His own words. It is on His lips, for example, that the term Lord appears when employed in its loftiest connections. It is He alone who applies to Himself the significant title of ‘ Son of Man,’ the vehicle of the most constant claim for Him of a superhuman nature. It is He alone who, speaking out of His own consciousness, proclaims Himself superior to those highest of God’s creatures, the angels (Mk 13³², Mt 24³⁵): represents Himself as living in continuous and perfect intercommunion with the Father, knowing Him even as He is known by Him and acting as the sole adequate mediator alike of the knowledge of God and of the grace of God to men (Mi 11²⁷, Lk 10²²): and in His great closing utterance places Himself, along with the Father and Holy Spirit and equally with them, even in the awful precincts of the Divine Name itself (Mt 28¹⁹). To separate between the narrative and reportorial elements of the Gospels, therefore, only brings home to us with peculiar poignancy the testimony they bear to the deity of our Lord, resting this testimony, as they do, onthe firm basis of our Lord’s own. self-testimony—a selftestimony in which He at times lays bare to us the innermost depths of His divine self-consciousness.

There can be no question of the deity of our Lord, therefore, if we can trust the report which the evangelists give of His words. It is at this point, however, that the assault on the validity of their representation is made. We are not asked to distinguish between what the evangelists say in their own person and what they say in the person of Jesus. (We are asked to distinguish (between what is really theirs in their account of the (life and teaching of Jesus and what is really Jesus’ “own transcribed into their narratives. It is suggested that they may have, or rather that they must have, and actually have, attributed much to Jesus which He never said; that they have read back their own ideas into His teaching, and unconsciously—or more or less consciously—placed on His lips what was in point of fact the dogmatic elaborations of the later Christian community. And it is demanded that we, therefore, subject the whole body of the evangelic representation of Jesus’ teaching to the most searchingly critical scrutiny with a view to sifting out from it what may really be depended upon as Jesus’ own. Thus only, we are told, will it be possible to find firm footing. Faith is the foe of fact: and in the enthusiasm of their devotion to Jesus it was inevitable that His followers should clothe Him in their thought of Him with attributes which He did not possess and never dreamed of claiming: and it was equally inevitable that they should imagine that He must have claimed them and have ended by representing Him as claiming them. We shall never know the truth about Jesus, therefore, we are told, until we penetrate behind the Jesus of the evangelists to the Jesus that really was.

The situation might not have been so bad, we are told, if the evangelists had been merely transmitters of a tradition, like, say, the rabbinical schools. But there is an essential difference between the two cases, a difference which casts us with respect to the evangelic tradition into grave doubt. This difference is due to the unfortunate fact that the evangelists themselves believed in Jesus and loved Him. In our case,” therefore, we are told,⁵ “we have not merely pupils transmitting the teaching of their master, but a believing community speaking of one they honor as the exalted Lord. Even the oldest Gospel is written from the standpoint of faith; already for Mark Jesus is not only the Messiah of the Jewish people, but the miracu- lous eternal Son of God whose glory shone in the world.⁶ “And it has been rightly emphasized that in this regard our three first Gospels are distinguished from the fourth only in degree. Must there not, then, have taken place here a complete repainting from the standpoint of faith? For there is a certain propriety in saying that faith is the enemy of history. Where we believe and honor, we no longer see objectively.” Accordingly we are told that the deepest longing of men’s hearts to-day is to rediscover the real Jesus.

“There is a great desire to know Him at first hand,” it is said,⁷ “not merely through the loving vision of His earliest interpreters, but as He looked and spoke and worked and thought.” Which is as much as to say that the vision the evangelists give us of Jesus is not conformable to the reality, but has been distorted by their love. If we wish the bald truth about Him and His claims we must go behind them.

This point of view, it will be observed, is definite enough. The evangelists are not to be trusted in the report they give of the teaching of bout Himself. But embarrassing questions remain. Above all, these embarrassing questions: Why should we not trust the evangelists’ report of Jesus’ teaching as to His own nature? And, distrusting them, how are we to get behind their report? That the evangelists believed in Jesus and loved Him does not seem in itself an absolutely compelling reason why we should distrust their report of His teaching concerning His own nature. Suppose we assume for the moment that Jesus did assert for Himself superhuman dignity. How does it throw doubt upon that fact that those who report it to us were led—possibly by overwhelming evidence of its truth—to believe that in so asserting He spoke truly? Are we to lay it down as the primary canon of criticism that no sympathetic report of a master’s teaching is trustworthy; that only inimical reporters are credible reporters?

Absurd as it seems, this is the actual canon of critical reconstruction upon which our would-be guides, in recovering from the obscuring hands of the evangelists the real Jesus, would have us proceed. It has found somewhat notorious enunciation in Professor Schmie-del’s article Gospels” in the Encyclopedia Biblica.? But it is so far from being peculiar to Professor Schmie-del that it is the common foundation stone upon which the whole school of criticism with which we are now concerned builds its attempt to penetrate behind the evangelical narratives and to recover from these an earlier and therefore presumably truer picture of Jesus and His claims.⁸ (Under its guidance we are set to searching diligently through the evangelical narratives (as if for hid treasures) for sentences or fragments of sentences in the reported words of Jesus, which appear, or may be made to appear, out of harmony with the high claims He is consentiently and constantly reported by all the evangelists to have made for Himself: and on these few broken passages, torn from their context and shredded in their own contents, is erected, as on its foundation stone, a totally new portrait of Jesus, expressing a totally new self-consciousnesswhich stands related to the Jesus of the evangelists and the self-consciousness which is ascribed to Him in their account, of course, as its precise contradictoryseeing that it is precisely on the principle of contradiction that it has been concocted.

Note: P. 1872: “When a profane historian finds before him a historical document which testifies to the worship of a hero unknown to other sources, he attaches first and foremost importance to those features which cannot be deduced merely from the fact of this worship, and he does so on the simple and sufficient ground that they would not be found in this source unless the author had met with them as the fixed data of tradition. The same fundamental principle may safely be applied in the case of the Gospels, for they also are all of them written by worshipers of Jesus.”

Surely we do not need to pause to point out that the procedure we are here invited to adopt is a prescription for historical investigation which must always issue in reversing the portraiture of the historical characters to the records of whose lives it is applied. The result of its universal application would be, so to speak, the writing of all history backwards and the adornment of its annals with a series of portraits which would have this only to recommend them, that they represent every historical character as the exact contrast to what each was thought to be by all who knew and esteemed him. The absurdity and wrong of invoking such a canon in the case of our Synoptic Gospels are peculiarly flagrant, inasmuch as these Gospels, as we have seen, and as these very critics are frank to allow, are themselves of very early date and rest on a documentary basis, quite at one with them in the portrait they draw of Jesus, which is naturally earlier than themselves; and therefore reflect the universal conviction of the first generation of Christians. It is really impossible to doubt that they bring to us the aboriginal testimony of the primitive Church—a Church which included in its membership a considerable number of actual eyewitnesses of Jesus and ear-witnesses of His teaching, —as to His claims and personality.

The absolute unanimity of that Church in its view of Jesus is very strikingly illustrated by the difficulty of discovering passages imbedded in our Gospels which can be used as a foundation for the opposing portraiture of Jesus which the critics would fain draw. Professor Schmiedel can by the utmost sharpness of inquisition find only five, which by applying more exegetical pressure he can increase only to nine. “The groundlessness of this assault on the trustworthiness of the portrait of Jesus presented in our Synoptics may fairly be said, therefore, to be matched by its resultlessness. Material cannot be gathered from our Gospels out of which a naturalistic Christ can be created. The method of criticism adopted being purely subjective, moreover, the assumed results naturally vary endlessly. We feel a certain sympathy, therefore, with the position assumed by those writers who frankly admit that, the evangelical portraiture of Jesus being distrusted, the real Jesus is hopelessly lost to our sight. Strive as we may, we are told, we cannot penetrate behind the Jesus of our first informants—the writers of the New Testament, upon whose palette had already been mingled, nevertheless, colors derived from Jewish prophecy, Rabbinic teaching, Oriental gnosis and Christian philosophy. “All that can be determined with certainty from these writings,” it is declared, is that conception of Christ which was the object of faith of the early Christian communities and their teachers’: the real Jesus is hopelessly hidden under the incrustations with which faith has enveloped it.¹⁰ Nor does there seem to be ¹⁰ So, Pfleiderer, The Early Christian Conception of Christ, E. T,, 1905.

lacking a certain logical force in the reasoning of bolder souls⁹ who drive the inference one step further and ask what need there is of assuming a real Jesus at all. The “real Jesus” whom the critics invent certainly was not the author of the Christianity that exists. If the Christianity that actually exists in the world can get along without the Jesus which alone would account for it, why, they argue, must there be assumed behind it a Jesus which will not account for it; of whom this only may be said,—that He is a useless figure, the assumption of whom is so far from accounting for that great religious movement which we call Christianity, that it is certain that the movement did not arise in Him and did not derive its fundamental convictions from Him? Let us, then, assume, they say, that there never was any such person as Jesus at all, and the picture drawn of Him in the evangelists is pure myth.

It is interesting—almost amusing—to observe our ‘disintegrating critics over against this more radical employment of their own methods, suddenly taking up the role of apologists’¹ and writing so in the spirit and with the adoption of so many of the exact arguments of the “” apologists,” whom they have been wont to despise, as to lead the reader to exclaim, ‘” Are these, too, among the prophets?” It is all, however, in vain. The fatal subjectivity which underlies their own view reasserts itself in the end and leaves them without adequate defense against extremists, simply because whether one stops with.them or goes on with the others is not a matter of principle, but only of temperament. It is just as impossible that Christianity can have sprung from the Jesus which these critics give us, as that it should have sprung up without any Jesus behind it at all, as the radicals assert. There is just as little reason in a sound historical criticism to discover the Jesus of Bousset behind the Jesus of the evangelists, as there is for discovering with Kalthoff that there was no real Jesus at all behind the Jesus of the evangelists. The plain fact is that the evangelists give us the primitive Jesus, behind which there is none other; and the attempt to set the Jesus they give us aside in favor of an assumed more primitive Jesus can mean nothing but the confounding of all historical sequences. The real impulse for the whole assault upon the trustworthiness of the portrait of Jesus drawn in the Gospels lies not in the region of historical investigation but in that of dogmatic prejudice,—or to be more specific, of naturalistic preconception. The moving spring of the critical reconstruction is the determination to have a ‘ natural”’ as over against the ‘ supernatural Jesus of the evangelists. There must be a more primitive Jesus than the evangelists’—this is the actual movement of thought—because their Jesus is already a supernatural Jesus,—“ a miraculous Son of God, in whom men believe, whom men elevate to a place by the side of God.”¹³ The plain fact, however, is that this supernatural Jesus is the only Jesus historically witnessed to us; the only Jesus historically discoverable by us; the only Jesus historically tolerable. We can rid ourselves of Him only by doing violence to the whole historical testimony and to the whole historical development as well. Not only is there no other Jesus witnessed in the documents, but no other Jesus can have formed the starting point of the great movement which, springing from Him, has conquered to itself the civilized world. What must absorb our attention immediately, however, is the difficulty that is found even on these naturalistic presuppositions in eliminating from the portrait of Jesus drawn in the Gospels all supernatural traits and all claims on His own part to a supernatural personality. To be successful here, there is required such a policy of thoroughgoing rejection as Kalthoff’s and XW. B. Smith’s, who sweep away the whole figure of Jesus itself as a myth, or at least as Wrede’s, who would have us believe that Jesus made no claim to even “Messianic dignity, so that the entire picture drawn of His career in our Gospels is false; or else such a policy of “ignoramus’ as Pfleiderer’s who declines to form any picture of the real Jesus at all. The majority of naturalistic critics recoil, however, from these extremes with an energy which seems to betray at least a semiconsciousness that there may haply be found in them the reductio ad absurdum of their whole method. Their position is certainly a hard one between these extremes from which they recoil and the portrait of the evangelists toward which their recoil brings them back. In enx deavoring to avoid conclusions recognized by them as intolerable they are compelled to give recognition to facts as to the claims of the real Jesus which are fatal to their whole elaborately argued position.

They are forced, for example, to allow that Jesus did announce Himself as the Messiah.¹⁰ And they are forced to admit that, in developing His Messianic conception, He was wont to call Himself the πεδως Coriatuly Son of Man.¹⁵ It makes very entertaining reading to observe Bousset, Messiah and for example, grudgingly conceding the f+ and then nervously endeavoring to save himself from the consequences of the damaging acknowledgment. He cannot deny that this title “represents a perfectly definite conception of the Messiah,” a conception which sees in the Messiah a supernatural figure who comes down from heaven for a mission, and who is clothed with no less a function than that of the Judge of the world: and he cannot deny that Jesus represents Himself as “the Son of Man.” But he wishes us to believe that Jesus did this only under great pressure, as the close of His life drew near and evil fate closed about Him, —seizing and clinging to the Danielic prophecy to comfort Himself in the face of the fast-coming disaster. And He assures us that Jesus did not adopt the title even then in its full content including the idea of preéxistence and His own judgeship of the world.” “To Him,” he tells us, the idea of the Son of Man “meant only one thing,—His return in glory.”¹⁶ He did not thereby place Himself on a level with God. Above all, He did not lay claim to the judgeship of the world, although that conception was, strictly speaking, included in that of the Son of Man.” It is true,” he adds, “in the narrative of our Gospels, the opposite. seems to be the case. But it is inconceivable… that Jesus… should have arrogated to Himself the judgeship of the world in place of God. This is “an instance of the faith of the community working upon the tradition… As the tradition was handed down by the community, Jesus was gradually removed from the position of a simple witness for His followers “before God’s tribunal to that of the actual judgeship id of the world.”¹⁷ That is to say, in brief, Bousset does “not like the consequences of allowing that Jesus applied “to Himself the title of Son of Man,’ and, finding Himself unable nevertheless to deny that He did apply ¹⁶ Jesus, p. 194. Cf. among naturalistic writers who admit that Jesus used the title Son of Man in connection with promises of returning in glory: Weisse, Evang. Geschichte i. 593 seq.: Keim, Jesus of Naz., m1. 85-87; Wittichen, Idee des Reiches Gottes, 166-172; Vernes, Idées Mess., 229-233, and note on 243; Schenkel, Character of Jesus, 145; Zeller, Strauss und Renan, 88-91. These are brought together by Stan-ton, p. 249, note I.

17. P. 203-5.

this title to Himself, contents himself simply with denying the consequences,— Jesus could not have meant it. Those who prefer to determine historical facts by the testimony of credible witnesses, rather than by the witness of Bousset’s consciousness as to what were fitting, will probably think otherwise.¹¹

Similarly it cannot be even plausibly denied that Jesus spoke the remarkable words attributed to Him in which He acknowledges His ignorance of the time of His promised ¹second coming. The critics are indeed in a great quandary as to this passage. It is not the kind of a passage they can assume the evangelists to have invented. On their fundamental canon that statements which are, or seem to be, in conflict with the evangelists’ hero-worship of Jesus, bear the ineradicable stamp of genuineness, they are bound to attribute these words of Jesus. For was not Jesus to the evangelists the omniscient Son of God? And how could they put on His lips a confession of ignorance of so simple a matter as the time of His return? In point of fact, accordingly, this passage is found among the nine absolutely credible” passages which Schmiedel declares “the foundation pillars for a truly scientific life of Jesus,”’¹² and is pronounced by him to have been “ most certainly”’ spoken by Jesus. Yet in this passage Jesus proclaims Himself a being superior to angels, sepa- “rated, that is, from the entire category of creaturely existences, and assimilated to the divine: “No one, not even the angels in heaven, nor yet the Son, but God only.”

And if it must be allowed that the real Jesus” currently called Himself ‘ the Son of Man,’ no doubt with full consciousness of its implications, and asserted for Himself superangelic dignity, it would seem mere _hypercriticism which would deny to Him the great as- sertion of intercommunion with the Father made in Mt 11²⁷, Lk 10²². On the general critical canon that sayings reported by both Matthew and Luke are to be used with confidence as representing the thought of Jesus,”² this passage must be accepted as an authoritative utterance of His.²¹ But, in that case, the real Jesus” must be credited with conceiving His relation to the Father less as that of a servant than as that of a fellow: as the Son He moves in the sphere of the divine life. And, this once allowed, what reason remains for denying to Him the culminating expression of His divine self-consciousness, the sublime utterance in which He gives the Son a share in the Divine Name itself (Mt 28⁹)? Of course it is denied to Him by the critics of the school we have been considering. But the denial is in the circumstances purely arbitrary and creates a situation which leaves an important historical sequence unaccounted for. It is undeniable, for example, that the trinitarian mode of speech here illustrated was current in the Church from its earliest origin: it already appears in Paul’s Epistles, for exampleespecially, as a familiar and well-understood form of speech, in 2 Cor 13⁴, which was written not more than twenty-five years after our Lord’s death and antedates all our Gospels. This current form of speech among Christians of the first age finds its complete account if the usage were rooted in utterances of our Lord, but it hangs inexplicably in the air without some such supposition. The occurrence of the passage in Mt 28¹⁹ in the records of our Lord’s teaching is thus too closely linked to a historical situation to permit its displacement on the purely subjective grounds on which alone its genuineness can be assailed.¹³

It would seem to be reasonably clear, therefore, that the attempt to penetrate behind the Synoptic tradition with a view to discovering a “real Jesus,” differing from the Synoptic Jesus as the natural differs from the supernatural, has failed. The purely subjective grounds on which such an attempt must proceed in order to reach its goal, lays it open to the exaggeration which would eliminate the figure of Jesus from history altogether. From this exaggeration, it can save itself only by imposing arbitrary limitations upon the application of its subjective principle, which render it nugatory for the end for which it is invoked. In any event no reasonable grounds can be assigned for discarding. the portrait of Jesus drawn by the Synoptists, or for depriving Him of the great sayings by which He is represented by them as testifying to His essential deity.. It is impossible to deny on any reasonable grounds that Jesus called Himself the Son of Man by predilection, and it is purely arbitrary to suppose that in doing so He did not mean what the term implies. It is equally impossible to deny that He represented Himself under the denomination of Son as of superangelic dignity, and as standing in a relation of intimate continuous intercourse with God the Father. This prepares the way for allowing farther that He represented Himself as sharer with the Father in the divine Name itself, and makes nugatory all subjective objection to it. The strictest scrutiny of the Synoptic record of Jesus’ teaching, in other words, renders an appeal from their representation to Jesus’ own teaching meaningless. It is not only the Synoptists who testify that Jesus is a divine person, but the Jesus they report: it is not only the Jesus as reported by them who bears this witness to Himself, but the only Jesus of history.

On the basis of the Synoptic record, in other words, we: can be fully assured that Jesus not only was believed to have taught that He was a divine person, but actu- ally did so teach.²³

Note: Evang., mL. 6, 32, πορευθέντες μαθητεύσατε πάντα ta ἔθνη dv 7 ὀνόματέ pov διδάσκοντες κτλ.), in which Conybeare, Ztschr. fir N. T. Wiss, 1901, p. 175 seq. supposes that he has discovered the original text, cf. E. Riggenbach, Der Trinit. Tanfbefehl, 1903 (Schlatter-Cremer, Beitr. VII. 1), by whom the matter is set at rest (erledigt). From Eus. Epist. ad Cesar. (Socr. h. e. 1. 8);. Marc. 1. 1; Hist. Eccl., III. 5, and other passages, it may be seen that Eusebius recognized the received text as that which had been transmitted to him too, and as that which alone could be employed in dogmatic discussion.” ²³ Cf. Stanton, Jewish and Christian Messiah, p. 252: “His own express language claimed the title [of Messiah] in a sense not one whit less supernatural and glorious than that in which it was afterwards understood.” So p. 390: “I have endeavored to show that Jesus must have claimed to be the Christ in a sense involving His deity.” Cf. pp. 154, 155.

---

← The Jesus of the Synoptists · Contents · The Designations of Our Lord in John and Their Significance →

Footnotes

1. Cf. O. Schmiedel, Die Hauptprobleme der Leben-Jesu Forschung 1906, p. 35: “The early Church in whose circles the narratives of the life of Jesus originated,… was at one in its acknowledgment of Christ, its exalted Lord.” TAA ↩

2. Cf. E. A. Abbott and W. G. Rushbrooke, The Common Tradition of the Synoptic Gospels, etc., 1884, p. x1: “Is it not possible that the condensed narrative which we can pick out of the three Synoptic records represents the elliptical style of the earliest Gospel notes or Memoirs, which needed to be expanded before they could be used for the purpose of teaching…?” ↩

3. There may be compared with this sketch the minimizing account which von Soden (History of Early Christian Literature, 1906, p. 144), gives of the christology of the primitive “Mark,” which according to him was of somewhat wider compass than what we have allowed it. “Somewhat more frequently,” he says, “than in the Logia of St. Matthew, stress is laid upon the Messianic character of Jesus—for instance, in the narrative of the Baptism (1¹⁰ sed) in the cry of the possessed (1²⁴), in the simile of the bridegroom (2¹⁹), in the question concerning the Davidic sonship of the Messiah (12³5sed-), perhaps in the claim to forgive sin (2¹⁰); again, on the part of the disciples in their confession (8²⁹), and in the petition of the sons of the Zebedee (10³⁷); finally on the part of our Lord, the disciples, and the people, in the story of the entry into Jerusalem (xx¹ sed). However, the expression “Son of God never occurs except in the voice at the Baptism (1¹¹), and in the utterance of 13³², though elsewhere in the Gospel it forms the proper formula for profession of belief (1¹ 3¹¹ 7 97 14⁶¹ 15³⁹); and the word Christ only occurs in the Confession of the Twelve (82⁹), and in the theological dispute of 12²⁵, though it likewise is often employed elsewhere by the evangelist (1¹,³4 1321 1451 1532). The term Son of Man is found in 2¹⁰,28 10³³,⁴⁵5 as also in 14²¹,⁴¹,⁶², if indeed these parts of the story of the Passion belong to the group of which we are speaking; while in the sections due to the evangelist it occurs only in ⁹,¹²,³¹ after the pattern of 8³¹ and 10³³.” One cannot help admiring the skill with which the attention of the reader is kept from dwelling on the fact that all the significant, high designations of Jesus are left in the fragment of the Gospel which is allowed to be primitive; but the fact cannot even so be totally obscured. ↩

4. The reconstruction of these so-called “Logia” by Harnack in his Spriiche und Reden Jesu, etc. 1907, pp. 88-102, provides one of the most convenient and accessible forms in which they may be studied, although Harnack (like Wellhausen) deprives them of the Passion story, and even eliminates the conception of the Passion from them (see to the contrary, Burkitt, The Gospel History and its Transmission, 1907). Their christology is minimizingly described by von Soden, History of Early Christian Literature, 1906, pp. 136, 137. While asserting that the claim advanced for Jesus in this document is “scarcely more than any master might make on his disciples,” von Soden is yet constrained to allow that “a higher self-consciousness may be clearly traced in the background.” “The word Christ,’” he continues, “which occurs twelve times elsewhere in St. Luke, together with the expression Son of God,” which elsewhere occurs nine times, does not occur in our compilation of sayings. Messianic tone and coloring, however, declare themselves in the sayings (17²3 sed. 26 10²²), and in the parable (12³⁵sed.), and, besides, the expression Son of Man.” How inadequate this is as a representation of the teaching of the material common to Matthew and Luke concerning our Lord’s selfpo IER IR LAR yn IRR rt IVER fr TR: eee rr ↩

5. By Bousset, Was wissen wir von Jesus? 1904, pp. 54 Seq. ↩

6. Cf. p. 57: “For the belief of the community, which is shared already by the oldest evangelist, Jesus is the miraculous Son of God, on whom men believe, whom men put wholly by God’s side.” And cf. Wrede, Das Messiaseeheimnis in den Evangelien, 1901, passim. ↩

7. Jesus the Prophet, by Charles S. MacFarland, Ph.D., 1905; introduction by Prof. Frank K. Sanders. ↩

8. Cf. e.g. Shailer Mathews, The Messianic Hope in the N. T., 1905, p- 58: “At this point we may safely use this canon: that saying is more probably genuine which treats of Messianic matters in any other way than that which characterized apostolic belief.” The trustworthiness of sayings which do not contradict, but agree with, apostolic belief must be decided on… more general critical grounds.” It is the same canon which Prof. N. Schmidt, The Prophet of Nazareth, 190s, lays down in the words (p. 235): “These sayings possess evidential value just in proportion as they contradict the notions current in the circles through which they were transmitted.” ↩

9. E.g. Albert Kalthoff, Das Christus-Problem, and Die Enistehung des Christentums, 1904; and William Benjamin Smith, New Testament Criticism, Status and Drift of, Art. in the “Encyclopedia Americana,” and, more fully, Der worchristliche Jesus, etc., 1906. ¹² E.g. Bousset, Was wissen wir von Jesus? 1904. ↩

10. Bousset, Jesus, 168, argues: “We have certain knowledge that the belief existed from the very beginning among the Christian community that Jesus was the Messiah, and, arguing backwards, we can assert that the rise of such a belief would be absolutely inexplicable if Jesus had not declared to His disciples in His life-time that He was Messiah.” It is consequently “now definitely assured, in spite of continual discussions in which it is still frequently disputed,” that Jesus considered Himself to be the Messiah of His people” (107). Cf. Volkmar Fritzsche, Das Berufsbewusstsein Jesu, 13, and Schwartzkopft there quoted. For a précis of the literature in which it is altogether denied that Jesus claimed to be the Messiah, see Holtzmann N. T. Theologie, 1. 280, note. Of course it is not disputable that it was a “self-evident assumption” on the part of the Synoptists that He was the Messiah (Bousset, 167): for the later community—the community which gave birth to the evangelical narratives—says Bousset (171), “the Messiahship of Jesus was the surest, most self-evident, and most precious thing about Him.” Cf. Dalman, Words, 306. ¹⁵ Professor N. Schmidt may be taken as the type of those extremists who find it more convenient just to deny that Jesus used this title of Himself at all: “Jesus never used this title concerning Himself either to claim Messiahship in any sense, or to hint that He was ‘a mere man or the true man’; but in some pregnant utterances used it in reference to man in general, his duties, rights and privileges” (The Prophet of Nazareth, p. vii.). Mt 820 according to him means that the life of man is “full of danger and uncertainty,” whereas a beast is “not deprived of his home and hearth by his convictions” (p. 111)! ↩

11. Cf. Shailer Mathews, The Messianic Hope in the N. T., p. 103: “The phrase is represented as being used by Jesus to refer to Himself as Judge (Mk 8³⁸ 14⁶²). To argue that these passages are Christian comments added to the words of Jesus is certainly to base conclusions on no clear evidence.” Nor is it easy to be rid of Jesus’ claim to be judge of the world; says Dalman (Words, 314), justly: “The right to judge the world was assumed by Jesus when He forgave sins,”—and the assertion of a function of forgiveness by Jesus is pervasive. ↩

12. Encyc. Biblica, 1881; Ibid., 1888, cf. 1872 and Dr. E. A. Abbott, 1773. Shailer Mathews (Messianic Hope in the N. T.) on the other hand, thinks that “it must be admitted that this verse sounds much like a gloss or editorial comment”; and Dalman (Words), p. 194, that “the ending, nor the Son, but the Father only,’ should be regarded as an accretion.” Of course writers like Martineau (Seat of Authority in Religion, 590), and N. Schmidt (The Prophet of Nazareth, 147, 231) take fright at the language, which seems to them redolent of a later time; and thereby bear their unwilling witness to the implications of the passage. In refutation of Dalman see Sanday, Hastings’ B. D., iv. 573 whose general remarks are quite convincing. ²⁰ Cf. Shailer Mathews, p. 58. This is but to say—with the whole body of critics—that passages found in both Matthew and Luke belong to what Weiss calls “the Apostolic source,” which contains the oldest (and most trustworthy) record of words of Jesus. ²¹1 A strong defense of the genuineness of the passage is made by Volkmar Fritzsche, Das Berufsbewust. Jesu, pp. 32 seq. Harnack (Das Wesen des Christentums, p. 81) pronounces it authentic, and treats it as the most important and characteristic of the words of Jesus. Even Schmiedel does not venture to reject it: he only, by appealing to the “Western” text, attempts to reduce its meaning. The Abbé Loisy, however, (I’Evangile et ‘Eglise, 45; Autour un petit Livre, 130), casts it out; but on the express ground that the declaration is too high an one for Jesus to have made; which is at least an admission that the words involve a claim to ontological Sonship. Prof. N. Schmidt, The Prophet of Nazareth, p. 152, considers “such an utterance out of harmony with the admittedly genuine sayings of Jesus,” and even “to cast an undeserved reflection upon His character.” For “how can the gentle Teacher… be supposed to have imagined Himself possessed of all knowledge and regarded all other men as ignorant of God?” Certainly this is an unanswerable query if Jesus is to be conceived as thinking of Himself only as a man among other men: the saying is, however, in point of fact, an express claim to be something very different from this. The occurrence of this verse in both Matthew and Luke,” says W. C. Allen, iz loc., “even if the two Evangelists borrow from a single source, proves that this saying reaches back to an early stage of the Gospel tradition. If, as is probable, the two writers drew from different sources, this tradition was wide-spread. If we add the fact that a similar use of the Son-the Father occurs in Mk 13³², this usage as a traditional saying of Christ is as strongly supported as any saying in the Gospels.” Cf. Plummer on Luke’s report of the saying, quoted above (p. 119). ↩

13. Schmiedel, Encyc. Bib., 1876, gives a summary of the reasons relied on to exclude the passage. The history of its criticism is briefly sketched by Holtzmann, N. T. Theologie, ed. 1, I. 378-379, note. F. C. Conybeare alone has sought to put a documentary basis under the rejection: see esp. his articles in Preuschen’s Zeitschrift fir N. T. Wissenschaft, etc., 1901, Heft 4, pp. 175-78, and Hibbert Journal, 1. 1. The findings of Conybeare have been taken up and repeated with extraordinary avidity by nearly the whole critical school. Only Harnack holds back: “No positive proofs can be adduced for regarding 28¹⁹ sed. as an interpolation” (Expansion of Christianity, E. T., I. 44-45, note). E. Riggenbach has sufficiently answered Conybeare—who indeed required no answer— (Schlatter and Cremer’s Beitrige zur Firderung christlicher Theologie, 1903. vII.; also 1906, X.).; Men like Harnack, while vindicating the genuineness of the passage in Matthew, and supposing it pre-Pauline in origin (op. cit. p. 111), yet deny it to Jesus. For reasons why it must be vindicated to Jesus see Hort. on 1 P 1¹⁻¹2; Sanday Criticism of the Fourth Cospel, 218, 219; Hastings’ B. D., 1. 213-14, Iv. 573, 574; P. H. Chase, The Lord’s Command to Baptize, in the Journal of Theological Studies, July, 1905. Cf. also Bruce, The Kingdom of God, 1889, p. 258: “With reference to the trinity of the Baptismal formula, it is to be observed that it simply sums up in brief compass the teaching of Jesus”; and especially Zahn on Mt 28¹⁸⁻²⁰ (p. 711, note 7): “The text of verses 18-20 is transmitted with certainty in all essential elements. With reference to the almost stereotyped abbreviation which recurs in Eusebius (for example Demonstr. ↩