V. Teaching Of The Synoptic Gospels
event, John has no difficulty in presenting the life of Our Lord on earth as the life of God in flesh, and in insisting at once on the glory that belongs to Him as God and on the humiliation which is brought to Him by the flesh. It is distinctly a duplex life which he ascribes to Christ, and he attributes to Him without embarrassment all the powers and modes of activity appropriate on the one hand to Deity and on the other to sinless (Jn. vii. 46; cf. xiv. 30; I Jn. iii. 5) human nature. In a true sense his portrait of Our Lord is a dramatization of the God-man which he presents to our contemplation in his prologue.
V. TEACHING OF THE SYNOPTIC
GOSPELS The same may be said of the other Gospels. They are all dramatizations of the God-man set forth in theoretical exposition in the prologue to John's Gospel. The Gospel of Luke, written by a known companion of Paul, gives us in a living narrative the same
Jesus who is presupposed in all Paul's allusions to Him. That of Mark, who was also a companion of Paul, as also of Peter, is, as truly as the Gospel of John itself, a presentation of facts in the life of Jesus with a view to making it plain that this was the life of no mere man, human as it was, but of the Son of God Himself. Matthew's Gospel differs from its fellows mainly in the greater richness of Jesus' own testimony to His Deity which it records. What is characteristic of all three is the inextricable interlacing in their narratives of the human and Divine traits which alike marked the life they are depicting. It is possible, by neglecting one series of their representations and attending only to the other, to sift out from them at will the portrait of either a purely Divine or a purely human Jesus. It is impossible to derive from them the portrait of any other than a Divine-human
Jesus if we surrender ourselves to their guidance and take off of their pages the portrait they have endeavored to draw. As in their narratives they cursorily suggest now the fulness of His Deity and now the completeness of His humanity and everywhere the unity of His person, they present as real and as forcible a testimony to the constitution of Our Lord's person as uniting in one personal life a truly Divine and a truly human nature, as if they announced this fact in analytical statement. Only on the assumption of this conception of Our Lord's person as underlying and determining their presentation, can unity be given to their representations; while, on this supposition, all their representations fall into their places as elements in one consistent whole. Within the limits of their common presupposition, each Gospel has no doubt its own peculiarities in the distribution of its emphasis. Mark lays particular stress on the Divine power of the man Jesus, as evidence of His supernatural being; and on the irresistible impression of a veritable Son of God, a Divine being walking the earth as a man, which He made upon all with whom He came into contact. Luke places his Gospel by the side of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the prominence it gives to the human development of the Divine being whose life on earth it is depicting and to the range of temptation to which He was subjected. Matthew's
Gospel is notable chiefly for the heights of the Divine selfconsciousness which it uncovers in its report of the words of Him whom it represents as nevertheless the Son of David, the Son of Abraham; heights of Divine self-consciousness which fall in nothing short of those attained in the great utterances preserved for us by John. But amid whatever variety there may exist in the aspects on which each lays his particular emphasis, it is the same Jesus Christ which all three bring before us, a Jesus Christ who is at once God and man and one individual person. If that be not recognized, the whole narrative of the Synoptic Gospels is thrown into confusion; their portrait of Christ becomes an insoluble puzzle; and the mass of
details which they present of His life-experiences is transmuted into a mere set of crass contradictions.
VI. TEACHING OF JESUS
1. The Johannine Jesus.—The Gospel narratives not only present us, however, with dramatizations of the God-man, according to their authors' conception of His composite person. They preserve for us also a considerable body of the utterances of Jesus Himself, and this enables us to observe the conception of His person which underlay and found expression in Our Lord's own teaching. The discourses of Our Lord which have been selected for record by John have been chosen (among other reasons) expressly for the reason that they bear witness to His essential Deity. They are accordingly peculiarly rich in material for forming a judgment of Our Lord's conception of His higher nature. This conception, it is needless to say, is precisely that which John, taught by it, has announced in the prologue to his
Gospel, and has illustrated by his Gospel itself, compacted as it is of these discourses. It will not be necessary to present the evidence for this in its fulness. It will be enough to point to a few characteristic passages, in which Our Lord's conception of His higher nature finds especially clear expression.
That He was of higher than earthly origin and nature, He repeatedly asserts. 'Ye are from beneath,' he says to the Jews (viii. 23), 'I am from above: ye are of this world; I am not of this world' (cf. xvii. 16).
Therefore, He taught that He, the Son of Man, had 'descended out of heaven' (iii. 13), where was His true abode. This carried with it, of course, an assertion of preexistence; and this preexistence is explicitly affirmed: 'What then,' He asks, 'if ye should behold the Son of man ascending where he was before?' (vi. 62). It is not merely
preexistence, however, but eternal preexistence which He claims for Himself: 'And now, Father,' He prays (xvii. 5), 'glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was' (cf. ver. 24); and again, as the most impressive language possible, He declares (viii. 58 A.V.): 'Verily, verily, I say unto you,
Before Abraham was, I am,' where He claims for Himself the timeless present of eternity as His mode of existence. In the former of these two last-cited passages, the character of His preexistent life is intimated; in it He shared the Father's glory from all eternity
('before the world was'); He stood by the Father's side as a companion in His glory. He came forth, when He descended to earth, therefore, not from heaven only, but from the very side of God (viii.
42; xvii. 8). Even this, however, does not express the whole truth; He came forth not only from the Father's side where He had shared in the Father's glory; He came forth out of the Father's very being—'I came out from the Father, and am come into the world' (xvi. 28; cf. viii. 42). 'The connection described is internal and essential, and not that of presence or external fellowship' (Westcott). This prepares us for the great assertion: 'I and the Father are one' (x. 30), from which it is a mere corollary that 'He that hath seen me hath seen the Father'
(xiv. 9; cf. viii. 19; xii. 45).
In all these declarations the subject of the affirmation is the actual person speaking: it is of Himself who stood before men and spoke to them that Our Lord makes these immense assertions. Accordingly, when He majestically declared, 'I and the Father are' (plurality of persons) 'one' (neuter singular, and accordingly singleness of being), the Jews naturally understood Him to be making Himself, the person then speaking to them, God (x. 33; cf. v. 18; xix. 7). The continued sameness of the person who has been, from all eternity down to this hour, one with God, is therefore fully safeguarded. His earthly life is, however, distinctly represented as a humiliation. Though even on
earth He is one with the Father, yet He 'descended' to earth; He had come out from the Father and out of God; a glory had been left behind which was yet to be returned to, and His sojourn on earth was therefore to that extent an obscuration of His proper glory. There was a sense, then, in which, because He had 'descended,' He was no longer equal with the Father. It was in order to justify an assertion of equality with the Father in power (x. 25, 29) that He was led to declare: 'I and my Father are one' (x. 30). But He can also declare
'The Father is greater than I' (xiv. 28). Obviously this means that there was a sense in which He had ceased to be equal with the Father, because of the humiliation of His present condition, and in so far as this humiliation involved entrance into a status lower than that which belonged to Him by nature. Precisely in what this humiliation consisted can be gathered only from the general implication of many statements. In it He was a man a man who hath told you the truth, which I have heard from God' (viii. 40), where the contrast with 'God' throws the assertion of humanity into emphasis (cf. x. 33). The truth of His human nature is, however, everywhere assumed and endlessly illustrated, rather than explicitly asserted. He possessed a human soul (xii. 27) and bodily parts (flesh and blood, vi. 53 if.; hands and side, xx. 27); and was subject alike to physical affections
(weariness, iv. 6, and thirst, xix. 28, suffering and death), and to all the common human emotions—not merely the love of compassion
(xiii. 34; xiv. 21; xv. 8-13), but the love of simple affection which we pour out on 'friends' (xi. 11; cf. xv. 14, 15), indignation (xi. 33, 38) and joy (xv. 11; xvii. 13). He felt the perturbation produced by strong excitement (xi. 33; xii. 27; xiii. 21), the sympathy with suffering which shows itself in tears (xi. 35), the thankfulness which fills the grateful heart (vi. 11, 23; xi. 41). Only one human characteristic was alien to Him: He was without sin: 'the prince of the world,' He declared, 'hath nothing in me' (xiv. 30; cf. viii. 46). Clearly our Lord, as reported by John, knew Himself to be true God and true man in
one indivisible person, the common subject of the qualities which belong to each.
2. The Synoptic Jesus.—(a) Mk. xiii. 32: The same is true of His selfconsciousness as revealed in His sayings recorded by the Synoptics.
Perhaps no more striking illustration of this could be adduced than the remarkable declaration recorded in Mk. xiii. 82 (cf. Mt. xxiv. 36):
'But of that day or that hour knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, nor yet the Son, but the Father.' Here Jesus places Himself, in an ascending scale of being, above 'the angels in heaven,' that is to say, the highest of all creatures, significantly marked here as supermundane. Accordingly, He presents Himself elsewhere as the Lord of the angels, whose requests they obey: 'The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that cause stumbling, and them that do iniquity' (Mt. xiii. 41), 'And he shall send forth his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other' (Mt. xxiv. 31; cf. xiii. 49; xxv. 31; Mk. viii. 38).
Thus the 'angels of God' (Lk. xii. 8, 9; xv. 10) Christ designates as His angels, the 'kingdom of God' (Mt. xii. 28; xix. 24; xxi. 31, 43; Mk. and Lk. often) as His Kingdom, the 'elect of God' (Mk. xiii. 20; Lk. xviii. 7; cf. Rom. viii. 33; Gal. iii. 12; Tit. i. 1) as His elect. He is obviously speaking in Mk. xiii. 22 out of a Divine self-consciousness: 'Only a Divine being can be exalted above angels' (B. Weiss). He therefore designates Himself by His Divine name, 'the Son,' that is to say, the unique Son of God (ix. 7; i. 11), to claim to be whom would for a man be blasphemy (Mk. xiv. 61, 64). But though He designates Himself by this Divine name, He is not speaking of what He once was, but of what at the moment of speaking He is: the action of the verb is present, 'knoweth.' He is claiming, in other words, the supreme designation of 'the Son,' with all that is involved in it, for His present self, as He moved among men: He is, not merely was, 'the Son.'
Nevertheless, what He affirms of Himself cannot be affirmed of Himself distinctively as 'the Son.' For what He affirms of Himself is ignorance— not even the Son' knows it; and ignorance does not belong to the Divine nature which the term 'the Son' connotes. An extreme appearance of contradiction accordingly arises from the use of this terminology, just as it arises when Paul says that the Jews
'crucified the Lord of glory' (I Cor. ii. 8), or exhorts the Ephesian elders to 'feed the church of God which he purchased with his own blood' (Acts xx. 28 in.); or John Keble praises Our Lord for 'the blood of souls by Thee redeemed.' It was not the Lord of Glory as such who was nailed to the tree, nor have either 'God' or 'souls' blood to shed.
We know how this apparently contradictory mode of speech has arisen in Keble's case. He is speaking of men who are composite beings, consisting of souls and bodies, and these men come to be designated from one element of their composite personalities, though what is affirmed by them belongs rather to the other; we may speak, therefore, of the 'blood of souls' meaning that these 'souls,' while not having blood as such, yet designate persons who have bodies and therefore blood. We know equally how to account for Paul's apparent contradictions. We know that he conceived of Our
Lord as a composite person, uniting in Himself a Divine and a human nature. In Paul's view, therefore, though God as such has no blood, yet Jesus Christ who is God has blood because He is also man.
He can justly speak, therefore, when speaking of Jesus Christ, of His blood as the blood of God. When precisely the same phenomenon meets us in Our Lord's speech of Himself, we must presume that it is the outgrowth of precisely the same state of things. When He speaks of 'the Son' (who is God) as ignorant, we must understand that He is designating Himself as 'the Son' because of His higher nature, and yet has in mind the ignorance of His lower nature; what He means is that the person properly designated 'the Son' is ignorant, that is to
say with respect to the human nature which is as intimate an element of His personality as is His Deity.
When our Lord says, then, that 'the Son knows not,' He becomes as express a witness to the two natures which constitute His person as Paul is when he speaks of the blood of God, or as Keble is a witness to the twofold constitution of a human being when he speaks of souls shedding blood. In this short sentence, thus, Our Lord bears witness to His Divine nature with its supremacy above all creatures, to His human nature with its creaturely limitations, and to the unity of the subject possessed of these two natures.
(b) Other passages: Son of Man and Son of God: All these elements of His personality find severally repeated assertions in other utterances of Our Lord recorded in the Synoptics. There is no need to insist here on the elevation of Himself above the kings and prophets of the Old Covenant (Mt. xii. 41 if.), above the temple itself (Mt. xii.
6), and the ordinances of the Divine Law (Mt. xii. 8); or on His accent of authority in both His teaching and action, His great 'I say unto you (Mt. v. 21, 22), 'I will; be cleansed' (Mk. i. 41; ii. 5; Lk. vii.
14); or on His separation of Himself from men in His relation to God, never including them with Himself in an 'Our Father,' but consistently speaking distinctively of 'my Father' (e.g., Lk. xxiv. 49) and 'your Father' (e.g., Mt. v. 16); or on His intimation that He is not merely David's Son but David's Lord, and that a Lord sitting on the right hand of God (Mt. xxii. 44); or on His parabolic discrimination of Himself a Son and Heir from all 'servants' (Mt. xxi. 33 if.); or even on His ascription to Himself of the purely Divine functions of the forgiveness of sins (Mk. ii. and judgment of the world (Mt. xxv. 31), or of the purely Divine powers of reading the heart (Mk. ii. 8; Lk. ix.
47), omnipotence (Mt. xxiv. 30; Mk. xiv. 62) and omnipresence (Mt. xviii 20; xxviii. 10). These things illustrate His constant assumption
of the possession of Divine dignity and attributes; the claim itself is more directly made in the two great designations which He currently gave Himself, the Son of Man and the Son of God. The former of these is His favorite self-designation. Derived from Dan. vii. 13, 14, it intimates on every occasion of its employment Our Lord's consciousness of being a super-mundane being, who has entered into a sphere of earthly life on a high mission, on the accomplishment of which He is to return to His heavenly sphere, whence He shall in due season come back to earth, now, however, in His proper majesty, to gather up the fruits of His work and consummate all things. It is a designation, thus, which implies at once a heavenly preexistence, a present humiliation, and a future glory; and He proclaims Himself in this future glory no less than the universal King seated on the throne of judgment for quick and dead (Mk. viii. 31; Mt. xxv. 31). The implication of Deity imbedded in the designation, Son of Man, is perhaps more plainly spoken out in the companion designation, Son of God, which Our Lord not only accepts at the hands of others, accepting with it the implication of blasphemy in permitting its application to Himself (Mt. xxvi. 63, 65; Mk. xiv. 61, 64; Lk. xxii. 29,
30), but persistently claims for Himself both, in His constant designation of God as His Father in a distinctive sense, and in His less frequent but more pregnant designation of Himself as, by way of eminence, 'the Son.' That His consciousness of the peculiar relation to God expressed by this designation was not an attainment of His mature spiritual development, but was part of His most intimate consciousness from the beginning, is suggested by the sole glimpse which is given us into His mind as a child (Lk. ii. 49). The high significance which the designation bore to Him is revealed to us in two remarkable utterances preserved, the one by both Matthew (xi.
27 if.) and Luke (x. 22 if.), and the other by Matthew (xxviii. 19).
(c) Mt. xi. 27; xxviii. 19. In the former of these utterances, Our Lord, speaking in the most solemn manner, not only presents Himself, as the Son, as the sole source of knowledge of God and of blessedness for men, but places Himself in a position, not of equality merely, but of absolute reciprocity and interpretation of knowledge with the Father. 'No one,' He says, 'knoweth the Son, save the Father; neither doth any know the Father, save the Son . . .' varied in Luke so as to read: 'No one knoweth who the Son is, save the Father; and who the Father is, save the Son . . .' as if the being of the Son were so immense that only God could know it thoroughly; and the knowledge of the Son was so unlimited that He could know God to perfection.
The peculiarly pregnant employment here of the terms 'Son' and 'Father' over against one another is explained to us in the other utterance (Mt. xxviii. 19). It is the resurrected Lord's commission to His disciples. Claiming for Himself all authority in heaven and on earth—which implies the possession of omnipotence—and promising to be with His followers 'alway, even to the end of the world'— which adds the implications of omnipresence and omniscience—He commands them to baptize their converts 'in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.' The precise form of the formula must be carefully observed. It does not read: 'In the names'
(plural)—as if there were three beings enumerated, each with its distinguishing name. Nor yet: 'In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost,' as if there were one person, going by a threefold name.
It reads: 'In the name [singular] of the Father, and of the [article repeated] Son, and of the [article repeated] Holy Ghost,' carefully distinguishing three persons, though uniting them all under one name. The name of God was to the Jews Jehovah, and to name the name of Jehovah upon them was to make them His. What Jesus did in this great injunction was to command His followers to name the name of God upon their converts, and to announce the name of God which is to be named on their converts in the threefold enumeration
of 'the Father' and 'the Son' and 'the Holy Ghost.' As it is unquestionable that He intended Himself by 'the Son,' He here places Himself by the side of the Father and the Spirit, as together with them constituting the one God. It is, of course, the Trinity which He is describing; and that is as much as to say that He announces
Himself as one of the persons of the Trinity. This is what Jesus, as reported by the Synoptics, understood Himself to be.
In announcing Himself to be God, however, Jesus does not deny that He is man also. If all His speech of Himself rests on His consciousness of a Divine nature, no less does all His speech manifest His consciousness of a human nature. He easily identifies
Himself with men (Mt. iv. 4; Lk. iv. 4), and receives without protest the imputation of humanity (Mt. xi. 19; Lk. vii. 34). He speaks familiarly of His body (Mt. xxvi. 12, 26; Mk. xiv. 8; xiv. 22; Lk. xxii.
19), and of His bodily parts—His feet and hands (Lk. xxiv. 39), His head and feet (Lk. vii. 44-46), His flesh and bones (Lk. xxiv. 39), His blood (Mt. xxvi. 28; Mk. xiv. 24; Lk. xxii. 20). We chance to be given indeed a very express affirmation on His part of the reality of His bodily nature; when His disciples were terrified at His appearing before them after His resurrection, supposing Him to be a spirit, He reassures them with the direct declaration: 'See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye behold me having' (Lk. xxiv. 39). His testimony to His human soul is just as express: 'My soul,' says He, 'is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death' (Mt. xxvi. 38; Mk. xiv. 34). He speaks of the human dread with which He looked forward to His approaching death (Lk. xii. 50), and expresses in a poignant cry His sense of desolation on the cross (Mt. xxvii. 46; Mk. xv. 34). He speaks also of His pity for the weary and hungering people (Mt. xv. 32; Mk. viii. 2), and of a strong human desire which He felt (Lk. xxii. 15). Nothing that is human is alien to Him except sin. He never ascribes