to such a call, and which could respond to it in the particular way in which He did. Nor is it likely that we should be much the wiser on this point if we knew far more than we do of the environment of His earlier years of the family and education, of the synagogue and social life of a Galilean village. We do not explain a Shakespeare in terms of the Parish Church and Grammar School of Stratford. Historical research may reveal the forces which condition but not those which produce the epoch-making individual.

One reflection, however, is suggested by the facts we know. "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." To see God means-among other things— to estimate the world according to a scale of values other than the common. It is to see the littleness of much that man calls great, the greatness of much that man calls little. It is to consider the lilies of the field, and to see that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. It is to see the worth of man as man, undazzled by the external differences that go with wealth and place. It is to see that whoso would be truly great must be the servant of his kind. To One who looked at life like this it might not seem so great a paradox that the Christ of God should be chosen from the ranks of those whose lot it is to labour and to serve. Nevertheless, in all great minds, and notably in all religious minds, there is an element of deep humility, and without some such an experience of voice or vision as that attested by the earliest tradition it would be difficult to understand His absolute conviction that He was indeed Lord of lords and King of kings.

APOCALYPTIC OR WARRIOR CHRIST?

The detailed story of the Temptation, found in St. Matthew and St. Luke (as well apparently as the Baptism), seems to have stood in Q, the oldest source which criticism has detected. It may perhaps be

interpreted as a kind of parable of the events of those days-our Lord was fain to speak in parables. Or it may be a reminiscence of something He told the disciples, insensibly cast by them in the re-telling into more pictorial form. It is even possible that the effects of a long hunger combined with the nervous reaction of the stirring experience of His Call actually caused His inner conflict to become visualised in the form related. In any case its psychological appropriateness to the situation is undeniable. A moment of intense spiritual exaltation is inevitably followed by a period of depression. Always after vision comes struggle, after a call the temptation most pertinent to it.

The revelation that He was the Christ, attested as it was by an audible voice divine, did not admit of doubt. But being the Christ, how He was called upon to act must have been a problem of no small perplexity. Once that was decided, the powers, miraculous or otherwise, necessary for the part might be presumed. One by one arise before His mind current ideas of what the Christ should do or be, one by one they are rejected as entailing faithlessness to the highest ideal.

"Bid these stones become bread." The value He set on the outward trappings of royalty may appear from the satirical allusion to those "that wear soft raiment to be found "in kings' houses." Its more material advantages, the command of all the means of gratifying physical and other wants, might for an instant attract one brought up to know the pinch of pinch of poverty, and feeling at the moment the actual pangs of hunger. But to use for such a purpose the gift of miracle (a gift, be it remembered, which was postulated by His Messiahship according to contemporary ideas 1) was inconsistent with the scheme of ethical values of one who could say, "How hardly shall they that have riches enter, into the kingdom of God.”

1 The Anti-Christ even was expected to have this power; cf. 2 Thess. ii. 9, Mark

xiii. 22.

"All the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them." The rejection of this temptation is the final rejection of the office of a "Warrior Christ" who would "wade through slaughter to a throne"; a Caesar on the throne of David, albeit ruling, when He got there, in the spirit of righteousness.

"If thou be the Son of God cast thyself down from hence." This is usually interpreted as the temptation to secure a general recognition of Himself as Messiah without effort and without appeal to any moral interest in His message, but simply by a dramatic miracle, in fact, to convert an evil and adulterous generation by a sign. I would, however, hazard another suggestion, based on the fact that St. Luke, preserving, as I believe, the original order of Q,1 places this after the Temptation to act as a Warrior Christ. If the kingdom is not to be established by the sword, it can only be by an act of God such as the Apocalyptists picture. But if so, is the Christ to wait and work, or should He by some startling act precipitate the consummation ? Man was expected to appear in the sky with attendant angels. Should He then fling Himself from the highest pinnacle of the Temple in sight of all Jerusalem, trusting that God, to save His Christ from destruction, would send a flight of angels to His support? Such an attempt to "force the hand" of God, inconsistent with the trust in the Heavenly Father taught elsewhere, is decisively rejected: "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God."

The Son of

The conception of Warrior Christ being rejected absolutely and in toto, there remained only the conception of the Christ to be Apocalyptically manifested. From this fact, and from the fact that our Lord so often speaks of Himself as Son of Man, it would appear that it was along the lines of that conception that He interpreted His office. But "along the lines of that conception " is all we are entitled to say. His independent inter1 Cf. Studies in the Synoptic Problem, p. 152 (c).

pretation of the Old Testament and His trenchant criticism of the traditions of the Scribes, forbid us to impute to Him a slavish literalism in the acceptance of contemporary apocalyptic symbolism. But of this more will be said hereafter (cf. p. 116 ff.).

The definite rejection of any political conception of Messiahship and the acceptance of the apocalyptic symbol of the Son of Man, even though interpreted in an original and independent way, brought with it the determination of His immediate course of action. The manifestation of the Son of Man was part, and, in the vision of Daniel at any rate, not even the first part, of the Great Restoration to be brought about by immediate Divine intervention. It was obvious, therefore, that His Messiahship was only, as it were, that of a Messiah presumptive. Not till the time came for the Kingdom to be established would He appear as King. His obvious duty, then, for the present lay in the continuance of the work of John the Baptist, i.e. in urging men to prepare themselves for the Kingdom that was soon to be: "Repent ye, for the Kingdom is at hand."

The fact that the Christ has come, but the time for His Kingdom has not yet come, ipso facto turns the Christ-designate into a Prophet-a rôle not originally included in the conception of the Christ. Thus as in the case of John the Baptist, in the first stage of the great religious movement we are studying, so in the second stage with our Lord Himself, we have a reaction to and a revival of the methods and ideas of the great ones of the past. The ordinary religious teacher of the time was the Rabbi-professedly only a commentator. Original inspiration when it existed took an anonymous or pseudonymous form, mainly Apocalyptic. Like John, our Lord came forth "speaking with authority" like one of the ancient prophets.

1 A partial qualification of this statement will be found on p. 119.

THE TEACHING OF OUR LORD ITS THEME AND CHARACTER

For a while, then, the Christ-to-be becomes, as it were, His own forerunner, and thus the last of the long succession of the Prophets. On the interpretation and application to life of the teaching thus, almost incidentally, given, treatises have been written and sermons preached for nineteen hundred years. for our present purpose it is not so much with its practical application as with its relation to the background of the thought of the time that we are concerned.

But

In the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God distinguished modern scholars have seen the essence of His teaching. It would be more correct to point to this, rather as being the presupposition and background of His teaching, than as the conspicuous feature in its actual content. Nothing, indeed, can be more obvious than that God was ever present to our Lord's mind as the one great reality, more real and actual than the external world. In His mind, too, that "fear of the Lord," which looms so large in Hebrew literature, has been swallowed up in the "perfect love which casteth out fear." Hence He speaks of God naturally and normally as "My Father," as "your heavenly Father."1 But this is not done as though it were some new conception of God which it is His special and primary duty to proclaim. Indeed, it was not in itself new, being found in earlier Jewish thought, though, of

1 It is noticeable that He is never reported as saying "Our Father." This may be accidental, but it may imply that the difference between His own special relationship to God and that of other men was never overlooked. The opening words of the Lord's Prayer are no exception, for it is not given as a prayer for His own use. In the Synoptics the title "Son of God" is commonly a synonym for Messiah, but is only twice clearly used by our Lord, in the form "the Son" (Mk. xiii. 32, Mt. xi. 27= Lk. x. 22); though it is implied by "Son" in Mk. xii. 6, Mt. xxii. 2. In Mt. xi. 27 it appears to have a mystical sense as well; cf. p. 119.

2 In the O.T. the actual word "Father" is never clearly used of the relation of God to the individual, but the idea of a Providence tender towards the individual seems to be the inspiring thought in Psalms like "The Lord is my Shepherd "