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discourse recorded by Mk., a longer discourse. This is the case with Mt 105-42 = Mk 67-13, Mt 133-52 Mk 42-34, Mt 18 = Mk 9, Mt 1224-45 = Mk 322-30, Mt 23 = Mk 1237b-40, Mt 24-25 Mk 13. In some of these cases Mt. may rather be substituting for Mk.'s short discourse a longer one from his Logian source, than simply compiling detached sayings round Mk.'s nucleus. But, in either case, the discourses, as they now stand in the First Gospel, are in large measure the result of accretion of detached sayings round a

common centre.

In other words, the artificiality which characterises Mt.'s arrangement of incidents also marks his arrangement of sayings. Many of them were clearly not spoken on the particular occasion to which he assigns them.

But, if we allow for this transposition of many sayings from their original context (which after all rarely affects the meaning of the saying, for what difference, e.g., does it make whether the saying about an ox or an ass in a pit was originally spoken after the healing of a man with a withered hand (Mt 12), or of a crippled woman (Lk 1315)), how far have these sayings, whether peculiar to Mt. or in substance recorded by Lk. as well, any real claim to be genuine utterances of Christ?

Before speaking of them as a whole, I will deal with one or two which seem to be most open to objection.

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Against Mt 314-15 it may reasonably be urged that the omission from Mk 14 Mt 38 of eis apeow duapriov suggests irresistibly that 314-15 is an editorial expansion of Mk., to explain how it was that the Lord could submit to John's baptism. Of course the words need not be due to the editor himself. He may have received them amongst his Palestinian traditions. But, even so, the impression which they leave upon the mind of being rather an attempt on the part of Christ's disciples to explain away a difficulty in His life, than an original utterance of Christ Himself, is very strong.

2531-46 leave upon my own mind the impression that they are a Christian homily, based no doubt upon reminiscence of words of Christ, but, in its present form, due to the editor or to some Palestinian preacher. I am aware that no convincing proof can be given for such a judgment; but, on the other hand, I do not feel that there is any fatal objection to such a view. The editor was, I believe, the sort of man who would add such a homily as a suit

1 Cf. Burkitt, The Gospel History and its Transmission, p. 199, "It is not so easy to make new Sayings and Parables like those in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke." These words would fitly apply to the passage under discussion. My point is that, not the tenor of the words, but the literary form in which they are set, suggests a Christian homily. The discourses in the Fourth Gospel furnish some analogy.

able peroration to his compilation of Christ's sayings on the last things, without necessarily intending his readers to suppose that the words were the exact words of Christ Himself, or suspecting that they would do so. If the passage was already familiar to many of his readers as a piece of Christian literature, they would know why it was placed in its present position, and would not misunderstand it.

2816-20 may in part be based upon Mk.'s lost ending, but, if not, it represents a piece of Palestinian tradition. In this case, I do not suppose that it ever occurred to the editor that his readers would infer that the exact words here recorded were literally spoken by Christ upon this particular occasion.

On 1112-13. 19 end, see the notes.

But what shall we say of these sayings taken as a whole? If I am right in conjecturing that they are in large part drawn from the Matthæan Logia, then they are perhaps the earliest of all our sources of knowledge for the life of Christ, and rest even more directly than does the Second Gospel on Apostolic testimony. For the Apostle Matthew seems to have written down for the use of his Palestinian fellow-Christians some of the sayings of Christ that he could remember, selecting no doubt such as would appeal most strongly to his readers and satisfy their needs. Better security that these sayings were really uttered by Christ Himself we could hardly desire.

There remains, however, one consideration which calls for our attention. I have endeavoured to show that these sayings are strongly marked by special features. As they now stand in the First Gospel, they represent our Lord as adopting a conservative attitude towards the Old Law, as teaching that He would return on the Clouds of Heaven to inaugurate the Kingdom, and as not limiting the scope of His teaching to Jews, but as assuming that it was intended, in the first place, for the Jew, and, in a secondary sense only, for the Gentile. And the question may well be asked, are we to assume that in broad outline Christ really taught such conceptions as these? Seeing that there must be between the original Aramaic Logia at least two stages of transmission, first a translation into Greek accompanied possibly by some re-editing, and secondly their incorporation into our Gospel, accompanied certainly by a good deal of artificial arrangement and editorial revision, is it not probable that the impression which these sayings, as they now stand, give of Christ's teaching upon these points, is in large part due to the Palestinian-Christian editors through whose hands they have passed?

Now this is a question which concerns to a small extent the commentator on the First Gospel, and to a larger extent the historian who attempts to reconstruct from all sources the life of Christ. The commentator must answer that, to some extent at

least, the impression given by the Gospel upon these points is due to the manipulation of his sources by the editor.

With regard to Christ's attitude to the law, e.g., it seems clear that the editor has rewritten Mk 101-12 in order to bring Christ's teaching upon the subject of divorce once again into harmony with the stricter school of Jewish interpretation of Dt 2414. He has done so by combining with Mk 101-12 another tradition as to Christ's teaching upon this subject, which he has also preserved in the Sermon on the Mount (583), and which he no doubt drew from the Logia. But the commentator will naturally say, "If the editor has interpolated into Mk 10 a clause "except for fornication," which is clearly inconsistent with the tenor of Christ's teaching upon that occasion, he or the Jewish editors through whose hands the Logia passed may also have interpolated the similar clause into the Logion preserved in 583,"

Again, the editor seems clearly to have tried to interpret Mk 714-23 in such a way as to avoid the obvious impression that Christ directly attacked the Mosaic distinction between clean and unclean meats; and, if this be so, some of the other passages in the First Gospel which emphasise the permanent validity of the law may have undergone similar revision. And once again: it seems clear that the editor has so altered Mk 91 as to make it emphasise the near approach of the Second Coming. If that be so, then some of the other passages in the Gospel may have undergone revision by the editor, or by his Jewish-Christian predecessors, from similar motives. In particular, the evbéws of 2429 may be due to such revision.

So far the commentator: the result of his observations being this: that, whilst the original group of Logia was a selection of Christ's sayings which laid emphasis on His teaching about His Second Coming, on His teaching about the permanence of the Old Law, and on the first claim of the Jew to discipleship of the Kingdom, some allowance must be made for a possible intensifying of these points in the process of transmission of the Logia in the period between the time when the Apostle Matthew penned them and the time when they appear in our Gospel; and that, in any case, the editor has worked over S. Mark's Gospel in order to introduce these conceptions into it where before they did not exist, or existed in language so ambiguous that other interpretations were possible.

At this point the commentatator should cease his work, and the historian of Christ's life should succeed him. Without any claim to be an historian, I may perhaps be permitted to suggest the way in which an historian would perhaps make use of the results of the commentator's work as just sketched

It seems clear that, if due allowance be made for some over

emphasis and undue insistence upon details, the representation of Christ's teaching upon the three points that have been so often mentioned was that which was familiar to the early JewishChristian Church, and which influenced to some extent the entire Apostolic preaching in its earliest stages.

Thus, the eschatological conception of the Kingdom and the belief in the imminent coming of Christ affect to some extent all the literature previous to the First Gospel. It is found in S. Mark (chap. 13). If Ac 1-12 may be taken as in any sense a generally accurate account of the belief of the early Church at Jerusalem, it prevailed there (111 320). It is frequently found in S. Paul's earlier letters, 1 Thess., 2 Thess., 1 Co 17 1623, Ph 320. It is found in S. James (57-8), in S. Peter (1 P 17-8), and in S. John (1 Jn 32).

Again: the belief that Christ had taught that the Gospel was intended primarily for the Jew, explains the controversy that occupies so large a part of the narrative of the Acts. Pressure of circumstances alone seems to have opened the eyes of the Palestinian Apostles to those other aspects of Christ's teaching, which led logically to the Jew and the Gentile being placed in a position of equality.

And again: the belief that Christ had come, not to do away with the claims of the Old Testament upon the consciences of men, but to reinforce them with stronger sanction than ever before, is a part of the common Christian belief of the New Testament writers.

On these grounds, the representation of the First Gospel of Christ's teaching upon these points (due allowance being made for some over-insistence upon detail, and over-emphasis due to massing of sayings under a common head) has every claim to be regarded as historically accurate.

On the other side must be set the wider perspective of much of S. Paul's teaching, and of the Third and Fourth Gospels, with regard to the Second Coming, and to the scope of the Gospel; and the question is naturally raised, "Do these wider conceptions represent a gradual spiritualisation of Christ's actual teaching, or do they carry us back to the historical Christ, whose teaching was misunderstood and narrowed in range and conception by the early Palestinian Church? At this point the historian will bring into account some other considerations. He will observe that a good deal of the discourse-material in the First Gospel, which it seems necessary to interpret from the standpoint of the editor, in accordance with ideas that run through the entire book, would (taken by themselves and in a different context) lend themselves to a very different interpretation. Such parables, e.g., as the Sower, the Mustard Seed, the Draw-Net, may, where they stand, teach lessons about the nature of the coming Kingdom; but how possible

it is that, as originally uttered, they were intended to illustrate the gradual spread of Christianity in the world. The preaching to the Gentiles may, to the editor, have seemed no obstacle to the immediate coming of Christ, but the words, as originally spoken, may well have foreshadowed a still far-distant future. The "fulfilling of the law" may, to the editor, have involved the permanent validity of the smallest commandment, but, interpreted in the light of Christ's teaching elsewhere, it seems clear that the words must have had a much wider meaning,

The historian who notices points like these will shrink from the conclusion that upon such subjects the teaching of Christ was altogether and exclusively what the editor of the First Gospel represents it to have been, to the exclusion of representation of it to be found in other parts of the New Testament.

And this should lead us to what seems to me to be a right judgement upon the representation of Christ's teaching as found in this Gospel.

That teaching was no doubt many-sided. Much of it may have been uttered in the form of paradox and symbol. The earliest tradition of it, at first oral, and then written, was that of a local church, that of Jerusalem, which drew from the treasure-house of Christ's sayings such utterances as seemed to bear most immediately upon the lives of its members, who were at first all Jews or proselytes. In this process of selection the teaching of Christ was only partially represented, because choice involved over-emphasis. Paradox may sometimes have been interpreted as an expression of literal truth, symbol as reality, and to some extent, though not, I think, to any great extent, the sayings in process of transmission may have received accretions arising out of the necessities of the Palestinian Church life. Thus the representation of Christ's teaching in this Gospel, though early in date, suffers probably from being local in character. In the meantime much of Christ's teaching remained uncommitted to writing; and, not until S. Paul's teaching had made men see that Palestinian Christianity suffered in some respects from a too one-sided representation of Christ's teaching, did they go back to the utterances of Christ, and reinterpret them from a wider point of view; seeking out also other traditions of different aspects of His teaching which had been neglected by the Palestinian guardians of His words.

But in making such generalisations I am going beyond my allotted sphere as commentator on the Gospel, and I leave these questions now to judgements which are wiser than my own.