M. Salvador points out the abiding significance of our Lord’s language in

the opinion of his co-religionists. ‘Si Pon ne s’attaquait qu’aux traditions et interprétations abusives, e’était s’en prendre ἃ la jurisprudence du jour, aux docteurs, aux hommes; e’était user simplement du droit commun en Israél, et provoquer une réforme. Mais si l’on se mettait au dessus de Vinstitution en elle-méme, si, comme Jésus devant les docteurs, on se proclamait le Maitre absolu du sabbath, dans ce cas, entre circoncis, e’était attaquer ἃ la loi, en renverser une des pierres angulaires; ¢ *était imposer au grand Sacri- ficateur le devoir de faire entendre une voix accusatrice ; enfin c’était s’élever au dessus du Dieu des Juifs, ow cout-au-moins se prétendre son Egal, Aussi un témoignage éclatant vient ἃ l’appui de cette distinction, et ajoute une preuve & la conformité générale des quatres Evangiles. ‘Les Juifs,” dit judicieusement Vapotre et évangél'ste Jean, ‘ne poursuivirent pas Jésus, par ce seul motif qu Ἢ violait les ordonnances relatives au sabbath. On lui intenta une action par cette autre raison; qu'il se faisait égal ἃ Dieu.””’ Salvador, Jésus-Christ, ii, pp. 80, 81. [ LECT,
envolves Fits true Divinity. 183
our Lord’s meaning. They knew that the Everlasting God ‘neither rests nor is weary;’ they knew that if He could slumber but for a moment the universe would collapse into the nothing- ness out of which He has summoned it. They knew that He ‘rested on the seventh day’ from the creation of new beings ; but that in maintaining the life of those which already exist, He ‘worketh hitherto.’ They knew that none could associate him- self as did Jesus with this world-sustaining energy of God, who was not himself God. They saw clearly that no one could cite God’s example of an uninterrupted energy in nature and provi- dence as a reason for setting aside God’s positive law, without also and thereby claiming to be Divine. It did not occur to them that our Lord’s words need have implied no more than a resem- blance between His working and the working of the Father. If indeed our Lord had meant nothing more than this, He would not have met the objection urged by the Jews against His break- ing the Sabbath. It would have been no argument against the Jews to have said, that because God’s incessant activity is ever working in the universe, therefore a holy Jew might work on uninterruptedly, although he thereby violated the Sabbath day. With equal reason might it have been urged, that because God sees good to take the lives of His creatures, in His mercy no less than in His justice, therefore a religious man might rightfully put to death His tempted or afflicted brother. The Sabbath was a positive precept, but it rested on a moral basis. It had been given by God Himself. Our Lord claims a right to break the Sabbath, because God’s ever active Providence is not suspended on that day. Our Lord thus places both His Will and His Power on the level of the Power and Will of the Father. He might have parried the Jewish attack by saying that the miracle of healing the impotent man was a work of God, and that He was Himself but the unresisting organ of a Higher Being. On the Socinian hypothesis He ought to have done so. But He repre-- sents the miracle as His own work. He claims distinctly to be Lord of nature, and thus to be equal with the Father in point of operative energy !. He makes the same assertion in saying that ‘whatsoever things the Father doeth, those things the Son also doeth in like manner™, To narrow down these words so as to make them only refer to Christ’s imitation of the moral nature
1 St. Cyril. Alex. Thesaurus, p. 324.
m St.John v. 19: ἃ γὰρ ἂν ἐκεῖνος ποιῇ, ταῦτα Kal ὁ Tids ὁμοίως ποιεῖ, Cf. viii. 28.
Iv |
184 The Son ts to be honoured as the Father.
of God, is to take a liberty with the text for which it affords no warrant ; it is to make void the plain meaning of Scripture by a sceptical tradition. Our Lord simply and directly asserts that the works of the Father, without any restriction, are, both as to their nature and mode of production, the works of the Son. Certainly our Lord insists very carefully upon the truth that the power which He wielded was derived originally from the Father. It is often difficult to say whether He is speaking, as Man, of the honour of union with Deity and of the graces which flowed from Deity, conferred upon His Manhood; or whether, as the Everlasting Son, He is describing those natural and eternal Gifts which are inherent in His Godhead, and which He receives from the Father, the Fountain or Source of Deity, not as a matter of grace or favour, but in virtue of His Eternal Generation. As God, ‘the Son can do nothing of Himself, and this, ‘not from lack of power, but because His Being is insepar- able from That of the Father® It is true of Christ as God in one sense—it is true of Him as Man in another—that ‘as the Father hath life in Himself, so hath He given to the Son to have life in Himself.” But neither is an absolute harmony of the works of Christ with the Mind and Will of the Father, nor a derivation of the Divine Nature of Christ Itself from the Being of the Father by an unbegun and unending Generation, destruc- tive of the force of our Lord’s representation of His operative energy as being on a par with that of the Father.
For, our Lord’s real sense is made plain by His subsequent statement that ‘the Father hath committed all judgment unto the Son; that all should honour the Son even as they honour the Father®.’ This claim is indeed no more than He had already advanced in bidding His followers trust Him and love Him. The obligation of honouring the Son is defined to be just
n Euthym.
ο St. John ν. 22, 23. Meyer inloc.: ‘In dem richtenden Sohne erscheint der beauftragte Stellvertreter des Vaters, und er ist in so fern (also immer relativ) zu ehren wie der Vater.’ But if the honour paid to the Son be merely relative, if He be merely honoured as an Ambassador or delegated Judge, then men do not honour Him as they honour the Father; they pay the Father one kind of honour, namely adoration, and they pay the Son a totally distinct kind of honour,—possibly respect. If this had been our Lord’s meaning, would He not either have omitted καθὼς, or used two different verbs to express what is due from all men to the Father and to the Son respectively? Moses was ‘as a Gop unto Pharaoh,’ and Gop’s ambas- sador and judge among the children of Israel. Does he therefore claim that all men should honour Moses even as they honour Jehovah?
[ LECT.
Christ claims to be One with the Father. 185
as stringent as the obligation of honouring the Father. What- ever form that honour may take, be it thought, or language, or outward act, or devotion of the affections, or submission of the will, or that union of thought and heart and will into one complex act of self-prostration before Infinite Greatness, which we of the present day usually mean by the term ‘adoration,’ such honour is due to the Son no less than to the Father. How fearful is such a claim if the Son be only human; how natural, how moderate, how just, if He is in very deed Divine!
(8) Beyond this assertion of an equal operative Power with the Father, and of an equal right to the homage of mankind, is our Lord’s revelation of His absolute oneness of Essence with the Father. The Jews gathered around Him at the Feast of Dedication in the Porch of Solomon, and pressed Him to tell them whether He was the Christ or notP. Our Lord referred them to the teaching which they had heard, and to the miracles which they had witnessed in vain4; but He proceeded to say that there were docile and faithful souls whom He terms His ‘sheep,’ and whom He ‘knew,’ while they too understood and followed Him?t. He goes on to insist upon the blessedness of these His true followers. With Him they were secure; no power on earth or in heaven could ‘pluck them out of His Hands” follows: ‘My Father which gave them Me is a Greater Power (μεῖζον) than all: and no man is able to pluck them out of My Father's Hand ὁ, In these words our Lord repeats His previous assurance of the security of His sheep, but He gives a different reason for it. He had represented them as ‘in His own Hand;’ He now represents them as in the Hand of the Almighty Father. How does He consolidate these two reasons which together assure His ‘sheep’ of their security? By distinctly asserting His own oneness with the Father: ‘I and My Father are One Thing*” Now what kind of unity is that which the context obliges us to see in this solemn statement? Is it such a unity as that which our Lord desired for His followers in His in- tercessory prayer; a unity of spiritual communion, of reciprocal love, of common participation in an imparted, heaven-sent
P St. John x. 22, 23. @ Ibid. ver. 25.
Tbid. ver. 27. 5 Ibid. ver. 28.
t Tbid. ver. 29.
u Tbid. ver. 30: "Ey® καὶ 6 Πατὴρ ἕν ἐσμεν. For a full explanation of this text see Bishop Beveridge’s noble sermon on the Unity of Christ with — the Father, Works, vol. ii. Serm, xxv, See also note Ὁ,
Iv
186 Christ's Oneness with the Father, essential,
Naturev? Is it a unity of design and co-operation, such as that which, in varying degrees, is shared by all true workers for God¥%? How would either of these lower unities sustain the full sense of the context, which represents the Hand of the Son as one with the Hand—that is, with the Love and Power—of the Father, securing to the souls of men an effectual preservation from eternal ruin? A unity like this must be a dynamic unity, as distinct from any mere moral and intellectual union, such as might exist in a real sense between a creature and its God. Deny this dynamic unity, and you destroy the internal con- nexion of the passage *. Admit this dynamic unity, and you admit, by necessary implication, a unity of Essence. The Power of the Son, which shields the redeemed from the foes of their salvation, is the very Power of the Father; and this identity of Power is itself the outflow and the manifestation of a Oneness of Nature. Not that at this height of contemplation the Person of the Son, so distinctly manifested just now in the work of guarding His redeemed, melts away into any mere aspect or relation of the Divine Being in His dealings with His creatures. As St. Augustine observes on this text, the ‘unum’ saves us from the Charybdis of Arianism; the ‘sumus’ is our safeguard against the Scylla of Sabellius. The Son, within the incom- municable unity of God, is still Himself; He is not the Father, but the Son. Yet this personal subsistence is in the mystery of the Divine Life strictly compatible with Unity of Essence ;—the Father and the Son are one Thing.
‘Intellexerunt Judei, quod non intelligunt Ariani.’ The Jews understood our Lord to assume Divine honours, and proceeded to execute the capital sentence decreed against blasphemy by
v As in St. John xvii. 11, 22, 23. Ἢ 1 Cor. iii. 8.
* Meyer in Joh. x. 29: ‘Der Vater in dem Sohne ist und wirkt, und daher dieser, als Organ und Trager [He is, of course, much more than this] der gottlichen Thatigkeit bei Ausfiihrung des Messianischen Werks, nicht ge- schieden von Gott [i.e. the Father] nicht ein zweiter ausser und neben Gott ist, sondern nach dem Wesen jener Gemeinschaft Lins mit Gott. Gottes Hand ist daher seine Hand in der Vollziehung des Werkes, bei welchem Er Gottes Macht, Liebe u. s. w. handhabt und zur Ausfiihrung bringt. Die Einheit ist mithin die der dynamischen Gemeinschaft, wornach der Vater im Sohne ist, und doch griésser als der Sohn, [i.e. as man,] weil Er ihn geweiht und gesandt hat. Die Arianische Fassung von der ethischen Harmonie geniigt nicht, da die Argumentation, ohne die Einheit der Macht (welche Chrys. Euth. Zig. u. V. auch Liicke mit Recht urgiren) zu ver- stehen, nicht zutreffen wiirde.’ This interpretation is remarkable for its scholarly fairness in a writer who sits so loosely to the Catholic belief in our Lord’s Godhead as Meyer. _
[ LECT.
Our Lord’s reference to Psalm \xxxii. 6. 187
the Mosaic law ¥. His words gave them a fair ground for saying that ‘being Man, He made Himself God’ Now if our Lord had been in reality only Man, He might have been fairly ex- pected to say so. Whereas He proceeds, as was often His wont, to reason with His opponents upon their own real or assumed grounds, and so to bring them back to a point at which they were forced to draw for themselves the very inference which had just roused their indignation. With this view our Lord points out the application of the word Elohim, to the wicked judges under the Jewish theocracy, in the eighty-second Psalm ἃ, Surely, with this authoritative language before their eyes, His countrymen could not object to His calling Himself the Son of God. And yet He irresistibly implies that His title to Divinity is higher than, and indeed distinct in kind from, that of the Jewish magistrates. If the Jews could tolerate that ascription of a lower and relative divinity to the corrupt officials who, theocratically speaking, represented the Lord Jehovah ; surely, looking to the witness of His works, Divinity could not be denied to One Who so manifestly wielded Divine power as did Jesus>, Our Lord’s argument is thus ἃ minori ad majus; and He arrives a second time at the assertion which had already given such offence to His countrymen, and which He now repeats in terms expressive of His sharing not merely a dy- namical but an essential unity with the Father: ‘The Father is in Me, and I in Him’, What the Father is to the Son, the Son is to the Father. The context again forbids us to compare this expression with the phrases which are often used to express the indwelling of God with holy souls, since no moral quality is here in question, but an identity of Power for the performance of superhuman works. Our Lord expresses this truth of His wielding the power of the Father, by asserting His identity of Nature with the Father, which involves His Omnipotence. And the Jews understood Him. He had not retracted what they accounted blasphemy, and they again endeavoured to take His life 4,
It will probably be said that the Church’s interpretation of Christ’s language in the Porch of Solomon is but an instance of that disposition to materialize spiritual truth, which seems to be
Υ St. John x. 31. ® Ibid. ver. 33: Σὺ, ἄνθρωπος ὧν, ποιεῖς σεαυτὸν Θεόν. 8 Ps, Ixxxii. 6. > St. John x. 37, 38. Cf. Perowne, Psalms, ii. 92. ¢ St. John x. 38: ἐν ἐμοὶ ὁ Πατὴρ, κἀγὼ ἐν αὐτῷ. ἐς ver. 39: ἐζήτουν οὖν πάλιν αὐτὸν πιάσαι. ἂν
188 Why Christ’s oneness with the Father is essential,
s0 unhappily natural to the mind of man. ‘What grossness of apprehension,’ it will be urged, ‘is here! How can you thus confound language which merely asserts a sustained intercom- munion between a holy soul and God, with those hard formal scholastic assertions of an identity of essence?’ But it is obvious to rejoin that in cases like that before us, language must be morally held to mean what it is understood to mean by those to whom it is addressed. After all, language is designed to convey thought; and if a speaker perceives that his real mind has not been conveyed by one statement, he is bound to correct the deficiencies of that statement by another. Had our Lord been speaking to populations accustomed to Pantheistic modes of thinking, and insensible to the fundamental distinctness of the Uncreated from all forms of created life, His assertion of His oneness with the Father might perhaps have passed for nothing more than the rapture of a subjective ecstasy, in which the consciousness of the Speaker had been so raised above its ordinary level, that He could hyperbolically describe His sensa- tions as Divine. Had our Lord been an Indian, or an Alex- andrian, or a German mystic, some such interpretation might have been reasonably affixed to His language. Had Christ been a Christian instead of the Author of Christianity, we might, after carefully detaching His words from their context, have even supposed that He was describing the blessed experience of millions of believers; it being certain that, since the Incarnation, the soul of man is capable of a real union with the All-holy God. Undoubtedly writers like St. Augustine, and many of later date 9, do speak of the union between God and the Chris- tian in terms which signally illustrate the loving condescension of God truly present in holy souls, of God’s gift of Himself to His redeemed creatures. But the belief of these writers re- specting the Nature of the Most High has placed the phrases of their mystical devotion beyond the reach of a possible misunderstanding. And our Lord was addressing earnest monotheists, keenly alive to the essential distinction between the Life of the Creator and the life of the creature, and re- ligiously jealous of the Divine prerogatives. The Jews did not understand Christ’s claim to be one with the Father in any merely moral, spiritual, or mystical sense. Christ did not
ὁ e.g. Thomas ἃ Kempis. Of his teaching respecting the union between Gop and the devout soul, there is a good summary in Ullmann’s Reformers before the Reformation, vol. ii. pp. 139-149, Clarke’s transl, [
LECT,
Christ conscious of having existed before Hts birth. 189
encourage. them so to understand it. The motive of their indignation was not disowned by Him. They believed Him to mean that He was Himself a Divine Person; and He never repudiated that construction of His language.
(y) In order however to determine the real sense of our Saviour’s claim to be One with the Father, let us ask a simple question. Does it appear that He is recorded to have been con- scious of having existed previously to His Human Life upon this earth ? Suppose that He is only a good man enjoying the highest degree of constant spiritual intercommunion with God, no refer- ences to a Pre-existent Life can be anticipated. There is nothing to warrant such a belief in the Mosaic Revelation, and to have professed it on the soil of Palestine would simply have been taken by the current opinion of the people as a proof of mental derangement. But believe that Christ is the Only-begotten Son of God, manifested in the sphere of sense and time, and clothed in our human nature; and some references to a consciousness extending backwards through the past into a boundless eternity are only what would naturally be looked for at His hands.
Let us then listen to Him as He is proclaiming to His countrymen in the temple, ‘If a man keep J/y saying, He shall never see deathf’ The Jews exclaim that by such an announce- ment He assumes to be greater than Abraham and the prophets. They indignantly ask, ‘Whom makest Thou Thyself?’ Here as elsewhere our Lord keeps both sides of His relation to the Eternal Father in full view: it is the Father that glorifies His Manhood, and the Jews would glorify Him too if they were the Father’s true children. But it was not their Heavenly Father alone with whom the Jews were at variance. The earthly ancestor of the Jewish race might be invoked to rebuke his | recreant posterity. ‘Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day, and he saw it and was glad.’ Abraham had seen the day of Messiah by the light of prophecy, and accordingly this statement was a claim on the part of Jesus to be the true Messiah. Of itself such a claim would not have shocked the Jews; they would have discussed it on its merits. They had latterly looked for a political chief, victorious but human, in their expected Messiah ; they would have welcomed any prospect of realizing their expectations. But they detected a deeper and to them a less welcome meaning in the words of Christ. He had meant,
* St. John viii. 52: ἐάν τις τὸν λόγον τὸν ἐμὸν τηρήσῃ, θάνατον οὐ μὴ θεω- ρήσῃ εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα. ε ty |
190 ‘Before Abraham was, 7 Am.’
they thought, by His ‘Day’ something more than the years of His Human Life. At any rate they would ask Him a question, which would at once justify their suspicions or enable Him to clear Himself. ‘Thou,’ they said to Him, ‘art not yet fifty years old, and hast Thou seen Abraham?’ Now if our Lord had only claimed to be a human Messiah, such as the Jews of later years had learned to look for, He must have earnestly disavowed any such inference from His words. He might have replied that if Abraham saw Him by the light of prophecy, this did not of itself imply that He was Abraham’s contemporary, and so that He had Himself literally seen Abraham. But His actual answer more than justified the most extreme suspicious of His examiners as to His real meaning. ‘Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, 7 am.’ In these tremendous words the Speaker institutes a double contrast, in respect both of the duration and of the mode of His existence, between Him- self and the great ancestor of Israel. Πρὶν ᾿Αβραὰμ γενέσθαι. ‘Abraham, then, had come into existence at some given point of time. Abraham did not exist until his parents gave him birth. But, ᾿Εγώ εἰμ. Here is simple existence, with no note of beginning or ends Our Lord says not, ‘Before Abraham was, I was,’ but ‘I am.’ He claims pre-existence indeed, but He does not merely claim pre-existence; He unveils a conscious- ness of Eternal Being. He speaks as One on Whom time has no effect, and for Whom it has no meaning. He is the I AM of ancient Israel; He knows no past, as He knows no future; He is unbeginning, unending Being; He is the eternal ‘ Now.’ This is the plain sense of His language Β, and perhaps the most instructive commentary upon its force is to be found in the violent expedients to which Humanitarian writers have been driven in order to evade iti,
® St. John viii. 58. Meyer in loc.: ‘Ehe Abraham ward, bin Ich, alter als Abraham’s Werden ist meine Existenz.’ Stier characterizes our Lord’s words as ‘a sudden [not to Himself] flash of revelation out of the depths of His own Eternal Consciousness.’ That Christ should finally have spoken thus, is not, Stier urges, to be wondered at, on the supposition of this Eternal Consciousness ever abiding with Him. Rather is it wonderful, that He should ordinarily, and as a rule, have restrained it so much. Here too, indeed, He restrains Himself. He does not go on to say, as afterwards in the Great Intercession—zp) τοῦ τὸν κόσμον εἶναι (St. John xvii. 5).
h Milman, Hist. of Christianity, i. 249: ‘The awful and significant words which identified Him, as it were, with Jehovah, the great self-ex- istent Deity.’ Why ‘as it were’?
i Cf. Meyer on St. John viii. 58: ‘Das ἐγώ εἶμι ist aber weder: Ich bin es (der Messias) zu deuten (Faustus Socinus, Paulus, ganz miata
LECT.
Christ affirms that [Te came down from heaven. 191
Here again the Jews understood our Lord, and attempted to kill Him; while He, instead of explaining Himself in any sense which would have disarmed their anger, simply withdrew from the temple J,
With this statement we may compare Christ’s references to His pre-existence in His two great sacramental Discourses. Conversing with Nicodemus He describes Himself as the Son of Man Who had come down from heaven, and Who while yet speaking was in heavenk, Preaching in the great synagogue of Capernaum, He calls Himself ‘the Bread of Life Which had come down from heaven.’ He repeats and expands this descrip- tion of Himself. His pre-existence is the warrant of His life- giving power!. The Jews objected that they knew His father and mother, and did not understand His advancing any such claim as this to a pre-existent Life. Our Lord replied by saying that no man could come to Him unless taught of God to do s0, and then proceeded to re-assert His pre-existence in the same terms as before™, He pursued His former statement into its mysterious consequences. Since He was the heaven-descended Bread of Life, His Flesh was meat indeed and His Blood was drink indeed, They only would have life in them who should eat this Flesh and drink this Blood ®. Life eternal, Resurrection at the last dayP, and His own Presence even now within the sould, would follow.upon a due partaking of that heavenly food. When the disciples murmured at this doctrine as a ‘hard say- ing’, our Lord met their objections by predicting His coming Ascension into Heaven as an event which would justify His allu- sions to His pre-existence, no less than to the life-giving virtue of His Manhood. ‘What and if ye shall see the Son of Man ascend up where He was befores?’ Again, the reality of our
noch in den Rathschluss Gottes, zu verlegen (Sam. Crell, Grotius, Paulus, B. Crusius), was schon durch das Praes. verboten wird. Nur noch geschichtlich bemerkenswerth ist die von Faustus Socinus auch in das Socinianische Bekenntniss (s. Catech. Racov. ed. Oeder, p. 144, f.) tiberge- gangene Auslegung: ‘‘Ehe Abraham, Abraham, ἃ. i. der Vater vieler Volker, wird, bin Ich es, nimlich der Messias, das Licht der Welt.” Damit ermahne Er die Juden, an Ihn zu glauben, so lange es noch Zeit sei, ehe die Gnade von ihnen genommen und auf die Heiden iibergetragen werde, wodurch dann Abraham der Vater vieler Volker werde.’
J St. John viii. 59. κ᾿ Tbid. iii, 13. 1 Thid. vi. 33.
™ Ibid. vers. 44-51. » Ibid. ver. 55. ° Tid. ver. 53. P Ibid. ver. 54. @ Ibid. ver. 56. τ Tbid. ver. 60,
8 Ibid. ver. 62. Strauss thinks it ‘ difficult but admissible’ to interpret St. i ohn viii. 58, with the Socinian Crell, of a purely ideal existence in the ΤΥ
192 Pre-existence alone, does not imply Divinity.
Lord’s pre-existence lightens up such mysterious sayings as the following: ‘I know whence I came, and whither I go; but ye cannot tell whence I come, and whither I got;’ ‘I am from above: ... I am not of this world";’ ‘If ye believe not that I am He, ye shall die in your sins’;’ ‘I proceeded forth and came from GodW;’ ‘I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father *.’ Once more, how full of solemn significance is that reference to ‘the glory which I had with Thee before the world was ¥’ in the great intercession which our Incarnate Saviour offered to the Eternal Father on the eve of His agony!
Certainly taken alone, our Lord’s allusions to His pre-existence need not imply His true Divinity. There is indeed no ground for the theory of a Palestinian doctrine of metempsychosis; and even Strauss shrinks from supposing that the fourth Evangelist makes Jesus the mouthpiece of Alexandrian theories of which a Jewish peasant would never have heard. Arianism however would argue, and with reason, that in some of the passages just referred to, though not in all, our Lord might conceivably have been speaking of a created, although pre-existent, life. Yet if we take these passages in connection with our Lord’s assertion of His being One with the Father, each truth will be seen to sup- port and complete the other. On the one hand, Christ asserts His substantial oneness with Deity, on the other, His distinct
predetermination of God. He considers it however ‘scarcely possible to view the prayer to the Father (St. John xvii. 5) to confirm the δόξα which Jesus had with Him before the world was, as an entreaty for the com- munication of a glory predestined for Jesus from eternity.’ He adds that the language of Jesus (St. John vi. 62) where He speaks of the Son of Man re-ascending where He was before, ἀναβαίνειν ὅπου, ἦν τὸ πρότερον, is ‘in its intrinsic meaning, as well as in that which is reflected on it from other passages, unequivocally significative of actual, not merely of ideal pre- existence.’ Leben Jesu, pt. ii. kap. 4. § 65.
Here, as sometimes elsewhere, Strauss incidentally upholds the natural and Catholic interpretation of the text of the Gospels; nor are we now concerned with the theory to which he eventually applies it. It may be further observed, that Strauss might have at least interpreted St. John viii, 58 by the light of St. John vi. 62.
* St. John viii. 14. « Tbid. ver. 23. v Ibid. ver. 24. W Tbid. ver. 42: ἐγὼ yap ἐκ Tod Θεοῦ ἐξῆλθον καὶ ἥκω. x Thid. xvi. 28. Υ Ibid. xvii. 5.
* St. Luke x. 18 would be a weighty addition to these passages, if é« τοῦ οὐρανοῦ could be pressed, against the apparent requirements of the context, so as to refer to the fall of the rebel angels. In that case ἐθεώρουν would be an act of the pre-existent Word. So many Fathers, and Hofmann, Schriftbew. i. p. 443, ed. 2.
[LEcT.
Our Lord’s testimony when before the Sanhedrin. 19 3
pre-existent Personality. He might be an inferior and created Being, if He were not thus absolutely One with God. He might be only a saintly man, and, as such, described as an ‘aspect,’ a ‘manifestation’ of the Divine Life, if His language about His pre-existence did not clearly imply that before His birth of Mary He was already a living and superhuman Person.
If indeed, in His dealings with the multitude, our Lord had been really misunderstood, He had a last opportunity for ex- pune Himself when He was arraigned before the Sanhedrin.
othing is more certain than that, whatever was the dominant motive that prompted our Lord’s apprehension, the Sanhedrin condemned Him because He claimed Divinity. The members of the court stated this before Pilate. ‘We havea law, and by our law He ought to die, because He made Himself the Son of God.’ Their language would have been meaningless if they had under- stood by the ‘Son of God’ nothing more than the ethical or theocratic Sonship of their own ancient kings and saints. If the Jews held Christ to be a false Messiah, a false prophet, a blas- phemer, it was because He claimed literal Divinity. True, the
_ Messiah was to have been Divine. But the Jews had secularized
the Messianic promises; and the Sanhedrin held Jesus Christ to be worthy of death under the terms of the Mosaic law, as ex- pressed in Leviticus and Deuteronomy». After the witnesses had delivered their various and inconsistent testimonies, the high priest arose and said, ‘I adjure Thee by the living God, that Thou tell us whether Thou be the Christ, the Son of God. Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand.of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven. Then the high priest rent his clothes, saying, He hath spoken blasphemy 9, The blasphemy did not consist, either in the assumption of the title Son of Man, or in the claim to be Messiah, or even, except- ing indirectly, in that which by the terms of Daniel’s prophecy was involved in Messiahship, namely, the commission to judge the world. It was the further clain4 to be the Son of God,
8 St. John xix. 7. ‘ Devant ce procurateur,’ observes M. Salvador, ‘chacune des parties émit une parole capitale. Telle fut celle du conseil ou de ses délégués: ‘Nous avons une loi; d’aprés cette loi il doit mourir,” non parce- qu il s’est fait Fils de Dieu, selon l’expression familitre ἃ notre langue et ἃ nos prophttes; mais parcequ’il se fait égal ἃ Dieu, et Dieu méme,’ Sal- vador, Jésus-Christ, ii. p. 204.
> Lev. xxiv. 16; Deut. xiii. 5; cf. Wilson, Illustration of the Method of Explaining the New Testament, p. 26. ο St. Matt. xxvi. 63-65.
4 Pressens¢, Jésus-Christ, pp. 341, 615. rv | ο
194 2776 ἐς condemned for claiming to be Divine.
not in any moral or theocratic, but in the natural sense, at which the high priest and his coadjutors professed to be so deeply shocked. The Jews felt, as our Lord intended, that the Son of Man in Daniel’s prophecy could not but be Divine; they knew what He meant by appropriating such words as applicable to Himself. Just as one body of Jews had endeavoured to destroy Jesus when He called God His Father in such sense as to claim Divinity ὃ ; and another when He contrasted His Eternal Being with the fleeting life of Abraham in a distant past f; and another when He termed Himself Son of God, and associated Himself with His Father as being dynamically and so substantially Ones; —just as they murmured at His pretension to ‘have come down from Heaven h,’ and detected blasphemy in His authoritative re- mission of sinsi;—so when, before His judges, He admitted that He claimed to be the Son of God, all further discussion was at an end. The high priest exclaimed ‘Ye have heard His blas- phemy ;’ and they all condemned Him to be guilty of death. And a very accomplished Jew of our own day, M. Salvador, has shewn that this question of our Lord’s Divinity was the real point at issue in that momentous trial. He maintains that a Jew had no logical alternative to belief in the Godhead of Jesus Christ except the imperative duty of putting Him to death Κ,