According to John ([vi. 15]), after the miracle of the loaves the people were inclined to constitute Jesus their (messianic) King; on the contrary, according to the other three Evangelists, either about the same time ([Luke ix. 18 f.]) or still later ([Matt. xvi. 13 f.]; [Mark viii. 27 f.]) the disciples could only report, on the opinions of the people respecting their master, that some said he was the resuscitated Baptist, some Elias, and others Jeremiah or one of the old prophets: in reference to that passage of John, however, as also to the synoptical one, [Matt. xiv. 33], according to which, some time before Jesus elicited the above report of the popular opinion, the people who were with him in the ship[10] when he had allayed the storm, fell at his feet and worshipped him as the Son of God, it may be observed that when Jesus had spoken or acted with peculiar impressiveness, individuals, in the exaltation of the moment, might be penetrated with a conviction that he was the Messiah, while the general and calm voice of the people yet pronounced him to be merely a prophet. [[285]]
But there is a more troublesome divergency relative to the disciples. In John, Andrew, after his first interview with Jesus, says to his brother, we have found the Messiah, εὑρήκαμεν τὸν Μεσσίαν ([i. 42]); and Philip describes him to Nathanael as the person foretold by Moses and the prophets ([v. 46]); Nathanael salutes him as the Son of God and King of Israel ([v. 50]); and the subsequent confession of Peter appears merely a renewed avowal of what had been long a familiar truth. In the synoptical Evangelists it is only after prolonged intercourse with Jesus, and shortly before his sufferings, that the ardent Peter arrives at the conclusion that Jesus is the Χριστὸς, ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ τοῦ ζῶντος ([Matt. xvi. 16], parall.). It is impossible that this confession should make so strong an impression on Jesus that, in consequence of it, he should pronounce Peter blessed, and his confession the fruit of immediate divine revelation, as Matthew narrates; or that, as all the three Evangelists inform us ([xvi. 20], [viii. 30], [ix. 21]), he should, as if alarmed, forbid the disciples to promulgate their conviction, unless it represented not an opinion long cherished in the circle of his disciples, but a new light, which had just flashed on the mind of Peter, and through him was communicated to his associates.
There is a third equally serious discrepancy, relative to the declarations of Jesus concerning his Messiahship. According to John he sanctions the homage which Nathanael renders to him as the Son of God and King of Israel, in the very commencement of his public career, and immediately proceeds to speak of himself under the messianic title, Son of Man ([i. 51 f.]): to the Samaritans also after his first visit to the passover ([iv. 26], [39 ff.]), and to the Jews on the second ([v. 46]), he makes himself known as the Messiah predicted by Moses. According to the synoptical writers, on the contrary, he prohibits, in the instance above cited and in many others, the dissemination of the doctrine of his Messiahship, beyond the circle of his adherents. Farther, when he asks his disciples, Whom do men say that I am? ([Matt. xvi. 15]) he seems to wish[11] that they should derive their conviction of his Messiahship from his discourses and actions, and when he ascribes the avowed faith of Peter to a revelation from his heavenly Father, he excludes the possibility of his having himself previously made this disclosure to his disciples, either in the manner described by John, or in the more indirect one attributed to him by Matthew in the Sermon on the Mount; unless we suppose that the disciples had not hitherto believed his assurance, and that hence Jesus referred the new-born faith of Peter to divine influence.
Thus, on the point under discussion the synoptical statement is contradictory, not only to that of John, but to itself; it appears therefore that it ought to be unconditionally surrendered before that of John, which is consistent [[286]]with itself, and one of our critics has justly reproached it with deranging the messianic economy in the life of Jesus.[12] But here again we must not lose sight of our approved canon, that in glorifying narratives, such as our gospels, where various statements are confronted, that is the least probable which best subserves the object of glorification. Now this is the case with John’s statement; according to which, from the commencement to the close of the public life of Jesus, his Messiahship shines forth in unchanging splendour, while, according to the synoptical writers, it is liable to a variation in its light. But though this criterion of probability is in favour of the first three Evangelists, it is impossible that the order in which they make ignorance and concealment follow on plain declarations and recognitions of the Messiahship of Jesus can be correct; and we must suppose that they have mingled and confounded two separate periods of the life of Jesus, in the latter of which alone he presented himself as the Messiah. We find, in fact, that the watchword of Jesus on his first appearance differed not, even verbally, from that of John, who professed merely to be a forerunner; it is the same Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand ([Matt. iv. 17]) with which John had roused the Jews ([iii. 2]); and indicates in neither the one nor the other an assumption of the character of Messiah, with whose coming the kingdom of heaven was actually to commence, but merely that of a teacher who points to it as yet future.[13] Hence the latest critic of the first gospel justly explains all those discourses and actions therein narrated, by which Jesus explicitly claims to be the Messiah, or, in consequence of which this dignity is attributed to him and accepted, if they occur before the manifestation of himself recorded in [John v]., or before the account of the apostolic confession ([Matt. xvi].), as offences of the writer against chronology or literal truth.[14] We have only to premise, that as chronological confusion prevails throughout, the position of this confession shortly before the history of the Passion, in nowise obliges us to suppose that it was so late before Jesus was recognised as the Messiah among his disciples, since Peter’s avowal may have occurred in a much earlier period of their intercourse. This, however, is incomprehensible—that the same reproach should not attach even more strongly to the fourth gospel than to the first, or to the synoptical writers in general. For it is surely more pardonable that the first three Evangelists should give us the pre-messianic memoirs in the wrong place, than that the fourth should not give them at all; more endurable in the former, to mingle the two periods, than in the latter, quite to obliterate the earlier one.
If then Jesus did not lay claim to the Messiahship from the beginning of his public career, was this omission the result of uncertainty in his own mind; or had he from the first a conviction that he was the Messiah, but concealed it for certain reasons? In order to decide this question, a point already mentioned must be more carefully weighed. In the first three Evangelists, but not so exclusively that the fourth has nothing similar, when Jesus effects a miracle of healing he almost invariably forbids the person cured to promulgate the event, in these or similar words, ὅρα μηδενὶ εἴπῃς; e.g. the leper, [Matt. viii. 4], parall.; the blind men, [Matt. ix. 30]; a multitude of the healed, [Matt. xii. 16]; the parents of the resuscitated damsel, [Mark v. 43]; above all he enjoins silence on the demoniacs, [Mark i. 34], [iii. 12]; and [John v. 13], it is said, after the cure of the man at the pool of Bethesda, Jesus had conveyed himself away, a multitude being in that place. Thus also he forbade the three [[287]]who were with him on the mount of the Transfiguration, to publish the scene they had witnessed ([Matt. xvii. 9]); and after the confession of Peter, he charges the disciples to tell no man the conviction it expressed ([Luke ix. 21]). This prohibition of Jesus could hardly, as most commentators suppose,[15] be determined by various circumstantial motives, at one time having relation to the disposition of the person healed, at another to the humour of the people, at another to the situation of Jesus: rather, as there is an essential similarity in the conditions under which he lays this injunction on the people, if we discern a probable motive for it on any occasion, we are warranted in applying the same motive to the remaining cases. This motive is scarcely any other than the desire that the belief that he was the Messiah should not be too widely spread. When ([Mark i. 34]) Jesus would not allow the ejected demons to speak because they knew him, when he charged the multitudes that they should not make him known ([Matt. xii. 16]), he evidently intended that the former should not proclaim him in the character in which their more penetrative, demoniacal glance had viewed him, nor the latter in that revealed by the miraculous cure he had wrought on them—in short, they were not to betray their knowledge that he was the Messiah. As a reason for this wish on the part of Jesus, it has been alleged, on the strength of [John vi. 15], that he sought to avoid awakening the political idea of the Messiah’s kingdom in the popular mind, with the disturbance which would be its inevitable result.[16] This would be a valid reason; but the synoptical writers represent the wish, partly as the effect of humility;[17] Matthew, in connexion with a prohibition of the kind alluded to, applying to Jesus a passage in Isaiah ([xlii. 1 f.]) where the servant of God is said to be distinguished by his stillness and unobtrusiveness: partly, and in a greater degree, as the effect of an apprehension that the Messiah, at least such an one as Jesus, would be at once proscribed by the Jewish hierarchy.
From all this it might appear that Jesus was restrained merely by external motives, from the open declaration of his Messiahship, and that his own conviction of it existed from the first in equal strength; but this conclusion cannot be maintained in the face of the consideration above mentioned, that Jesus began his career with the same announcement as the Baptist, an announcement which can scarcely have more than one import—an exhortation to prepare for a coming Messiah. The most natural supposition is that Jesus, first the disciple of the Baptist, and afterwards his successor, in preaching repentance and the approach of the kingdom of heaven, took originally the same position as his former master in relation to the messianic kingdom, notwithstanding the greater reach and liberality of his mind, and only gradually attained the elevation of thinking himself the Messiah. This supposition explains in the simplest manner the prohibition we have been considering, especially that annexed to the confession of Peter. For as often as the thought that he might be the Messiah suggested itself to others, and was presented to him from without, Jesus must have shrunk, as if appalled, to hear confidently uttered that which he scarcely ventured to surmise, or which had but recently become clear to himself. As, however, the Evangelist often put such prohibitions into the mouth of Jesus unseasonably (witness the occasion mentioned, [Matt. viii. 4], when, after a cure effected before a crowd of spectators, it was of little avail to enjoin secrecy on the cured),[18] it is probable [[288]]that evangelical tradition, enamoured of the mysteriousness that lay in this incognito of Jesus,[19] unhistorically multiplied the instances of its adoption.
§ 63.
JESUS, THE SON OF GOD.
In [Luke i. 35], we find the narrowest and most literal interpretation of the expression, ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ; namely, as derived from his conception by means of the Holy Ghost. On the contrary, the widest moral and metaphorical sense is given to the expression in [Matt. v. 45], where those who imitate the love of God towards his enemies are called the sons of the Father in heaven. There is an intermediate sense which we may term the metaphysical, because while it includes more than mere conformity of will, it is distinct from the notion of actual paternity, and implies a spiritual community of being. In this sense it is profusely employed and referred to in the fourth gospel; as when Jesus says that he speaks and does nothing of himself, but only what as a son he has learned from the Father ([v. 19], [xii. 49]; and elsewhere), who, moreover, is in him ([xvii. 21]), and notwithstanding his exaltation over him ([xiv. 28]), is yet one with him ([x. 30]). There is yet a fourth sense in which the expression is presented. When ([Matt. iv. 3]) the devil challenges Jesus to change the stones into bread, making the supposition, If thou be the Son of God; when Nathanael says to Jesus, Thou art the Son of God, the King of Israel ([John i. 49]); when Peter confesses, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God ([Matt. xvi. 16]; comp. [John vi. 69]); when Martha thus expresses her faith in Jesus, I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God ([John xi. 27]); when the high priest adjures Jesus to tell him if he be the Christ, the Son of God ([Matt. xxvi. 63]): it is obvious that the devil means nothing more than, If thou be the Messiah; and that in the other passages the υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ, united as it is with Χριστὸς and βασιλεὺς, is but an appellation of the Messiah.