It V ill be seen how the most advanced science of our time is by degrees giving back a full equiva- lent for the old naive conception that would make the passages above quoted direct unmediated pre- dictions of the persjonal Messiah. As ajiplica to the Messiah the.se prophecies are not unimili.ited. The steps are one thing, the shrine to which iliey lead is another. The Scriptures of which we have been speaking mark so many separate contri- butions to the total result ; but the result, when it is attained, has the completeuess of an organic whole. A Figure was created — projected as it were upon the clouds — which was invested with all the attributes of a per.son. And the minds of men were turned towards it in an attitude of ex- pectation. It makes no matter that the lines of I Ills I'igure are drawn from dill'erent originals. They meet at last in a single portraiture. And we should never have kiiuwii bow perfectly they meet if we had not had the NT picture to coiiii)are with that of OT. The most literal fullilmeiit of pre- diction would not be more conclusive prool that all the course of the world and all the threads of history are in one guiding Hand.
2. JEWISH WJUTjyGS.—l'a 2, as it has been rightly observed, stands at the head of a long lino ol subsequent development. The conception of the Messiah as also ' Son ' became a fixed part of the tradition, not perhaps quite so widely extended as
might have been expected, — it does not figure at all largely in the Tuliaud, — and yet sulUeiently attested in those forms of Judaism which present the nearest alliiiities to Christianity.
(i.) The Ajjocrijpha and Pseudepif/rapha. — The title 'Son' as aiiplied to the Messiah occurs only once in the Book of Enoch (105-') in a passage the origin and date of which are uncertain. It does not occur at all in Ajioc. of Barucli. But in 4 Ezra (2 Esdras) it seems to be fairly well established. This book is lost in the original (Gr. or Heb. '!), but ispreserved in no fewer than live versions, Lat., Syr., Atli., Arab, (two forms), Arm., which are com- monly supposed to rank in this order, though the subject has not yet been thoroughly investigated.
The text printed in our Bibles is from the Latin. In 7®- 29 this version has e\idently passed through Christian han<ls ; Syr. has twice and Arab, once ' my Son Messiah," .'Eth. once ' my St-n-ant Messiah' (perhaps = ffa7f), and Arm. once 'the Messiah of God.' From this rough statement, wlxioh can hardly he pursued into close detail, it will he seen that there is some douhc. In 133- and 87 Lat. Syr. Arab., and in lo-'~ i-at. Syr. identically, and .^th. Arab, approximate]}-, all have ' Son," which, however, does not appear in the Armenian. A like relation is found in 14^, where Lat. Syr. .d£th. Codd. Arab, have ' Son " ; jV.lh. Co<ld. ' sons," while Arm. drops and paraphrases. The edd., including Hilgenfeld and Gunkel in Ivautzsch, ApokT. u. I'seudepig. d. A T, read * Son 'in all these places ; hut the reading cannot be regarded as quite secure (cf. Drummond, JewuJi jyt-ftft'ia/i, pp. 2^.'.-'ifti>).
The strongly Messianic passage in Ps-Sol 1723-51 has not the title ' Son," but clearly borrows from Ps 2 in v.'-W.
(ii). I'he Talmud. — Apart from the above instances there is not much evidence for the Messianic inter- pretation of Ps 2 in the Rabljinic literature. Dal- inan (Wurtc Jcsu, p. 222) gives three examples of this, one dating c. 2i0 and another c. 350 a.l>.
Two other connnenta quoted by him are of some interest. The Midrash on Ps '2^2 concludes thus: * To whom is this like? To a king who is %vroth with his subjects, and the subjects go and make their peace with the king's son, that he may make jieace for them. Then when the subjects go to give thanks to the king, he saith to them : Would .\'e give thanks to meV Go and give them to my son ; smce, but for him, I shoidd long ago have blotted out the people. So saith God to the nations of the world when they wouhl give thanks to him. Go thank the cliiUlrun of Israel, for without them ye would not have continued for a single hour.'
A late comment in Midr. Tchill. ii. 7 is e.vpressly directed against the Christian interpretation : ' From this pa.-^sage (Ps '27) an answer may be given to the Minim (Christians) who say the Holy One — blessed be He — has a Son, and thou canst reply to them ; it does not mean '* A Son art Thou to Me," but " Thou art My Son"; like a servant whom his master encourages by saying to him, "I love thee as my son 1 " ' Although this is se*t down as ' very late," it is just the interpretation that would be natural to a Jew.
II. The New Testament.— In passing over to NT it is important to observe th.at we should not form an adequate conception of the significance of the title 'Son of God' if we were to confine our- selves to the use of that title alone. It is true that it occurs in some central passages, and true that in these pas.'<ages the phrase is invested with great depth of meaning. But we should not adequately apjiieciate this depth, and still less should we under.stand the mass and volume of NT teaching on this head, if we did not directly connect w ith the explicit lelerciices to the 'Son of God' that other long series of references to God as pre-eminently ' the Father,' and to Christ as pre-eminently ' the Son.' These two lines of usage are really conver- gent. And we must first consider them separately before we bring them together. It has seemed best first to collect and sift the evidence before seeking to penetrate further into its meaning.