Theology, \-o\. ii. pp. 364-39S; Salmond, 77. (A,, ' I'.nrine
of Iminortaiity ; OreWi, Die hebr, SynnH^, I. ' !:,ri,j.
keit\'i\&xi\,Geschichteder Israel. Rcli'ji'' i ' mi the
NTsee the various NT theologies, esperi;,;; j hlag
and H. Holtzmann. Cf. also Samuel Da\ I'l-'n, /a.'/.m, nf the Last Things ; Toy, Judaism and Christianilii ; A. Beet, Last Things^; Dalman, The Words of Jesus.
G. Gordon Stott.
ETHICS.— A very little reflexion will reveal the unusual difficulties that lurk in a subject like the present — the Ethics of Jesus, or, of the Gospels. Even the uninitiated is aware that we cannot in strictness speak of the ' Ethics ' of Jesus at all— in the sense, that is, of a doctrini' systcinaticiilly de- veloped according to priiiciiilcs. ;iihl exhaustively applied to the facts of life. I or Ili> «.is mi seien- titic or methodical sjiiiil : 11 i^ .sij;nirnanee lie.s rather in the realm of personality, in tlie unique quality of His moral feeling and judgment, in the peculiar way in which men and things moved Him, and in which He reacted upon them. Hence we need not look for either an orderly arrangement of, or even an approximate completeness in. His ethical ideas. From the drama of His life we are unable to compile a system of morals, but we may see how a great Personality creates a moral standard bj' what He does and suft'ers, and how He elucidates it in His words.
But are we justified in connecting with Him the term ' ethical ' at all 1 We speak accurately of Ethics or Moral Science only when we regard the conduct of men in their mutual relations as some- thing by itself, abstracted from religious feeling and action, and when ethical ends and maxims are disengaged from religion, in virtue of their in- herent worth ; and such an independent position of Ethics, whether it ajijiear wurtli attaining or not, is simply beside the mark in the case of Jesus. His moral and His reli.ui..iis principles are so closely interwoven, His mural feeling, e.ff. His love for man, is so inseverable from the religious basis of His belief in the Fatherhood of God, that it would seem to be impossible to delineate His ' Ethics ' without at the same time treating of, say, the Kingdom of God, the Divine grace, or the final judgment. And if, nevertheless, we venture upon the task, we must never lose sight of the connect- ing lines that run between His ethical teaching and His religious principles.
Then there is the question whether our sources are at all sufficient for the full and accurate repre- sentation of the moral jiersonality of Jesus. In restricting ourselves to the Synoptic Gospels, we
are doing nothing more than recognizing the claims of historical science. But now, to what extent can we regard the three older Gospels as adequate sources for our theme ? H we investigate the oldest of all, viz. Mark, we find that it nowhere makes any attempt to portray the Ethics of Jesus as such. In reporting His conflict and controversy with the Judaism of His time, it casts but an in- direct light upon this side of His character, and that, moreover, in a series of isolated scenes. Of these the most outstanding are the Rabbinical disputations regarding the Sabbath CiP-Z^), purity (7'--''), divorce (10^-'=) ; then come the important passages narrating the conversation with the rich man (K)""^) and regarding the 'first command- ment' (12^""). Various other aspects of His con- ception of life are vividly illustrated by such utter- ances as that to the paralytic (2^^'), about the physician and the sick (2"), the true kinship (Z^), children (10'*'), and tribute-money (12"""). In the section dominated by the three predictions of His death (8"-10''*) we have a mass of admonitions to the disciples— concerning readiness to suffer, loyalty, courage, humility, reverence for childhood, etc-. \Ve have here something of the nature of a primitive Christian catechism ; not instructions (as in the Vidache, let us say) for tranquil seasons and everyday life, but rather articles of war for the ecclesia militans of the persecutions, a manuale
An entirely difi'erent kind of appeal is made by the Sermon on the Mount in Mt 5-7. In its extant form the Sermon is the promulgation of a great progranune, in which the Evangelist seeks to give a definitive and approximately complete statement of Jesus' relation to the Law, with a reference, more- over, to the representatives of the anti-legalistic standpoint, who think that He is come ' to destroy the law.' It is tlie purpose of the writer to con- vince these tliat .lesus, being in a general way the Fulliller of Propliecy, is, as a lawgiver, the ful- liller of the jiropliecy regarding the second Moses, whom God was to raise up in the last days (Dt 18'*), and who, so far from abrogating the Law, will rather consummate and even transcend it.f In our reading of the Sermon ^\e cannot attord to ignore this design of tlie writer ; we miist draw a distinction between \\ liat its A\()rds inniiorted to him, and Mhat they meant in tlie tradition he utilized. Similarly, in reading St. Luke's ver- sion of the Sermon on the Mount, we must bear in mind that he has materially abridged his material, not alone by discarding the Jewish and preserving only the typically human elements, but by considerably transforming it under the influence of his pronounced ascetic view.J Both Mt. and Lk. thus throw us back upon the source of our Lord's w orcls, in which the primitive Jewish- Christian coiiumniity had grouped the Logia of Jesus fur its own instruction. Hence we are forced to distinguish lietween the Ethics of the Evan- gelists and the Etlucs of their source. Further, we must make a searching exandnation of the characteristically Lukan tradition as it appears in the parables of the Rich Man and Lazarus, the Good Saraarita,n, etc. ; § only so shall we be iustified in attempting to answer tlie question, What was the ethical position of Jesus ? An extremely com- plicated critical process must thus be gone through before we use our present authorities as documents for the solution of our problem. But as it is impossible to reproduce here the details of such investigation, only the results can be stated, with references to other works of the present writer.