1. If the order of incidents in the Gospel of St. Mark could be accepted as chronological, the first collision of Jesus with the representatives of the tradition was occasioned by His eating with pub- licans and sinners at the house of Levi (Mk 2'5*). Although stress cannot be laid on the order in which the incidents are narrated, this furnishes us with an excellent illustration of the way in which the fundamental ideas of Jesus brought Him into conflict with the religious prejudices of His time. His doctrine of the Fatherhood of God and of the incomparable value of the human soul were fundamental convictions. To this was added the consciousness of His own mission to restore the lost children to their Father. Hence He met the criticism of His condtict in associating with the degraded by the explanation that He was a physician, and where was the physician's place but in the midst of the sick ? There is indeed a terrible irony in the words, for there were none whose moral and religious, health was, to the eyes
of Jesus, in a more desperate condition than that of His critics. But scandalized as tliey might be by conduct so unprofessional on the part of a teacher, there was an obvious conclusiveness in the reply of Jesus which could have been evaded only by the assertion that the salvation of such people was not desirable. Tlie two types of holiness emerge in clear contradiction — the type which seeks to avoid all contact with the contaminating in order that personal purity may not be compromised, and the type that is entirely forgetful of self in its zeal for the regeneration of others. It is in connexion with a similar accusation that St. Luke relates the parables of the Lost Sheep, the Lost Drachma, and the Lost Son (Lk lo). Similarly Christ's lodging Avith Zacchreus the publican gave rise to criticism ; and here again Jesus explained His action by His mission : ' The Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost' (Lk 19^").
2. The second point in which the new type dis- played a contrast with the old was in the matter of Fasting. Wonder was excited that, while the Pharisees and the disciples of the Baptist fasted, the disciples of Jesus neglected this religious exer- cise. The Pharisees fasted twice in the week, on Monday and Thursday. What fasts were observed by the disciples of John we do not know. But the distinction was not one simply between disciples, it went back to the leaders. The Baptist was an ascetic, clothed in camel's hair and a leathern girdle, with locusts and wild honey for his food ; his congenial home was the desert, his message one of judgment to come, the axe already lying at the root of the tree. He came neither eating nor drinking, and this unsociable disposition called fortli the charge that he had a devil. Jesus, on the other hand, was no ascetic ; so little of an ascetic, in fact, that His enemies taxed Him with over-indulgence : ' The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold a gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners' (Mt IV^). Jesus defends His disciples against the criticism implied in the question, ' Why do John's disciples and the disciples of the Phari- sees fast, but tiiy disciples fast not?' (Mk 2i») by the answer, ' Can the sons of the bride-chamber fast Avhile the bridegroom is with them ? as long as they have the bridegroom with them they cannot fast.' The principle underlying this is that the external practice must be a spontaneous expression of the inward feeling. Fasting is out of place in their present circumstances, they have the bride- groom with them, therefore all is joy and festivity. It would be a piece of unreality to introduce into their present religious life an element so incongru- ous. But He proceeds : ' The days will come, when the bridegroom .shall be taken away from them, and then will they fast in that day.' The reference is to His own death ; and possibly the foreboding expressed should lead us to assign this incident to His later ministry, after the declaration of Messiahship had been made and the prediction of death had been uttered. On the other hand, the veiled allusion makes it possible that those who heard it would not catch His meaning, and we can, in that case, assign it to a late date only if we are clear that Jesus Himself became con- scious at a comparatively late period in His mini- stry of the death that aMaited Him. The incident itself rather makes the impression that it belongs to the earlier period of Christ's activity. This was one of the respects in which failure to conform to conventional piety would early attract attention.
Wellhausen regards the incident as unauthentic. He points to the curious fact that the question is one between the dis- ciples of the Baptist and of Jesus, and draws the inference that it is a justification for the deviation of the later practice of Christ's followers from that of Jesus Himself, who in practice conformed strictly to the Judaism of His time. He confirms
this by pointing out that as a matter of fact the bridegroom is not taken away from wedding festivities, and here therefore the choice of expression has been determined by the actual fact of Christ's removal by death. However plausible this sug- gestion may be, the sayings bear rather the stamp of Jesus than of the early Apostolic Church. The criticism of the dis- ciples rather than of Jesus has its parallel in the incident of the plucking of the ears of corn on the Sabbath and the disciples eating with unwashed hands, and the temper of the Master was much freer than that of the timidly legalistic disciples.