A somewhat similar desire to avo d words which might seem out of harmony with OT regulations has probably caused the omission in Mt 128 of the clause, ' The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath,' found in Mk 227.
Lastly, an example of over-emphasis due to arrangement of
* For divorce by a woman amongst the Jews, cf. Aramaic Papyri discovered at Assuan, p. 12 (i.jndon, G. Moring, 1906).
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MATTHEW (GOSPEL)
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sayings may be found in Mt 5i"-20. it is quite probable that vv.is- ly are genuine sayings of Christ spoken on some oocasion when their meaning could not be mistaken, as a paradoxical expression of the permanent value of the moral elements in the OT. But as they now stand they hopelesslj' confuse the plain tenor of the Sermon. The illustrations given in vv.2i-i3 make it clear that the ' fulfilling ' of v.i" meant to make clear the true spiritual meaning of the Law. But vv.is.i9 interpret T'/.r,f>:j(7a.i in another sense ; namely, to reaffirm and carry out in detail, which is indeed in harmony with the teaching of Rabbinical Judaism, but is inconsistent with the plain meaning of the rest of the chapter. If vv.!!*- iwbe omitted as extraneous to this con- text, and due to the practice of the editor of bringing together sayings which in any way bear upon the same subject, the meaning of vv.i" -O-^^ is quite clear. Christ did not, as His adversaries argued, subvert the Law. He reaffirmed its spiritual principles, and gave to it a deeper meaning ihan that arrived at by Rabbinical exegesis. The 'righteousness' of His disciples was to exceed that of the Pharisees, because it would be based upon a more spiritual understanding of the principles under- lying the OT revelation.
(2) The near approach of the Kingdom. — A still more difficult problem is raised by the question, Did Je.sus Christ promise that He ^vould come again on the clouds of heaven Avithin the life- time of the generation to which He spoke ? The Palestinian Church, as represented by the First Gospel, certainly believed that this was the case. But did they misunderstand Him? And the ques- tion may be raised in an earlier form. Nearly all the terms used in sayings of this nature were familiar technical theological terms in use in the apocalj'ptic writings, which expressed one side of contemporary Messianic expectation. E.g. ' the Son of Man,' ' the clouds of heaven,' the ' coming' of the Son of Man, 'the throne of glorj-,' 'the coming age,' 'the day of judgment,' the division between righteous and wicked, the condemnation to Gehenna, the inheritance of the Kingdom by the righteous, the feast in the Kingdom, and ' eternal life ' — all these formed part of the ordinary mental equipment of every writer who tried to express the hopes of Israel under apocalyptic im- agery. Did the Lord use them of Himself, or did the Palestinian Church try to express her faith and belief in Him as the Divine Messiah by transferring to Him the phrases and the imagery of current Messianic belief? Attempts have been made to show that the second supposition is the more probable,* but, so far as the present writer can judge, they have failed in their aim. For it is impossible to disentangle all apocalyptic imagery from Christ's teaching, without entirely destroy- ing the credit of the Gospels as historical records. This kind of imagery and metaphor is, of course, more accumulated in the First Gospel than in the others, and one or two phrases, as, e.g., the ' end ' or ' consummation of the age,' and ' the throne of glory,' occur only in it, but still all the Gospels contain a good deal. If Christ did not .speak of Himself as the ' Son of Man ' and of His ' coming ' at the Last Day, and of other similar things, then we have no solid ground for believing that any saying recorded of Him is genuine.
But if we assume that Christ did use of Himself this apocalyptic language, what shall we say of the more important question, Are, then, the conceptions which His sayings, as they are arranged in the First Gospel, seem to convey, to be taken as a part of the real teaching? And here we shall neces- sarily have to take into consideration the following facts amongst others.
(a) It seems clear that Christ must have given utterance to words which left upon the minds of the early disciples the impression that He had promised to come again shortly. For this con- ception not only pervades the Synoptic Gospels,
* E.g. it has been argued on ling-uistic grounds that Christ could not have spoken of Himself as the ' Son of Man,' and that much of the apocalj'ptic imagery in Mk 13, Mt 24, is due to the blending of a Jewish Apocaij-pse with genuine sayings of Christ. But the former theorj' is still unproven, and the second is an unsuccessful exegetical device to solve a difficulty. I
but is found in almost eveiy part of the NT litera- ture.
(b) It Avas, however, inevital le that anj' expres- sions of time to which He gave utterance should have been interpreted by His Jewish adherents to imply a short time literally. For if we grant for a moment, for the sake of argument, that He had foreknowledge of the future development of history, it is clear to us now that it would have been inconsistent with His methods of teaching to have unveiled to His disciples the historical details of future ages. On the other hand, He may well have wished that His return should be, as it has been, the soul's pole-.star of His lovers in every successive age, and have left the period of His Coming veiled in ambiguous language. In that case tiie early Jewi.sh Church has been influenced by the contemporary- Messianic belief which always placed the coming of the Messiah in the near future, and has selected from Christ's sayings those which were most easily interpreted to con- vej- the impression of the nearness of the Kingdom.