pressed upon their souls like a heavy burden, but itself enabled them to bear life's greatest loads. He became, therefore, a popular interpreter of the Book to the weary heart of humanity ; while He became, on the other hand, a hated teacher to the privileged class, who felt their jirofession endan- gered both by His methods and by the reception they met with at the hands of the crowd. He regarded the OT with much more real reverence than did the scribes, and, indeed. He spoke of it in a way that might almost sound extravagant in its praise, but He also treated its message with a freedom that was surprising, and broke through the husk of the letter till He found for men the strength and the sweetness of the kernel they had not before tasted.
{a) The great ideas that ivere regulative of the OT revelation were also those which guided the conduct and. practice of our Lord, ideas that were central to His thinking, and loyalty to which He demanded not only from all His followers, but from the people who themselves professed to rever- ence them. The OT idea of righteousness of con- duct as consisting in both outward obedience to the ceremonial observance of the Law and inward obedience to its spiritual precepts, were the two points round which His own teaching and practice appear to have centred. It was this, we are told (Mt 3^^), that led Him to undergo the ceremony of bap- tism at the hands of John, as it was this also that on more than one occasion made Him quote the great spiritual commandments of the Law as con- taining within themselves the secret of eternal life.
{b) It is not, of course, possible to judge fully from the scanty references preserved in the Gospels as to how far our Lord employed the histories of the OT to illustrate His teaching ; but inasmuch as we have no material other tlian these upon which to form a judgment, we must examine the records that we possess. The difficulty is increased, more- over, by our uncertainty as to when the statements are clearly those of the Master Himself, and when they are due to the editing hand of the Evan- gelist.
In the passage, for example, in which He refers to Noah's flood (Mt 2437ff., Lk I726t.)^ He has been dealing with the ques- tion of the future history of the world. In Mt. the words occur in the middle of the great apocalyptic passage, which is more than likely to have been much influenced by later ideas, and more altered than many sections of the Gospel. As Lk. reports the reference, it is contained in a short section of teaching to the disciples that follows upon a question asked by the Phari- sees ; but it is a section which also bears upon it the impress of apocalypse, and may be a passage extracted by the Evangelist from what the present writer regards as most probably the first collection of the sayings of Jesus, i.e. His apocalyptic utterances about the future. Apocalypse was so favourite a form of litera- ture in our Lord's day, and exercised so strong an influence upon His contemporaries, that it seems more than likely that the first series of His words to be reduced to writing would be that which in form and substance most readily fell in with current conceptions. Such a collection of sayings also best accounts for the variety of form in which this particular section appears in the first three Gospels, and ma}' also lie behind St. Paul's well-known passages in the Epp. to the Thessalonians. If the theory here suggested is a sound one, that collection of our Lord's sayings would be in the hands not only of St. Paul, but probably also of his correspondents ; and consequently his language and imagery would not only be familiar and intel- ligible, but would have the authority of Christ behind it. In the parallel passage in Lk., above referred to, there is added to the reference to Noah a reference to the history of Lot, and the fate of Sodom and the Cities of the Plain is again referred to by our Lord when He utters His judgment upon the generation that rejected Him, and declares that in the Final Judgment it shall be more tolerable for Sodom than for them (Mt lOis 1124, Lk 101-). In the same connexion He makes reference to the fate of Tyre and Sidon. According to Mt 12-1'', our Lord speaks of Jonah's being swallowed by the sea-monster, but from the parallel in Lk. we should judge that the reference was made only to Jonah's preaching and the subsequent repentance of the Ninevites (Lk 1129. 32).
All the Synoptics (Mt 123f-, Mk 225f., Lk 63f) contain a refer- ence to an incident in the life of David, viz. his eating the shew- bread, and, according to Mk. and Lk., his sharing it with his companions. The account of Mk. has a peculiar difficulty, inas- much as 'Abiathar' is given as the name of the priest, where
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the OT narrative (1 S 21iff-) states that it was ' Ahinielech ' (see Abiathar). To Elijah the prophet there is more than one refer- ence. In answer to the question asked by the disciples as to what is meant by the statement of the religious authorities that Elijah must be the precursor of the Messiah (a doctrine founded on Mai 45), our Lord replies that the advent of Elijah has already taken place — a statement which in one con- nexion (Mt 111-*) is directly referred by Jesus in its fulfilment to John the Baptist, whereas in another place (Mt 17'-*) this interpretation is ^iven b\ the Evangelist himself. Another reference to the history of the same prophet is that to his visit to the widow of Sidon in the time of the great famine (Lk ■l25f), where also an illustration is taken from Elisha's cleans- ing of Xaaman the Syrian. In the former passage there is again a divergence from the OT as to the length of the period of famine. The latter two passages occur in the address in the synagogue of Nazareth, for which, of course, we have only the authority of Lk. ; but inherent probability is in favour of our Lord's using such illustrations to show the wider reach of His mission, though it is not perhaps quite probable that He would have done so, as Lk. represents, at the very outset of His ministry. We may therefore, perhaps, regard the fact of the reference as a correct tradition, but the place and manner of it as due to the Evangelist himself.