The analysis of prophetic _consciousness_ may be, and in a great measure is, impossible. But the facts of prediction remain. It remains that our Lord Himself predicted. He foretold minutely His own death, and the end of the City and the Temple, and the circumstances of the close of this Êon. Was He "soothsaying"? It remains that He perpetually and most emphatically claimed to be the exact Fulfilment of predictions which, on any hypothesis, were then ages old. Was He mistaken in their character and quality?
In those last words I step, as I well know, upon a field of the most urgent controversy. What is the weight to be assigned to our ever blessed Lord's verdict upon the Old Testament as history and prophecy? It is now asserted, and by Christian men, that that verdict is not final; that He in the days of His flesh so submitted to human limitations that He was liable to mistakes of fact just as His best contemporaries were; that we adore Christ, and rely absolutely on Him, but it is on Christ not as He was but as He is, the glorified Christ. Here is an unspeakably overawing subject. I would not treat of it as if the question could be swept away in a sentence. But I do, as in our living Master's presence, venture to say that His witness to the nature and character of the Old Scriptures claims definitely to be _ex cathedr‚_. True, He doubtless spoke in this matter, as elsewhere, not in what may be called the technical style; not every reference of His to "Moses" need necessarily mean to assert precisely that Moses wrote every clause of the Pentateuch. But the present question goes, as we have remembered, much deeper. It asks whether or no the Lord Jesus was altogether and in principle mistaken. He treated the Law, Prophets, and Psalms as a solid structure of historic fact and supernatural promise, divinely planned all through, divinely carried out and up from the foundation, and leading straight up to Himself. Was it all the time true that large parts of them were no more historical than the False Decretals on which the high Papal claims were built?[7]
[7] I may remind the reader that about the middle of the ninth century there were published, by one Isidore, a collection of decisions and decrees, purporting to be by the earliest Bishops of Rome, all supporting the Papal claims as known in the Middle Ages. The collection was afterwards increased, and in the middle of the twelfth century engrafted into Gratian's _Decretum_, on which is based the Canon Law of the Roman Church. These documents are undoubtedly fabrications long after date.
If we revise the opinion of our Redeemer on this conspicuous point of His teaching, where shall we securely pause? Certainly we cannot _securely_ trust, as oracular and final, His own predictions of things still future, at least in their details.