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Another highly significant instance is found in the divergences concerning the account of the last supper and the day on which Jesus died. The Synoptic narratives agree in representing the Master as eating the passover' with the disciples. They join together in the national celebration when the paschal lamb was slain and roasted for the festal meal with desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer,' Luke 2215. But in the Fourth Gospel the parting supper takes place 'before the feast of the passover,' 13'. The arrest follows the same night; early next morning his captors have still the passover before them, 1828; and it is the preparation' day, 191431. Jesus, in fact, dies about the hour when the paschal lamb is slain. He is mysteriously identified with it by the application to him of the Levitical rubric that no bone of it should be broken, 1936 cp. Exod. 1246;1 and the narrative thus rests on the idea expressed by Paul, 'Our passover also hath been sacrificed, even Christ,' Cor. 57. No one now seriously attempts to conciliate these two dates2; but opinion naturally varies as to the more probable, and critics of opposite schools such as the late Bishop Westcott

been misplaced, and really belongs to the last days. See his note, p. 273, and his general argument concerning frequent disarrangements of material. Another distinguished American scholar once told me that he believed all three Johannine passovers to be the same.

1 Others suggest an allusion to a free Greek rendering of Psalm 3420.

2 At least, with our present texts. For instance, the problem is abandoned by Sanday, Hastings' Dict. of the Bible, vol. ii. p. 634; and by Dods, Expositor's Greek Test., vol. i. p. 814.

and Dr. Sanday on the one side, and Dr. Abbott and Prof. Bacon on the other, unite in preferring the Johannine view.1

·

When the record of external events thus differs, it is not surprising that the presentment of the Teacher's word and work should differ also. Here is no preaching of the Gospel.' The kingdom of God,' the theme of so many parables and sayings in the Synoptic ministry, is named only in the conversation with Nicodemus, John 335. No call to repentance awakens the guilty conscience; no promise of forgiveness kindles the sinner's hope. In place of these great ideas which play so important a part in the Synoptic records, the Fourth Gospel represents Jesus as describing himself in figures, 'I am the door, the good shepherd, the vine;' or deals with high abstract conceptions, with symbols and emblems, arranged in pairs of opposites, God being set over against the world, truth against falsehood, light against darkness, love against hatred, and life against death. From these summits of thought the Teacher speaks, no longer on the common things of homely interest, in short pregnant sayings where a phrase frequently contains a picture, or in the brief tales where some simple in

1 Bacon's argument, Introd. p. 267, that Paul's comparison would be very strange if the event had taken place a day after the paschal rite, seems to attribute an exactness of thought to the Apostle which is not prominent in some of his other analogies. More weight attaches to Dr. Abbott's remarks, Encycl. Brit., vol. x. p. 828. Westcott, Introd. to the Study of the Gospels, 6th ed, 1881, p. 344, decided for the Johannine date, and endeavoured to reconcile the Synoptists with it.

2 Cp. Mk. 114-15, Matt. 423, 935.

cidents bring types of character into clear relief, but often in sustained discourse, sometimes so closely linked with the writer's comment or continuation, that it is hard to tell where the speaker ends and the expositor begins. To the farewell address at the last supper, John 14-16, with the prayer which follows in 17, no parallel exists in the Synoptics. The groups of sayings aggregated in Matthew's sermon on the Mount are obviously collected out of smaller clusters, as the different distribution of much of the material in Luke sufficiently proves. But the discourse in which Jesus prepares the disciples for his departure, is bound together by certain common ideas, and although a close seems to be reached in 141, it is hard to believe that chapters 15-16 ever occupied any other position than the place where they now stand. Yet how unlike is this utterance to the brief colloquies of the First Three narratives, and especially to that strange irony (Luke 2236) with which the Master, foreseeing the tragic issue of the night, recommended the disciple without purse to sell his cloak and buy a sword!

Once more, the crises of the story have all changed. Unlike the Christ of the Synoptics, who,

1 There are, of course, terse utterances of the synoptic type; but the characteristic style is found rather in the development of ideas and principles somewhat after the fashion of a composer working out a musical theme.

2 Bacon proposes to insert these chapters after 1320; Spitta after 130; and Wendt after 1335 (Gospel, etc., p. 103-4). But this last arrangement shatters the connexion of Peter's question in 36 with Christ's announcement of his departure to a place where he could not be followed in 33. What meaning could the question have after 1628-29 ? and who does not see a sublime close (perhaps the most wonderful in sacred literature) in 1632-33 ?

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in the earliest form of the traditions, receives no recognition as Messiah even from his own disciples till the question is plainly put to them at Caesarea Philippi 'Who say ye that I am?', the Johannine Jesus is attested by the Baptist and accepted in that character from the outset. Andrew reports to Simon 'We have found the Messiah,' 1"; Philip perceives in him the fulfilment of prophetic hopes, and Nathanael hails him as 'King of Israel,' 19. To the Samaritan woman Jesus declares his dignity, 426; and the townsmen believe in him as 'indeed the Saviour of the world,' 4". To fulfil the Father's will he has himself come down from heaven, 688; and authority has been given to him to execute judgment, 52, and raise up the believer at the last day, 61o. Viewed as the Son of God before mortal birth, he needed no heavenly voice at the baptism to assure him of his august parentage, and these incidents therefore are not reproduced; while the descent of the Spirit which in earlier traditions was the emblem of Messianic unction, is converted into a sign for the Baptist, 132-33. In the consciousness of the heavenly Son, there can be no place for struggle, and no temptation arrests him at the outset; nor can he whose meat it was to do the Father's will, feel any conflict even in the face of Death; and accordingly with the rebukes to Satan in the wilderness there vanishes also the prayer beneath the olives of Gethsemane. Instead of those glimpses of the victory of the willing spirit over the feeble flesh, which has ever since sustained 1 See ante, Lect VI., p. 330.

the strength of the weary or despairing disciple,' the figure of Jesus stands with majestic calm, and a Roman cohort of six hundred men falls prostrate before him as he declares who he is, 183-6. Before Pilate he breaks the Synoptic silence by the announcement that he was born to bear witness of the truth, 187; and on the cross he proclaims the achievement of the heavenly purpose. When he can say 'it is finished,' 1980, the work given him to do is ended, and he may re-enter the glory of the eternal home, 1745. No greater contrast can be conceived to the appalling cry, 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!'

Do the First Three Gospels and the Fourth really depict the same person? In the language of the Dean of Westminster, We are constrained to ask, can both these representations be historically true? or is the one the simple and natural story of the facts, and the other the poetic creation of an ideal life of Christ?'

II.

The twentieth century is not the first to put these questions. They were asked in this country as long ago as 1792, by Edward Evanson, ex-vicar of Tewkesbury, in a remarkable little volume published at Ipswich under the title of The Dissonance of the Four Generally Received Evangelists, and the

1 On 127 cp. Dr. Abbott, Enc. Brit. vol. x. p. 827.

2 Dr. Armitage Robinson, The Study of the Gospels (1902), p. 137.