has made you may take you into the dwellings of the kingdom of God. If you have not dealt faithfully with such pitiful wealth as that, who would ever entrust you with the true wealth, the highest blessing? And if you have not dealt faithfully with that which can never really be yours, who would entrust you with your own true inheritance?"

We see at once that it is not Jesus who speaks, but the man whose hand we have so often recognized before in the third Gospel, the man who considers poverty a glory and a merit, and declares that earthly wealth which is not ours, but belongs to Mammon, the god of wealth or the god of the present age is good for nothing whatever but to be given away in alms. If so used it brings its owner, or rather its administrator, to the kingdom of Heaven; otherwise to Gehenna. We may further note that the writer, who puts this doctrine into the mouth of Jesus, takes the opportunity of saying that the Pharisees were covetous, though this was far from being their specially besetting sin. We shall presently meet with a very different picture of a steward in the Gospels, in this case, perhaps, authentic.

Be faithful in your calling! Such was the exhortation which constantly recurred in the Master's conversations with his friends; but he did not conceal the difficulties that awaited them, and, when speaking of the work henceforth committed to them, he represented the future as any thing but bright with promise. "I am sending you out like sheep in the midst of wolves. Be as cautious as serpents and as harmless as doves! Beware of men, for they will drag you before the judgment seats, and beat you with rods in their synagogues.1 But when they give you up to justice take no thought beforehand as to how or what to speak in your defence; for what you are to say will be given you at the time, for it is not you that speak, but the spirit of your Father that speaks in you. Brother shall give up brother to death, and father child; and children shall rise up against their parents to compass their death. And you shall be hated by every one, because you are my disciples; but those who endure to the end shall attain to the kingdom of God. So, when you are driven out of one city take refuge in another; for verily you will not have gone through the cities of Israel before the Son of Man shall come."

This final word of encouragement is open to the grav est suspicion, at any rate in its present form; nor can Jesus 1 See p. 198; and compare Matthew xxiv. 9, 13.

have used the language attributed to him by Luke: I my self will give you such courage and wisdom that none of your adversaries will have power to resist or contradict you." And finally, the addition made by all the Evangelists, "and you shall also be brought before governors and kings for my sake, as a witness to them and to the heathen," is obviously borrowed from the actual event.1

But enough! After deducting all the later additions, we have still the means of forming some idea of the line adopted by Jesus during the closing weeks of his life in preparing his faithful disciples for their glorious but arduous task.

It seems that Jesus gradually drew back more and more into the circle of his friends. At any rate it is open to doubt whether he continued his public teaching in Jerusalem to the very last. Perhaps the authorities of the temple had taken steps to exclude him from the sacred precincts, and he kept out of their way to avoid tumultuous and violent collisions But all this is simply a conjecture, and only rests upon the fact that we find him. one or two days before the Passover apparently, at a meal in Bethany, and on the Thursday morning, when the festival was to begin at even, he sent two of his disciples to the city in advance, and himself, perhaps, remained with his host till the afternoon.

It has indeed been imagined that Jesus expressly bade farewell to Jerusalem in a saying still preserved. For at the close of the attack upon the Scribes and Pharisees occurs a passage which we shall presently give in full, concluding with the words addressed to the citizens of Jerusalem: "I tell you, you shall see me no more till the time when you shall say,Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!'" From this enigmatical saying it has even been inferred that Jesus thought of returning to Galilee. But the fact is that the whole passage which these words conclude seems to be a citation from some lost work of the Jewish-Christian school. There are other sayings attributed to Jesus in the Gospels which likewise point to the existence of such a work, composed a little before the fall of the Jewish state. Perhaps it resembled the contemporary book of Revelation, and at any rate took the form of an oracle containing a description of the approaching end of the world and establishment of the kingdom of God. We shall presently return to the evi1 Compare Acts xxiii. 33, xxv. 6, 23. See pp 22, 24.

3 See p. 402.

dence that such a book existed and was used by the Evan gelists; but meanwhile we will give the whole passage of which we are now speaking. Though the words are put into the mouth of Jesus in the Gospels, yet in the original work they must have been uttered by the "Wisdom of God,"1 which is equivalent to his Spirit or Revelation.

'Behold! I send prophets and sages and Scribes to you; and some of them you will slay and crucify, and others you will scourge in your synagogues and pursue from city to city; that upon you may come [that is, that you may be held responsible for] all the righteous blood that has been shed upon the earth from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Berechiah, whom you slew between the temple and the altar. Verily I say unto you it shall all come upon this generation!

"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem! thou who slayest the prophets and stonest those that are sent unto thee! how often would I have gathered thy children together as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! But now I withdraw my protecting hand from your house, and you shall no more see me till the time when you shall say, Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!

Here Wisdom, or more plainly God himself, complains of the chosen people. For a short time He will surrender Israel to punishment, till the kingdom of God shall come in its glory. Now the date of these verses may be gathered with great precision from the mention of Zechariah's murder as the latest deed of its kind. Of course this man is not the son of Jehoiada who was stoned more than eight and a half centuries before, but a certain man whom Josephus speaks of as a rich and noble citizen, whose hatred of all evil and love of freedom exposed him to the enmity of the zealots. They endeavored to compass his death; and when, in spite of their threats, the court which they had instituted to condemn him pronounced him innocent, they slew him in the temple and then hurled him down the precipice. It is a strange anachronism to make Jesus mention this murder; but in other respects it was a fine conception to lay upon his lips this profoundly touching expression of disappointment at Israel's impenitence.

The following picture was drawn with a similar intention: Early in the morning, as Jesus was going to the city from Bethany with his friends, be felt hungry; and seeing a fig-tree 1 See p. 252, and compare Luke xi. 49. 2 See vol. . p. 175.

at some little distance, in full leaf, he went up to it to pluck some fruit, but found that there were only leaves upon it. "May never man eat fruit of you again!" he cried, and the tree immediately withered, upon which the disciples said in amazement: "See how the fig-tree has shrivelled up in an instant!"

We can hardly read this little story as it stands without a shock; not so much because of its gross impossibility as because this curse is so utterly unworthy of Jesus. The first two Gospels, taking the story literally, have doubtless failed to reproduce it faithfully. Mark, who spreads it over two days and makes the unfortunate remark that it was not time for figs yet, is especially far out. But it is easy to rediscover the true meaning. For in the third Gospel, which does not give this story, we have already heard Jesus speaking of Israel as the unfruitful fig-tree. And here again the figtree is Israel, and the emphasis falls upon the disappointment of Jesus. It was not without reason that he had formed such lofty expectations, for the tree was covered with luxuriant foliage. Israel seemed so zealous for the service and the honor of its God, so fervid in its longing for the Messianic blessedness! Alas! it was but an empty show. The substance, the fruit which it promised and which it ought to bear, was nowhere to be found. The consequences could not be averted. Israel had smitten itself for ever with absolute spiritual barrenness.

This image, then, as a description of the final issue, is quite in its place at this period of the ministry of Jesus, and accurately represents the fact. The sublime attempt of Jesus had failed. The masses of the people lent him a ready ear; but their shallow attachment was worth nothing, for it did not win them to the kingdom. Meanwhile his position grew more critical from day to day, and the storm was rapidly approaching. Must not a deep melancholy have settled on him, even when among his friends, as he thought of the judgment his people was bringing down upon itself? Doubtless the sigh which Luke would have us think escaped him at the very moment of his triumphal entry did indeed rise more than once a week or two later, as he crossed the western slope of the Mount of Olives with the Twelve and saw the city stretched before him. Well might he weep for her and cry, "Oh if thou didst but know, now that the rescuing hand is 2 Mark xii. 37.

1 See p. 349.

8 Luke xix. 41-44; see also p. 357.

extended to thee! if thou didst but know what truly makes for thy salvation! But alas! thine eyes are blind!" Well might he breathe his dark forebodings to his friends, though not precisely in the form which Luke has borrowed from the history of the fall of Jerusalem in the year 70 A.D. "The days shall surely come when thine enemies shall cast up a mound against thee, and surround thee and hem thee in upon every side, and destroy both thee and thy children within thee, and leave no stone standing upon another, because thou hast brought to nought God's last attempt to save thee!'

We also find in all three Gospels an elaborate prediction which Jesus is represented as making to the Twelve or to four of them, and in which the heaviest sufferings are foretold to Israel. Luke, who gives two of these discourses, goes so far in the second of them as expressly to describe the siege and capture of the City of the Temple, which is another instance of history in the form of prophecy. But even in its earlier shape the discourse can hardly be from Jesus. It describes the end of the present world with all the fearful events which will precede it, the return of Jesus from heaven with terrific signs in the sky, and the great Messianic judgment. Its different parts are not only disconnected, but contradictory. For instance, we are told on the one hand that the return of the Son of Man, and the establishment of the kingdom of God, will most assuredly take place before the generation of the contemporaries of Jesus has passed away; and, on the other hand, that these events must not be looked for too soon; that the gospel must first be preached to every nation throughout the world, and that no one, not even the Son of Man, has any knowledge when they will come to pass. Moreover, the discourse displays an unmistakable resemblance to the various productions of that peculiar branch of Jewish literature represented in the Bible by Daniel and Revelation, and outside the canon by various other writings; and, finally, it appears on careful inspection that the original author, while acquainted with the events that immediately preceded the fall of the Jewish people, had no knowledge of the fall itself. Much the same may be said of the book of Revelation. All this makes it tolerably certain that the discourse we are dealing with consists of loose fragments of a more extensive work written a year or two before the destruction of Jerusalem, in view of the circumstances of the time, to en

1 Compare vol. ii. pp. 562 ff.; and pp. 289, 331 ff.