brethren; He giving out of a heavenly fulness, they at best receiving; they transformed by the divine second birth, He acting, thinking, feeling from an original inborn harmony with God. The sense of a unique purpose in His life, of proceeding from God in a sense which was true of no other, the consciousness of having been born directly out of a higher world into this, could not but grow up in Him. This very consciousness He expresses when He speaks of "coming down from heaven," "having proceeded from God," when He calls Himself the Taρà тоû deοû ŏvта (vi. 46). But He did not mean by this a bodily transference from heaven to earth of which He retained a remembrance. No doubt this consciousness of a descent from God, a heavenly descent, went along with that consciousness of pre-existence which we have found above and endeavoured to understand; the consciousness of having descended from a higher world must have led to the notion of that world as His true and original home; and the consciousness of belonging properly to the eternal and not to the temporal world, must have begotten in Him the notion of having been transplanted from that eternal world into the temporal. But the deepest mysteries of existence belong to the world of spirit, and not to some higher world of sense; when they are expressed in human words it must be in figurative language, and anyone is on wholly wrong lines who in interpreting the Gospel of John, fails to consider this element of metaphor in its thought and language, and like the foolish people of Capernaum insists on the literal sense of what was spiritually conceived, in order to extort the confirmation of confused and impossible dogmatic notions. The analogy of Holy Scripture, according to which it must be expounded, condemns such a mode of exposition. When James says of every good and perfect gift that it comes from above, he does not mean that it exchanges a heavenly locality for an earthly, but simply seeks to express its origin from God. When Jesus asks the high priest whether the baptism of John was è oupavoù (Mark xi. 30), He does not mean that it formerly took place in heaven, but that it sprang from divine revelation and not from human discovery. In the same way, He did not regard heaven really and literally as the place of His former abode; it was for Him the kingdom of

eternal blessedness, the sphere of God's personal life from which He was derived, and so He was able to say in one and the same breath-in the passage iii. 13 to be expounded later on that He came down from heaven and that He is in heaven; that is, He is in constant intercourse with God even on earth, and lives and moves in the world of eternal blessedness.1 His declarations of having come down from heaven or of having proceeded from God, must be understood according to this canon if they are to be understood biblically and rationally. I cannot find that the passage, xvi. 28, urged with special emphasis against this exposition, ἐξῆλθον ἐκ τοῦ πατρὸς καὶ ἐλήλυθα εἰς τὸν κόσμον· πάλιν ἀφίημι τὸν κόσμον καὶ πορεύομαι πρὸς τὸν πατέρα,—demands, or even permits another interpretation.2 The phrase, "leaving the world and returning to the Father," is certainly only a figurative expression for the glory which Jesus won by passing through death;

1 The popular way of looking on ó ☎v iv Tậ oùpav@ as equivalent to an imperfect, yields-apart from the grammatical obscurity-a very lame meaning and a superfluous idea. For when it has just been said, He came down from heaven, there is no need of saying that He once was in heaven. On the contrary, taken as a present, it yields a significant and coherent idea. No one has risen to the knowledge of the inоupáva, save the one who has sprung from heaven, and ever lives and moves in heaven; cf. i. 51.

2 I regret that I cannot agree with Dr. Weiss about this passage. With reference to my Christology of the New Testament he writes concerning this passage as follows:-N. T. Theol. ii. p. 334: "Any possibility of referring this to anything else than to a coming forth from a heavenly existence with the Father, is excluded by the fact that it is contrasted with a leaving the world and going home to the Father, which must admittedly be taken as His exaltation to heaven. Without entering into these decisive instances Beyschlag wishes by an appeal to the figurative character of these expressions to find in them indications of the supernatural birth." I do not find the supernatural birth but the supernatural descent of Jesus indicated therein, which is a different thing. But as to the decisive instances, I also understand the passage as referring to a going forth from a heavenly existence with the Father, but to me this existence is an existence in God and not an existing beside God, and in like manner the exaltation is not a transference into another space above the earth, but the passing into a divine unlimited form of existence. The difference between us is, as to whether the original being with the Father is the personal existence of a devтEpos sós, beside God the Father, or the existence of the future Christ in the heart of God. The first I am neither able to think nor to harmonise with the Gospel of John, in which the Father is só,, and ó sós alone is the Father.

for in reality Jesus does not leave the world, but remains with His own, and He does not need to go in quest of the Father who is in Him and in whom He is; and in the same way the previous phrase, "I came forth from the Father and am come into the world," is not to be understood of an actual leaving of the heavenly Father's house and an exchange of that for an earthly dwelling. Otherwise birth and death, with the deeper meaning which they had in the mind and life of Jesus, as origin from God and perfection in God, would form no true logical contrast.

§ 10. THE SOURCE FROM WHICH HE DERIVES HIS KNOWLEDGE OF HEAVENLY THINGS

If, as has been accepted for centuries without investigation, and is still maintained, the Johannine Christ traces back His higher knowledge and revelation of heavenly things to a reminiscence of a pre-existent state, so that when He speaks of having seen the Father, the expression must be placed in the time before His birth, then we must make up our minds to regard the traditional conception of the pre-existence as a previous personal life which the Logos as eternal Son enjoyed in intercourse with the Father, as at least a part of the Johannine view.1 Certainly, when one reads, vi. 46, ovx ὅτι τὸν πατέρα ἑώρακεν τις· εἰ μὴ ὁ ὢν παρὰ τοῦ θεοῦ, οὗτος ÉúρаKEV TÒV Tаrépa, it is very tempting to add in thought, "when He was yet with the Father." Or when the Baptist says, iii. 31, 32, "He that cometh from heaven is above all; and what He hath seen and heard, that He testifieth," the exposition is suggested, "what He hath seen and heard in heaven before His coming." And yet the Baptist continues, ver. 34: "For He whom God hath sent speaketh the word of God; for God hath not given the Spirit by measure" (to Him He hath sent): he therefore deduces the speaking of the word of God attributed to the Messiah from the Holy Spirit given to Him without measure,-consequently, not from a seeing

1 Weiss, N. T. Theol. ii. p. 332: "Pondering the origin of this unique knowledge of God, Jesus becomes sensible that it is not to be traced back to any point of His earthly life, or to any analogy in the experience of other God-sent men. It is a completed fact of the past to which He refers, and which continues only in its effects (swpaxa).”

and hearing in a previous life.

That whole notion, however

If

it may commend itself to a reader entangled in preconceived opinions, appears on closer examination to be unnatural. we refer phrases such as ἃ ἐγὼ ἑώρακα παρὰ τῷ πατρί (viii. 38); τὴν ἀλήθειαν, ἣν ἤκουσα παρὰ τοῦ θεοῦ (viii. 40); καθὼς ἐδίδαξέν με ὁ πατήρ, ταῦτα λαλῶ (viii. 28), to the preexistence, there arises a positively meaningless notion of the Logos. Is the Logos the sum of all God's thoughts, the fountain of all eternal wisdom and truth, to be thought of as a child sitting at the Father's feet in order to be taught by Him, in order to see and hear the eternal facts and truths? That is not an idea of the Logos with which one can credit the evangelist, whoever he may be. Here also we need, instead of expounding Scripture by preconceived dogmatic opinions, to expound it according to the standard of its own usage, in order to find the correct and intelligible view. To see and to hear in the spiritual sense are the simple designations of how the prophets received the revelation, as it came to them not in some heavenly pre-existence, but in their earthly life. In this sense Jesus (v. 37) reproaches the heads of the Jewish people, that they had "neither heard the voice of God, nor seen His face"; that is, they had in no way received His revelation, nor believed in Him whom God hath sent. In the same sense He says of Himself and the Baptist in common, iii. 11: "We speak what we know, and testify what we have seen." This having seen did not take place in a pre-existent state in His case any more than in that of the Baptist. Jesus no doubt exalts Himself above the Baptist and all the prophets. That which in the Old Testament is declared alone of Moses, that he saw God face to face (Num. xii. 8), is claimed by Jesus for Himself in a higher sense and with greater truth, and is based on His descent from God, on that original endowment which has conferred on Him a spiritual insight into the divine and eternal such as no one had before or after Him. But in doing so He just as little places it in the pre-existent state, as Moses' seeing of God was placed by the Old Testament in a pre-existent state. The meaning of the passage already adduced (vi. 44-46) is explained in accordance with this. "Everyone who hears. and learns of the Father cometh to Me: not that any man

hath seen the Father save He who is of God, He hath seen the Father." That is to say, a certain revelation of God is given to every man in order to put him on the way to Christ; but the perfect revelation, the open vision of God, is given directly to none; only He who is derived from God knows Him perfectly as the Father, and can reveal Him to others as the Father. The assertion that there was no completed fact in the earthly life of Jesus on which He could have looked back with an cúpaka Tòv Tатépа, is without foundation. That fundamental revelation in which He felt that He was called to be the Messiah, and in which His divine Sonship first arose on Him in its full meaning, might have been described as seeing the Father." When the heavens opened to Him at His baptism, and the voice of God sounded to His heart, "Thou art My beloved Son," then He saw the Father face to face, for then He received the decisive impulse to reveal Him to His brethren. Or is it unsuitable and un-Johannine to speak of revelations of God within the earthly life of Jesus? Jesus Himself acknowledges such, even in the Fourth Gospel. When He says, v. 30, "I can do nothing of Myself: as I hear I judge,” He means an ἀκούειν παρὰ τοῦ πατρός; and when He says, v. 20, "The Father loveth the Son, and showeth Him all things that Himself doeth: and He will show Him greater works than these,” we have then an ὁρᾷν παρὰ τῷ πατρί in addition to the ἀκούειν παρὰ τοῦ πατρός, and a present seeing as well as a future (deife), that is, a continuous revelation of God in the life of the Lord.1 How could there fail to be, in virtue of that decisive revelation of God in which He once for all knew the Father and His own mission, and in His constant Messianic intercourse with God, a continuous unfolding throughout His life of new details of His purpose, and continuous divine directions and unveilings of what the Son must do and suffer in the course of His life? The conclusion will now hold good that since Jesus spoke of seeing (or being

1 This against Weiss, N. T. Theol. ii. 332, who writes the remarkable statement: "He nowhere speaks of divine revelations or visions which were imparted to Him here on earth, as Beyschlag undertakes to prove." I did not know that I had undertaken to prove visions in the life of Jesus. But were there no revelations? Not even at the baptism and transfiguration? Was there no answer even to what He sought as a Son in prayer?