(Matt. vii, 28, 29). It was a recognition of the matter and manner of his speech as a prime literary power.

The main element of literary perfection in Jesus' words is their perfect keeping alike with a human personality and with all that we can conceive of the divine. The difficulty for critics who would deny these utterances to him is to find a writer great enough to have invented them. Such a writer must needs be of Messianic caliber. Even though transmitted to us through the memory of his hearers, there is a quality in his words as unique in literature as is his personality in history and human experience.

It does not belong to the scope of this book to give in analysis or systematic arrangement the subject matter of his teachings. We are concerned rather with their literary relations that is, their manner of expression and adaptedness to audience and occasion. To this end we will consider various aspects of his teachings, as these were called forth by the circumstances in which he was placed.

I

These words of mine

His General Public Utterances. (mou tous logous toutous) is the phrase by which Jesus refers to the Sermon on the Mount, which he is just finishing (Matt. vii, 24, 26). It makes an unpretending literary claim for his public speech: no display of eloquence, no assumption of scholarly logic; but just familiar talk. And yet it has not the loose discursiveness of ordinary talk; it is close-knit and ordered, and there are no superfluous words.

The so-called Sermon on the Mount, given most fully in Matthew v-vii, and in substance in Luke vi, 20-49, may be taken as the type of discourse by which Jesus imparted his teaching to receptive and candid audiences. It was addressed to his newly made disciples (see Matt. v, I; Luke vi, 20); men who had attached themselves to him not out of idle curiosity or with critical design, but with desire to learn and

think for themselves. But it was overheard by multitudes (Matt. vii, 28; Luke vi, 17); for his discourses were never esoteric nor contained things meant for a mystery to one class and clearness to another. They were really addressed to mankind in general, and used the ideas current among ordinary people. Both the disciples and the larger multitudes could be assumed to be acquainted with the law and with the religious sentiment of their day, and it was upon these that he built his teachings.

It is worth while to note how the style of Jesus' public utterances compares with the Old Testament types of style. Comparison The ancient prophets, addressing the nation as a with Earlier whole and at times of national crisis, were impasScripture sioned, oratorical, vehement, with a tendency to the rhythmical and poetic. The sages, or wise men, addressing audiences in the didactic tone, developed the mashal or proverb, as a vehicle for such utterance, to a fine artistry of phrasing and pointed sentence structure; rising at times, as in Job and the first section of Proverbs, to sustained poetic sublimity and intensity. The later writings, like the megilloth, were to a notable degree keyed to the more selfconscious and refined literary forms.1 In Jesus' teaching we find no lack of poetic beauty, or sturdy vigor, or clean-cut phrasing and point; but all this is subdued to the tone of the conversational, the familiar, the idiom of common life and affairs. Pascal, himself a master of style, remarks of this quality Jesus Christ said grand things so simply that it seems as though he had not thought about them, and yet so clearly y that one sees he must have reflected upon them. This clearness joined with this simplicity is wonderful." This quite befitted his supreme object, which was to be helpful to all men, from the humblest up, to men not in specialized classes or as a nation, but as living the universal life of man.

1 Cf. p. 484, above.

2 Pascal, "Thoughts," Benj. E. Smith trans., p. 121.

What is this? a new teaching!" was the response of his hearers at Capernaum when they heard his words in the Contrasts synagogue and saw them backed with mighty with Current spiritual power (Mark i, 27). Of the qualities in Methods his general public discourse which reveal him as a unique teacher and personality, we may here note three salient things.

1. Their uniform employment of the simplest language and imagery, dealing with plain truths of life. This was a new note in his day; for the scribes, who were the accredited. teachers, tended to wire-drawn and petty interpretations of the law and to a wooden, academic style. Jesus' discourses deal much in the familiar analogical figures simile and metaphor; and these are always drawn from everyday objects and carried enough into detail to indicate the full value of their lesson. This may be exemplified by the so-called Sermon on the Mount in Matthew v-vii. After the Beatitudes (v, 1-12), which constitute a kind of text, the discourse is introduced by the metaphors of the salt and the light (vss. 13-16). The detailed similes of the houses on the rock and on the sand (vii, 24-27), which form the peroration, are a summary and practical application of the whole. The figures of the lilies of the field (vi, 28-30), of the mote and the beam (vii, 3-5), and of the good and the corrupt trees (vii, 18-20) are instances selected at random which may show how masterfully he employed homely imagery for the weightiest thought. It was his power to make great elemental truths clear and self-evidencing which called forth the remark of a biographer, "The common people heard him gladly (Mark, xii, 37).

2. Their prominently paradoxical and thought-provoking cast. In the old mashal or proverb literature there was ofterf cultivated, for the sake of stimulating thought, a kind of dling or enigma element; one species of mashal, indeed, was called hidah, "dark saying" (cf. Prov. i, 6). Something

of this principle is freely made use of by Jesus. He is not averse to using a paradox or half-truth when his purpose of making men think is served thereby. One is aware of this as soon as one reflects on the Beatitudes, which ascribe blessedness to just the opposite qualities from those which are usually accounted blessed, to the poor in spirit, the mourners, the meek, the maligned and persecuted. He states some of his important teachings, also, in a form so strange and one-sided as to rouse a vigorous protest in the hearer's mind, until the meaning is subjected to a spiritual test. Such, for instance, are his injunction to turn the left cheek to him who smites you on the right (Matt. v, 39); his remark that one who follows him must hate his nearest earthly kin (Luke xiv, 26); and his solemn declaration, which he himself followed out, that he who loses his life in the cause of truth shall find it (Matt. x, 39). In all these, it would seem, Jesus deliberately accepts the risk of scorn and misunderstanding, trusting to men's saner second thoughts. But like all his words they are an appeal to men's spiritual good sense; and men of a spirit like his will understand and appropriate them. Our many centuries of conversance with them have adjusted our minds to these words of his; but as first uttered they must have been to a degree startling and mystifying.

3. Their absoluteness of assertion and tone. This is especially notable in the section of the Sermon on the Mount wherein Jesus deals with the Mosaic law and with men's traditions (Matt. v, 17-48). Of the hard and stereotyped ideas that prevailed concerning murder, adultery, divorce, oath-taking, retaliation, his pronouncements were: "Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, . . . but I say unto you"; thus correcting and reversing long-established ideas and customs on his own personal assertion. His first person singular is not egoism; it is spiritual authority. In the same way, by both precept and example, he took such

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liberties as a sound spirit dictated with the unwritten customs of the sabbath and of fasting (cf. Matt. xii, 1-8; Mark ii, 18, 19); making these things what they were meant to be, not ends of life or cultus but means and factors of mercy and sincerity. All this, which handled old traditions so freely, was really in the interests of a more perfectly fulfilled law and a higher because more inward standard of righteousness.

Jesus' absoluteness of assertion is founded on truth which once heard cannot be gainsaid. The sound sense of man, seeing it, intuitively assents to it. Hence Jesus does not present truth by process of argumentation or philosophy, as if it had to pass through uncertain logical stages. It can, however, be made clear by illustration and analogy, and these means are freely employed. But the inner logic of his words is intuitive and absolute. Men cannot hear them without the sense that they are authoritative for conscience, nor gainsay them without doing violence to their spiritual nature. It was this absolute quality of his words, especially, which so contrasted Jesus' method with that of the scribes..

II

His Teaching in Parables. There came a time in Jesus' ministry when, rather abruptly it would seem, he changed the manner of his teaching. The disciples, indeed, who were in constant intercourse with him, he continued to instruct by literal and expository methods, giving them the more inward elements of his truth as they were able to apprehend them. This is especially noticeable in the discourses reported in the gospel of John; and even these he regarded as relatively primitive (cf. John iii, 12; xvi, 12). For the floating multitude, however, who might hear him only casually, or be actuated merely by the curiosity or enthusiasm of the crowd, he put his teaching in the form of parable. This new departure, with the first group of parables thus given, is narrated in Matthew xiii and Mark iv.