by the Jews thinking that they could, by their murmuring reference to His creaturehood, to His wellknown human origin (ver. 41 f.), confute His previously asserted pretension that He, the Son of man, furnished the food which ministered to eternal life (ver. 27), and that He Himself was, in a still truer sense than the manna in the desert, the bread that had come down from heaven and ministered life (ver. 32 ff.). For against this objection He most emphatically urged the necessity of a trustful acceptance just of this His creaturely-human condition. He certainly did not regard this creaturely side of His being, His "flesh," as something valuable in itself. It is well to notice that He did not declare of His "flesh," or His "flesh and blood," as He previously did of Himself as a whole, that it had come down from heaven, since such a declaration would have involved a contradiction in thought. But in reference to His "flesh," or His "flesh and blood," He now repeats only the claim that it was food necessary to men for obtaining eternal life. And that He ascribes this saving significance to His "flesh," not as such, but only inasmuch as it is the vehicle of the Divine Spirit and the medium for men of the message which tends to life, He clearly expresses at the close in the words :

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It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life" (ver. 63). In this statement He does not by any means nullify or weaken the paradoxical declaration, that men must assimilate His flesh and blood in order to attain to life; but He gives that declaration such an explanation as makes

its justness clearly appear. For if men recognise the essence of His Messianic significance in the fact that He brings a message originating from the Divine Spirit and tending to eternal life, they will find in His creaturely - human nature nothing contradictory of His saving significance, nor will they even regard it as something indifferent and superfluous, but will rather recognise and prize it as the necessary organ of imparting His message to men, charged with the spirit of God and ministering eternal life. Thus this discussion by Jesus in John vi. serves for the confirmation and explanation of the thought which He elsewhere briefly expresses by His self-designation as "the Son of man." For when He brings out, by the assumption of this name, that the co-existence of His weak creaturely humanity with His Messianic dignity must be right and necessary, since it corresponds to the prophetic word of Scripture as to the representative of the Messianic kingdom appearing as the Son of man, He shows by this discussion in John vi. that, not only because of the authority of that word of Scripture, but also on account of the intelligible real significance of His human nature for His Messianic preaching activity, He declares the necessity of this His creaturely humanity for His Messiahship.

9. By our survey of the utterances of Jesus in regard to His Messianic person, it has been established that, according to all our sources, even according to the discourses of the fourth Gospel, Jesus' judgment as to His own nature stands in close inner mutual

relation to His idea of the nature of the kingdom of God. The relation between God and men, determined by the idea of God, which He taught men to recognise as the essence of the kingdom of God, He knew to be perfectly realised in His own person, and in this consciousness He possessed the sure guarantee that He was the Messiah of the kingdom of God. His perfect consciousness of sonship towards God, however, blended without difficulty with His consciousness of being a feeble human creature. Nowhere has He, by a theory of a dogmatic kind, given an explanation of how this twofold paradoxical statement, that He is "the Son of God" and "the Son of man," can be reconciled. The co-existence of the relation to God denoted by the former name with the relation to mankind indicated by the latter, was assured to Him by His own immediate experience; therefore He did not inquire into and prove the possibility of this co-existence, but He simply declared its actuality. But we can yet plainly perceive that in His by no means natural, but purely spiritual and ethical, view of God, and in the religious-ethical mode of view— according to which He recognised as the true and proper life only the ethical being and activity through God's help and for God, and just on account of which He was able to regard the natural human conditions as a means of the development and manifestation of the true Divine life-He possessed the certain principle of harmony for His Messianic self-consciousness as the Son of God and the Son of man.

CHAP. II. VOCATION WORK OF THE MESSIAH.

The general idea of the Messiah, which was equally authoritative for the Jews as for Jesus, was, in accordance with His mission, that of the agent divinely commissioned to establish and bring in the kingdom of grace of the latter day. We must inquire how Jesus, in conformity to His special idea of the nature of the kingdom of God, determined the peculiar nature and limits of the task of His vocation as Messiah.

1. For the Jews in the time of Jesus all the detailed ideas in regard to the Messiah's vocation work were conditioned by the certainty, founded in the Old Testament promises and denoted in the name itself of Messiah, that the Messiah would be a king exercising kingly functions. Not only in the case where the external prosperity and political power of the expected kingdom were set in the forefront, but even where the moral-religious nature of the kingdom and the object of the Messiah to establish and maintain the holiness and righteousness of the people of the latter day were strongly emphasised, as, for example, in the Psalter of Solomon, did the essential task of the Messiah appear to be His kingly rule, His victory over the enemies of God and of God's people, and His judicial authority over the members of the kingdom. But to this view of the Messiah's vocationtask Jesus set Himself in very noteworthy opposition. Certainly, at His last entrance to Jerusalem, He

1 Cf. the quotation given above, vol. i. p. 79, from the Psalms of Solomon.

accepted the acclamation of the attendant crowd who hailed "the kingdom of their father David" as coming in with Him (Mark xi. 10), and, at His trial before Pilate, He answered affirmatively the question whether He was the king of the Jews (Mark xv. 2). For here it was of importance that He should openly avow His claim to be the Messiah expected on the ground of the Old Testament promises: therefore He had to take that Old Testament Jewish title of the Messiah to Himself. But as He knew that He announced and realised the kingdom of God in a higher sense than that in which it was promised in the Old Testament and was expected by the Jews, so He also claimed for Himself, only in an adapted sense, the Old Testament Jewish title of Davidic king as applied to the Messiah. Certainly in His view also, on the ground of the whole previous tradition, it belonged originally to the essential characteristics of the Messiah that He should reign as king. But after the impartation to Him, at His baptism, of the consciousness that, in His pure and perfect filial relationship to God the highest positive basis of His Messianic dignity was given, in the inward conflict which then succeeded in regard to the assertion of His Messianic self-consciousness, He definitively put away, as what was wrong and Satanic, the Jewish ideal of the earthly sway of the Messiah which met Him with tempting allurement. On the basis of our Gospel-sources we cannot hold it justified when it is explained that Jesus, at that post-baptismal period, only put away the incitement to acquire earthly kingship through unworthy means, but afterwards, at