Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in. Who is this King of glory? The LORD strong and mighty, the LORD mighty in battle. Lift up your heads, O ye gates; even lift them up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in.
— Psalm 24:7-9
And his name through faith in his name hath made this man strong, whom ye see and know: yea, the faith which is by him hath given him this perfect soundness in the presence of you all. And now, brethren, I wot that through ignorance ye did it, as did also your rulers.
— Acts 3:16-17
Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion. I will declare the decree: the LORD hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee. Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel. Be wise now therefore, O ye kings: be instructed, ye judges of the earth. Serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their trust in him.
— Psalm 2:6-12
And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory. And the posts of the door moved at the voice of him that cried, and the house was filled with smoke. Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts.
— Isaiah 6:3-5
And then shall they see the Son of man coming in the clouds with great power and glory.
— Mark 13:26
Mark’s Conception of our Lord, by Benjamin B Warfield.
Which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
— 1 Corinthians 2:8
Who is this King of glory? The LORD of hosts, he is the King of glory. Selah.
— Psalm 24:10
If, now, we review the series of designations applied to our Lord in the Gospel of Mark, as a whole, we shall, we think, be led by them into the heart of Mark’s representation of Jesus.
A Divine Intervention in Christ
What Mark undertook in his Gospel was obviously to give an account of how that great religious movement originated which we call Christianity, but which he calls “the Gospel of Jesus Christ”—the glad tidings, that is, concerning Jesus Christ which were being proclaimed throughout the world. To put it in his own words, he undertook to set forth “the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ” (1:1). The account which he gives of the beginning of this great religious movement, by means of his ‘Gospel,’ is briefly that it originated in a divine intervention; and that this divine intervention was manifested in the ministry of the divinely promised and divinely sent Messiah who was no other than the man Jesus. This man is represented as coming, endowed with ample authority for His task; and as prosecuting this task by the aid of supernatural powers by which He was at once marked out as God’s delegate on earth and enabled, in the face of all difficulties and oppositions, to accomplish to its end what He had set His hand to do.
Christ’s Life Thoroughly Supernatural
It is idle to speak of Mark presenting us in his account of Jesus with the picture of a purely human life. It belongs to the very essence of his undertaking to portray this life as supernatural; and, from beginning to end, he sets it forth as thoroughly supernatural. The Gospel opens, therefore, by introducing Jesus to us as the divinely given Messiah, in whom God had from the ages past promised to visit His people; heralded as such by the promised messenger making ready the way of the Lord; and witnessed by this messenger as the “mightiest” of men, who bore in His hands the real potencies of a new life (1:8); and by God Himself from heaven as His Son, His beloved, in whom He was well pleased (1:11). Anointed and tested for His task, Jesus is then presented as entering upon and prosecuting His work as God’s representative, endowed with all authority and endued with all miraculous powers. His authority was manifested alike in His teaching (1:22), in His control of demonic personalities (1:27), in the forgiveness of sins (2:10), in His sovereignty over the religious ordinances of Israel (2:28), in His relations to nature and nature’s laws (4:41), in His dominion over death itself (5:42). As each of these typical exercises of authority is signalized in turn and copiously illustrated by instances, the picture of a miraculous life becomes ever more striking, and indeed stupendous. Even the failure of His friends to comprehend Him and the malice of His enemies in assaulting Him, are made by the evangelist contributory to the impression of an utterly supernatural life which he wishes to make on his readers. So little was it a normal human life that Jesus lived that His uncomprehending friends were tempted to think Him beside Himself, and His enemies proclaimed Him obviously suffering from “possession” (3:20–30). Whatever else this life was, it certainly was not, in view of any observer, a “natural” one. The “unnaturalness” of it is not denied: it is only pointed out that this “unnaturalness” was systematic, and that it was systematically in the interests of holiness. What is manifested in it, therefore, is neither the vagaries of lunacy nor the wickedness of demonism. What is exhibited is the binding of Satan and the destruction of satanic powers (cf. 1:27 et saepe). To ascribe these manifestations to Satan is therefore to blaspheme the Spirit of God. Nobody, it appears, dreamed of doubting in any interest the abnormality of this career: and we should not misrepresent Mark if we said that his whole Gospel is devoted to making the impression that Jesus’ life and manifestation were supernatural through and through.
Jesus the Messiah
This is, of course, however, not quite the same as saying that Mark has set himself to portray in Jesus the life of a supernatural person.
Whether the supernatural life he depicts is supernatural because it is the life on earth of a supernatural person, or because it is the life of a man with whom God dwelt and through whom God wrought, may yet remain a question. Certainly very much in Mark’s narrative would fall in readily with the latter hypothesis. To him Jesus is primarily the Messiah, and the Messiah is primarily the agent of God in bringing in the new order of things. Undoubtedly Mark’s fundamental thought of Jesus is that He is the man of God’s appointment, with whom God is. Designating Him currently merely by His personal name of ‘Jesus,’ and representing Him as currently spoken of by His contemporaries merely as ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ and addressed by the simple honorific titles of ‘Rabbi,’ ‘Teacher,’ ‘Lord’— His fundamental manifestation is to him plainly that of a man among men. That this man was the Messiah need not in itself import more than that He was the subject of divine influences beyond all other men, and the vehicle of divine operations surpassing all other human experience. It may fairly be asked, therefore, what requires us to go beyond the divine office to explain this supernaturally filled life? Will not the assumption of the Messiahship of Jesus fully account for the abounding supernaturalism of His activity as portrayed by Mark? Questions like these are in point of fact constantly raised around us and very variously answered. But it behooves us to be on our guard respecting them that we be not led into a false antithesis, as if we must explain Mark’s presentation of the supernatural life of Jesus either on the basis of His office as Messiah or on the basis of His superhuman personality.
There is no necessary contradiction between these two hypotheses; and we must not introduce here a factitious “either—or.” What it behooves us to do is simply to inquire how the matter lay in Mark’s mind; what the real significance of the Messiahship he attributed to Jesus, and represented Jesus as claiming for Himself, is; and whether he posits for Jesus and represents Him as asserting for Himself something more than a human personality.
Jesus’ Person Enhances His Designations
We cannot have failed to note in reviewing the designations applied in the course of Mark’s narrative to our Lord, a tendency of them all when applied to Him to grow in richness of content. The term ‘Lord’ is merely an honorific address, equivalent to our ‘Sir’: but when applied to Jesus it seems to expand in significance until it ends by implying supreme authority. The term ‘Messiah’ is a mere term of office and might be applied to anyone solemnly set apart for a service: but when applied to Jesus it takes on fuller and fuller significance until it ends by assimilating Him to the Divine Being Himself. He who simply reads over Mark’s narrative, noting the designations he applies to our Lord, accordingly, will not be able to doubt that Mark conceived of Jesus not merely as officially the representative of God but as Himself a superhuman person, or that Mark means to present Jesus as Himself so conceiving of His nature and personality. The evidence of this is very copious, but also often rather subtle; and, in endeavoring to collect and appreciate it, we might as well commence with some of the plainest items, although this method involves a somewhat unordered presentation of it.
Jesus a Superangelic Person
Let us look, then, first at that remarkable passage (13:32) in which Jesus acknowledges ignorance of the time of His (second) coming. Here, in the very act of admitting limitations to His knowledge, in themselves astonishing, He yet asserts for Himself not merely a superhuman but even a superangelic rank in the scale of being.
In any possible interpretation of the passage, He separates Himself from the “angels in heaven” (note the enhancing definition of locality, carrying with it the sense of the exaltation of these angels above all that is earthly) as belonging to a different class from them, and that a superior class. To Jesus as He is reported, and presumably to Mark reporting Him, we see, Jesus “the Son” stands as definitely and as incomparably above the category of angels, the highest of God’s creatures, as to the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, whose argument may be taken as a commentary upon this passage (Heb 1:4, 2:8). Nor is this passage singular in Mark in exalting Jesus in dignity and authority above the angels. Already in the account of the temptation at the opening of His ministry we find the angels signalized as ministering to Him (1:13), and elsewhere they appear as His subordinates swelling His train (8:38) or His servants obeying His behests (13:27,”He shall send the angels”). Clearly, therefore, to Mark Jesus is not merely a superhuman but a superangelic personality: and the question at once obtrudes itself whether a superangelic person is not by that very fact removed from the category of creatures.
Jesus of Heavenly Origin
A similar implication, as has already been pointed out, is embedded in the title ‘Son of Man,’ which Mark represents as our Lord’s stated self-designation. The appeal involved in it to Daniel 7:13, 14 is a definite assertion for the Messiah of a heavenly as distinguished from an earthly origin, with all the suggestions of preëxistence, divine exaltation and authority, and endless sovereignty necessarily connected with a heavenly origin. It would be impossible to frame a Messianic conception on the basis of this vision of Daniel and to suppose the Messiah to be in His person a mere man deriving His origin from the earth. This is sufficiently illustrated indeed by the history of the Messianic ideal among the Jews. There is very little evidence among the Jews before or contemporary with our Lord, of resort to Daniel 7:13, 14 as a basis for Messianic hopes: but wherever this occurs it is the conception of a preexistent, heavenly monarch who is to judge the world in righteousness which is derived from this passage. No other conception, in fact, could be derived from Daniel, where the heavenly origin of the eternal King is thrown into the sharpest contrast with the lower source of the preceding bestial rulers. Judaism may not have known how to reconcile this heavenly origin of the Messiah with His birth as a human being, and may have, therefore, when so conceiving the Messiah, sacrificed His human condition entirely to His heavenly nature and supposed Him to appear upon the earth as a developed personality. That our Lord does not feel this difficulty or share this notion manifests, in the matter of His adoption of the title ‘Son of Man’ as His favorite Messianic self-designation, His independence of whatever Jewish tradition may be supposed to have formed itself. But His adoption of the title at all, with its obvious reference to the vision of Daniel,5 necessarily carried with it the assertion of heavenly origination and nature.
Jesus’ Earthly Life a Mission
This in turn carried with it, we may add, the conception that He had “come” to earth upon a mission, a conception which does not fail to find independent expression in such passages, as 1:38, 2:17, 10:45. For, that the assertions in these passages that He “came forth” to preach, that He “came” not to save the righteous but sinners, that He “came” not to be ministered unto but to minister and to give His life as a ransom for many, refer to His divine mission (cf. also 11:9, 10), lies on their face. It is suggested by the pregnancy of the expressions themselves, and the connections in which they are employed; and it is supported by the even more direct language of some of the parallels. In themselves these expressions may not necessarily involve the idea of preëxistence (cf. 9:11 and Jno. 1:7 of John the Baptist); but they fall readily in with it, and so far suggest it that when supported by other forms of statement implying it, they cannot well be taken in any other sense.
Jesus’ Functions Divine
It is, however, above all in the picture which Jesus Himself draws for us of the ‘Son of Man’ that we see His superhuman nature portrayed. For the figure thus brought before us is distinctly a superhuman one; one which is not only in the future to be seen sitting at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of heaven (14:62)—in clouds with great power and glory (13:26), even in the glory of His Father with the holy angels (8:38) who do His bidding as the Judge of all the earth, gathering His elect for Him (13:26) while He punishes His enemies (8:38); but which in the present world itself exercises functions which are truly divine,—for who is Lord of the Sabbath but the God who instituted it in commemoration of His own rest (2:28), and who can forgive sins but God only (2:10, cf. verse 7)? The assignment to the Son of Man of the function of Judge of the world and the ascription to Him of the right to forgive sins are, in each case, but another way of saying that He is a divine person; for these are divine acts.
The Uniqueness of Jesus’ Sonship
We have already had occasion to point out the uniqueness and closeness of the relation to God which is indicated by the designation ‘Son of God’ as ascribed to Jesus. In the parable of Mark 12 not only is it emphasized that God has but one such son (verse 6), but He is as such expressly contrasted with all God’s “servants” (verses 2 and 4)
and expressly signalized as God’s “heir” (verse 7). As we read this parable the mind inevitably reverts again to the representation of the Epistle to the Hebrews, which in its doctrine of the Son (cf. Heb 1:4, 3:6 etc.), might almost appear a thetical exposition of it. And in the immediate recognition of Jesus as the ‘Son of God’ by the evil spirits —”as soon as ever they caught sight of Him”—we can scarcely fail to see a testimony from the spiritual world to a sonship in Jesus surpassing that of mere appointment to an earthly office and function and rooted in what lies beyond this temporal sphere. It is noteworthy also that when responding to the adjuration of the high priest to declare whether He were ‘the Christ, the Son of the Blessed,’ Jesus points apparently to His exaltation at the right hand of power and His coming with the clouds of heaven, which they were to see, as the warranty for His acceptance of the designation: as much as to say that to be ‘the Christ, the Son of the Blessed,’ involves session at the right hand of God and the eternal dominion promised in Daniel (Mk. 14:62). And it is noticeable farther that immediately upon our Lord’s acceptance of the ascription the high priest accused Him of blasphemy (14:63), which appears to be an open indication that to claim to be ‘the Son of the Blessed’ was all one with claiming to be a divine person. Even the heathen centurion’s enforced conviction, as he witnessed the circumstances of Jesus’ death, that this man certainly was ‘a Son of God,’ appears to be recorded for no other reason (15:39) than to make plain that the supernaturalness of Jesus’ person was such as necessarily to impress any observer. No doubt a heathen centurion is but a poor witness to Jesus’ essential nature; and no doubt his designation of Him as “a son of God” must needs be taken in a sense consonant with his standpoint as a heathen. But it manifests how from his own standpoint Jesus’ death impressed him —as the death, to wit, of one of superhuman dignity. And its record seems to round out the total impression which Mark appears to wish to make in his use of the phrase, viz., that the superhuman dignity of Jesus was perforce recognized and testified to by all classes and by every variety of witness. The spiritual denizens of another world (1:24, 1:34, 3:11, 5:7), the appointed guardians of the spiritual life of Israel (14:61), Jesus Himself (12:6, 13:32, 14:62), God in Heaven (1:11, 9:7), and even the heathen man who gazed upon Him as He hung on the cross, alike certify to His elevation, as the Son of God, in the supernatural dignity of His person, above all that is earthly, all “servants” and “ministers” of God whatever, including the very angels. Certainly this designation,’Son of God,’ is colored so deeply with supernatural implications that even apart from such a passage as 13:32 where the superangelic nature of the Son is openly expressed, we cannot avoid concluding (cf. especially 12:6, 14:62, 15:39) that a supernatural personality as well as a supernatural office is intended to be understood by it. And if so, in view of the nature of the term itself, it is difficult to doubt that this supernaturalness of personality is intended to be taken at the height of the Divine. What can the Son, the unique and “beloved” Son of God, who also is God’s heir, in contradistinction from all His servants, even the angels, be— but God Himself?
Jesus Assimilated to Jehovah
It has already been suggested that something of this implication is embedded in the employment of the designation ‘Bridegroom’ (2:19, 20) of our Lord. For there is certainly involved in it not merely the representation, afterwards copiously developed in the New Testament, of our Lord as the Bridegroom of the people of God, by virtue of which His Church is His bride (Mt 22:2, 25:1, Jno 3:29, Rom 7:4, 2 Cor 11:2, Eph 5:29, Rev 19:7, 21:2, 9), but also a reminiscence of those Old Testament passages, of which Hos 2:19 may be taken as the type (cf. Ex 20:5, Jer 2:20, Ezek 16:38, 60, 63), in which Jehovah’s relation to His people is set forth under the figure of that of a loving husband to his wife. In other words, the use of ‘the Bridegroom’ as a designation of our Lord assimilates His relation to the people of God to that which in the Old Testament is exclusively, even jealously, occupied by Jehovah Himself, and raises the question whether Jesus is not thereby, in some sense, at any rate, identified with Jehovah. This question once clearly raised, other phenomena obtrude themselves at once upon our attention. We are impelled, for example, to ask afresh what sense our Lord put upon the words of the 110th Psalm,”The Lord said unto my Lord,’Sit Thou on my right hand till I make Thine enemies the footstool of Thy feet,’ ” when (Mk. 12:35 et seq.) He adduced them to rebuke the Jews for conceiving the Christ as only the son of David, whereas David himself in this passage, and that speaking in the Spirit, expressly calls Him his Lord? It is not merely the term ‘Lord’ which comes into consideration here; but the exaltation which the application of the term in this connection to Him assigns to the Messiah. The scribes would have had no difficulty in understanding that the Messiah should be David’s “greater son,” who should—nay, must—because Messiah, occupy a higher place in the Kingdom of God than even His great father. The point of the argument turns on the supreme exaltation of the Lordship ascribed to Him, implying something superhuman in the Messiah’s personality and therefore in His origin. Who is this ‘Lord’ who is to sit at the right hand of the ‘Lord’ who is Jehovah, and to whom David himself therefore does reverence? It is hard to believe that our Lord intended—or was understood by Mark to intend—by such a designation of the Messiah, who He Himself was, to attribute to Him less than a superhuman—or shall we not even say a divine—dignity, by virtue of which He should be recognized as rightfully occupying the throne of God. To sit at the right hand of God is to participate in the divine dominion,15 which, as it is a greater than human dignity, would seem to require a greater than human nature. To be in this sense David’s Lord falls little if anything short of being David’s God.
Jesus Identified with Jehovah
In estimating the significance of such a passage, we must not permit to fall out of sight the constant use of the term ‘Lord’ in the LXX version of the Old Testament for God. There it is “practically equivalent to God (θεός) and is the rendering of the solemn name of Jehovah.” The writers of the New Testament, and Mark among them, must be understood to have been thoroughly familiar with this use of the term, and could scarcely fail to see in its appellative application to Christ a suggestion of His deity, when the implications of the context were, as we have seen them repeatedly to be, of His superhuman dignity and nature. Particularly when they apply to Him Old Testament passages in which the term ‘Lord’ refers to God, we can scarcely suppose they do so without a consciousness of the implications involved, and without a distinct intention to convey them. When, for example, in the opening verses of Mark, we read: “Even as it is written in Isaiah the prophet, Behold I send my messenger before thy face, who shall prepare thy way; The voice of one crying in the wilderness, make ye ready the way of the Lord, make His paths straight,—so John came,” etc., we cannot easily rid ourselves of the impression that the term ‘Lord’ is applied to Jesus. The former of the two prophetic citations here brought together is distinctly made to refer to Christ, by a change in the pronouns from the form they bear in the original—though the reference in the original is to Jehovah: and this by an inevitable consequence carries with it the reference of the latter also to Christ. But in the original of Isaiah 40:3 again the reference of the term ‘Lord’ is to Jehovah. Here we see Jesus then identified by means of the common term ‘Lord’ with Jehovah. Of course it may be said that it is not Jesus who is identified with Jehovah, but the coming of Jesus which is identified with the “advent of Jehovah” to redeem His people predicted so frequently in the Old Testament.22 And this explanation might serve very well in the absence of other indications in this Gospel that Jesus was viewed as a superhuman being. In the presence of such indications, however,—especially so clear an instance as is afforded by the saying of Jesus in 13:32—and in the presence of other suggestions of the identification of Jesus with the Jehovah of the Old Testament,—such as is afforded by His adoption of the title of ‘Bridegroom,’—the natural implication of joining this prediction to its fellow in which we hear of the “messenger” coming “before the face” of Jesus (“thy”) and “preparing His way” (“thy”), must be permitted to determine the question in favor of the application of the term ‘Lord’ to Jesus Himself. And in that case it is the person of Jesus which is identified with Jehovah.
Mark’s Method
It cannot be doubted, therefore, that Mark sees in Jesus a supernatural person,—not merely a person endowed with supernatural powers, but a Person in His own personality superior to angels and therefore standing outside the category of creatures. He does not, however, dwell upon this. It emerges in his narrative, almost, we may say, by accident. This is in accordance with the character of his undertaking, which is illustrated by many kindred phenomena. His is not the Gospel of reflection: it is the Gospel of action. This evangelist is not accustomed to stop to muse upon the events he records or to develop all their significance. He does not attempt to give even a full record of the teaching of Jesus. He has set himself to exhibit “the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ”; and he exhibits this “beginning” in a vivid picture of the wonderful career of the divine Messiah, preserving only casually certain of our Lord’s sayings as substantial elements in his presentation of His career and only incidentally suggesting what our Lord was in describing what He did. His concern is to portray fully the supernatural life which Jesus lived, at the beginning of the Gospel, as the fountain from which has flowed the great movement in which he was himself an actor. In doing this his method is of a piece throughout. He does not record for us, for example, the great saying in which Jesus declares: “All authority has been given unto me in heaven and in earth” (Mt 28:18). He simply exhibits the exercise of this authority by Jesus in detail (1:22, 27, 2:10, 28, 3:27, 4:41, 5:42, etc.); leaving it to the reader to infer the gift. Similarly he does not stop in his rapidly moving narrative to say,”Lo, here is a supernatural person”: much less does he pause to develop that conception into its implications. He does not even charge himself to cite from Jesus’ lips His own claims to divine origin and His own conception of His unique relations with the Father. What he gives us on these themes is incidental to the narrative and falls out in it almost by accident.
Mark’s Silence
What he gives us is ample, nevertheless, to make it clear that Mark was not ignorant of these things. How can it be said that Mark knows nothing of the preëxistence of Christ when he records Jesus’ constant application to Himself of the title ‘Son of Man’? How can it be said that he knows nothing of the supernatural birth of Jesus when he records Jesus’ assertion of a superangelic nature for Himself? How should one above angels enter into the sphere of human life except by a supernatural birth? Unless we consider it more credible that Mark claimed for Him an even more supernatural descent as an adult from heaven? Mark, in a word, leaves the exposition of these things to others. It is Matthew and Luke who complete the story by the record of the supernatural birth. It is John who develops all the implications of Jesus’ preexistence. But all that these bring to expression in their fuller accounts is implied in Mark’s narrative, in which he incidentally tells us of the dignity of that person’s nature whose wonderful career he has undertaken to describe. And there is no reason why we should suppose him ignorant of the implications of his own facts, especially when his purpose in writing did not call for the explication of these implications. In a word, it seems clear enough that there lies behind the narrative of Mark not an undeveloped christology, but only an unexpressed one. To give expression to his christology did not lie within the limits of the task he had undertaken.
Mark’s Conception of the Messiahship
We must guard ourselves especially from imagining that the recognition found in Mark of the deity of Jesus is in any way clouded by the emphasis he places on the Messiahship of Jesus as the fundamental fact of His mission. We have already had occasion to point out that the Messiahship and the deity of Jesus are not mutually exclusive conceptions. Even on the purely Jewish plane it was possible to conceive the Messiah a supernatural person: and He is so conceived, for example, in the Similitudes of Enoch and the Visions of 4 Esdras. The recognition of the deity of Jesus by Mark— and by Jesus as reported by Mark—in no way interferes with the central place taken in Mark’s narrative—and in Jesus’ thought of Himself as reported by Mark,—by our Lord’s Messianic claims. It only deepens the conception of the Messiahship which is presented as the conception which Jesus fulfilled. The result is merely that the Christian movement becomes, from the point of view of the history of the Messianic ideal, an attempt to work a change in the current conception of the Messianic office—a change which involved its broadening to cover a wider area of Old Testament prophecy and its deepening to embody spiritual rather than prevailingly external aspirations. We have already noted that our Lord’s preference for His self-designation of the title ‘Son of Man’ over other more current titles is indicatory of His enlarged and enriched conception of the Messiahship: and we have already hinted that even the title ‘Son of Man’ only partly suggests the contents of His conception, elements of which found their adumbration in yet other portions of Old Testament prediction. Among these further elements of Old Testament prophecy taken up into and given validity in His conception, there are especially notable those that portray the Righteous Servant of Jehovah, culminating in the 53d chapter of Isaiah, and those that set forth what has appropriately been called the “Advent of Jehovah,”—the promises, in a word, of the intervention of Jehovah Himself to redeem His people. It may be very easy to do less than justice to the Messianic ideal current among the Jewish people at the time of our Lord, centering as it did in the hope of the establishment of an external kingdom endowed with the irresistible might of God. Of course this Kingdom of God was conceived as a kingdom of righteousness; and it may be possible to show that most of the items that enter into the Old Testament predictions, including that of redemption from sin, were not wholly neglected in one or another form of its expression. The difference between it and the Messianic conception developed by Jesus and His followers may thus almost be represented as merely a difference of emphasis. But a difference of emphasis may be far from a small difference; and the effect of the difference in this case certainly amounted to a difference in kind. This new Messianic ideal is unmistakably apparent in Mark’s conception and in the conception of Jesus as represented by Mark’s record of His sayings. We can trace in Mark’s record the influence of factors recalling the Righteous Servant (10:45, 9:12, 14:21, 1:24) and the Divine Redeemer (1:3) as well as the Danielic Son of Man. But these factors attain fuller expression in the records of the other evangelists. So that here too we find them bringing out into clearness what already lies in Mark rather than adding anything really new to his presentation.
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