document which no longer exists in an independent form, but
which can be partially reconstructed from the portions of it
which have been embodied in the Gospels of St Matthew and
St Luke.
When we review St Mark’s narrative as a whole we are struck, first of all, with its directness and simplicity. It moves straightforward upon a well-defined path. It shows us the Lord Jesus entering on the mission predicted by the Baptist without declaring Himself to be the Messiah; attracting the multitudes in Galilee by His healing power and His unbounded sympathy, and at the same time awakening the envy and suspicion of the leaders of religion; training a few disciples till they reach the conviction that He is the Christ, and then, but not till then, admitting them into the secret of His coming sufferings, and preparing them for a mission in which they also must sacrifice themselves; then journeying to Jerusalem to fulfil the destiny which He foresaw, accepting the responsibility of the Messianic title, only to be condemned by the religious authorities as a blasphemer and handed over to the Roman power as a pretender to the Jewish throne. That is the story in its barest outline. It is adequate to its presumed purpose of offering to distant Gentile converts a clear account of their Master’s earthly work, and of the causes which led to His rejection by His own people and to His death by Roman crucifixion. The writer makes no comment on the wonderful story which he tells. Allusions to Jewish customs are, indeed, explained as they occur, but apart from this the narrative appears to be a mere transcript of remembered facts. The actors are never characterized; their actions are simply noted down; there is no praise and no blame. To this simplicity and directness of narrative we may in large measure attribute the fact that when two later evangelists desired to give fuller accounts of our Lord’s life they both made this early book the basis of their work. In those days there was no sense of unfairness in using up existing materials in order to make a more complete treatise. Accordingly so much of St Mark’s Gospel has been taken over word for word in the Gospels of St Luke and St Matthew that, if every copy of it had perished, we could still reconstruct large portions of it by carefully comparing their narratives. They did not hesitate, however, to alter St Mark’s language where it seemed to them rough or obscure, for each of them had a distinctive style of his own, and St Luke was a literary artist of a high order. Moreover, though they both accepted the general scheme of St Mark’s narrative, each of them was obliged to omit many incidents in order to find room for other material which was at their disposal, by which they were able to supplement the deficiencies of the earlier book. The most conspicuous deficiency was in regard to our Lord’s teaching, of which, as we have seen, St Mark had given surprisingly little. Here they were happily in a position to make a very important contribution.
For side by side with St Mark’s Gospel there was current in the earliest times another account of the doings and sayings of Jesus Christ. Our knowledge of it to-day is entirely derived from a comparison of the two later evangelists who embodied large portions of it, working it in and out of the general scheme which they derived from St Mark, according as each of them thought most appropriate. St Luke appears to have taken it over in sections for the most part without much modification; but in St Matthew’s Gospel its incidents seldom find an independent place; the sayings to which they gave rise are often detached from their context and grouped with sayings of a similar character so as to form considerable discourses, or else they are linked on to sayings which were uttered on other occasions recorded by St Mark. It is probable that many passages of St Luke’s Gospel which have no parallel in St Matthew were also derived from this early source; but this is not easily capable of distinct proof; and, therefore, in order to gain a secure conception of the document we must confine ourselves at first to those parts of it which were borrowed by both writers. We shall, however, look to St Luke in the main as preserving for us the more nearly its original form.
We proceed now to give an outline of the contents of this document. To begin with, it contained a fuller account of the teaching of John the Baptist. St Mark tells us only his message of hope; but here we read the severer language with which he called men to repentance. We hear his warning of “the coming wrath”: his mighty Successor will baptize with fire; the fruitless tree will be cast into the fire; the chaff will be separated from the wheat and burned with unquenchable fire; the claim to be children of Abraham will not avail, for God can raise up other children to Abraham, if it be from the stones of the desert. Next, we have a narrative of the Temptation, of which St Mark had but recorded the bare fact. It was grounded on the Divine sonship, which we already know was proclaimed at the Baptism. In a threefold vision Jesus is invited to enter upon His inheritance at once; to satisfy His own needs, to accept of earthly dominion, to presume on the Divine protection. The passage stands almost alone as a revelation of inner conflict in a life which outwardly was marked by unusual calm.
Not far from the beginning of the document there stood a remarkable discourse delivered among the hills above the lake. It opens with a startling reversal of the common estimates of happiness and misery. In the light of the coming kingdom it proclaims the blessedness of the poor, the hungry, the sad and the maligned; and the woefulness The Sermon on the Mount. of the rich, the full, the merry and the popular. It goes on to reverse the ordinary maxims of conduct. Enemies are to be loved, helped, blessed, prayed for. No blow is to be returned; every demand, just or unjust, is to be granted: in short, “as ye desire that men should do to you, do in like manner to them.” Then the motive and the model of this conduct are adduced: “Love your enemies . . . and ye shall be sons of the Highest; for He is kind to the thankless and wicked. Be merciful, as your Father is merciful; and judge not, and ye shall not be judged.” We note in passing that this is the first introduction of our Lord’s teaching of the fatherhood of God. God is your Father, He says in effect; you will be His sons if like Him you will refuse to make distinctions, loving without looking for a return, sure that in the end love will not be wholly lost. Then follow grave warnings—generous towards others, you must be strict with yourselves; only the good can truly do good; hearers of these words must be doers also, if they would build on the rock and not on the sand. So, with the parable of the two builders, the discourse reached its formal close.
It was followed by the entry of Jesus into Capernaum, where He was asked to heal the servant of a Roman officer. This man’s unusual faith, based on his soldierly sense of discipline, surprised the Lord, who declared that it had no equal in Israel itself. Somewhat later messengers arrived from the imprisoned Baptist, who asked if Jesus were indeed “the coming One” of whom he had spoken. Jesus pointed to His acts of healing the sick, raising the dead and proclaiming good news for the poor; thereby suggesting to those who could understand that He fulfilled the ancient prophecy of the Messiah. He then declared the greatness of John in exalted terms, adding, however, that the least in the kingdom of God was John’s superior. Then He complained of the unreasonableness of an age which refused John as too austere and Himself as too lax and as being “the friend of publicans and sinners.” This narrative clearly presupposes a series of miracles already performed, and also such a conflict with the Pharisees as we have seen recorded by St Mark. Presently we find an offer of discipleship met by the warning that “the Son of Man” is a homeless wanderer; and then the stern refusal of a request for leave to perform a father’s funeral rites.
Close upon these incidents follows a special mission of disciples, introduced by the saying: “The harvest is great, but the labourers are few.” The disciples as they journey are to take no provisions, but to throw themselves on the bounty of their hearers; they are to heal the Other Sayings of Jesus. sick and to proclaim the nearness of the kingdom of God. The city that rejects them shall have a less lenient judgment than Sodom; Tyre and Sidon shall be better off than cities like Chorazin and Bethsaida which have seen His miracles;
