Take, again, the eschatology of the disciples, their notion of the final things, of the approaching great judgment and end of the world. This consisted mainly in a literal appropriation of the apocalyptic pictures of the book of Daniel and the book of Enoch, and a transference of them to Jesus Christ and his kingdom. It is not surprising, certainly, that men with the mental range of their time, and with so little flexibility of thought, that, when Jesus told them to beware of 'the leaven of the Pharisees,'[1] or when he called himself 'the bread of life' and said, He that eateth me shall live by me,[2] they stuck hopelessly fast in the literal meaning of the words, and were accordingly puzzled or else offended by them,—it is not surprising that these men should have been incapable of dealing in a large spirit with prophecies like those of Daniel, that they should have applied them to Jesus narrowly and literally, and should therefore have conceived his kingdom unintelligently. This is not remarkable; what is remarkable is, that they should themselves supply us with their Master's blame of their too literal criticism, his famous sentence: 'The kingdom of God is within you!'[3] Such an account of the kingdom of God has more right, even if recorded only once, to pass with us for Jesus Christ's own account, than the common materialising accounts, if repeated twenty times; for it was manifestly quite foreign to the disciples' own notions, and they could never have invented it. Evidence of the same kind, again,—evidence borne by the reporters themselves against their own power of rightly understanding what their Master, on this topic of the kingdom of God and its coming, meant to say—is Christ's warning to his apostles, that the subject of final things was one where they were all out of their depth:
- ↑ Matth., xvi, 6–12.
- ↑ John, vi, 48, 57.
- ↑ Luke, xvii, 21.
