as possible. 'I and my Father are one!'[1] he would say at one time; and, 'My Father is greater than I!'[2] at another. When the Jews were offended at his calling himself the Son of God, he quotes Scripture to show that even mere men were in Scripture called Gods; and for you, he says, who go by the letter of Scripture, surely this is sanction enough for calling anyone, whom God sends, the Son of God![3] He did not at all mean, that the Messiah was a son of God merely in the sense in which any great man might be so called; but he meant that these questions of theosophy were useless for his hearers, and that they puzzled themselves with them in vain. All they were concerned with was, that he was the Messiah they expected, sent to them with salvation from God.
It is the same when Jesus says: 'Before Abraham was, I am!'[4] He was baffling his countrymen's theosophy, showing them how little his doctrine was meant to offer a field for it. 'Life,' he means, 'the life of him who lays down his life that he may take it again,[5] is not what you suppose. Your notions of life and death are all false, and with your present notions you cannot discuss theology with me; follow me!' So, again, to the Jews in the rut of their traditional theology, and haggling about the Son of David;—Jesus, they insisted, could not be the Christ, because the Christ was the Son of David. Jesus answers them by the objection that in the Psalms (and the Scripture cannot be broken!) David calls the Christ his Lord; and 'if he call him Lord, how is he then his son?'[6] The argument as a serious argument is perfectly futile. The king of God's chosen people is going out to war, and what the Psalmist really sings is: 'The Eternal saith unto the king's majesty, Thou shalt conquer!' St. Peter in the Acts gravely uses
