ego had been in existence before this earthly body in which He stood visibly upon the stage of the world. He felt that His ego had had being and life before He became incarnate upon earth. . . . This new conception of Himself, born of His solitary musings, was incorporated into the very substance of His natural personal ego. A new ego had superseded the old natural, corporeally conditioned ego."
Ambition, too, came into play�the high ambition to do God a service by the offering up of Himself. The passion of self-sacrifice is characteristic of a consciousness such as this. According to the document which underlies the Johannine Gospel it was not in consequence of outward events that Jesus took His resolve to die. "It was the later Gospel tradition which exhibited His fate as an inevitable consequence of His conflict with a world impervious to spiritual impression." In the original Gospel that fate was freely embraced from the outset as belonging to the vocation of the Son of God. Only by the constant presence of the thought of death could a life which for two years walked the razor edge of such dizzy dreams have been preserved from falling. The conviction, or perhaps rather the instinctive feeling, that the role of a Son of God upon earth was not one to be maintained for decades was the necessary counterpoise to the enthusiasm of Jesus' spirit. From the first He was as much at home with the thought of death as with His Heavenly Father.
This Son of Man�according to Noack's interpretation the title is equivalent to Son of Hope�requires of the multitude that they shall take His lofty dream for solid reality. "He revealed His message from heaven to the world at the Paschal Feast of the year 35, by throwing out a challenge to the Sadducaean hierarchy in Jerusalem." In the time between John's removal from the scene and John's death, there falls the visit of Jesus to Samaria and a sojourn in the neighbourhood of His Galilaean home. At the Feast of Tabernacles in Jerusalem in the autumn of that year, the healing of the lame man at the pool of Bethesda led to a breach with the Sabbatic regulations of the Pharisees. Later on, in consequence of His generous feeding of the multitude in the Gaulonite table-land, there is an attempt to make Him into a Messianic King; which He, however, repudiates. At the time of the Passover in Galilee in the year 36, in the synagogue at Capernaum, He tests the spiritual insight of those who may, He hopes, be ripe for the higher teaching concerning the Son of God made flesh, by the touchstone of His mystical words about the bread of life. At the next Feast of Tabernacles, in the city of Zion, He makes a last desperate attempt to move men's hearts by the parable of the Good Shepherd who is ready to lay down His life for His sheep, the people of Israel.
