igo7 1 LAMBERTON— NARRATIVE OF WALKING ON SEA. 85 



shore, on the beach close to and toward the waters edge. eVt rr)? 

 6a\d(T(T7]<; may perfectly well mean this, though it may have the 

 other meaning also : but only this interpretation seems to cover all the 

 facts as given by John. They have rowed, they don't know pre- 

 cisely how far : they guess 25 or 30 furlongs, but are nearer shore, as 

 the event proves, than they had supposed. Jesus had been alone in 

 the mountain (he had not stayed to dismiss the crowd, therein 

 Matthew and Mark are mistaken, he was too eager to get away from 

 their dangerous presence) : after dark, towards morning in fact, 

 he makes his way down to the shore at the point where he looked 

 for his disciples to land (Matthew and Mark both speak of his 

 seeing the boat from the land), thus imitating in the reverse direc- 

 tion the movements of the crowds, when they followed him (and 

 got ahead of him, we remember) to the " desert place." The dis- 

 ciples see him as he approaches the shore and comes nearer to them : 

 they may have thought that he was actually beyond the shore line 

 (they probably did) and coming out to them: they arc frightened 

 and, when quieted by his assurance that it is he, their master, they 

 wanted to get him on board ; so they put on a spurt in their eager- 

 ness and before they knew it (having miscalculated their distance 

 probably in the dim light) they were at the land and there was their 

 Lord. This same conclusion has been reached (but on insufficient 

 grounds) by J. Weiss in his Life of Christ and by Edwin A. 

 Abbott in his Johannin grammar solely on syntactical grounds. 

 The confusion in the tradition, shown by the accounts in Matthew 

 and Mark and the omission by Luke, entirely due to a misunder- 

 standing of what happened, arose in all likelihood from the fact 

 that Jesus hurried ( rfvayfcaae in Matthew and Mark) his disciples 

 away, and hence they were perplexed — did not understand, ra eirl 

 Tol^ dpTOL<;= what followed the miracle of the feeding. The wonder- 

 ful scene they had just witnessed, the abrupt way in which their 

 master fairly drove them into the boat and made them push off, 

 put them into a state of mind where senses and memory at once 

 were likely to play them false, and this seems to have happened. 



The clear result is, that there appears to have been a risk of 

 Jesus being seized and proclaimed as ]\Iessiah in what may be 

 called the temporary and political sense ; this was to run counter to 



