PRESENT DAY FACTORS IN NEW TESTAMENT STUDY. 39 



p. 125, maintains that it is earlier than Mark, and that nothing 

 prevents it from being assigned to a.d. 50 or still earlier, so 

 that Harnack allows that it may well have come to us from a 

 personal acquaintance or disciple of our Lord. 



Harnack, however, ridicules the argument that Q was 

 written before the Passion because it breaks off before that 

 event. Other critics, however, take a different view, notably 

 Mr. St. George Stock in the Hihhert Journal for last April, 

 pp. 723-4, and he asks what more satisfactory reason could 

 there be for Q's containing no account of the Passion. 



But without stopping over this, Dr. Harnack, as we have seen, 

 is convinced of the high antiquity of Q, and in it he regards the 

 words of our Lord in Matthew xi, 27, as authentic tradition, 

 words which have been recently described as the greatest 

 Christological passage in the Gospels. Wellhausen, too, and 

 Schmiedel both regard the words in St. Matthew as spoken 

 by oar Lord. 



The fullest account of the bearing of the whole passage, with 

 an account of the literature which has gathered round it, is 

 given by Dr. Schumacher of Freiburg {Die Selbstoffenbarung Jesu, 

 1912). It is, no doubt, quite true that Dr. Harnack does not 

 interpret the words as many of us do, but at all events it seems 

 certain that we cannot reject this saying, so Johannine in form 

 and expression, as an interpolation or an accretion, but that it 

 was actually attributed to our Lord in a document which Harnack 

 assigns to the year a.d. 50 or even earlier. May it not be said 

 of such a passage that it is testimony of the very highest value 

 to the belief in J esus and His own self-consciousness ? He and 

 the Father are separated in their essential nature from collective 

 humanity. 



Professor Burkitt, indeed, has recently made an interesting 

 attempt to interpret the words and their context (Journal of 

 Theological Studies, January, 1911). The towns of Galilee had 

 not repented in answer to the announcement by Jesus of the 

 Kingdom of God, and for this failure, as well as for the success 

 in the reception of His message by the simple folk, Jesus thanks 

 the Father. " I can stand alone," he seems to say, " unrecog- 

 nized, for my heavenly Father recognizes me ; I stand alone, 

 I and my disciples, but it is we who know God and recognize the 

 signs of His visitation." But may we not fairly ask if this 

 explanation does justice to the words ? can it be maintained 

 that this passage places our Lord and His disciples on an equality 

 in their knowledge of the Father ? 



But if Q contains no history of the Passion, the earliest 



