hour knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father” (Mark xiii. 32).  This confession of the limitation of his knowledge is conclusive.  Yet it is not isolated.  With his undoubted power to read “what was in man,” he was not independent of ordinary ways of learning facts.  When the woman was healed who touched the hem of his garment, Jesus knew that his power had been exercised, but he discovered the object of his healing by asking, “Who touched me?” and calling the woman out from the crowd to acknowledge her blessing (Mark v. 30-34); when the centurion urged Jesus to heal his boy without taking the trouble to come to his house, Jesus “marvelled” at his faith (Matt. viii. 10); when he came to Bethany, assured of his Father’s answer to his prayer for the raising of Lazarus, he asked as simply as any other one in the company, “Where have ye laid him?” (John xi. 34).  It should not be forgotten that his knowledge of approaching death, resurrection, and return in glory did not prevent the earnest pleading in Gethsemane, and it may be that his reply to the ambition of James and John, it “is not mine to give” (Mark x. 40), is a confession of ignorance as well as subordination to his Father.

248.  The supernatural knowledge of Jesus, so far as its exercise is apparent in the gospels, was concerned with the truths intimately related to his religious teaching or his Messianic work.  There is no evidence that it occupied itself at all with facts of nature or of history discovered by others at a later day.  When he says of God that “he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good” (Matt. v. 45), there is no evidence that he thought of the earth and its relation to the sun differently from his contemporaries; it is probable that his thought anticipated Galileo’s discovery no more than do his words.  Much the same may be said with reference to the purely literary or historical questions of Old Testament criticism, now so much discussed.  If it is proved by just interpretation of all the facts that the Pentateuch is only in an ideal sense to be attributed to Moses, and that many of the psalms inscribed with his name cannot have been written by David, the propriety of Jesus’ references to what “Moses said” (Mark vii. 10), and the validity of his argument for the relative unimportance of the Davidic descent of the Messiah, will not suffer.  Had Jesus had in mind the ultimate facts concerning the literary structure of the Pentateuch, he could not have hoped to hold the attention of his hearers upon the religious teaching he was seeking to enforce, unless he referred to the early books of the Old Testament as written by Moses.  Jesus did repeatedly go back of Moses to more primitive origins (Mark x. 5, 6; John vii. 22); yet there is no likelihood that the literary question was ever present in his thinking.  This phase of his intellectual life, like that which concerned his knowledge of the natural universe, was in all probability one of the points in which he was