his critics, he felt it unnecessary to guard against arousing undue enthusiasm by this frank avowal of his claims.  He consequently asserted his authority to forgive sins, his special mission to the sick in soul whom the scribes shunned as defiling, his right to modify the conception of Sabbath observance; even as, later, he warned his critics of their fearful danger if they ascribed his good deeds to diabolical power (Mark iii. 28-30), and as, after the collapse of popularity, he rebuked them for making void the word of God by their tradition (Mark vii. 13).  His attitude to the scribes in Galilee from the beginning discloses as definite Messianic claims as any ascribed by the fourth gospel to this early period.

255.  These facts of the independence of Jesus in his teaching and his self-assertion in response to criticism confirm the impression that his answer to John the Baptist (Matt. xi. 2-6) gives the key to his method in Galilee.  In John’s inquiry the question of Jesus’ personal relation to the kingdom was definitely asked.  The answer, “Blessed is he whosoever shall find none occasion of stumbling in me,” showed plainly that Jesus was in no doubt in the matter, although for the time he still preferred to let his ministry be the means of leading men to form their conclusions concerning him.  What he brought into prominence at Caesarea Philippi, therefore, was that which had been the familiar subject of his own thinking from the time of his baptism.

256.  In the ministry subsequent to the confession of Peter the self-disclosures of Jesus became more frequent and clear.  His predictions of his approaching death were at the time the greatest difficulty to his disciples; when considered in their significance for his own life, however, they prove that his conviction of his Messiahship was as independent of current and inherited ideas as was his teaching concerning the kingdom.  When he came to see that death was the inevitable issue of his work, he at once discovered in it a divine necessity; it does not seem to have shaken in the least his certainty that he was the Messiah.  Associated with this conception of his death is the conviction which appears in all the later teachings, that in rejecting him his people were pronouncing their own doom.  Because she would not accept him as her deliverer, Jerusalem’s “house was left unto her desolate” (Luke xiii. 35).  His sense of his supreme significance appears most clearly in some of the later parables, such as The Marriage of the King’s Son (Matt. xxii. 1-14) and The Wicked Husbandmen (Matt. xxi. 33-44), which definitely connect the condemnation of the chosen people with their rejection of God’s Son.  Two other sayings in the first three gospels express the personal claim of Jesus in the most exalted form,—­his declaration on the return of the seventy:  “All things have been delivered unto me of my Father, and no man knoweth who the Son is save the Father, and who the Father is save the Son, and he to whomsoever