If Jesus had failed to see laws so fundamental, which other teachers of mankind have recognized, it is hardly likely that his teaching would have survived or influenced men as it has done.  Mankind can dispense with a teacher who misses patent facts, whatever his charm.  But there never was any doubt that Jesus was alive to the difference between right and wrong.  His critics saw this, but they held that he confused moral issues, and that his distinctions in the ethical sphere were badly drawn.

Jesus could not have ignored the problem of sin and forgiveness, even if he had wished to ignore it.  To this the thought of mankind had been gravitating, and in Jewish and in Greek thought, conduct was more and more the centre of everything.  For the Stoics morals were the dominant part of philosophy; but for our present purpose we need not go outside the literature of the New Testament.  Sin was the keynote of the preaching of John the Baptist.  It is customary to connect the mission of Jesus with that of John, and to find in the Baptist’s preaching either the announcement of his Successor (as is said with most emphasis in the Fourth Gospel), or (as some now say) the impulse which drove Jesus of Nazareth into his public ministry.  Whatever may be the historical connexion between them, it is as important for us at least to realize the broad gulf that separates them.  They meet, it is true; both use the phrase “Kingdom of God,” both preach repentance in view of the coming of the Kingdom; and we are apt to assume they mean the same thing; but Jesus took some pains to make it clear, though in the gentlest and most sympathetic way, that they did not.

On the famous occasion, when John the Baptist sent two of his disciples to Jesus with his striking message:  “Art thou he that should come? or look we for another?” (Luke 7:19-35; Matt. 11:1-19), Jesus, when the messengers were gone, spoke to the people about the Baptist.  “What went ye out into the wilderness for to see?  A reed shaken with the wind?  A man clothed in soft raiment?  A prophet?  Yea, I say unto you, and much more than a prophet.  Among those that are born of women there is not a greater prophet than John the Baptist, but he that is least in the Kingdom of God is greater than he.”  I am not sure which is the right translation, whether it is “he that is less, least, or little,” and I do not propose to discuss it.  The judgement is remarkable enough in any case, and the words of Jesus, as we have seen, have a close relation to real fact as he saw it.  Why does he speak in this way?  Our answer to this question, if we can answer it, will help us forward to the larger problem before us.  But, for this, we shall have to study John with some care.