o the prophets.[9] We do not know in what
form, nor to what extent, these affirmations of himself were made.
Jesus ought not to be judged by the law of our petty
conventionalities. The admiration of his disciples overwhelmed him and
carried him away. It is evident that the title of _Rabbi_, with which
he was at first contented, no longer sufficed him; even the title of
prophet or messenger of God responded no longer to his ideas. The
position which he attributed to himself was that of a superhuman
being, and he wished to be regarded as sustaining a higher
relationship to God than other men. But it must be remarked that these
words, "superhuman" and "supernatural," borrowed from our petty
theology, had no meaning in the exalted religious consciousness of
Jesus. To him Nature and the development of humanity were not limited
kingdoms apart from God--paltry realities subjected to the laws of a
hopeless empiricism. There was no supernatural for him, because there
was no Nature. Intoxicated with infinite love, he forgot the heavy
chain which holds the spirit captive; he cleared at one bound the
abyss, impossible to most, which the weakness of the human faculties
has created between God and man.

[Footnote 1: The passages in support of this are too numerous to be
referred to here.]

[Footnote 2: It is only in the Gospel of John that Jesus uses the
expression "Son of God," or "Son," in speaking of himself.]

[Footnote 3: Matt. xii. 8; Luke vi. 5.]

[Footnote 4: Matt. xi. 27.]

[Footnote 5: John v. 22.]

[Footnote 6: Matt. xvii. 18, 19; Luke xvii. 6.]

[Footnote 7: Matt. ix. 8.]

[Footnote 8: Matt. ix. 2, and following; Mark ii. 5, and following;
Luke v. 20, vii. 47, 48.]

[Footnote 9: Matt. xii. 41, 42; xxii. 43, and following; John viii.
52, and following.]

We cannot mistake in these affirmations of Jesus the germ of the
doctrine which was afterward to make of him a divine hypostasis,[1] in
identifying him with the Word, or "second God,"[2] or eldest Son of
God,[3] or _Angel Metathronos_,[4] which Jewish theology created apart
from him.[5] A kind of necessity caused this theology, in order to
correct the extreme rigor of the old Monotheism, to place near God an
assessor, to whom the eternal Father is supposed to delegate the
government of the universe. The belief that certain men are
incarnations of divine faculties or "powers," was widespread; the
Samaritans possessed about the same time a thaumaturgus named Si