" but adds, "Son of the living God." This makes a great
difference, and the remarkable thing is, that later on Jesus only commands
his disciples to keep secret that he, Jesus, was the Messiah, and says
nothing of himself as the Son of God. So much has been written about other
discrepancies in this passage, particularly of the promise of the building
of the church upon this rock (Peter), which is only found in (Matthew xvi.
18), that we have nothing further to say about it, unless it be that in
Mark in this very passage Jesus rebukes Peter because he thinks more of
the world than of God, like so many of his later successors.

Let us bear in mind further that neither revelation nor divine inspiration
was really necessary for recording most of the things related in the
Gospels. The less, the better; for either the witnesses knew that Pilate
was at the time governor in Palestine, that Caiaphas was high priest, and
that Jairus was ruler of a synagogue, or they did not know it, and in that
case we cannot assume that these things were revealed to them by God
without irreverence. If, however, it is impossible that God should have
inspired or sanctioned the historical part of the Gospels, why then the
other part, which contains the teachings of Christ? Is it not much better,
much more honest and trustworthy for the writers to have communicated them
to us, as they knew and understood them (and that they occasionally
misunderstood them they themselves quite honestly admit), than to have
been supernaturally inspired for the purpose, and even to have received a
revelation in the form of a theophany? Through such weak human ideas we
merely drag the Real, the truly Divine, into the dust, and from whom do
these ideas of a divine inspiration or revelation come, if not from men as
they were everywhere, whether in India or Judea? Everywhere the natural is
divine, the supernatural or miraculous is human.

Even for the Apostles and the authors of the Gospels there was only one
revelation: that was the revelation through Christ; and this has an
entirely different meaning. To understand this, however, we must glance at
what we know of the intellectual movements of that time. The Jewish nation
cherished two great expectations. The one was ancient and purely Jewish,
the expectation of the Messiah, the anointed (Christ), who should be the
political and spiritual liberator of the chosen but enslaved people of
Israel. The other was also Jewish, but