Note 14 — Chapter XVII · THE JESUS-FIGURE OF M. LOISY

And when we turn to specific teachings, his commentary does but compel us to ask how the teaching which he insists upon taking as genuinely uttered by the Teacher can be associated with the Messianist he has been describing. Accepting as genuine the story of the woman taken in adultery, now bracketed in the English Revised Version as being absent from the most ancient manuscripts, but presumably found in the lost Gospel of the Hebrews,14 he remarks that “the elect of the kingdom must not use marriage; they were to be as the angels in heaven”;15 and at the same time he describes the veto on divorce as “a trait so personal to the teaching of Christ, and so difficult to comprehend if one denies all originality to that teaching.”16 That is to say, the believer in the speedy end of all marriage relations, and the establishment of a new and angelic life for all who survive, occupied himself earnestly with the restriction or abolition of divorce!