Note 18 — Chapter XVII · THE JESUS-FIGURE OF M. LOISY

But however that may be, we have to note that for M. Loisy the promise of reward at the judgment for help given to the distressed is not a Jesuine utterance. It occurs only in Matthew; and we may readily agree that, if such an allocution were really delivered by the alleged Founder, it could not conceivably have been left to one collector to preserve it. “The redactor of the first Gospel,” comments M. Loisy in his best critical vein, “thought he ought to put this here to complete his collection of instructions concerning the parousia and the great judgment. It is ... a piece in which is developed, from the point of view of the last judgment, the word of the Lord: ‘He that receiveth you receiveth me.’” So that a teaching which still makes a great impression on the Christian consciousness is confessedly but a development by an unknown hand of a bare Messianic phrase. “It has been visibly arranged to close the compilation of discourses and parables made here by the redactor of the first Gospel.”18