Note 42 — Chapter VI · THE DISCOURSES OF JESUS IN THE THREE FIRST GOSPELS.1

The case is otherwise when we regard those portions of the discourse which Luke places in his twelfth chapter, and even later, and which in Matthew are distinguishable as a second part of the same discourse. Such are the directions to the apostles as to their conduct before tribunals (Matt. x. 19 f.; Luke xii. 11); the exhortation not to fear those who can only kill the body (Matt. v. 28; Luke v. 4 f.); the warning against the denial of Jesus (Matt. v. 32 f.; Luke v. 8 f.); the discourse on the general disunion of which he would be the cause (Matt. v. 34 ff.; Luke v. 51 ff.); a passage to which Matthew, prompted apparently by the enumeration of the members of a family, attaches the declaration of Jesus that these are not to be valued above him, that his cross must be taken, etc., which he partly repeats on a subsequent occasion, and in a more suitable connexion (xvi. 24 f.); further, predictions which recur in the discourse on the Mount of Olives, relative to the universal persecution of the disciples of Jesus (v. 17 f. 22, comp. xxiv. 9, 13); the saying which Luke inserts in the Sermon on the Mount (vi. 40), and which also appears in John (xv. 20), that the disciple has no claim to a better lot than his master (v. 24 f.); lastly, the direction, which is peculiar to the discourse in Matthew, to flee from one city to another, with the accompanying consolation (v. 23). These commands and exhortations have been justly pronounced by critics42 to be unsuitable to the first mission of the twelve, which, like the alleged mission of the seventy, had no other than happy results (Luke ix. 10, x. 17); they presuppose the troublous circumstances which supervened after the death of Jesus, or perhaps in the latter period of his life. According to this, Luke is more correct than Matthew in assigning these discourses to the last journey of Jesus;43 unless, indeed, such descriptions of the subsequent fate of the apostles and other adherents of Jesus were produced ex eventu, after his death, and put into his mouth in the form of prophecies; a conjecture which is strongly suggested by the words, He who taketh not up his cross, etc. (v. 38).44