Note 77 — Chapter VI · THE DISCOURSES OF JESUS IN THE THREE FIRST GOSPELS.1

As the discourses in Matthew xv. 1–20 have been already considered, we must pass on to xviii. 1 ff., Mark ix. 33 ff., Luke ix. 46 ff., where various discourses are connected with the exhibition of a little child, occasioned by a contention for pre-eminence among the disciples. The admonition to become as a little child, and to humble one’s self as a little child, in Matthew, forms a perfectly suitable comment on the symbolical reproof (v. 3, 4,); but the connexion between this and the following declaration of Jesus, that whosoever receives one such little child in his name, receives him, is not so obvious. For the child was set up to teach the disciples in what they were to imitate it, not how they were to behave towards it, and how Jesus could all at once lose sight of his original object, it is difficult to conceive. But yet more glaring is the irrelevance of the declaration in Mark and Luke; for they make it follow immediately on the exhibition of the child, so that, according to this, Jesus must, in the very act, have forgotten its object, namely, to present the child to his ambitious disciples as worthy of imitation, not as in want of reception.77 Jesus was accustomed to say of his disciples, that whosoever received them, received him, and in him, the Father who had sent him (Matt. x. 40 ff.; Luke x. 16; John xiii. 20). Of children he elsewhere says merely, that whosoever does not receive the kingdom of heaven as a little child cannot enter therein (Mark x. 15; Luke xviii. 17). This declaration would be perfectly adapted to the occasion in question, and we may almost venture to conjecture that ὃς ἐὰν μὴ δέξηται τὴν βασιλείαν τῶν οὐρανῶν ὡς παιδίον, was the original passage, and that the actual one is the result of its confusion with Matthew x. 40, ὃς ἐὰν δέξηται παιδίον τοιοῦτον ἓν ἐπὶ τῷ ὀνόματί μου.