Note 78 — Chapter VI · THE DISCOURSES OF JESUS IN THE THREE FIRST GOSPELS.1

Closely connected by the word ἀποκριθεὶς, answering, with the sentences just considered, Mark (ix. 38 f.) and Luke (ix. 49 f.) introduce the information which John is said to give to Jesus, that the disciples having seen one casting out devils in the name of Jesus, without attaching himself to their society, had forbidden him. Schleiermacher explains the connexion thus: because Jesus had commanded the reception of children in his name, John was led to the confession, that he and his associates had hitherto been so far from regarding the performance of an act in the name of Jesus as the point of chief importance, that they had interdicted the use of his name to one who followed not with them.78 Allowing this explanation to be correct, we must believe that John, arrested by the phrase, in my name (which yet is not prominent in the declaration of Jesus, and which must have been thrown still further into the background by the sight of the child set up in the midst), drew from it the general inference, that in all actions the essential point is to perform them in the name of Jesus; and with equal rapidity, leaped to the remote reflection, that the conduct of the disciples towards the exorcist was in contradiction with this rule. But all this supposes the facility of combination which belongs to a Schleiermacher, not the dulness which still characterized the disciples. Nevertheless, the above critic has unquestionably opened on the true vein of connexion between the preceding apothegm and this ἀπόκρισις of John; he has only failed to perceive that this connexion is not intrinsic and original, but extrinsic and secondary. It was quite beyond the reach of the disciples to apply the words in my name, by a train of deductions, to an obliquely connected case in their own experience; but, according to our previous observations, nothing could be more consistent with the habit of association that characterizes the writer of the evangelical tradition in the third gospel, whence the second Evangelist seems to have borrowed, than that he should be reminded by the striking phrase, in my name, in the preceding discourse of Jesus, of an anecdote containing the same expression, and should unite the two for the sake of that point of external similarity alone.79