Note 94 — Chapter VI · THE DISCOURSES OF JESUS IN THE THREE FIRST GOSPELS.1

A controversial question concerning the Messiah is proposed (v. 41–46) to the Pharisees by Jesus, namely, How can the same personage be at once the Lord and the son of David? Paulus maintains that this is a model of interpretation in conformity with the text;94 an assertion which is no good augury that his own possesses that qualification. According to him, Jesus, in asking how David could call the Messiah, Lord, when in the general opinion he was his son, intended to apprise the Pharisees, that in this Psalm it is not David who is speaking of the Messiah, but another poet who is speaking of David as his lord, so that to suppose this warlike psalm a messianic one, is a mistake. Why, asks Paulus, should not Jesus have found out this interpretation, since it is the true one? But this is the grand error of his entire scheme of interpretation—to suppose that what is truth in itself, or more correctly, for us, must, even to the minutest details, have been truth for Jesus and the apostles. The majority of ancient Jewish interpreters apply this psalm to the Messiah;95 the apostles use it as a prophecy concerning Christ (Acts ii. 34 f.; 1 Cor. xv. 25); Jesus himself, according to Matthew and Mark, adds ἐν πνεύματι to Δαβὶδ καλεῖ αὐτὸν Κύριον, thus plainly giving his approval to the notion that it is David who there speaks, and that the Messiah is his subject: how then can it be thought that he held the contrary opinion? It is far more probable, as Olshausen has well shown, that Jesus believed the psalm to be a messianic one: while, on the other hand, Paulus is equally correct in maintaining that it originally referred, not to the Messiah, but to some Jewish ruler, whether David or another. Thus we find that Jesus here gives a model of interpretation, in conformity, not with the text, but with the spirit of his time: a discovery which, if the above observations be just, ought to excite no surprise. The solution of the enigma which Jesus here proposes to the Pharisees, lay without doubt, according to his idea, in the doctrine of the higher nature of the Messiah; whether he held that, in virtue of this, he might be styled the Lord of David, while, in virtue of his human nature, he might also be regarded as his son; or whether he wished to remove the latter notion as erroneous.96 The result, however, and perhaps also the intention of Jesus with respect to the Pharisees, was merely to convince them that he was capable of retaliating on them, in their own way, by embarrassing them with captious questions, and that with better success than they had obtained in their attempts to entrap him. Hence the Evangelists place this passage at the close of the disputations prompted by the Pharisees, and Matthew adds, Neither durst any man from that day forth ask him any more questions: a concluding form which is more suitable here than after the lesson administered to the Sadducees, where it is placed by Luke (xx. 40), or than after the discussion on the greatest commandment, where it is introduced by Mark (xii. 34).