eath of the last
person who had been alive when Jesus said "There be some of them that
stand here that shall in no wise taste death till they see the Son
of Man coming in his kingdom" destroyed the last possibility of the
promised Second Coming, and bore out the incredulity of Pilate and the
Jews. And as Matthew writes as one believing in that Second Coming,
and in fact left his story unfinished to be ended by it, he must have
produced his gospel within a lifetime of the crucifixion. Also, he must
have believed that reading books would be one of the pleasures of the
kingdom of heaven on earth.

CLASS TYPE OF MATTHEW'S JESUS

One more circumstance must be noted as gathered from Matthew. Though he
begins his story in such a way as to suggest that Jesus belonged to the
privileged classes, he mentions later on that when Jesus attempted to
preach in his own country, and had no success there, the people said,
"Is not this the carpenter's son?" But Jesus's manner throughout is that
of an aristocrat, or at the very least the son of a rich bourgeois, and
by no means a lowly-minded one at that. We must be careful therefore
to conceive Joseph, not as a modern proletarian carpenter working for
weekly wages, but as a master craftsman of royal descent. John the
Baptist may have been a Keir Hardie; but the Jesus of Matthew is of the
Ruskin-Morris class.

This haughty characterization is so marked that if we had no other
documents concerning Jesus than the gospel of Matthew, we should not
feel as we do about him. We should have been much less loth to say,
"There is a man here who was sane until Peter hailed him as the Christ,
and who then became a monomaniac." We should have pointed out that
his delusion is a very common delusion among the insane, and that such
insanity is quite consistent with the retention of the argumentative
cunning and penetration which Jesus displayed in Jerusalem after his
delusion had taken complete hold of him. We should feel horrified at the
scourging and mocking and crucifixion just as we should if Ruskin had
been treated in that way when he also went mad, instead of being cared
for as an invalid. And we should have had no clear perception of any
special significance in his way of calling the Son of God the Son of
Man. We should have noticed that he was a Communist; that he regarded
much of what we call law and order as machinery for robbing the poor
under legal forms; that he thought domestic ties