or confirmed this process by
connecting the story of Jesus with the picture given in the fifty-third
chapter of Isaiah of the suffering of the righteous Servant of the Lord.

The Servant is a comparatively common title in the Old Testament for
those who faithfully carried {53} out the will of God; it is used of
Abraham, David, and Job among the sons of Israel, of Cyrus among the
heathen, of Israel in general, and of the righteous portion of Israel
in particular. In some parts, but not in all, the suffering of the
Servant, whoever he may be, is emphasised; but there is no trace in the
Old Testament, or in the later Jewish writings, that these descriptions
were regarded as predictive of the future. It was inevitable that the
resemblance of the death of Jesus to Isaiah liii. should sooner or
later strike Christian readers of the Old Testament, but it does not
appear to have done so immediately, and it is doubtful whether Isaiah
liii. was the first "suffering" passage in the Old Testament to be
ascribed to him. It is more probable that the use of the twenty-second
Psalm was earlier.

One further title of Jesus in the early Christian literature remains to
be discussed. He is referred to as Son of God. What would this phrase
mean in Jewish ears? In general the Jews regarded God as unique. The
idea of a Son of God in any physical sense, such as seemed natural
enough to the heathen world, would have been unthinkable to them, but
they believed that God himself had used the phrase metaphorically to
describe the relation between him and his chosen people. It was a
moral sonship, not a physical one in the heathen sense, or a
metaphysical one in the later Christian sense.

In the later literature the phrase developed on two {54} separate
lines. There was the tendency, exemplified in some of the Psalms, and
still more in the Psalms of Solomon, to use the phrase "Son of God" to
describe the Davidic king, but it was also used in quite a different
sense in the Wisdom Literature as the description of the righteous man,
and especially of the righteous man who suffered.

In Christian literature it seems tolerably clear that the history of
the phrase passed through several stages. The latest, though in the
end the most important for the development of doctrine, is that of
metaphysical sonship, which followed upon the equation of "Son of God"
with "Logos." Somewhat earlier than this, in the early chapters of
Luke, and probably