solated. With his undoubted power to read "what was in man," he
was not independent of ordinary ways of learning facts. When the woman was
healed who touched the hem of his garment, Jesus knew that his power had
been exercised, but he discovered the object of his healing by asking,
"Who touched me?" and calling the woman out from the crowd to acknowledge
her blessing (Mark v. 30-34); when the centurion urged Jesus to heal his
boy without taking the trouble to come to his house, Jesus "marvelled" at
his faith (Matt. viii. 10); when he came to Bethany, assured of his
Father's answer to his prayer for the raising of Lazarus, he asked as
simply as any other one in the company, "Where have ye laid him?" (John
xi. 34). It should not be forgotten that his knowledge of approaching
death, resurrection, and return in glory did not prevent the earnest
pleading in Gethsemane, and it may be that his reply to the ambition of
James and John, it "is not mine to give" (Mark x. 40), is a confession of
ignorance as well as subordination to his Father.

248. The supernatural knowledge of Jesus, so far as its exercise is
apparent in the gospels, was concerned with the truths intimately related
to his religious teaching or his Messianic work. There is no evidence
that it occupied itself at all with facts of nature or of history
discovered by others at a later day. When he says of God that "he maketh
his sun to rise on the evil and the good" (Matt. v. 45), there is no
evidence that he thought of the earth and its relation to the sun
differently from his contemporaries; it is probable that his thought
anticipated Galileo's discovery no more than do his words. Much the same
may be said with reference to the purely literary or historical questions
of Old Testament criticism, now so much discussed. If it is proved by just
interpretation of all the facts that the Pentateuch is only in an ideal
sense to be attributed to Moses, and that many of the psalms inscribed
with his name cannot have been written by David, the propriety of Jesus'
references to what "Moses said" (Mark vii. 10), and the validity of his
argument for the relative unimportance of the Davidic descent of the
Messiah, will not suffer. Had Jesus had in mind the ultimate facts
concerning the literary structure of the Pentateuch, he could not have
hoped to hold the attention of his hearers upon the religious teaching he
was seeking to enforce, unless he referred to the early books of the