Mark iii. 28-30), and as, after the collapse of popularity, he rebuked
them for making void the word of God by their tradition (Mark vii. 13).
His attitude to the scribes in Galilee from the beginning discloses as
definite Messianic claims as any ascribed by the fourth gospel to this
early period.

255. These facts of the independence of Jesus in his teaching and his
self-assertion in response to criticism confirm the impression that his
answer to John the Baptist (Matt. xi. 2-6) gives the key to his method in
Galilee. In John's inquiry the question of Jesus' personal relation to the
kingdom was definitely asked. The answer, "Blessed is he whosoever shall
find none occasion of stumbling in me," showed plainly that Jesus was in
no doubt in the matter, although for the time he still preferred to let
his ministry be the means of leading men to form their conclusions
concerning him. What he brought into prominence at Caesarea Philippi,
therefore, was that which had been the familiar subject of his own
thinking from the time of his baptism.

256. In the ministry subsequent to the confession of Peter the
self-disclosures of Jesus became more frequent and clear. His predictions
of his approaching death were at the time the greatest difficulty to his
disciples; when considered in their significance for his own life,
however, they prove that his conviction of his Messiahship was as
independent of current and inherited ideas as was his teaching concerning
the kingdom. When he came to see that death was the inevitable issue of
his work, he at once discovered in it a divine necessity; it does not seem
to have shaken in the least his certainty that he was the Messiah.
Associated with this conception of his death is the conviction which
appears in all the later teachings, that in rejecting him his people were
pronouncing their own doom. Because she would not accept him as her
deliverer, Jerusalem's "house was left unto her desolate" (Luke xiii. 35).
His sense of his supreme significance appears most clearly in some of the
later parables, such as The Marriage of the King's Son (Matt. xxii. 1-14)
and The Wicked Husbandmen (Matt. xxi. 33-44), which definitely connect the
condemnation of the chosen people with their rejection of God's Son. Two
other sayings in the first three gospels express the personal claim of
Jesus in the most exalted form,--his declaration on the return of the
seventy: "All things have been delivered unto me of my F