Editorial August 16, 1900 Issue

The Common People

Editor

It is recorded in Mark (12 : 37) that the common people heard Jesus gladly. It is well, always, when considering Scriptural quotations, to observe the connection in which the quoted words were used. There has been too much laxity in this respect, both by the professional and non-professional exponent, and much confusion as well as outright misunderstanding has been the result.

Jesus was teaching in the Temple when it was said that the common people heard him gladly. He evidently was telling the people who Christ was. He had asked the question, "How say the scribes that Christ is the son of David?" And he thus answers: "For David himself said by the Holy Ghost, The Lord said to my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool. David therefore himself calleth him Lord; and whence is he then his son?" Then says the record, "And the common people heard him gladly."

The term "common people" may have been then, as it is now, somewhat elastic. It may have referred to a class of people who were willing truth-seekers regardless of social position, or it may have been used in the presentday sense of the expression. Be that as it may, it seems clear, from the Gospels as a whole, that the "common people" were a class apart from the scribes and Pharisees, whether Jews or Gentiles. The scribes and Pharisees were the learned among the Jews. They were the educators of their times, and to them were the Jewish people wont to look for their instruction in religion and philosophy. Jesus recognized this. His query, "How say the scribes that Christ is the son of David?" indicates that the scribes had maintained that Christ was the son of David in the line of fleshly, or material, lineage, rather than the son of God in the spiritual sense.

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