 |  |
"And lo a voice from heaven, saying, `This is My beloved Son, in Whom I am well
pleased" (Matt. 3: 17).
"And behold a voice out of the cloud, which said, `This is My beloved Son, in Whom
I am well pleased; hear ye Him" (Matt. 17: 5).
We now have two pairs of corresponding terms,
A |
The voice from heaven.
B
| From that time . . . . . began.
B
| From that time . . . . . began.
A |
The Voice from heaven.
We observe moreover that in chapter sixteen, just before the new revelation is made
concerning the Lord's sufferings, that Peter makes his great confession.
"He saith unto them, But Whom say ye that I am? And Simon Peter answered and
said, Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God" (Matt. 16: 15, 16).
With this we must place the confession made by Christ Himself when adjured by the
High Priest:
"I adjure Thee by the living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son
of God. Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said" (Matt. 26: 63, 64).
The words "Thou hast said" are in the original su eipas and in the early Greek
manuscripts (where there were many contractions employed to economize space and
where no space was allowed between one word and another) we find that where, in
Matt. 16: 18 we now read su ei Petros "thou art Peter", the earlier contraction was
sueips, which would naturally be expanded to su eipas "thou hast said", had Peter not
been in the immediate context. This matter needs much more examination and proof than
these few notes can supply, but we are convinced that in both cases the words stand for
one and the same thing--an emphatic affirmation, and that Peter's name does not come
into Matt. 16: 18 at all. We now have sufficient data to build the complete structure of
the Gospel according to Matthew, not by alliteration however useful such a method may
be, but by recording the actual facts as found in the scriptures.