ONE HAVING AUTHORITY BY JOHN EDGAR M'FADYEN " He taught them as
one having authority " Jesus was a teacher, and His teaching
astonished those whom He taught. In the literal sense, it was
extra-ordinary; that is, it did not find its place within the
ordinary. It belonged to another order altogether. There were
then, as there are to-day, two ways of teaching ù the way of
Jesus, and the way of the scribes. The way of Jesus astonished
everybody; the way of the scribes astonished nobody, except,
perhaps, Jesus ù for must He not many a time have listened with
sad, if not angry, wonder to their lifeless exposition of the
living oracles of His God? Between Him and the teachers of His
time there was a great gulf fixed ù in method, in influence, in
everything. Almost the only thing that, as teachers, they had in
common, was that they used the same text-book, and that only
threw into the more glaring light the contrast between the
freshness, the freedom, the power, the originality, of the one,
and the literalism, the co