Scaurus’s next objection was this: “Soon after telling us that Jesus called four men away from being fishers of fish to be ‘fishers of men’—without explaining the nature or object of this ‘fishing,’ Mark says, ‘Men were amazed at his teaching. For his way of teaching was that of one having authority and not as the way of the scribes.’ But what kind of ‘_authority_’? Listen to the rabble, how they define it (a few lines lower down). ‘What is this? A novel teaching! With _authority_ does he dictate even to the unclean spirits and they obey him.’ Now Flavius Josephus has told me that he himself has known a conjurer or exorcist cast out an unclean spirit or demon—in the presence of Vespasian and his officers—and make it knock over a bucket of water in its exit: but he never told me—and you may be sure he would never have supposed—that the conjurer, on the strength of his exorcisms, would claim to preach a gospel!” This struck me at first as a very forcible objection. And I was not surprised that Matthew omitted the whole of this narrative; for it is liable to be misunderstood. But I found on examination that Jesus did not (as Scaurus said) “claim to preach a gospel” on the strength of such exorcisms. On the contrary, Mark and Luke say soon afterwards, that Jesus “would not allow the demons to speak because they knew him.” Moreover I found that the man from whom the demon was said to have been expelled cried out that Jesus was “the Holy One of God.” So it appeared possible that Jesus—if he possessed, like Apollo or Æsculapius, some divine power of healing—might heal lunatics or possessed persons among others, and yet might not claim, on the strength of such exorcisms alone, to preach a gospel. From what I had read in Paul’s epistles, and also from my recent reading of Isaiah’s prediction of the “gospel,” it seemed to me more likely that Jesus would connect his gospel—though what the connexion would be I did not yet see—with the forgiveness of sins. And this indeed I found to be the subject of Scaurus’s next objection; “Then Jesus says that he will cure a man of paralysis in order that the spectators ‘may know that the Son of man hath authority on earth to forgive sins.’ Now this is the first mention of ‘the Son of man.’ Who, or of what nature, is this Son of man? There is no answer.” Scaurus spoke thus, perhaps, because he had in his mind some passages in the Jewish scriptures where a “son of man” is described as coming on the clouds to judge mankind, and others where a “son of man” means “son of a mere mortal.” He may have thought that Mark ought to have explained which of the two was meant.