Scaurus went on to say that Mark’s sayings about the Son of man would have been much clearer if some parable or statement of this kind had been inserted making it clear that Christ as it were identified himself with the empire of the Son of man mentioned by the prophet Daniel, against the empire of the Beasts. “There is always a tendency,” said Scaurus, “among men of the world, and perhaps among statesmen quite as much as among soldiers—yes, and it exists among some philosophers, too, spite of their creeds—to deify force. I own I admire Christ for deifying humanity. But his biographers—Mark, in particular—do not make the deification clear. If I were to lend my copy of Mark to a fairly educated Roman gentleman, I really should not be surprised if he were to come to me, after reading it right through from beginning to end, and ask me, ‘Who _is_ this Son of man?’” These words impressed me at the time; but much more afterwards when I actually met this very question in the fourth gospel, asked by the multitude at the end of Christ’s preaching, “Who _is_ this Son of man?” “After this,” said Scaurus (not speaking quite accurately, for he omitted, as I will presently shew, one short but important saying of Christ) “comes a statement that a certain kind of lunacy cannot be cured by the disciples unless they fast as well as pray. But here, I am convinced, Mark has made some mistake through not understanding ‘faith as a grain of mustard-seed,’ which the parallel Matthew has. That is a very interesting phrase, which I must go into another time. “Close on this, occurs a prediction, with part of which I will deal later on. But about part of it I will say at once that I find it quite unintelligible. It is, ‘The Son of man is on the point of being betrayed into the hands _of men_.’ Why ‘_of men_’? Surely he could not be betrayed into the hands of anyone else! I observe that Mark and Luke say, ‘They were ignorant of this saying,’ and I am not surprised. I presume it is simply a repetition of Christ’s prediction of his violent death, introduced in order to emphasize his foreknowledge of the treachery of one of his own disciples. But I do not understand ‘_of men_’.”