with guests" by gathering together as many as are found in the highways. A new episode commences when the king comes in to see the guests (v. 11). He observes a man there who has not on a wedding garment, and he desires the servants to (v. 13) "Bind him hand and foot, and cast him into the darkness without," where "there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth;"(1) and then comes our passage (v. 14): "For many are called but few chosen." Now, whether applied to the first or to the latter part of the parable, the saying is irrelevant. The guests first called were in fact chosen as much as the last, but themselves refused to come, and of all those who, being "called" from the highways and byways, ultimately furnished the wedding with guests in their stead, only one was rejected. It is clear that the facts here distinctly contradict the moral that "few are chosen." In both places the saying is, as it were, "dragged in by the hair." On examination, however, we find that the oldest MSS. of the New Testament omit the sentence from Matthew xx. 16. It is neither found in the Sinaitic nor Vatican codices, and whilst it has not the support of the Codex Alexandrinus, which is defective at the part, nor of the Dublin rescript (z), which omits it, many other MSS. are also without it. The total irrelevancy of the saying to its context, its omission by the oldest authorities from Matth. xx. 16, where it appears in later MSS., and its total absence from both of the other Gospels, must at once strike every one as peculiar, and as very unfortunate, to say 1 This is not the place to criticize the expectation of finding a wedding garment on a guest hurried in from highways and byways, or the punishment inflicted for such an offence, as questions affecting the character of the parable. {244} the least of it, for those who make extreme assertions with regard to its supposed quotation by the Epistle of Barnabas. Weizsacker, with great probability, suggests that in this passage we have merely a well-known proverb,(1) which the author of the first gospel has introduced into his work from some uncanonical or other source, and placed in the mouth of Jesus.(2) Certainly under the circumstances it can scarcely be maintained in its present context as a historical saying of Jesus. Ewald, who naturally omits it from Matthew xx. 16, ascribes the parable xx. 1--16 as well as that xxii. 1--14, in which it stands, originally to the Spruchsammlung(3) or collection of discourses, out of which, with intermediate works, he considers that our first Gospel was composed.(4) However this may be, there is, it seems to us, good reason for believing that it was not originally a part of these parables, and that it is not in that sense historical; and there is, therefore, no ground for asserting that it may not have been derived by the author of the Gospel from some older work, from which also it may have come into the "Epistle of Barnabas."(5) {245}