It remains to consider the passage (Mark x. 42-45; Matt. xx. 25-28) on true greatness and service. Here we have a characteristic teaching of Jesus cutting athwart the ordinary opinion of mankind. But the maxim, "Whosoever would become great among you," is connected with Himself as the example of true greatness. He, the teacher and example of humility, refers to Himself as the supreme illustration of true greatness. His death is the supreme expression of self-sacrifice for the good of others, and in it by implication is the highest service done to man.[13] Ethics and doctrine about Himself and His death are as inextricably blended in this saying of Jesus as in Paul's statement, "Though he was rich yet for your sakes became poor," or John's, "He laid down his life for us and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren" (2 Cor. viii. 9; I John iii. 16). In His deepest ethical teaching Jesus points not away from Himself, as do other moral teachers. His words in the Synoptics are not essentially different from those in John: "If I your Lord and teacher have washed your feet, you ought also to wash one another's feet" (xiii. 14). 13: Recent exegesis finds a Pauline meaning in the words whether it refers them to Jesus or to the influence of Paul. Plummer ("Matthew," p. 280) says: "'The Son of Man came' implies the preëxistence of the Son; it is not merely a synonym for being born." (Cf. John xviii. 37.) In the use of the word λύτρον [lytron], Bacon thinks that, "here and in xiv. 24 Mark goes beyond Paul's careful use of language" ("Beginnings of Gospel Story," p. 149). Bousset, on the other hand, emphasizing "the many," thinks that Paul was the first to give the full reach to the thought. (_Op. cit._, p. 2.) According to Wendling, in Mark x. 45, the fully developed Pauline doctrine of the ἀπολύτρωσις [apolytrôsis] (Rom. iii. 23 ff.) is crystallized into an aphorism and put into the mouth of Jesus; "The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, etc." (See Sanday's "Oxford Studies," p. 399.) The Christology of Jesus finds expression in the familiar words in Matthew xi. 25-30 (Luke x. 21, 22): "All things have been delivered unto me of my Father, etc." These words are often spoken of as the climax of His self-revelation in the Synoptic Gospels, and modern criticism unites with Christian devotion in recognizing their importance. The conviction is growing that the words, as they stand in all the Greek texts, cannot have been the utterance of a merely human Jesus, the pattern of truthfulness and the example of humility. A few examples will show the trend of recent interpretation. Plummer thinks that the self-revelation of Jesus in the expression, "All things were delivered unto Me, etc.," "contains the whole of the Christology of the Fourth Gospel;"[14] and he believes that the aorist verb "points back to a moment in eternity, and implies the preëxistence of the Messiah."[15]