But did He not definitely command His disciples to engage in the Gentile work after His departure? Certainly He did not do so according to the modern critical view of the Gospels. But even if the great commission of Matt. xxviii. 19, 20 be accepted as an utterance of Jesus, it is by no means clear that the question of Gentile liberty was settled. In the great commission, the apostles are commanded to make disciples of all the nations. But on what terms were the new disciples to be received? There was nothing startling, from the Jewish point of view, in winning Gentile converts; the non-Christian Jews, as has just been observed, were busily engaged in doing that. The only difficulty arose when the terms of reception of the new converts were changed. Were the new converts to be received as disciples of Jesus without being circumcised and thus without becoming members of the covenant people of God? The great commission does not answer that question. It does indeed mention only baptism and not circumcision. But might that not be because circumcision, for those who were to enter into God's people, was a matter of course? In a number of His utterances, it is true, Jesus did adopt an attitude toward the ceremonial Law, at least toward the interpretation of it by the scribes, very different from what was customary in the Judaism of His day. "There is nothing from without the man," He said, "that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man" (Mark vii. 15). No doubt these words were revolutionary in their ultimate implications. But there is no evidence that they resulted in revolutionary practice on the part of Jesus. On the contrary, there is definite reason to suppose that He observed the ceremonial Law as it was contained in the Old Testament, and definite utterances of His in support of the authority of the Law have been preserved in the Gospels.