He saith. They had answered glibly enough, not knowing what was to come of their natural admission; now Christ puts a difficulty before them which might have led them to pause and reflect upon what that assertion might connote.
How then? πῶς οὖν; If Christ is David's Son, how is it then, in what sense can it be said, etc.? Doth David in spirit can him Lord. "In spirit" means speaking under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit—an argument surely for the Divine authority of the Old Testament, when "holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost" (2 Peter 1:21).
Christ proceeds to quote a passage from Psalms 110:1-7., acknowledged by the Jews to be Davidic and Messianic. Both these positions have been called in question in modem days, and sceptical critics have hence presumed to infer ignorance or deceit on the part of Christ; i.
e. either that he did not know that the authorship was wrongly attributed to David, and that the psalm really referred to Maccabean times, or that, knowing these facts, he deliberately ignored them and endorsed a popular error in order to give colour to his argument.
The statement of such a charge against our Lord is a sufficient refutation. Universal tradition, extending to this very time, which gave to the psalm a Messianic interpretation, is surely more worthy of credit than a theory elaborated in the present century, which in no respect regards the natural signification of the language, and can be made to support the novel idea only by forced and unreal accommodations.
By speaking of David as having uttered the quoted words, Christ does not formally state that this king wrote the psalm; he merely gives the accepted view which classed it as Davidic. The authorship did not matter in his application; his argument was equally sound, whoever was the writer.