This article springs in part from a critical consideration of Professor F. L. Cross's I Peter, a Paschal Liturgy (Mowbray, 1954), and is an attempt, first, to define difficulties which seem to me to stand in the way of accepting his thesis, and then to offer an alternative suggestion. But first of all, I must express my gratitude to Dr Cross for the stimulus of his lecture and my admiration for the skill and brilliance with which he handles the material. My only hope is that my own attempts at a solution of the problem of I Peter are advanced with anything like as much modesty as his: for I have no doubt that they will need the more clemency.

The relationship between the New Testament and the Qumran Literature is much more basic and fundamental than occasional words and phrases reminiscent of one another; for the messianic motifs of the Qumran Community are combined, modified, and adapted in the New Testament portrayal of Jesus the Christ. As we here use the term Messianic, we intend to include all that relates to the great eschatological figures of the sect, the Teacher of Righteousness, the coming prophet like unto Moses, and the two Messiahs of Aaron and Israel.

Did Jesus believe in a doctrine of Universal Fatherhood? Such a belief not many years ago was almost axiomatic in Liberal Christian circles. ‘In the combination of these ideas—God the Father, Providence, the position of men as God's children, the infinite value of the human soul—the whole Gospel is expressed.’ But lately, after an examination of the gospel evidence, it has been denied that Jesus believed that God was the Father of all men. ‘In spite of what is commonly supposed, there is no ground whatever for asserting that Jesus taught a doctrine of “the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of man”…There is no hint anywhere, either that he himself believed, or that he taught a doctrine of Universal Fatherhood.’ Professor Sparks arrives at this conclusion by considering all the times that Jesus is recorded as having used Father as a word for God. ‘The bulk of his recorded references to God as Father are Messianic; and apart from one, at the best ambiguous, reference in Matthew, all his references to God as the Father of men are in passages where he is speaking to his disciples’ (p. 260). With this we may compare the words of Dalman: ‘Much rather is God regarded as the Heavenly Father of His own disciples or else as the Heavenly Father of Jesus himself.’ Dalman indicates the unique personal relationship which subsists in the first place between God and Jesus himself, and also between God and those who are his, who can be spoken of as ‘sons of the theocracy’ (Matt. xiii. 38).