Mark 14:61 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

The Son of the Blessed?— This is a very sublime and emphatical method of expressing the happiness of God. It conveys such an ideaof the divine blessedness, that, comparatively speaking, there is none happy but he. Seethe note on Matthew 26:62-63. It is plain from the parallel passage, Luke 22:67 that the answer of our Saviour, set down by St. Mark as well as St. Matthew, is an answer only to this question, Art thou the Son of God? and not to that other, Art thou the Christ, or the Messiah? which preceded, and which he had answered before; and though St. Matthew and St. Mark connect them together, as if making but one question, and omit all the intervening discourse, yet it is plain from St. Luke, that they were two distinct questions, to which Jesus gave two distinct answers; in the first whereof, according to his usual caution, he declined saying in plain and express words that he was the Messiah, though in the latter he owned himself to be the Son of God: which, though they, being Jews, understood to signify the Messiah, yet he knew could be no legal or weighty accusation against him before a heathen; and so it proved. There was, however, a great deal of craft in the question, which consisted in this, that if Jesus answered in the affirmative, they were ready to condemn him as a blasphemer; but if in the negative, they proposed to have him punished as an impostor, who, by accepting the honours and titles of the Messiah from the people, had deceived them. See Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity, p. 154.