Chapter I · RELATION OF JESUS TO THE IDEA OF A SUFFERING AND DYING MESSIAH; HIS DISCOURSES ON HIS DEATH, RESURRECTION, AND SECOND ADVENT.
George Eliot translation
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§ 111.
DID JESUS IN PRECISE TERMS PREDICT HIS PASSION AND DEATH?
In the critical investigation of these evangelical accounts, we shall proceed from the special to the general, in the following manner. First we shall ask: Is it credible that Jesus had a foreknowledge of so many particular features of the fate which awaited him? and next: Is even a general foreknowledge and prediction of his sufferings, on the part of Jesus, probable? in which inquiry, the difference between the representation of John and that of the synoptists, will necessarily come under our consideration.
There were sufficient inducements for the Christian legend thus to put into the mouth of Jesus, after the event, a prediction of the particular features of his passion, especially of the ignominious crucifixion. The more the Christ crucified became to the Jews a stumbling-block, and to the Greeks foolishness (1 Cor. i. 23), the more need was there to remove this offence by every possible means; and as, among subsequent events, the resurrection especially served as a retrospective cancelling of that shameful death; so it must have been earnestly desired to take the sting from that offensive catastrophe beforehand also, and this could not be done more effectually than by such a minute prediction. For as the most unimportant fact, when prophetically announced, gains importance, by thus being made a link in the chain of a higher knowledge: so the most ignominious fate, when it is predicted as part of a divine plan of salvation, ceases to be ignominious; above all, when the very person over whom such a fate impends, also possesses the prophetic spirit, which enables him to foresee and foretell it, and thus not only suffers, but participates in the divine prescience of his sufferings, he manifests himself as the ideal power over those suffering. But the fourth Evangelist has gone still farther on this track; he believes it due to the honour of Jesus to represent him as also the real power over his sufferings, as not having his life taken away by the violence of others, but as resigning it voluntarily (x. 17 f.): a representation which indeed already finds some countenance in Matt. xxvi. 53, where Jesus asserts the possibility of praying to the Father for legions of angels, in order to avert his sufferings.
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§ 112.
THE PREDICTIONS OF JESUS CONCERNING HIS DEATH IN GENERAL; THEIR RELATION TO THE JEWISH IDEA OF THE MESSIAH: DECLARATIONS OF JESUS CONCERNING THE OBJECT AND EFFECTS OF HIS DEATH.
In order to decide between these alternatives, we must first examine whether, prior to the death of Jesus, and independently of that event, the messianic ideas of the age included the characteristics of suffering and death. If already in the lifetime of Jesus it was the Jewish opinion that the Messiah must die a violent death, then it is highly probable that Jesus imbibed this idea as a part of his convictions, and communicated it to his disciples; who, in that case, could so much the less have remained uninstructed on this point, and overwhelmed by the actual result, in the degree alleged by the Evangelists. If, on the contrary, that idea was not diffused among his countrymen before the death of Jesus, it still remains possible that Jesus might arrive at that idea by his private reflection; but it is a prior possibility that the disciples were the first to adopt the characteristics of suffering and death into their conception of the Messiah, after they had been taught by the issue.
Although, according to this, it cannot be proved, and is even not probable, that the idea of a suffering Messiah already existed among the Jews in the time of Jesus: it is still possible that, even without such a precedent, Jesus himself, by an observation of circumstances, and a comparison of them with Old Testament narratives and prophecies, might come to entertain the belief that suffering and death were a part of the office and destination of the Messiah; and if so, it would be more natural that he should embrace this conviction gradually in the course of his public ministry, and that he should chiefly have confined his communications on the subject to his intimate friends, than that he should have had this conviction from the beginning, and have expressed it before indifferent persons, nay enemies. The latter is the representation of John; the former, of the synoptists.
Thus Jesus might by psychological reflection come to the conviction that such a catastrophe would be favourable to the spiritual development of his disciples, and that it was indispensable for the spiritualizing of their messianic ideas, nay, in accordance with national conceptions, and by a consideration of Old Testament passages, even to the idea that his messianic death would have an expiatory efficacy. Still, what the synoptists make Jesus say of his death, as a sin offering, might especially appear to belong rather to the system which was developed after the death of Jesus; and what the fourth Evangelist puts into his mouth concerning the Paraclete, to have been conceived ex eventu: so that, again, in these expressions of Jesus concerning the object of his death, there must be a separation of the general from the special.
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§ 113.
PRECISE DECLARATIONS OF JESUS CONCERNING HIS FUTURE RESURRECTION.
According to the evangelical accounts, Jesus predicted his resurrection in words not less clear than those in which he announced his death, and also fixed the time of its occurrence with singular precision. As often as he said to his disciples, the Son of Man will be crucified, he added: And the third day he shall rise again, καὶ τῇ τρίτῃ ἡμέρᾳ ἀναστήσεται, or ἐγερθήσεται (Matt. xvi. 21, xvii. 23, xx. 19 parall. comp. xvii. 9, xxvi. 32 parall.).
It is true, that as the conduct of the disciples, after the death of Jesus, speaks against such a prediction on the part of Jesus, so the conduct of his enemies appears to speak for it. For when, according to Matt. xxvii. 62 ff., the chief priests and Pharisees entreat Pilate to set a watch at the grave of Jesus, they allege as a reason for their request, that Jesus while yet alive had said: After three days I will rise again, μετὰ τρεῖς ἡμέρας ἐγείπομαι. But this narrative of the first gospel, which we can only estimate at a future point in our investigation, at present decides nothing, but only falls to one side of the dilemma, so that we must now say: if the disciples really so acted after the death of Jesus, then neither can he have decidedly foretold his resurrection, nor can the Jews in consideration of such a prediction have placed a watch at his grave; or, if the two latter statements be true, the disciples cannot have so acted.
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§ 114.
FIGURATIVE DISCOURSES, IN WHICH JESUS IS SUPPOSED TO HAVE ANNOUNCED HIS RESURRECTION.
If, according to this, on every interpretation of the expression, except the inadmissible one relative to the body of Jesus, the words ἐν τρισὶν ἡμέραις form a difficulty: a resource might be found in the narrative of the Acts, as being free from that determination of time. For here Stephen is only accused of saying, ὅτι Ἰ. ὁ Ναζ. οὗτος καταλύσει τὸν τόπον τοῦτον (τὸν ἅγιον), καὶ ἀλλάξει τὰ ἔθη ἃ παρέδωκε Μωϋσῇς. What is false in this allegation (for the witnesses against Stephen also are described as μάρτυρες ψευδεῖς), might be the second proposition, which speaks in literal terms of a changing of the institutes of Moses, and instead of this, Stephen, and before him Jesus, may very probably have said in the figurative signification above developed, καὶ πάλιν οἰκοδομήσει (—σω) αὐτὸν, or καὶ ἄλλον (ἀχειροποίητον) οἰκοδομήσει (—σω).
Thus the foreknowledge, as well as the prediction of the resurrection, was attributed to Jesus only after the issue; and in fact, it was an easy matter, with the groundless arbitrariness of Jewish exegesis, for the disciples and the authors of the New Testament to discover in the Old, types and prophecies of the resurrection. Not that they did this with crafty design, according to the accusation of the Wolfenbüttel Fragmentist, and others of his class: but as he who has looked at the sun, long sees its image wherever he may turn his gaze; so they, blinded by their enthusiasm for the new Messiah, saw him on every page of the only book they read, the Old Testament, and in the conviction that Jesus was the Messiah, founded in the genuine feeling that he had satisfied their deepest need—a conviction and a feeling which we also still honour—they laid hold on supports which have long been broken, and which can no longer be made tenable by the most zealous efforts of an exegesis which is behind the age.
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§ 115.
THE DISCOURSES OF JESUS ON HIS SECOND ADVENT. CRITICISM OF THE DIFFERENT INTERPRETATIONS.
Not only did Jesus, according to the evangelical accounts, predict that he should return to life three days after his death; but also that at a later period, in the midst of the calamities which would issue in the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, he should come in the clouds of heaven, to close the present period of the world, and by a general judgment, open the future age (Matt. xxiv. and xxv.; Mark. xiii.; Luke xvii. 22–37, xxi. 5–36).
Such inferences from the discourse before us would inflict a fatal wound on Christianity; hence it is natural that exegetists should endeavour by all means to obviate them. And as the whole difficulty consists in Jesus having apparently placed an event now long past, in immediate chronological connexion with one still future, three expedients are possible: either to deny that Jesus in part spoke of something now past, and to allege that he spoke solely of what is still future; or to deny that a part of his discourse relates to something still future, and thus to refer the entire prediction to what is already lying in the past; or lastly, to admit that the discourse of Jesus does indeed partly refer to something which is still future to us, but either to deny that he places the two series of events in immediate chronological succession, or to maintain that he has also noticed what is intermediate.
It thus appears that the discourse of Jesus will not as a whole, admit of being referred either to the destruction of the Jewish state, or to the events at the end of the world; it would therefore be necessarily referred to something distinct from both, if this twofold impossibility adhered alike to all its parts. But the case is not so; for while, on the one hand, what is said Matt. xxiv. 2, 3, 15 ff. of the devastation of the temple, cannot be referred to the end of the world: on the other hand, what is predicted xxv. 31 ff. of the judgment to be held by the Son of Man, will not suit the destruction of Jerusalem. As, according to this, in the earlier part of the discourse of Jesus, the destruction of Jerusalem is the predominant subject, but in the subsequent part, the end of all things: it is possible to make a division, so as to refer the former to the more proximate event, the latter to the more remote one. This is the middle path which has been taken by the majority of modern exegetists, and here the only question is: where is the partition to be made? As it must present a space of time within which the whole period from the destruction of Jerusalem to the last day may be supposed to fall, and which therefore would include many centuries, it must, one would think, be plainly indicated, so as to be easily and unanimously found. It is no good augury for the plan, that this unanimity does not exist,—that, on the contrary, the required division is made in widely different parts of the discourse of Jesus.
Thus the last attempt to discover in the discourse before us the immense interval which, looking from our position in the present day, is fixed between the destruction of Jerusalem and the end of all things, having failed; we are taught practically that that interval lies only in our own conception, which we are not justified in introducing into the text. And when we consider that we owe our idea of that interval only to the experience of many centuries, which have elapsed since the destruction of Jerusalem: it cannot be difficult to us to imagine how the author of this discourse, who had not had this experience, might entertain the belief that shortly after the fall of the Jewish sanctuary, the world itself, of which, in the Jewish idea, that sanctuary was the centre, would also come to an end, and the Messiah appear in judgment.
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§ 116.
ORIGIN OF THE DISCOURSES ON THE SECOND ADVENT.
The result just obtained involves a consequence, to avoid which has been the object of all the futile attempts at explanation hitherto examined: if, namely, Jesus conceived and declared that the fall of the Jewish sanctuary would be shortly followed by his visible return and the end of the world, while it is now nearly 1800 years since the one catastrophe, and yet the other has not arrived; it follows that in this particular he was mistaken. Hence expositors, who so far yield to exegetical evidence, as to agree with us in the above conclusion concerning the meaning of the discourse before us, seek from dogmatical considerations to evade this legitimate consequence.
There is only one point which Jesus, as the author of this discourse, could not have gathered from any types, but must have drawn entirely from himself: namely, the declaration that the catastrophe which he described would arrive within the present generation. This prediction we must hesitate to derive from a supernatural knowledge, for the reason, already noticed, that it is only half fulfilled: while the other side of the fact, the striking fulfilment of at least the one half of the prophecy, might incline us to distrust the supposition of a merely natural calculation, and to regard this determination of time as a feature introduced into the discourse of Jesus after the issue. Meanwhile, it is clear from the passages cited at the conclusion of the last section, that the apostles themselves expected the return of Christ to take place within their lifetime; and it is not improbable that Jesus also believed that this event, together with the ruin of the city and temple, which according to Daniel was to precede it, was very near at hand. The more general part of the expectation, namely, the appearing at some future time in the clouds of heaven, to awake the dead, to sit in judgment, and to found an everlasting kingdom, would necessarily, from a consideration of Daniel, where such a coming is ascribed to the Son of man, be contemplated by Jesus as a part of his own destiny, so soon as he held himself to be the Messiah; while, with regard to the time, it was natural that he should not conceive a very long interval as destined to elapse between his first messianic coming in humiliation, and his second, in glory.
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