Note 2 — Chapter I · RELATION OF JESUS TO THE IDEA OF A SUFFERING AND DYING MESSIAH; HIS DISCOURSES ON HIS DEATH, RESURRECTION, AND SECOND ADVENT.

There are two modes of explaining how Jesus could so precisely foreknow the particular circumstances of his passion and death; the one resting on a supernatural, the other on a natural basis. The former appears adequate to solve the problem by the simple position, that before the prophetic spirit, which dwelt in Jesus in the richest plenitude, his destiny must have lain unfolded from the beginning. As, however, Jesus himself, in his announcements of his sufferings, expressly appealed to the Old Testament, the prophecies of which concerning him must be fulfilled in all points (Luke xviii. 31, comp. xxii. 37, xxiv. 25 ff.; Matt. xxvi. 54): so the orthodox view ought not to despise this help, but must give to its explanation the modification, that Jesus continually occupied with the prophecies of the Old Testament, may have drawn those particularities out of them, by the aid of the spirit that dwelt within him.2 According to this, while the knowledge of the time of his passion remains consigned to his prophetic presentiment, unless he be supposed to have calculated this out of Daniel, or some similar source; Jesus must have come to regard Jerusalem as the scene of his suffering and death, by contemplating the fate of earlier prophets as a type of his own, the Spirit telling him, that where so many prophets had suffered death, there, à fortiori, must the Messiah also suffer (Luke xiii. 33); that his death would be the sequel of a formal sentence, he must have gathered from Isa. liii. 8, where a judgment ‏מִשְׁפִּט‎ is spoken of as impending over the servant of God, and from v. 12, where it is said that he was numbered with the transgressors, ἐν τοῖς ἀνόμοις ἐλογίσθη (comp. Luke xxii. 37); that his sentence would proceed from the rulers of his own people, he might perhaps have concluded from Ps. cxviii. 22, where the builders, αἰκοδομοῦντες who reject the corner-stone, are, according to apostolic interpretation (Acts iv. 11), the Jewish rulers; that he would be delivered to the Gentiles, he might infer from the fact, that in several plaintive psalms, which are susceptible of a messianic interpretation, the persecuting parties are represented as ‏רְשָׁעִים‎, i.e. heathens; that the precise manner of his death would be crucifixion, he might have deduced, partly from the type of the brazen serpent which was suspended on a pole, Num. xxi. 8 f. (comp. John iii. 14), partly from the piercing of the hands and feet, Ps. xxii. 17, LXX.; lastly, that he would be the object of scorn and personal maltreatment, he might have concluded from passages such as v. 7 ff. in the Psalm above quoted, Isa. l. 6, etc. Now if the spirit which dwelt in Jesus, and which, according to the orthodox opinion, revealed to him the reference of these prophecies and types to his ultimate destiny, was a spirit of truth: this reference to Jesus must admit of being proved to be the true and original sense of those Old Testament passages. But, to confine ourselves to the principal passages only, a profound grammatical and historical exposition has convincingly shown, for all who are in a condition to liberate themselves from dogmatic presuppositions, that in none of these is there any allusion to the sufferings of Christ. Instead of this, Isa. l. 6, speaks of the ill usage which the prophets had to experience;3 Isa. liii. of the calamities of the prophetic order, or more probably of the Israelitish people;4 Ps. cxviii. of the unexpected deliverance and exaltation of that people, or of one of their princes;5 while Ps. xxii. is the complaint of an oppressed exile.6 As to the 17th verse of this Psalm, which has been interpreted as having reference to the crucifixion of Christ, even presupposing the most improbable interpretation of ‏כארי‎ by perfoderunt, this must in no case be understood literally, but only figuratively, and the image would be derived, not from a crucifixion, but from a chase, or a combat with wild beasts;7 hence the application of this passage to Christ is now only maintained by those with whom it would be lost labour to contend. According to the orthodox view, however, Jesus, in a supernatural manner, by means of his higher nature, discovered in these passages a pre-intimation of the particular features of his passion; but, in that case, since such is not the true sense of these passages, the spirit that dwelt in Jesus cannot have been the spirit of truth, but a lying spirit. Thus the orthodox expositor, so far as he does not exclude himself from the light dispensed by an unprejudiced interpretation of the Old Testament, is driven, for the sake of his own interest, to adopt the natural opinion; namely, that Jesus was led to such an interpretation of Old Testament passages, not by divine inspiration, but by a combination of his own.