Note 10 — Chapter I · RELATION OF JESUS TO THE IDEA OF A SUFFERING AND DYING MESSIAH; HIS DISCOURSES ON HIS DEATH, RESURRECTION, AND SECOND ADVENT.

If then Jesus cannot have had so precise a foreknowledge of the circumstances of his passion and death, either in a supernatural or a natural way: he cannot have had such a foreknowledge at all: and the minute predictions which the Evangelists put into his mouth must be regarded as a vaticinium post eventum.10 Commentators who have arrived at this conclusion, have not failed to extol the account of John, in opposition to that of the synoptists, on the ground that precisely those traits in the predictions of Jesus which, from their special character, he cannot have uttered, are only found in the synoptists, while John attributes to Jesus no more than indefinite intimations, and distinguishes these from his own interpretation, made after the issue; a plain proof that in his gospel alone we have the discourses of Jesus unfalsified, and in their original form.11 But, regarded more nearly, the case does not stand so that the fourth Evangelist can only be taxed with putting an erroneous interpretation on the otherwise unfalsified declarations of Jesus: for in one passage, at least, he has put into his mouth an expression which, obscurely, it is true, but still unmistakably, determines the manner of his death as crucifixion; and consequently, he has here altered the words of Jesus to correspond with the result. We refer to the expression ὑψωθῆναι, to be lifted up: in those passages of the fourth gospel where Jesus speaks in a passive sense of the Son of Man being lifted up, this expression might possibly mean his exaltation to glory, although in iii. 14, from the comparison with the serpent in the wilderness, which was well known to have been elevated on a pole, even this becomes a difficulty; but when, as in viii. 28, he represents the exaltation of the Son of Man as the act of his enemies (ὅταν ὑψώσητε τὸν υἱὸν τ. ἀ.), it is obvious that these could not lift him up immediately to glory, but only to the cross; consequently, if the result above stated be admitted as valid, John must himself have framed this expression, or at least have distorted the Aramæan words of Jesus, and hence he essentially falls under the same category with the synoptical writers. That the fourth Evangelist, though the passion and death of Jesus were to him past events, and therefore clearly present to his mind, nevertheless makes Jesus predict them in obscure expressions,—this has its foundation in the entire manner of this writer, whose fondness for the enigmatical and mysterious here happily met the requirement, to give an unintelligible form to prophecies which were not understood.