Note 41 — Chapter I · RELATION OF JESUS TO THE IDEA OF A SUFFERING AND DYING MESSIAH; HIS DISCOURSES ON HIS DEATH, RESURRECTION, AND SECOND ADVENT.

But of this announcement also it is said, that the disciples understood it not; so little, that they even debated among themselves what the rising from the dead should mean, τί ἐστι τὸ ἐκ νεκρῶν ἀναστῆναι (Mark ix. 10); and in consistency with this want of comprehension, they, after the death of Jesus, exhibit no trace of a recollection that his resurrection had been foretold to them, no spark of hope that this prediction would be fulfilled. When the friends of Jesus had taken down his body from the cross, and laid it in the grave, they undertook (John xix. 40)—or the women reserved to themselves (Mark xvi. 1; Luke xxiii. 56)—the task of embalming him, which is only performed in the case of those who are regarded as the prey of corruption; when, on the morning which, according to the mode of reckoning in the New Testament, opened the day which had been predetermined as that of the resurrection, the women went to the grave, they were so far from thinking of a predicted resurrection, that they were anxious about the probable difficulty of rolling away the stone from the grave (Mark xvi. 3); when Mary Magdalene, and afterwards Peter, found the grave empty, their first thought, had the resurrection been predicted, must have been, that it had now actually taken place: instead of this, the former conjectures that the body may have been stolen (John xx. 2), while Peter merely wonders, without coming to any definite conjecture (Luke xxiv. 12); when the women told the disciples of the angelic apparition which they had witnessed, and discharged the commission given them by the angel, the disciples partly regarded their words as idle tales, λῆρος (Luke xxiv. 11), and were partly moved to fear and astonishment (ἐξέστησαν ἡμᾶς, Luke xxiv. 22 ff.); when Mary Magdalene, and subsequently the disciples going to Emmaus, assured the eleven, that they had themselves seen the risen one, they met with no credence (Mark xvi. 11, 13), and Thomas still later did not believe even the assurance of his fellow-apostles (John xx. 25); lastly, when Jesus himself appeared to the disciples in Galilee, all of them did not even then cast off doubt (οἱ δὲ ἐδίστασαν, Mark xxviii. 17). All this we must, with the Wolfenbüttel Fragmentist,41 find incomprehensible, if Jesus had so clearly and decidedly predicted his resurrection.