Note 106 — Chapter I · RELATION OF JESUS TO THE IDEA OF A SUFFERING AND DYING MESSIAH; HIS DISCOURSES ON HIS DEATH, RESURRECTION, AND SECOND ADVENT.

One objection to the genuineness of the synoptical discourses on the second advent, is yet in reserve; it has, however, less weight in our point of view than in that of the prevalent criticism of the gospels. This objection is derived from the absence of any detailed description of the second advent of Jesus in the Gospel of John.106 It is true that the fundamental elements of the doctrine of Christ’s return are plainly discoverable in the fourth gospel also.107 Jesus therein ascribes to himself the offices of the future judgment, and the awaking of the dead (John v. 21–30); which last is not indeed numbered among the concomitants of the advent of Christ in the synoptical gospels, but not seldom appears in that connexion elsewhere in the New Testament (e.g. 1 Cor. xv. 23; 1 Thess. iv. 16). When Jesus, in the fourth gospel, sometimes denies that he is come into the world for judgment (iii. 17, viii. 15, xii. 47), this refers only to his first presence on earth, and is limited by opposite declarations, in which he asserts that he is come into the world for judgment (ix. 39, comp. viii. 16), to the sense that the object of his mission is not to condemn but to save, and that his judgment is not individual or partial; that it consists, not in an authoritative sentence proceeding subjectively from himself, but in an objective act proceeding from the intrinsic tendency of things, a doctrine which is significantly expressed in the declaration, that him who hears his word without believing he judges not, but the word, which he has spoken, shall judge him in the last day (ὁ λόγος, ὂν ἐλάλησα, κρινεῖ αὐτὸν ἐν τῇ ἐσχάτῃ ἡμέρᾳ, xii. 48). Further, when the Jesus of John’s gospel says of the believer: οὐ κρίνεται, he is not judged, εἰς κρίσιν οὐκ ἔρχεται, he shall not come into judgment (iii. 18, v. 24), this is to be understood of a judgment with a condemnatory issue; when on the contrary, it is said of the unbeliever: ἤδη κέκριται, he is judged already (iii. 18), this only means that the assigning of the merited lot to each is not reserved until the future judgment at the end of all things, since each one in his inward disposition bears within himself the fate which is his due. This does not exclude a future solemn act of judgment, wherein that which has at present only a latent existence will be made matter of awful revelation; for in the very passage last quoted we find the consignment to condemnation, and elsewhere the awarding of future blessedness (v. 28 f., vi. 39 f., 54), associated with the last day and the resurrection. In like manner, Jesus says in Luke also, in the same connexion in which he describes his return as a still future, external catastrophe, xvii. 20 f.: The kingdom of God cometh not with observation; neither shall they say, lo here! or, lo there! for behold the kingdom of God is within you. A certain interpretation of the words uttered by the Jesus of John’s gospel, supposes him even to intimate that his return was not far distant. The expressions already mentioned in the farewell discourses, in which Jesus promises his disciples not to leave them comfortless, but, after having gone to the Father, shortly (xvi. 16) to come again to them (xiv. 3, 18), are not seldom understood of the return of Christ at the last day;108 but when we hear Jesus say of this same return, that he will therein reveal himself only to his disciples, and not to the world (xiv. 19, comp. 22), it is impossible to think of it as the return to judgment, in which Jesus conceived that he should reveal himself to good and bad without distinction. There is a particularly enigmatical allusion to the coming of Christ in the appendix to the fourth gospel, chap. xxi.. On the question of Peter as to what will become of the apostle John, Jesus here replies, If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee? (v. 22) whence, as it is added, the Christians inferred that John would not die, since they supposed the coming (ἔρχεσθαι) here spoken of, to be the final return of Christ, in which those who witnessed it were to be changed, without tasting death (1 Cor. xv. 51 f.). But, adds the author correctively, Jesus did not say, the disciple would not die, but only, if he willed that he should tarry till he came, what was that to Peter? Hereby the Evangelist may have intended to rectify the inference in two ways. Either it appeared to him erroneous to identify the remaining until Jesus came, with not dying, i.e. to take the coming of which Jesus here spoke for the last, which would put an end to death; and in that case he must have understood by it an invisible coming of Christ, possibly in the destruction of Jerusalem:109 or, he held it erroneous that what Jesus had only said hypothetically—even if he willed the given case, that was no concern of Peter’s—should be understood categorically, as if such had really been the will of Jesus; in which case the ἔρχομαι would retain its customary sense.110