Note 9 — Chapter X · THE TRANSFIGURATION OF JESUS, AND HIS LAST JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM.

To avoid the above difficulty, others, still confining the event to the internal experience of the parties, regard it as the product of a natural activity of soul, and thus explain the whole as a dream.9 During or after a prayer offered by Jesus, or by themselves, in which mention was made of Moses and Elias, and their advent as messianic forerunners desired, the three disciples, according to this interpretation, slept, and (the two names mentioned by Jesus yet sounding in their ears) dreamed that Moses and Elias were present, and that Jesus conversed with them: an illusion which continued during the first confused moments after their awaking. As the former explanation rests on the ὅραμα of Matthew, so it is alleged in support of this, that Luke describes the disciples as heavy with sleep, βεβαρημένοι ὕπνῳ, and only towards the end of the scene as fully awake, διαγρηγορήσαντες (v. 32). The hold which the third Evangelist here presents to the natural explanation, has been made a reason for assigning to his narrative an important superiority over that of the two other Evangelists; recent critics pronouncing that by this and other particulars, which bring the event nearer to natural possibility, the account in Luke evinces itself to be the original, while that of Matthew, by its omission of those particulars, is proved to be the traditionary one, since with the eagerness for the miraculous which characterized that age, no one would fabricate particulars calculated to diminish the miracle, as is the case with the sleepiness of the disciples.10 This mode of conclusion we also should be obliged to adopt, if in reality the above features could only be understood in the spirit of the natural interpretation. But we have only to recollect how in another scene, wherein the sufferings, which according to Luke were announced at the transfiguration, began to be accomplished, and wherein, according to the same Evangelist, Jesus likewise held communication with a heavenly apparition, namely, in Gethsemane, the disciples, in all the synoptical gospels, again appear asleep, καθεύδοντες (Matt. xxvi. 40 parall.). If it be admitted, that the merely external, formal resemblance of the two scenes, might cause a narrator to convey the trait of the slumber into the history of the transfiguration, there is a yet stronger probability that the internal import of the trait might appear to him appropriate to this occasion also, for the sleeping of the disciples at the very moment when their master was going through his most critical experience, exhibits their infinite distance from him, their inability to attain his exalted level; the prophet, the recipient of a revelation, is among ordinary men like a watcher among the sleeping: hence it followed, of course, that as in the deepest suffering, so here also in the highest glorification of Jesus, the disciples should be represented as heavy with sleep. Thus this particular, so far from furnishing aid to the natural explanation, is rather intended by a contrast to heighten the miracle which took place in Jesus. We are, therefore, no longer warranted in regarding the narrative in Luke as the original one, and in building an explanation of the event on his statement; on the contrary, we consider that addition, in connexion with the one already mentioned (v. 31), a sign that his account is a traditionary and embellished one,11 and must rather adhere to that of the two other Evangelists.