Note 40 — Chapter X · THE TRANSFIGURATION OF JESUS, AND HIS LAST JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM.

So total a divergency necessarily gave unwonted occupation to the harmonists. According to them, the departure from Galilee mentioned by the synoptists, is not the departure to the last Passover, but to the feast of dedication;40 though Luke, when he says, when the time came that he should be received up, ἐν τῷ συμπληροῦσθαι τὰς ἡμέρας τῆς ἀναλήψεως αὐτοῦ (ix. 51), incontrovertibly marks it as the departure to that feast on which the sufferings and death of Jesus awaited him, and though all the synoptists make the journey then begun end in that triumphal entry into Jerusalem which, according to the fourth gospel also, took place immediately before the last passover.41 If, according to this, the departure from Galilee narrated by the synoptists is regarded as that to the feast of dedication, and the entrance into Jerusalem which they mention as that to the subsequent passover; they must have entirely passed over all which, on this supposition, lay between these two points, namely, the arrival and residence of Jesus in Jerusalem during the feast of dedication, his journey from thence into Peræa, from Peræa to Bethany, and from Bethany to Ephraim. If from this it should appear to follow that the synoptists were ignorant of all these particulars: our harmonists urge, on the contrary, that Luke makes Jesus soon after his journey out of Galilee, encounter scribes, who try to put him to the proof (x. 25 ff.); then shows him in Bethany in the vicinity of Jerusalem (x. 38 ff.); hereupon, removes him to the frontiers of Samaria and Galilee (xvii. 11); and not until then, makes him proceed to the passover in Jerusalem (xix. 29 ff.): all which plainly enough indicates, that between that departure out of Galilee, and the final entrance into Jerusalem, Jesus made another journey to Judæa and Jerusalem, and from thence back again.42 But, in the first place, the presence of the scribes proves absolutely nothing; and in the second, Luke makes no mention of Bethany, but only of a visit to Mary and Martha, whom the fourth Evangelist places in that village: from which, however, it does not follow that the third also supposed them to dwell there, and consequently imagined Jesus when at their home, to be in the vicinity of Jerusalem. Again, from the fact that so very long after his departure (ix. 51–xvii. 11), Jesus first appears on the frontier between Galilee and Samaria, it only follows that we have before us no orderly progressive narrative. But, according to this harmonizing view, even Matthew was aware of those intermediate events, and has indicated them for the more attentive reader: the one member of his sentence, he departed from Galilee, μετηρεν ἀπὸ τῆς Γαλιλαίας, intimates the journey of Jesus to the feast of dedication, and thus forms a separate whole; the other, and came into the coasts of Judæa beyond Jordan, καὶ ἦλθεν εἰς τὰ ὅρια τῆς Ἰουδαίας πέραν τοῦ Ἰορδάνου, refers to the departure of Jesus from Jerusalem into Peræa (John x. 40), and opens a new period. In adopting this expedient, however, it is honourably confessed that without the data gathered from John, no one would have thought of such a dismemberment of the passage in Matthew.43 In opposition to such artifices, no way is open to those who presuppose the accuracy of John’s narrative, but that adopted by the most recent criticism; namely, to renounce the supposition that Matthew, who treats of the journey very briefly, was an eye-witness; and to suppose of Luke, whose account of it is very full, that either he or one of the collectors of whose labours he availed himself, mingled together two separate narratives, of which one referred to the earlier journey of Jesus to the feast of dedication, the other to his last journey to the passover, without suspecting that between the departure of Jesus out of Galilee, and his entrance into Jerusalem, there fell yet an earlier residence in Jerusalem, together with other journeys and adventures.44