Note 42 — Chapter II · MACHINATIONS OF THE ENEMIES OF JESUS; TREACHERY OF JUDAS; LAST SUPPER WITH HIS DISCIPLES.

But such is not at all the impression produced by the evangelical narrative. Of a preconcerted arrangement, of a previous bespeaking of the apartment, it says nothing; on the contrary, the words, they found as he had said unto them, in Mark and Luke, seem intended to convey the idea that Jesus was able to predict everything as they afterwards actually found it; a solicitous foresight is nowhere indicated, but rather a miraculous foreknowledge. Here, in fact, as above in the procuring of the animal for the entrance into Jerusalem, we have a twofold miracle: first, the fact that everything stands ready to supply the wants of Jesus, and that no one is able to withstand the power of his name; secondly, the ability of Jesus to take cognizance of distant circumstances, and to predict the merest fortuities.42 It must create surprise that, forcibly as this supranaturalistic conception of the narrative before us urges itself upon the reader, Olshausen himself seeks to elude it, by arguments which would nullify most of the histories of miracles, and which we are accustomed to hear only from rationalists. To the impartial expositor, he says,43 the narrative does not present the slightest warrant for a miraculous interpretation (we almost fancy ourselves transported into the commentary of Paulus); if the narrators intended to recount a miracle, they must have expressly observed that no previous arrangement had been made (precisely the rationalistic demand—if a cure were meant to be recognised as a miracle, the application of natural means must have been expressly denied); moreover the object of such a miracle is not to be discerned, a strengthening of the faith of the disciples was not then necessary, nor was it to be effected by this unimportant miracle, after the more exalted ones which had preceded it:—grounds on which the thoroughly similar narrative of the procuring of the ass for the entrance, which Olshausen upholds as a miracle, would be equally excluded from the sphere of the supernatural.