Note 9 — Chapter III · RETIREMENT TO THE MOUNT OF OLIVES, ARREST, TRIAL, CONDEMNATION AND CRUCIFIXION OF JESUS.

From the untenable ecclesiastical view of the agony of Jesus, a descent has in more modern times been made to coarse materialism, by reducing what it was thought hopeless to justify ethically, as a mental condition, to a purely physical one, and supposing that Jesus was attacked by some malady in Gethsemane;9 an opinion which Paulus, with a severity which he should only have more industriously applied to his own explanations, pronounces to be altogether unseemly and opposed to the text, though he does not regard as improbable Heumann’s hypothesis, that in addition to his inward sorrow, Jesus had contracted a cold in the clayey ground traversed by the Kedron.10 On the other hand, the scene has been depicted in the colours of modern sentimentalism, and the feelings of friendship, the pain of separation, the thoughts of parting, have been assigned as the causes which so lacerated the mind of Jesus:11 or a confused blending of all the different kinds of sorrow, selfish and sympathetic, sensual and spiritual, has been presupposed.12 Paulus explains εἰ δυνατόν ἐστι, παρελθέτω τὸ ποτήριον (if it be possible, let this cup pass from me) as the expression of a purely moral anxiety on the part of Jesus, as to whether it were the will of God that he should give himself up to the attack immediately at hand, or whether it were not more accordant with the Divine pleasure, that he should yet escape from this danger: thus converting into a mere inquiry of God, what is obviously the most urgent prayer.