Note 44 — Chapter III · RETIREMENT TO THE MOUNT OF OLIVES, ARREST, TRIAL, CONDEMNATION AND CRUCIFIXION OF JESUS.

If we here revert to the question from which we set out, whether we are rather to retain the farewell discourses in John as thoroughly historical, and renounce the synoptical representation of the scene in Gethsemane, or vice versâ: we shall be more inclined, considering the result of the inquiry just instituted, to embrace the latter alternative. The difficulty, that it is scarcely conceivable how John could accurately remember these long discourses of Jesus, Paulus has thought to solve, by the conjecture, that the apostle, probably on the next Sabbath, while Jesus lay in the grave, recalled to his mind the conversations of the previous evening, and perhaps also wrote them down.44 But in that period of depression, which John also shared, he would be scarcely in a condition to reproduce these discourses without obscuring their peculiar hue of unclouded serenity; on the contrary, as the author of the Wolfenbüttel fragments observes, had the narrative of the words and deeds of Jesus been committed to writing by the Evangelists in the couple of days after the death of Jesus, when they had no longer any hope, all promises would have been excluded from their gospels.45 Hence even Lücke, in consideration of the mode of expression in the farewell discourses, and particularly in the final prayer, being so peculiarly that of John, has relinquished the position that Jesus spoke in the very words which John puts into his mouth, i.e. the authenticity of these discourses in the strictest sense; but only to maintain the more firmly their authenticity in the wider sense, i.e. the genuineness of the substantial thoughts.46 Even this, however, has been attacked by the author of the Probabilia, for he asks, with especial reference to chap. xvii., whether it be conceivable that Jesus in the anticipation of violent death, had nothing of more immediate concern than to commune with God on the subject of his person, the works he had already achieved, and the glory to be expected? and whether it be not rather highly probable that the prayer flowed only from the mind of the writer, and was intended by him as a confirmation of his doctrine of Jesus as the incarnate word λόγος, and of the dignity of the apostles?47 This representation is so far true that the final prayer in question resembles not an immediate outpouring of soul, but a product of reflection—is rather a discourse on Jesus than a discourse from him. It presents everywhere the mode of thought of one who stands far in advance of the circumstances of which he writes, and hence already sees the form of Jesus in the glorifying haze of distance; an illusion which he heightens by putting his own thoughts, which had sprung from an advanced development of the Christian community, into the mouth of its Founder prior to its actual existence. But in the preceding farewell discourses also there are many thoughts which appear to have taken their shape from an experience of the event. Their entire tone may be the most naturally explained by the supposition, that they are the work of one to whom the death of Jesus was already a past event, the terrors of which had melted away in its blessed consequences, and in the devotional contemplation of the church. In particular, apart from what is said of the return of Christ, that era in the Christian cause which is generally called the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, is predicted in the declarations concerning the Paraclete, and the judgment which he would hold over the world (xiv. 16 ff. 25, xv. 26, xvi. 7 ff. 13 ff.), with a distinctness which seems to indicate light borrowed from the issue.