Note 37 — Chapter IV · DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS.

The Evangelist assures us, with the most solicitous earnestness, that this really happened to Jesus, and that his account is trustworthy, as being founded on personal observation (v. 35). According to some, he gives this testimony in opposition to docetic Gnostics, who denied the true corporeality of Jesus:37 but wherefore then the mention of the water? According to others, on account of the noteworthy fulfilment of two prophecies by that procedure with respect to the body of Jesus.38 But, as Lücke himself says, though John does certainly elsewhere, even in subordinate points, seek a fulfilment of prophecy, he nowhere attaches to it so extraordinary a weight as he would here have done according to this supposition. Hence it appears the most natural supposition that the Evangelist intended by those assurances to confirm the truth of the death of Jesus,39 and that he merely appended the reference to the fulfilment of Scripture as a secondary illustrative addition. The absence of an historical indication, that so early as the period of the composition of the fourth gospel, there existed a suspicion that the death of Jesus was only apparent, does not suffice, in the paucity of information at our command concerning that period, to prove that a suspicion so easy of suggestion had not actually to be combated in the circle in which the above gospel arose, and that it may not have given occasion to the adduction of proofs not only of the resurrection of Jesus, but also of his death.40 Even in the Gospel of Mark a similar effort is visible. When this Evangelist, in narrating Joseph’s entreaty for the body of Jesus, says: And Pilate marvelled if he were already dead (v. 44): this suggests the idea that he lent to Pilate an astonishment which he must have heard expressed by many of his cotemporaries concerning the rapidity with which the death of Jesus had ensued; and when he proceeds to state that the procurator obtained from the centurion certain information that Jesus had been some time dead, πάλαι ἀπέθανε: it appears as if he wished, in silencing the doubt of Pilate, to silence that of his cotemporaries also; but in that case he can have known nothing of a wound with a spear, and its consequences, otherwise he would not have left unnoticed this securest warrant of death having really taken place: so that the representation in John has the appearance of being a fuller development of a tendency of the legend already visible in Mark.