Note 356 — Chapter IX · MIRACLES OF JESUS.

But let us only remember who it is to whom we owe that addition. It is Mark, who, in his efforts after the explanatory and the picturesque, so frequently draws on his own imagination; and in doing this, as it has been long ago perceived, and as we also have had sufficient opportunities of observing on our way, he does not always go to work in the most considerate manner. Thus, here, he is arrested by the first striking particular that presents itself, namely, that the tree was without fruit, and hastens to furnish the explanation, that it was not the time for figs, not observing that while he accounts physically for the barrenness of the tree, he makes the conduct of Jesus morally inexplicable. Again, the above-mentioned divergency from Matthew in relation to the time within which the tree withered, far from evincing more authentic information,356 or a tendency to the natural explanation of the marvellous on the part of Mark, is only another product of the same dramatising effort as that which gave birth to the above addition. The idea of a tree suddenly withering at a word, is difficult for the imagination perfectly to fashion; whereas it cannot be called a bad dramatic contrivance, to lay the process of withering behind the scenes, and to make the result be first noticed by the subsequent passers by. For the rest, in the assertion that it was then (a few days before Easter) no time for figs, Mark is so far right, as it regards the conditions of climate in Palestine, that at so early a time of the year the new figs of the season were not yet ripe, for the early fig or boccore is not ripe until the middle or towards the end of June; while the proper fig, the kermus, ripens only in the month of August. On the other hand, there might about Easter still be met with here and there, hanging on the tree, the third fruit of the fig-tree, the late kermus, which had remained from the previous autumn, and through the winter:357 as we read in Josephus that a part of Palestine (the shores of the Galilean sea), more fruitful, certainly, than the country around Jerusalem, where the history in question occurred, produces figs uninterruptedly during ten months of the year, σῦκον δέκα μησὶν ἀδιαλείπτως χορηγεῖ.358