JESUS AS THE MESSIAH. [752]
§ 61.
JESUS, THE SON OF MAN.
In treating of the relation in which Jesus conceived himself to stand
to the messianic idea, we can distinguish his dicta concerning his own
person from those concerning the work he had undertaken.
The appellation which Jesus commonly gives himself in the Gospels is,
the Son of man, ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου. The exactly corresponding Hebrew
expression בֶּן־אָדָם is in the Old Testament a frequent designation of
man in general, and thus we might be induced to understand it in the
mouth of Jesus. This interpretation would suit some passages; for
example, Matt. xii. 8, where Jesus says: The Son of man is lord also of
the Sabbath day, κύριος γάρ ἐστι τοῦ σαββάτου ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ
ἀνθρώπου,—words which will fitly enough take a general meaning, such as
Grotius affixes to them, namely, that man is lord of the Sabbath,
especially if we compare Mark (ii. 27), who introduces them by the
proposition, The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath,
τὸ σάββατον διὰ τὸν ἄθρωπον ἐγένετο, οὐχ ὁ ἄνθρωπος διὰ τὸ σάββατον.
But in the majority of cases, the phrase in question is evidently used
as a special designation. Thus, Matt. viii. 20, a scribe volunteers to
become a disciple of Jesus, and is admonished to count the cost in the
words, The Son of man hath not where to lay his head, ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ
ἀνθρώπου οὐκ ἔχει, ποῦ τὴν κεφαλὴν κλἱνῃ: here some particular man must
be intended, nay, the particular man into whose companionship the
scribe wished to enter, that is, Jesus himself. As a reason for the
self-application of this term by Jesus, it has been suggested that he
used the third person after the oriental manner, to avoid the I. [753]
But for a speaker to use the third person in reference to himself, is
only admissible, if he would be understood, when the designation he
employs is precise, and inapplicable to any other person present, as
when a father or a king uses his appropriate title of himself; or when,
if the designation be not precise, its relation is made clear by a
demonstrative pronoun, which limitation is eminently indispensable if
an individual speak of himself under the universal designation man. We
grant that occasionally a gesture might supply the place of the
demonstrative pronoun; but that Jesus in every instance of his using
this habitual expression had recourse to some visible explanatory sign,
or that the Evangelists would not, in that case, have supplied its
necessary absence from a written document by some demonstrative
addition, is inconceivable. If both Jesus and the Evangelists held such
an elucidation superfluous, they must have seen in the expression
itself the key to its precise application. Some are of opinion that
Jesus intended by it to point himself out as the ideal man—man in the
noblest sense of the word; [754] but this is a modern theory, not an
historical inference, for there is no trace of such an interpretation
of the expression in the time of Jesus, [755] and it would be more easy
to show, as others have attempted, that the appellation, Son of Man, so
frequently used by Jesus, had reference to his lowly and despised
condition. [756] Apart however from the objection that this acceptation
also would require the addition of the demonstrative pronoun, though it
might be adapted to many passages, as Matt. viii. 20; John i. 51, there
are others (such as Matt. xvii. 22, where Jesus, foretelling his
violent death, designates himself ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου) which demand the
contrast of high dignity with an ignominious fate. So in Matt. x. 23,
the assurance given to the commissioned disciples that before they had
gone over the cities of Israel the Son of Man would come, could have no
weight unless this expression denoted a person of importance; and that
such was its significance is proved by a comparison of Matt. xvi. 28,
where there is also a mention of an ἔρχεσθαι, a coming of the Son of
man, but with the addition ἐν τῇ βασιλείᾳ αὐτοῦ. As this addition can
only refer to the messianic kingdom, the υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου must be the
Messiah.
How so apparently vague an appellation came to be appropriated to the
Messiah, we gather from Matt. xxvi. 64 parall., where the Son of man is
depicted as coming in the clouds of heaven. This is evidently an
allusion to Dan. vii. 13 f. where after having treated of the fall of
the four beasts, the writer says: I saw in the night visions, and
behold, one like the Son of Man (כְּבַר אֱנָשׁ ὡς υἱὸς ἀνθρώπου, LXX.) came
with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days. And there
was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people,
nations and languages should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting
dominion. The four beasts (v. 17 ff.) were symbolical of the four great
empires, the last of which was the Macedonian, with its offshoot,
Syria. After their fall, the kingdom was to be given in perpetuity to
the People of God, the saints of the Most High: hence, he who was to
come with clouds of heaven could only be, either a personification of
the holy people, [757] or a leader of heavenly origin under whom they
were to achieve their destined triumph—in a word, the Messiah; and this
was the customary interpretation among the Jews. [758] Two things are
predicated of this personage,—that he was like the Son of man, and that
he came with the clouds of heaven; but the former particular is his
distinctive characteristic, and imports either that he had not a
superhuman form, that of an angel for instance, though descending from
heaven, or else that the kingdom about to be established presented in
its humanity a contrast to the inhumanity of its predecessors, of which
ferocious beasts were the fitting emblems. [759] At a later period, it
is true, the Jews regarded the coming with the clouds of heaven
עִס־עֲנָנִי שְׁמַיָא as the more essential attribute of the Messiah, and
hence gave him the name Anani, after the Jewish taste of making a
merely accessory circumstance the permanent epithet of a person or
thing. [760] If, then, the expression ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου necessarily
recalled the above passage in Daniel, generally believed to relate to
the Messiah, it is impossible that Jesus could so often use it, and in
connexion with declarations evidently referring to the Messiah, without
intending it as the designation of that personage.
That by the expression in question Jesus meant himself, without
relation to the messianic dignity, is less probable than the contrary
supposition, that he might often mean the Messiah when he spoke of the
Son of Man, without relation to his own person. When, Matt. x. 23, on
the first mission of the twelve apostles to announce the kingdom of
heaven, he comforts them under the prospect of their future
persecutions by the assurance that they would not have gone over all
the cities of Israel before the coming of the Son of Man, we should
rather, taking this declaration alone, think of a third person, whose
speedy messianic appearance Jesus was promising, than of the speaker
himself, seeing that he was already come, and it would not be
antecedently clear how he could represent his own coming as one still
in anticipation. So also when Jesus (Matt. xiii. 37 ff.) interprets the
Sower of the parable to be the Son of Man, who at the end of the world
will have a harvest and a tribunal, he might be supposed to refer to
the Messiah as a third person distinct from himself. This is equally
the case, xvi. 27 f., where, to prove the proposition that the loss of
the soul is not to be compensated by the gain of the whole world, he
urges the speedy coming of the Son of Man, to administer retribution.
Lastly, in the connected discourses, Matt. xxiv., xxv. parall., many
particulars would be more easily conceived, if the υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου
whose παρουσία Jesus describes, were understood to mean another than
himself.
But this explanation is far from being applicable to the majority of
instances in which Jesus uses this expression. When he represents the
Son of Man, not as one still to be expected, but as one already come
and actually present, for example, in Matt xviii. 11, where he says:
The Son of Man is come to save that which was lost; when he justifies
his own acts by the authority with which the Son of Man was invested,
as in Matt. ix. 6; when, Mark viii. 31 ff. comp. Matt. xvi. 22, he
speaks of the approaching sufferings and death of the Son of Man, so as
to elicit from Peter the exclamation, οὐ μὴ ἔσται σοι τοῦτο, this shall
not be unto thee; in these and similar cases he can only, by the υἱὸς
τοῦ ἀνθρώπου, have intended himself. And even those passages, which,
taken singly, we might have found capable of application to a messianic
person, distinct from Jesus, lose this capability when considered in
their entire connexion. It is possible, however, either that the writer
may have misplaced certain expressions, or that the ultimately
prevalent conviction that Jesus was the Son of Man caused what was
originally said merely of the latter, to be viewed in immediate
relation to the former.
Thus besides the fact that Jesus on many occasions called himself the
Son of Man, there remains the possibility that on many others, he may
have designed another person; and if so, the latter would in the order
of time naturally precede the former. Whether this possibility can be
heightened ta a reality, must depend on the answer to the following
question: Is there, in the period of the life of Jesus, from which all
his recorded declarations are taken, any fragment which indicates that
he had not yet conceived himself to be the Messiah?
§ 62.
HOW SOON DID JESUS CONCEIVE HIMSELF TO BE THE MESSIAH, AND FIND
RECOGNITION AS SUCH FROM OTHERS?
Jesus held and expressed the conviction that he was the Messiah; this
is an indisputable fact. Not only did he, according to the Evangelists,
receive with satisfaction the confession of the disciples that he was
the Χριστὸς (Matt. xvi. 16 f.) and the salutation of the people,
Hosanna to the Son of David (xxi. 15 f.); not only did he before a
public tribunal (Matt. xxvi. 64, comp. John xviii. 37) as well as to
private individuals (John iv. 26, ix. 37, x. 25) repeatedly declare
himself to be the Messiah; but the fact that his disciples after his
death believed and proclaimed that he was the Messiah, is not to be
comprehended, unless, when living, he had implanted the conviction in
their minds.
To the more searching question, how soon Jesus began to declare himself
the Messiah and to be regarded as such by others, the Evangelists
almost unanimously reply, that he assumed that character from the time
of his baptism. All of them attach to his baptism circumstances which
must have convinced himself, if yet uncertain, and all others who
witnessed or credited them, that he was no less than the Messiah; John
makes his earliest disciples recognise his right to that dignity on
their first interview (i. 42 ff.), and Matthew attributes to him at the
very beginning of his ministry, in the sermon on the mount, a
representation of himself as the Judge of the world (vii. 21 ff.) and
therefore the Messiah.
Nevertheless, on a closer examination, there appears a remarkable
divergency on this subject between the synoptical statement and that of
John. While, namely, in John, Jesus remains throughout true to his
assertion, and the disciples and his followers among the populace to
their conviction, that he is the Messiah; in the synoptical gospels
there is a vacillation discernible—the previously expressed persuasion
on the part of the disciples and people that Jesus was the Messiah,
sometimes vanishes and gives place to a much lower view of him, and
even Jesus himself becomes more reserved in his declarations. This is
particularly striking when the synoptical statement is compared with
that of John; but even when they are separately considered, the result
is the same.
According to John (vi. 15), after the miracle of the loaves the people
were inclined to constitute Jesus their (messianic) King; on the
contrary, according to the other three Evangelists, either about the
same time (Luke ix. 18 f.) or still later (Matt. xvi. 13 f.; Mark viii.
27 f.) the disciples could only report, on the opinions of the people
respecting their master, that some said he was the resuscitated
Baptist, some Elias, and others Jeremiah or one of the old prophets: in
reference to that passage of John, however, as also to the synoptical
one, Matt. xiv. 33, according to which, some time before Jesus elicited
the above report of the popular opinion, the people who were with him
in the ship [761] when he had allayed the storm, fell at his feet and
worshipped him as the Son of God, it may be observed that when Jesus
had spoken or acted with peculiar impressiveness, individuals, in the
exaltation of the moment, might be penetrated with a conviction that he
was the Messiah, while the general and calm voice of the people yet
pronounced him to be merely a prophet.
But there is a more troublesome divergency relative to the disciples.
In John, Andrew, after his first interview with Jesus, says to his
brother, we have found the Messiah, εὑρήκαμεν τὸν Μεσσίαν (i. 42); and
Philip describes him to Nathanael as the person foretold by Moses and
the prophets (v. 46); Nathanael salutes him as the Son of God and King
of Israel (v. 50); and the subsequent confession of Peter appears
merely a renewed avowal of what had been long a familiar truth. In the
synoptical Evangelists it is only after prolonged intercourse with
Jesus, and shortly before his sufferings, that the ardent Peter arrives
at the conclusion that Jesus is the Χριστὸς, ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ τοῦ ζῶντος
(Matt. xvi. 16, parall.). It is impossible that this confession should
make so strong an impression on Jesus that, in consequence of it, he
should pronounce Peter blessed, and his confession the fruit of
immediate divine revelation, as Matthew narrates; or that, as all the
three Evangelists inform us (xvi. 20, viii. 30, ix. 21), he should, as
if alarmed, forbid the disciples to promulgate their conviction, unless
it represented not an opinion long cherished in the circle of his
disciples, but a new light, which had just flashed on the mind of
Peter, and through him was communicated to his associates.
There is a third equally serious discrepancy, relative to the
declarations of Jesus concerning his Messiahship. According to John he
sanctions the homage which Nathanael renders to him as the Son of God
and King of Israel, in the very commencement of his public career, and
immediately proceeds to speak of himself under the messianic title, Son
of Man (i. 51 f.): to the Samaritans also after his first visit to the
passover (iv. 26, 39 ff.), and to the Jews on the second (v. 46), he
makes himself known as the Messiah predicted by Moses. According to the
synoptical writers, on the contrary, he prohibits, in the instance
above cited and in many others, the dissemination of the doctrine of
his Messiahship, beyond the circle of his adherents. Farther, when he
asks his disciples, Whom do men say that I am? (Matt. xvi. 15) he seems
to wish [762] that they should derive their conviction of his
Messiahship from his discourses and actions, and when he ascribes the
avowed faith of Peter to a revelation from his heavenly Father, he
excludes the possibility of his having himself previously made this
disclosure to his disciples, either in the manner described by John, or
in the more indirect one attributed to him by Matthew in the Sermon on
the Mount; unless we suppose that the disciples had not hitherto
believed his assurance, and that hence Jesus referred the new-born
faith of Peter to divine influence.
Thus, on the point under discussion the synoptical statement is
contradictory, not only to that of John, but to itself; it appears
therefore that it ought to be unconditionally surrendered before that
of John, which is consistent with itself, and one of our critics has
justly reproached it with deranging the messianic economy in the life
of Jesus. [763] But here again we must not lose sight of our approved
canon, that in glorifying narratives, such as our gospels, where
various statements are confronted, that is the least probable which
best subserves the object of glorification. Now this is the case with
John’s statement; according to which, from the commencement to the
close of the public life of Jesus, his Messiahship shines forth in
unchanging splendour, while, according to the synoptical writers, it is
liable to a variation in its light. But though this criterion of
probability is in favour of the first three Evangelists, it is
impossible that the order in which they make ignorance and concealment
follow on plain declarations and recognitions of the Messiahship of
Jesus can be correct; and we must suppose that they have mingled and
confounded two separate periods of the life of Jesus, in the latter of
which alone he presented himself as the Messiah. We find, in fact, that
the watchword of Jesus on his first appearance differed not, even
verbally, from that of John, who professed merely to be a forerunner;
it is the same Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand (Matt. iv.
17) with which John had roused the Jews (iii. 2); and indicates in
neither the one nor the other an assumption of the character of
Messiah, with whose coming the kingdom of heaven was actually to
commence, but merely that of a teacher who points to it as yet future.
[764] Hence the latest critic of the first gospel justly explains all
those discourses and actions therein narrated, by which Jesus
explicitly claims to be the Messiah, or, in consequence of which this
dignity is attributed to him and accepted, if they occur before the
manifestation of himself recorded in John v., or before the account of
the apostolic confession (Matt. xvi.), as offences of the writer
against chronology or literal truth. [765] We have only to premise,
that as chronological confusion prevails throughout, the position of
this confession shortly before the history of the Passion, in nowise
obliges us to suppose that it was so late before Jesus was recognised
as the Messiah among his disciples, since Peter’s avowal may have
occurred in a much earlier period of their intercourse. This, however,
is incomprehensible—that the same reproach should not attach even more
strongly to the fourth gospel than to the first, or to the synoptical
writers in general. For it is surely more pardonable that the first
three Evangelists should give us the pre-messianic memoirs in the wrong
place, than that the fourth should not give them at all; more endurable
in the former, to mingle the two periods, than in the latter, quite to
obliterate the earlier one.
If then Jesus did not lay claim to the Messiahship from the beginning
of his public career, was this omission the result of uncertainty in
his own mind; or had he from the first a conviction that he was the
Messiah, but concealed it for certain reasons? In order to decide this
question, a point already mentioned must be more carefully weighed. In
the first three Evangelists, but not so exclusively that the fourth has
nothing similar, when Jesus effects a miracle of healing he almost
invariably forbids the person cured to promulgate the event, in these
or similar words, ὅρα μηδενὶ εἴπῃς; e.g. the leper, Matt. viii. 4,
parall.; the blind men, Matt. ix. 30; a multitude of the healed, Matt.
xii. 16; the parents of the resuscitated damsel, Mark v. 43; above all
he enjoins silence on the demoniacs, Mark i. 34, iii. 12; and John v.
13, it is said, after the cure of the man at the pool of Bethesda,
Jesus had conveyed himself away, a multitude being in that place. Thus
also he forbade the three who were with him on the mount of the
Transfiguration, to publish the scene they had witnessed (Matt. xvii.
9); and after the confession of Peter, he charges the disciples to tell
no man the conviction it expressed (Luke ix. 21). This prohibition of
Jesus could hardly, as most commentators suppose, [766] be determined
by various circumstantial motives, at one time having relation to the
disposition of the person healed, at another to the humour of the
people, at another to the situation of Jesus: rather, as there is an
essential similarity in the conditions under which he lays this
injunction on the people, if we discern a probable motive for it on any
occasion, we are warranted in applying the same motive to the remaining
cases. This motive is scarcely any other than the desire that the
belief that he was the Messiah should not be too widely spread. When
(Mark i. 34) Jesus would not allow the ejected demons to speak because
they knew him, when he charged the multitudes that they should not make
him known (Matt. xii. 16), he evidently intended that the former should
not proclaim him in the character in which their more penetrative,
demoniacal glance had viewed him, nor the latter in that revealed by
the miraculous cure he had wrought on them—in short, they were not to
betray their knowledge that he was the Messiah. As a reason for this
wish on the part of Jesus, it has been alleged, on the strength of John
vi. 15, that he sought to avoid awakening the political idea of the
Messiah’s kingdom in the popular mind, with the disturbance which would
be its inevitable result. [767] This would be a valid reason; but the
synoptical writers represent the wish, partly as the effect of
humility; [768] Matthew, in connexion with a prohibition of the kind
alluded to, applying to Jesus a passage in Isaiah (xlii. 1 f.) where
the servant of God is said to be distinguished by his stillness and
unobtrusiveness: partly, and in a greater degree, as the effect of an
apprehension that the Messiah, at least such an one as Jesus, would be
at once proscribed by the Jewish hierarchy.
From all this it might appear that Jesus was restrained merely by
external motives, from the open declaration of his Messiahship, and
that his own conviction of it existed from the first in equal strength;
but this conclusion cannot be maintained in the face of the
consideration above mentioned, that Jesus began his career with the
same announcement as the Baptist, an announcement which can scarcely
have more than one import—an exhortation to prepare for a coming
Messiah. The most natural supposition is that Jesus, first the disciple
of the Baptist, and afterwards his successor, in preaching repentance
and the approach of the kingdom of heaven, took originally the same
position as his former master in relation to the messianic kingdom,
notwithstanding the greater reach and liberality of his mind, and only
gradually attained the elevation of thinking himself the Messiah. This
supposition explains in the simplest manner the prohibition we have
been considering, especially that annexed to the confession of Peter.
For as often as the thought that he might be the Messiah suggested
itself to others, and was presented to him from without, Jesus must
have shrunk, as if appalled, to hear confidently uttered that which he
scarcely ventured to surmise, or which had but recently become clear to
himself. As, however, the Evangelist often put such prohibitions into
the mouth of Jesus unseasonably (witness the occasion mentioned, Matt.
viii. 4, when, after a cure effected before a crowd of spectators, it
was of little avail to enjoin secrecy on the cured), [769] it is
probable that evangelical tradition, enamoured of the mysteriousness
that lay in this incognito of Jesus, [770] unhistorically multiplied
the instances of its adoption.
§ 63.
JESUS, THE SON OF GOD.
In Luke i. 35, we find the narrowest and most literal interpretation of
the expression, ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ; namely, as derived from his conception
by means of the Holy Ghost. On the contrary, the widest moral and
metaphorical sense is given to the expression in Matt. v. 45, where
those who imitate the love of God towards his enemies are called the
sons of the Father in heaven. There is an intermediate sense which we
may term the metaphysical, because while it includes more than mere
conformity of will, it is distinct from the notion of actual paternity,
and implies a spiritual community of being. In this sense it is
profusely employed and referred to in the fourth gospel; as when Jesus
says that he speaks and does nothing of himself, but only what as a son
he has learned from the Father (v. 19, xii. 49; and elsewhere), who,
moreover, is in him (xvii. 21), and notwithstanding his exaltation over
him (xiv. 28), is yet one with him (x. 30). There is yet a fourth sense
in which the expression is presented. When (Matt. iv. 3) the devil
challenges Jesus to change the stones into bread, making the
supposition, If thou be the Son of God; when Nathanael says to Jesus,
Thou art the Son of God, the King of Israel (John i. 49); when Peter
confesses, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God (Matt. xvi.
16; comp. John vi. 69); when Martha thus expresses her faith in Jesus,
I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God (John xi. 27); when
the high priest adjures Jesus to tell him if he be the Christ, the Son
of God (Matt. xxvi. 63): it is obvious that the devil means nothing
more than, If thou be the Messiah; and that in the other passages the
υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ, united as it is with Χριστὸς and βασιλεὺς, is but an
appellation of the Messiah.
In Hos. xi. 1; Exod. iv. 22, the people of Israel, and in 2 Sam, vii.
14; Ps. ii. 7 (comp. lxxxix. 28), the king of that people, are called
the son and the first-born of God. The kings (as also the people) of
Israel had this appellation, in virtue of the love which Jehovah bore
them, and the tutelary care which he exercised over them (2 Sam. vii.
14); and from the second psalm we gather the farther reason, that as
earthly kings choose their sons to reign with or under them, so the
Israelitish kings were invested by Jehovah, the supreme ruler, with the
government of his favourite province. Thus the designation was
originally applicable to every Israelitish king who adhered to the
principle of the theocracy; but when the messianic idea was developed,
it was pre-eminently assigned to the Messiah, as the best-beloved Son,
and the most powerful vicegerent of God on earth. [771]
If, then, such was the original historical signification of the
epithet, Son of God, as applied to the Messiah, we have to ask: is it
possible that Jesus used it of himself in this signification only, or
did he use it also in either of the three senses previously adduced?
The narrowest, the merely physical import of the term is not put into
the mouth of Jesus, but into that of the annunciating angel, Luke i.
35; and for this the Evangelist alone is responsible. In the
intermediate, metaphysical sense, implying unity of essence and
community of existence with God, it might possibly have been understood
by Jesus, supposing him to have remodelled in his own conceptions the
theocratic interpretation current among his compatriots. It is true
that the abundant expressions having this tendency in the Gospel of
John, appear to contradict those of Jesus on an occasion recorded by
the synoptical writers (Mark x. 17 f.; Luke xviii. 18 f.), when to a
disciple who accosts him as Good Master, he replies: Why callest thou
me good? there is none good but one, that is God. Here Jesus so
tenaciously maintains the distinction between himself and God, that he
renounces the predicate of (perfect) goodness, and insists on its
appropriation to God alone. [772] Olshausen supposes that this
rejection related solely to the particular circumstances of the
disciple addressed, who, regarding Jesus as a merely human teacher,
ought not from his point of view to have given him a divine epithet,
and that it was not intended by Jesus as a denial that he was,
according to a just estimate of his character, actually the ἀγαθὸς in
whom the one good Being was reflected as in a mirror; but this is to
take for granted what is first to be proved, namely, that the
declarations of Jesus concerning himself in the fourth gospel are on a
level as to credibility with those recorded by the synoptical writers.
Two of these writers cite some words of Jesus which have an important
bearing on our present subject: All things are delivered to me of my
Father: and no man knoweth the Son but the Father: neither knoweth any
man the Father, but the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal
him, Matt. xi. 27. Taking this passage in connexion with the one before
quoted, we must infer that Jesus had indeed an intimate communion of
thought and will with God, but under such limitations, that the
attribute of perfect goodness, as well as of absolute knowledge (e.g.,
of the day and hour of the last day, Mark xiii. 32 parall.) belonged
exclusively to God, and hence the boundary line between divine and
human was strictly preserved. Even in the fourth gospel Jesus declares,
My Father is greater than I, ὁ πατήρ μον μείζων μου ἐστὶ (xiv. 28), but
this slight echo of the synoptical statement does not remove the
difficulty of conciliating the numerous discourses of a totally
different tenor in the former, with the rejection of the epithet ἀγαθὸς
in the latter. It is surprising, too, that Jesus in the fourth gospel
appears altogether ignorant of the theocratic sense of the expression
υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ, and can only vindicate his use of it in the metaphysical
sense, by retreating to its vague and metaphorical application. When,
namely (John x. 34 ff.), to justify his assumption of this title, he
adduces the scriptural application of the term θεοὶ to other men, such
as princes and magistrates, we are at a loss to understand why Jesus
should resort to this remote and precarious argument, when close at
hand lay the far more cogent one, that in the Old Testament, a
theocratic king of Israel, or according to the customary interpretation
of the most striking passages, the Messiah, is called the Son of
Jehovah, and that therefore he, having declared himself to be the
Messiah (v. 25), might consistently claim this appellation.
With respect to the light in which Jesus was viewed as the Son of God
by others, we may remark that in the addresses of well-affected persons
the title is often so associated as to be obviously a mere synonym of
Χριστὸς, and this even in the fourth gospel; while on the other hand
the contentious Ἰουδαῖοι of this gospel seem in their objections as
ignorant as Jesus in his defence, of the theocratic, and only notice
the metaphysical meaning of the expression. It is true that, even in
the synoptical gospels, when Jesus answers affirmatively the question
whether he be the Christ, the Son of the living God (Matt. xxvi. 65,
parall.), the high priest taxes him with blasphemy; but he refers
merely to what he considers the unwarranted arrogation of the
theocratic dignity of the Messiah, whereas in the fourth gospel, when
Jesus represents himself as the Son of God (v. 17 f., x. 30 ff.), the
Jews seek to kill him for the express reason that he thereby makes
himself ἴσον τῷ θεῷ, nay even ἑαυτὸν θεὸν. According to the synoptical
writers, the high priest so unhesitatingly considers the idea of the
Son of God to pertain to that of the Messiah, that he associates the
two titles as if they were interchangeable, in the question he
addresses to Jesus: on the contrary the Jews in the Gospel of John
regard the one idea as so far transcending the other, that they listen
patiently to the declaration of Jesus that he is the Messiah (x. 25),
but as soon as he begins to claim to be the Son of God, they take up
stones to stone him. In the synoptical gospels the reproach cast on
Jesus is, that being a common man, he gives himself out for the
Messiah; in the fourth gospel, that being a mere man, he gives himself
out for a divine being. Hence Olshausen and others have justly insisted
that in those passages of the latter gospel to which our remarks have
reference, the υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ is not synonymous with Messiah, but is a
name far transcending the ordinary idea of the Messiah; [773] they are
not, however, warranted in concluding that therefore in the first three
Evangelists also [774] the same expression imports more than the
Messiah. For the only legitimate interpretation of the high priest’s
question in Matthew makes ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ a synonym of ὁ Χριστὸς, and
though in the parallel passage of Luke, the judges first ask Jesus if
he be the Christ (xxii. 67)? and when he declines a direct
answer,—predicting that they will behold the Son of man seated at the
right hand of God,—hastily interrupt him with the question, Art thou
the Son of God? (v. 70); yet, after receiving what they consider an
affirmative answer, they accuse him before Pilate as one who pretends
to be Christ, a king (xxiii. 2), thus clearly showing that Son of man,
Son of God, and Messiah, must have been regarded as interchangeable
terms. It must therefore be conceded that there is a discrepancy on
this point between the synoptical writers and John, and perhaps also an
inconsistency of the latter with himself; for in several addresses to
Jesus he retains the customary form, which associated Son of God with
Christ or King of Israel, without being conscious of the distinction
between the signification which υἱὸς τ. θ. must have in such a
connexion, and that in which he used it elsewhere—a want of perception
which habitual forms of expression are calculated to induce. We have
before cited examples of this oversight in the fourth Evangelist (John
i. 49, vi. 69, xi. 27).
The author of the Probabilia reasonably considers it suspicious that,
in the fourth gospel, Jesus and his opponents should appear entirely
ignorant of the theocratic sense which is elsewhere attached to the
expression ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ, and which must have been more familiar to
the Jews than any other, unless we suppose some of them to have
partaken of Alexandrian culture. To such, we grant, as well as to the
fourth Evangelist, judging from his prologue, the metaphysical relation
of the λόγος μονογενὴς to God would be the most cherished association.
§ 64.
THE DIVINE MISSION AND AUTHORITY OF JESUS. HIS PRE-EXISTENCE.
The four Evangelists are in unison as to the declaration of Jesus
concerning his divine mission and authority. Like every prophet, he is
sent by God (Matt. x. 40; John v. 23 f., 56 f.), acts and speaks by the
authority, and under the immediate guidance of God (John v. 19 ff.),
and exclusively possesses an adequate knowledge of God, which it is his
office to impart to men (Matt xi. 27; John iii. 13). To him, as the
Messiah, all power is given (Matt. xi. 27); first, over the kingdom
which he is appointed to found and to rule with all its members (John
x. 29, xvii. 6); next, over mankind in general (John xvii. 2), and even
external nature (Matt, xxviii. 18); consequently, should the interests
of the messianic kingdom demand it, power to effect a thorough
revolution in the whole world. At the future commencement of his reign,
Jesus, as Messiah, is authorized to awake the dead (John v. 28), and to
sit as a judge, separating those worthy to partake of the heavenly
kingdom from the unworthy (Matt. xxv. 31 ff.; John v. 22, 29); offices
which Jewish opinion attributed to the Messiah, [775] and which Jesus,
once convinced of his Messiahship, would necessarily transfer to
himself.
The Evangelists are not equally unanimous on another point. According
to the synoptical writers, Jesus claims, it is true, the highest human
dignity, and the most exalted relation with God, for the present and
future, but he never refers to an existence anterior to his earthly
career: in the fourth gospel, on the contrary, we find several
discourses of Jesus which contain the repeated assertion of such a
pre-existence. We grant that when Jesus describes himself as coming
down from heaven (John iii. 13, xvi. 28), the expression, taken alone,
may be understood as a merely figurative intimation of his superhuman
origin. It is more difficult, but perhaps admissible, to interpret,
with the Socinian Crell, the declaration of Jesus, Before Abraham was,
I am, πρὶν Ἀβραὰμ γενέσθαι, ἐγω εἰμι (John viii. 58), as referring to a
purely ideal existence in the pre-determination of God; but scarcely
possible to consider the prayer to the Father (John xvii. 5) to confirm
the δόξα (glory) which Jesus had with Him before the world was, πρὸ τοῦ
τὸν κόσμον εἶναι, as an entreaty for the communication of a glory
predestined for Jesus from eternity. But the language of Jesus, John
vi. 62, where he speaks of the Son of man reascending αναβαίνειν where
he was before ὅπου ἦν τὸ πρότερον, is in its intrinsic meaning, as well
as in that which is reflected on it from other passages, unequivocally
significative of actual, not merely ideal, pre-existence.
It has been already conjectured [776] that these expressions, or at
least the adaptation of them to a real pre-existence, are derived, not
from Jesus, but from the author of the fourth gospel, with whose
opinions, as propounded in his introduction, they specifically agree;
for if the Word was in the beginning with God (ἐν ἀρχῇ πρὸς τὸν θέον),
Jesus, in whom it was made flesh, might attribute to himself an
existence before Abraham, and a participation of glory with the Father
before the foundation of the world. Nevertheless, we are not warranted
in adopting this view, unless it can be shown that neither was the idea
of the pre-existence of the Messiah extant among the Jews of Palestine
before the time of Jesus, nor is it probable that Jesus attained such a
notion, independently of the ideas peculiar to his age and nation.
The latter supposition, that Jesus spoke from his own memory of his
pre-human and pre-mundane existence, is liable to comparison with
dangerous parallels in the history of Pythagoras, Ennius, and
Apollonius of Tyana, whose alleged reminiscences of individual states
which they had experienced prior to their birth, [777] are now
generally regarded either as subsequent fables, or as enthusiastic
self-delusions of those celebrated men. For the other alternative, that
the idea in question was common to the Jewish nation, a presumption may
be found in the description, already quoted from Daniel, of the Son of
man coming in the clouds of heaven, since the author, possibly, and, at
all events, many readers, imagined that personage to be a superhuman
being, dwelling beforehand with God, like the angels. But that every
one who referred this passage to the Messiah, or that Jesus in
particular, associated with it the notion of a pre-existence, is not to
be proved; for, if we exclude the representation of John, Jesus depicts
his coming in the clouds of heaven, not as if he had come as a visitant
to earth from his home in heaven, but, according to Matt. xxvi. 65
(comp. xxiv. 25), as if he, the earth-born, after the completion of his
earthly course, would be received into heaven, and from thence would
return to establish his kingdom: thus making the coming from heaven not
necessarily include the idea of pre-existence. We find in the Proverbs,
in Sirach, and the Book of Wisdom, the idea of a personified and even
hypostasized Wisdom of God, and in the Psalms and Prophets, strongly
marked personifications of the Divine word; [778] and it is especially
worthy of note, that the later Jews, in their horror of
anthropomorphism in the idea of the Divine being, attributed his
speech, appearance, and immediate agency, to the Word (מימרא) or the
dwelling place (שׁכינתא) of Jehovah, as may be seen in the venerable
[779] Targum of Onkelos. [780] These expressions, at first mere
paraphrases of the name of God, soon received the mystical
signification of a veritable hypostasis, of a being at once distinct
from, and one with God. As most of the revelations and interpositions
of God, whose organ this personified Word was considered to be, were
designed in favour of the Israelitish people, it was natural for them
to assign to the manifestation which was still awaited from Him, and
which was to be the crowning benefit of Israel,—the manifestation,
namely, of the Messiah,—a peculiar relation with the Word or Shechina.
[781] From this germ sprang the opinion that with the Messiah the
Shechina would appear, and that what was ascribed to the Shechina
pertained equally to the Messiah: an opinion not confined to the
Rabbins, but sanctioned by the Apostle Paul. According to it, the
Messiah was, even in the wilderness, the invisible guide and benefactor
of God’s people (1 Cor. x. 4, 9); [782] he was with our first parents
in Paradise; [783] he was the agent in creation (Col. i. 16); he even
existed before the creation, [784] and prior to his incarnation in
Jesus, was in a glorious fellowship with God (Phil. ii. 6).
As it is thus evident that, immediately after the time of Jesus, the
idea of a pre-existence of the Messiah was incorporated in the higher
Jewish theology, it is no far-fetched conjecture, that the same idea
was afloat when the mind of Jesus was maturing, and that in his
conception of himself as the Messiah, this attribute was included. But
whether Jesus were as deeply initiated in the speculations of the
Jewish schools as Paul, is yet a question, and as the author of the
fourth gospel, versed in the Alexandrian doctrine of the λόγος, stands
alone in ascribing to Jesus the assertion of a pre-existence, we are
unable to decide whether we are to put the dogma to the account of
Jesus, or of his biographer.
§ 65.
THE MESSIANIC PLAN OF JESUS. INDICATIONS OF A POLITICAL ELEMENT.
The Baptist pointed to a future individual, and Jesus to himself, as
the founder of the kingdom of heaven. The idea of that messianic
kingdom belonged to the Israelitish nation; did Jesus hold it in the
form in which it existed among his cotemporaries, or under
modifications of his own?
The idea of the Messiah grew up amongst the Jews in soil half
religious, half political: it was nurtured by national adversity, and
in the time of Jesus, according to the testimony of the gospels, it was
embodied in the expectation that the Messiah would ascend the throne of
his ancestor David, free the Jewish people from the Roman yoke, and
found a kingdom which would last for ever (Luke i. 32 f., 68 ff.; Acts
i. 6). Hence our first question must be this. Did Jesus include this
political element in his messianic plan?
That Jesus aspired to be a temporal ruler, has at all times been an
allegation of the adversaries of Christianity, but has been maintained
by none with so much exegetical acumen as by the author of the
Wolfenbüttel Fragments, [785] who, be it observed, by no means denies
to Jesus the praise of aiming at the moral reformation of his nation.
According to this writer, the first indication of a political plan on
the part of Jesus is, that he unambiguously announced the approaching
messianic kingdom, and laid down the conditions on which it was to be
entered, without explaining what this kingdom was, and wherein it
consisted, [786] as if he supposed the current idea of its nature to be
correct. Now the fact is, that the prevalent conception of the
messianic reign had a strong political bias; hence, when Jesus spoke of
the Messiah’s kingdom without a definition, the Jews could only think
of an earthly dominion, and as Jesus could not have presupposed any
other interpretation of his words, he must have wished to be so
understood. But in opposition to this it may be remarked, that in the
Parables by which Jesus shadowed forth the kingdom of heaven; in the
Sermon on the Mount, in which he illustrates the duties of its
citizens; and lastly, in his whole demeanour and course of action, we
have sufficient evidence, that his idea of the messianic kingdom was
peculiar to himself. There is not so ready a counterpoise for the
difficulty, that Jesus sent the apostles, with whose conceptions he
could not be unacquainted, to announce the Messiah’s kingdom throughout
the land (Matt. x.). These, who disputed which of them should be
greatest in the kingdom of their master (Matt, xviii. 1; Luke xxii.
24); of whom two petitioned for the seats at the right and left of the
messianic king (Mark x. 35 ff.); who, even after the death and
resurrection of Jesus, expected a restoration of the kingdom to Israel
(Acts i. 6);—these had clearly from the beginning to the end of their
intercourse with Jesus, no other than the popular notion of the
Messiah; when, therefore, Jesus despatched them as heralds of his
kingdom, it seems necessarily a part of his design, that they should
disseminate in all places their political messianic idea.
Among the discourses of Jesus there is one especially worthy of note in
Matt. xix. 28 (comp. Luke xxii. 30). In reply to the question of Peter,
We have left all and followed thee; what shall we have therefore? Jesus
promises to his disciples that in the παλιγγενεσία, when the Son of man
shall sit on his throne, they also shall sit on twelve thrones, judging
the twelve tribes of Israel. That the literal import of this promise
formed part of the tissue of the messianic hopes cherished by the Jews
of that period, is not to be controverted. It is argued, however, that
Jesus spoke figuratively on this occasion, and only employed familiar
Jewish images to convey to the apostles an assurance, that the
sacrifices they had made here would be richly compensated in their
future life by a participation in his glory. [787] But the disciples
must have understood the promise literally, when, even after the
resurrection of Jesus, they harboured anticipations of worldly
greatness; and as Jesus had had many proofs of this propensity, he
would hardly have adopted such language, had he not intended to nourish
their temporal hopes. The supposition that he did so merely to animate
the courage of his disciples, without himself sharing their views,
imputes duplicity to Jesus;—a duplicity in this case quite gratuitous,
since, as Olshausen justly observes, Peter’s question would have been
satisfactorily answered by any other laudatory acknowledgment of the
devotion of the disciples. Hence it appears a fair inference, that
Jesus himself shared the Jewish expectations which he here sanctions:
but expositors have made the most desperate efforts to escape from this
unwelcome conclusion. Some have resorted to an arbitrary alteration of
the reading; [788] others to the detection of irony, directed against
the disproportion between the pretensions of the disciples, and their
trivial services, [789] others to different expedients, but all more
unnatural than the admission, that Jesus, in accordance with Jewish
ideas, here promises his disciples the dignity of being his assessors
in his visible messianic judgment, and that he thus indicates the
existence of a national element in his notion of the Messiah’s kingdom.
It is observable, too, that in the Acts (i. 7), Jesus, even after his
resurrection, does not deny that he will restore the kingdom to Israel,
but merely discourages curiosity as to the times and seasons of its
restoration.
Among the actions of Jesus, his last entry into Jerusalem (Matt. xxi. 1
ff.) is especially appealed to as a proof that his plan was partly
political. According to the Fragmentist, all the circumstances point to
a political design: the time which Jesus chose,—after a sufficiently
long preparation of the people in the provinces; the Passover, which
they visited in great numbers; the animal on which he rode, and by
which, from a popular interpretation of a passage in Zechariah, he
announced himself as the destined King of Jerusalem; the approval which
he pronounces when the people receive him with a royal greeting; the
violent procedure which he hazards in the temple; and finally, his
severe philippic on the higher class of the Jews (Matt. xxiii.), at the
close of which he seeks to awe them into a reception of him as their
messianic king, by the threat that he will show himself to them no more
in any other guise.
§ 66.
DATA FOR THE PURE SPIRITUALITY OF THE MESSIANIC PLAN OF JESUS. BALANCE.
Nowhere in our evangelical narratives is there a trace of Jesus having
sought to form a political party. On the contrary, he withdraws from
the eagerness of the people to make him a king (John vi. 15); he
declares that the messianic kingdom comes not with observation, but is
to be sought for in the recesses of the soul (Luke xvii. 20 f.); it is
his principle to unite obedience to God with obedience to temporal
authority, even when heathen (Matt. xxii. 21); on his solemn entry into
the capital, he chooses to ride the animal of peace, and afterwards
escapes from the multitude, instead of using their excitement for the
purposes of his ambition; lastly, he maintains before his judge, that
his kingdom is not from hence οὐκ ἐντεῦθεν, is not of this world οὐκ ἐκ
τοῦ κόσμου τούτου (John xvi. 36), and we have no reason in this
instance to question either his or the Evangelist’s veracity.
Thus we have a series of indications to counterbalance those detailed
in the preceding section. The adversaries of Christianity have held
exclusively to the arguments for a political, or rather a
revolutionary, project, on the part of Jesus, while the orthodox
theologians adhere to those only which tell for the pure spirituality
of his plan: [790] and each party has laboured to invalidate by
hermeneutical skill the passages unfavourable to its theory. It has of
late been acknowledged that both are equally partial, and that there is
need of arbitration between them.
This has been attempted chiefly by supposing an earlier and a later
form of the plan of Jesus. [791] Although, it has been said, the moral
improvement and religious elevation of his people were from the first
the primary object of Jesus, he nevertheless, in the beginning of his
public life, cherished the hope of reviving, by means of this internal
regeneration, the external glories of the theocracy, when he should be
acknowledged by his nation as the Messiah, and thereby be constituted
the supreme authority in the state. But in the disappointment of this
hope, he recognised the divine rejection of every political element in
his plan, and thenceforth refined it into pure spirituality. It is held
to be a presumption in favour of such a change in the plan of Jesus,
that there is a gladness diffused over his first appearance, which
gives place to melancholy in the latter period of his ministry; that
instead of the acceptable year of the Lord, announced in his initiative
address at Nazareth, sorrow is the burthen of his later discourses, and
he explicitly says of Jerusalem, that he had attempted to save it, but
that now its fall, both religious and political, was inevitable, As,
however, the evangelists do not keep the events and discourses proper
to these distinct periods within their respective limits, but happen to
give the two most important data for the imputation of a political
design to Jesus (namely the promise of the twelve thrones and the
public entrance into the capital), near the close of his life; we must
attribute to these writers a chronological confusion, as in the case of
the relation which the views of Jesus bore to the messianic idea in
general: unless as an alternative it be conceivable, that Jesus uttered
during the same period the declarations which seem to indicate, and
those which disclaim, a political design.
This, in our apprehension, is not inconceivable; for Jesus might
anticipate a καθίζεσθαι ἐπὶ θρόνους for himself and his disciples, not
regarding the means of its attainment as a political revolution, but as
a revolution to be effected by the immediate interposition of God. That
such was his view may be inferred from his placing that judiciary
appearance of his disciples in the παλιγγενεσία; for this was not a
political revolution, any more than a spiritual regeneration,—it was a
resurrection of the dead, which God was to effect through the agency of
the Messiah, and which was to usher in the messianic times. [792] Jesus
certainly expected to restore the throne of David, and with his
disciples to govern a liberated people; in no degree, however, did he
rest his hopes on the sword of human adherents (Luke xxii. 38; Matt.
xxvi. 52), but on the legions of angels, which his heavenly Father
could send him (Matt. xxvi. 53). Wherever he speaks of coming in his
messianic glory, he depicts himself surrounded by angels and heavenly
powers (Matt. xvi. 27, xxiv. 30 f., xxv. 31; John i. 52); before the
majesty of the Son of man, coming in the clouds of heaven, all nations
are to bow without the coercion of the sword, and at the sound of the
angel’s trumpet, are to present themselves, with the awakened dead,
before the judgment-seat of the Messiah and his twelve apostles. All
this Jesus would not bring to pass of his own will, but he waited for a
signal from his heavenly Father, who alone knew the appropriate time
for this catastrophe (Mark xiii. 32), and he apparently was not
disconcerted when his end approached without his having received the
expected intimation. They who shrink from this view, merely because
they conceive that it makes Jesus an enthusiast, [793] will do well to
reflect how closely such hopes corresponded with the long cherished
messianic idea of the Jews, [794] and how easily, in that day of
supernaturalism, and in a nation segregated by the peculiarities of its
faith, an idea, in itself extravagant, if only it were consistent, and
had, in some of its aspects, truth and dignity, might allure even a
reasonable man beneath its influence.
With respect to that which awaits the righteous after
judgment,—everlasting life in the kingdom of the Father,—it is true
that Jesus, in accordance with Jewish notions, [795] compares it to a
feast (Matt. viii. 11, xxii. 2 ff.), at which he hopes himself to taste
the fruit of the vine (Matt. xxvi. 29), and to celebrate the Passover
(Luke xxii. 16); but his declaration that in the αἰὼν μέλλων the
organic relation between the sexes will cease, and men will be like the
angels (ἰσάγγελοι, Luke xx. 35 ff.), seems more or less to reduce the
above discourses to a merely symbolical significance.
Thus we conclude that the messianic hope of Jesus was not political,
nor even merely earthly, for he referred its fulfilment to supernatural
means, and to a supermundane theatre (the regenerated earth): as little
was it a purely spiritual hope, in the modern sense of the term, for it
included important and unprecedented changes in the external condition
of things: but it was the national, theocratic hope, spiritualized and
ennobled by his own peculiar moral and religious views.
§ 67.
THE RELATION OF JESUS TO THE MOSAIC LAW.
The Mosaic institutions were actually extinguished in the church of
which Jesus was the founder; hence it is natural to suppose that their
abolition formed a part of his design:—a reach of vision, beyond the
horizon of the ceremonial worship of his age and country, of which
apologists have been ever anxious to prove that he was possessed. [796]
Neither are there wanting speeches and actions of Jesus which seem to
favour their effort. Whenever he details the conditions of
participation in the kingdom of heaven, as in the Sermon on the Mount,
he insists, not on the observance of the Mosaic ritual, but on the
spirit of religion and morality; he attaches no value to fasting,
praying, and almsgiving, unless accompanied by a corresponding bent of
mind (Matt. vi. 1–18); the two main elements of the Mosaic worship,
sacrifice and the keeping of sabbaths and feasts, he not only nowhere
enjoins, but puts a marked slight on the former, by commending the
scribe who declared that the love of God and one’s neighbour was more
than whole burnt-offerings and sacrifices, as one not far from the
kingdom of God (Mark xii. 23 f.), [797] and he ran counter in action as
well as in speech to the customary mode of celebrating the Sabbath
(Matt. xii. 1–13; Mark ii. 23–28, iii. 1–5; Luke vi. 1–10, xiii. 10
ff., xiv. 1 ff.; John v. 5 ff., vii. 22, ix. 1 ff.), of which in his
character of Son of Man he claimed to be Lord. The Jews, too, appear to
have expected a revision of the Mosaic law by their Messiah. [798] A
somewhat analogous sense is couched in the declarations attributed by
the fourth Evangelist to Jesus (ii. 19); Matthew (xxvi. 61) and Mark
(xiv. 58) represent him as being accused by false witnesses of saying,
I am able to destroy (John, destroy) the temple of God (Mark, that is
made with hands), and to build it in three days (Mark, I will build
another made without hands). The author of the Acts has something
similar as an article of accusation against Stephen, but instead of the
latter half of the sentence it is thus added, and (he, i.e. Jesus)
shall change the customs which Moses delivered us; and perhaps this may
be regarded as an authentic comment on the less explicit text. In
general it may be said that to one who, like Jesus, is so far alive to
the absolute value of the internal compared with the external, of the
bent of the entire disposition compared with isolated acts, that he
pronounces the love of God and our neighbour to be the essence of the
law (Matt. xxii. 36 ff.),—to him it cannot be a secret, that all
precepts of the law which do not bear on these two points are
unessential. But the argument apparently most decisive of a design on
the part of Jesus to abolish the Mosaic worship, is furnished by his
prediction that the temple, the centre of Jewish worship (Matt. xxiv. 2
parall.), would be destroyed, and that the adoration of God would be
freed from local fetters, and become purely spiritual (John iv. 21
ff.).
The above, however, presents only one aspect of the position assumed by
Jesus towards the Mosaic law; there are also data for the belief that
he did not meditate the overthrow of the ancient constitution of his
country. This side of the question has been, at a former period, and
from easily-conceived reasons, the one which the enemies of
Christianity in its ecclesiastical form, have chosen to exhibit; [799]
but it is only in recent times that, the theological horizon being
extended, the unprejudiced expositors of the church [800] have
acknowledged its existence. In the first place, during his life Jesus
remains faithful to the paternal law; he attends the synagogue on the
sabbath, journeys to Jerusalem at the time of the feast, and eats of
the paschal lamb with his disciples. It is true that he heals on the
sabbath, allows his disciples to pluck ears of corn (Matt. xii. 1 ff.),
and requires no fasting or washing before meat in his society (Matt.
iv. 14, xv. 2). But the Mosaic law concerning the sabbath simply
prescribed cessation from common labour, מְלָאכָה (Exod. xx. 8 ff.,
xxxi. 12 ff., Deut. v. 12 ff.), including ploughing, reaping (Exod.
xxxiv. 21), gathering of sticks (Num. xv. 32 ff.), and similar work,
and it was only the spirit of petty observance, the growth of a later
age, that made it an offence to perform cures, or pluck a few ears of
corn. [801] The washing of hands before eating was but a rabbinical
custom; [802] in the law one general yearly fast was alone prescribed
(Lev. xvi. 29 ff., xxiii. 27 ff.) and no private fasting required;
hence Jesus cannot be convicted of infringing the precepts of Moses.
[803] In that very Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus exalts spiritual
religion so far above all ritual, he clearly presupposes the
continuation of sacrifices (Matt. v. 23 f.), and declares that he is
not come to destroy the law and the prophets, but to fulfil (Matt. v.
17). Even if πληρῶσαι, in all probability, refers chiefly to the
accomplishment of the Old Testament prophecies, οὐκ ἦλθον καταλῦσαι
must at the same time be understood of the conservation of the Mosaic
law, since in the context, perpetuity is promised to its smallest
letter, and he who represents its lightest precept as not obligatory,
is threatened with the lowest rank in the kingdom of heaven. [804] In
accordance with this, the apostles adhered strictly to the Mosaic law,
even after the feast of Pentecost; they went at the hour of prayer into
the temple (Acts iii. 1), clung to the synagogues and to the Mosaic
injunctions respecting food (x. 14), and were unable to appeal to any
express declaration of Jesus as a sanction for the procedure of
Barnabas and Paul, when the judaizing party complained of their
baptizing Gentiles without laying on them the burthen of the Mosaic
law.
This apparent contradiction in the conduct and language of Jesus has
been apologetically explained by the supposition, that not only the
personal obedience of Jesus to the law, but also his declarations in
its favour, were a necessary concession to the views of his
cotemporaries, who would at once have withdrawn their confidence from
him, had he announced himself as the destroyer of their holy and
venerated law. [805] We allow that the obedience of Jesus to the law in
his own person, might be explained in the same way as that of Paul,
which, on his own showing, was a measure of mere expediency (1 Cor. ix.
20, comp. Acts xvi. 3). But the strong declarations of Jesus concerning
the perpetuity of the law, and the guilt of him who dares to violate
its lightest precept, cannot possibly be derived from the principle of
concession; for to pronounce that indispensable, which one secretly
holds superfluous, and which one even seeks to bring gradually into
disuse, would, leaving honesty out of the question, be in the last
degree injudicious.
Hence others have made a distinction between the moral and the ritual
law, and referred the declaration of Jesus that he wished not to
abrogate the law, to the former alone, which he extricated from a web
of trivial ceremonies, and embodied in his own example. [806] But such
a distinction is not found in those striking passages from the Sermon
on the Mount; rather in the νόμος and προφῆται, the law and the
prophets, we have the most comprehensive designation of the whole
religious constitution of the Old Testament, [807] and under the most
trivial commandment, and the smallest letter of the law, alike
pronounced imperishable, we cannot well understand anything else than
the ceremonial precepts. [808]
A happier distinction is that between really Mosaic institutes, and
their traditional amplifications. [809] It is certain that the sabbath
cures of Jesus, his neglect of the pedantic ablutions before eating,
and the like, ran counter, not to Moses, but to later rabbinical
requirements, and several discourses of Jesus turn upon this
distinction. Matt. xv. 3 ff., Jesus places the commandment of God in
opposition to the tradition of the elders, and Matt. xxiii. 23, he
declares that where they are compatible, the former may be observed
without rejecting the latter, in which case he admonishes the people to
do all that the scribes and Pharisees enjoin; where, on the contrary,
either the one or the other only can be respected, he decides that it
is better to transgress the tradition of the elders, than the
commandment of God as given by Moses (Matt. xv. 3 ff.). He describes
the mass of traditional precepts, as a burthen grievous to be borne,
which he would remove from the oppressed people, substituting his own
light burthen and easy yoke; whence it may be seen, that with all his
forbearance towards existing institutions, so far as they were not
positively pernicious, it was his intention that all these commandments
of men, as plants which his heavenly Father had not planted, should be
rooted up (xv. 9, 13). The majority of the Pharisaical precepts
referred to externals, and had the effect of burying the noble morality
of the Mosaic law under a heap of ceremonial observances; a gift to the
temple sufficed to absolve the giver from his filial duties (xv. 5),
and the payment of tithe of anise and cummin superseded justice, mercy,
and faith (xxiii. 23). Hence this distinction is in some degree
identical with the former, since in the rabbinical institutes it was
their merely ceremonial tendency that Jesus censured, while, in the
Mosaic law, it was the kernel of religion and morality that he chiefly
valued. It must only not be contended that he regarded the Mosaic law
as permanent solely in its spiritual part, for the passages quoted,
especially from the Sermon on the Mount, clearly show that he did not
contemplate the abolition of the merely ritual precepts.
Jesus, supposing that he had discerned morality and the spiritual
worship of God to be the sole essentials in religion, must have
rejected all which, being merely ritual and formal, had usurped the
importance of a religious obligation, and under this description must
fall a large proportion of the Mosaic precepts; but it is well known
how slowly such consequences are deduced, when they come into collision
with usages consecrated by antiquity. Even Samuel, apparently, was
aware that obedience is better than sacrifice (1 Sam. xv. 22), and
Asaph, that an offering of thanksgiving is more acceptable to God than
one of slain animals (Ps. 1.); yet how long after were sacrifices
retained together with true obedience, or in its stead! Jesus was more
thoroughly penetrated with this conviction than those ancients; with
him, the true commandments of God in the Mosaic law were simply, Honour
thy father and thy mother, Thou shalt not kill, etc., and above all,
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbour
as thyself. But his deep-rooted respect for the sacred book of the law,
caused him, for the sake of these essential contents, to honour the
unessential; which was the more natural, as in comparison with the
absurdly exaggerated pedantry of the traditional observances, the
ritual of the Pentateuch must have appeared highly simple. To honour
this latter part of the law as of Divine origin, but to declare it
abrogated on the principle, that in the education of the human race,
God finds necessary for an earlier period an arrangement which is
superfluous for a later one, implies that idea of the law as a
schoolmaster, νόμος παιδαγωγὸς (Gal. iii. 24), which seems first to
have been developed by the Apostle Paul; nevertheless, its germ lies in
the declaration of Jesus, that God had permitted to the early Hebrews,
on account of the hardness of their hearts (Matt. xix. 8 f.), many
things which, in a more advanced state of culture, were inadmissible.
A similar limitation of the duration of the law is involved in the
predictions of Jesus (if indeed they were uttered by Jesus, a point
which we have to discuss), that the temple would be destroyed at his
approaching advent (Matt. xxiv. parall.), and that devotion would be
freed from all local restrictions (John iv.); for with these must fall
the entire Mosaic system of external worship. This is not contradicted
by the declaration that the law would endure until heaven and earth
should pass away (Matt. v. 18), for the Hebrew associated the fall of
his state and sanctuary with the end of the old world or dispensation,
so that the expressions, so long as the temple stands, and so long as
the world stands, were equivalent. [810] It is true that the words of
Jesus, Luke xvi. 16, ὁ νόμος καὶ οἱ προφῆται ἕως Ἰωάννου, seem to
imply, that the appearance of the Baptist put an end to the validity of
the law; but this passage loses its depreciatory sense when compared
with its parallel, Matt xi. 13. On the other hand, Luke xvi. 17
controls Matt. v. 18, and reduces it to a mere comparison between the
stability of the law, and that of heaven and earth. The only question
then is, in which of the gospels are the two passages more correctly
stated? As given in the first, they intimate that the law would retain
its supremacy until, and not after, the close of the old dispensation.
With this agrees the prediction, that the temple would be destroyed;
for the spiritualization of religion, and, according to Stephen’s
interpretation, the abolition of the Mosaic law, which were to be the
results of that event, were undoubtedly identified by Jesus with the
commencement of the αἰὼν μέλλων of the Messiah. Hence it appears, that
the only difference between the view of Paul and that of Jesus is this:
that the latter anticipated the extinction of the Mosaic system as a
concomitant of his glorious advent or return to the regenerated earth,
while the former believed its abolition permissible on the old,
unregenerated earth, in virtue of the Messiah’s first advent. [811]
§ 68.
SCOPE OF THE MESSIANIC PLAN OF JESUS. RELATION TO THE GENTILES.
Although the church founded by Jesus did, in fact, early extend itself
beyond the limits of the Jewish people, there are yet indications which
might induce a belief that he did not contemplate such an extension.
[812] When he sends the twelve on their first mission, his command is,
Go not into the way of the Gentiles—Go rather to the lost sheep of the
house of Israel (Matt. x. 5 f.). That Matthew alone has this
injunction, and not the two other synoptists, is less probably
explained by the supposition that the Hebrew author of the first gospel
interpolated it, than by the opposite one, namely, that it was wilfully
omitted by the Hellenistic authors of the second and third gospels.
For, as the judaizing tendency of Matthew is not so marked that he
assigns to Jesus the intention of limiting the messianic kingdom to the
Jews; as, on the contrary, he makes Jesus unequivocally foretell the
calling of the Gentiles (viii. 11 f., xxi. 33 ff., xxii. 1 ff., xxviii.
19 f.): he had no motive for fabricating this particularizing addition;
but the two other Evangelists had a strong one for its omission, in the
offence which it would cause to the Gentiles already within the fold.
Its presence in Matthew, however, demands an explanation, and
expositors have thought to furnish one by supposing the injunction of
Jesus to be a measure of prudence. [813] It is unquestionable that,
even if the plan of Jesus comprehended the Gentiles as well as the
Jews, he must at first, if he would not for ever ruin his cause with
his fellow-countrymen, adopt, and prescribe to the disciples, a rule of
national exclusiveness. This necessity on his part might account for
his answer to the Canaanitish woman, whose daughter he refuses to heal,
because he was only sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel
(Matt. xv. 24), were it not that the boon which he here denies is not a
reception into the messianic kingdom, but a temporal benefit, such as
even Elijah and Elisha had conferred on those who were not Israelites
(1 Kings xvii. 9 ff.; 2 Kings v. 1 ff.)—examples to which Jesus
elsewhere appeals (Luke iv. 25 ff.). Hence the disciples thought it
natural and unobjectionable to grant the woman’s petition, and it could
not be prudential considerations that withheld Jesus, for a time, from
compliance. That an aversion to the Gentiles may not appear to be his
motive, it has been conjectured [814] that Jesus, wishing to preserve
an incognito in that country, avoided the performance of any messianic
work. But such a design of concealment is only mentioned by Mark (vii.
25), who represents it as being defeated by the entreaties of the
woman, contrary to the inclinations of Jesus; and as this Evangelist
omits the declaration of Jesus, that he was not sent but to the lost
sheep of the house of Israel, we must suspect that he was guided by the
wish to supply a less offensive motive for the conduct of Jesus, rather
than by historical accuracy. Had Jesus really been influenced by the
motive which Mark assigns, he must at once have alleged it to his
disciples instead of a merely ostensible one, calculated to strengthen
their already rigid exclusiveness. We should therefore rather listen to
the opinion that Jesus sought, by his repeated refusal, to prove the
faith of the woman, and furnish an occasion for its exhibition, [815]
if we could find in the text the slightest trace of mere dissimulation;
and none of a real change of mind. [816] Even Mark, bent as he was on
softening the features of the incident, cannot have thought of a
dissimulation of this kind; otherwise, instead of omitting the harsh
words and making the inadequate addition, and would have no man know
it, he would have removed the offence in the most satisfactory manner,
by an observation such as, he said this to prove her (comp. John vi.
6). Thus it must be allowed that Jesus in this case seems to share the
antipathy of his countrymen towards the Gentiles, nay, his antipathy
seems to be of a deeper stamp than that of his disciples; unless their
advocacy of the woman be a touch from the pencil of tradition, for the
sake of contrast and grouping.
This narrative, however, is neutralized by another, in which Jesus is
said to act in a directly opposite manner. The centurion of Capernaum,
also a Gentile (as we gather from the remarks of Jesus), has scarcely
complained of a distress similar to that of the Canaanitish woman, when
Jesus himself volunteers to go and heal his servant (Matt. viii. 5).
If, then, Jesus has no hesitation, in this instance, to exercise his
power of healing in favour of a heathen, how comes it that he refuses
to do so in another quite analogous case? Truly if the relative
position of the two narratives in the gospels have any weight, he must
have shown himself more harsh and narrow at the later period than at
the earlier one. Meanwhile, this single act of benevolence to a
Gentile, standing as it does in inexplicable contradiction to the
narrative above examined, cannot prove, in opposition to the command
expressly given to the disciples, not to go to the Gentiles, that Jesus
contemplated their admission as such into the messianic kingdom.
Even the prediction of Jesus that the kingdom of heaven would be taken
from the Jews and given to the Gentiles, does not prove this. In the
above interview with the centurion of Capernaum, Jesus declares that
many shall come from the east and the west, and sit down with the
patriarchs in the kingdom of heaven, while the children of the kingdom
(obviously the Jews), for whom it was originally designed, will be cast
out (Matt. viii. 11 f.). Yet more decidedly, when applying the parable
of the husbandmen in the vineyard, he warns his countrymen that the
kingdom of God shall be taken from them, and given to a nation bringing
forth the fruits thereof (Matt. xxi. 43). All this may be understood in
the sense intended by the prophets, in their promises that the
messianic kingdom would extend to all nations; namely, that the
Gentiles would turn to the worship of Jehovah, embrace the Mosaic
religion in its entire form, and afterwards be received into the
Messiah’s kingdom. It would accord very well with this expectation,
that, prior to such a conversion, Jesus should forbid his disciples to
direct their announcement of his kingdom to the Gentiles.
But in the discourses concerning his re-appearance, Jesus regards the
publication of the gospel to all nations as one of the circumstances
that must precede that event (Matt. xxiv. 14; Mark xiii. 10); and after
his resurrection, according to the synoptists, he gave his disciples
the command, Go ye, and teach all nations, baptizing them, etc. (Matt.
xxviii. 19; Mark xvi. 15; Luke xxiv. 47); i.e. go to them with the
offer of the Messiah’s kingdom, even though they may not beforehand
have become Jews. Not only, however, do the disciples, after the first
Pentecost, neglect to execute this command, but when a case is thrust
on them which offers them an opportunity for compliance with it, they
act as if they were altogether ignorant that such a direction had been
given by Jesus (Acts x., xi.). The heathen centurion Cornelius, worthy,
from his devout life, of a reception into the messianic community, is
pointed out by an angel to the Apostle Peter. But because it was not
hidden from God, with what difficulty the apostle would be induced to
receive a heathen, without further preliminary, into the Messiah’s
kingdom, he saw it needful to prepare him for such a step by a
symbolical vision. In consequence of such an admonition Peter goes to
Cornelius; but to impel him to baptize him and his family, he needs a
second sign, the pouring out of the Holy Ghost on these uncircumcised.
When, subsequently, the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem call him to
account for this reception of Gentiles, Peter appeals in his
justification solely to the recent vision, and to the Holy Ghost given
to the centurion’s family. Whatever judgment we may form of the
credibility of this history, it is a memorial of the many deliberations
and contentions which it cost the apostles after the departure of
Jesus, to convince themselves of the eligibility of Gentiles for a
participation in the kingdom of their Christ, and the reasons which at
last brought them to a decision. Now if Jesus had given so explicit a
command as that above quoted, what need was there of a vision to
encourage Peter to its fulfilment? or, supposing the vision to be a
legendary investiture of the natural deliberations of the disciples,
why did they go about in search of the reflection, that all men ought
to be baptized, because before God all men and all animals, as his
creatures, are clean, if they could have appealed to an express
injunction of Jesus? Here, then, is the alternative: if Jesus himself
gave this command, the disciples cannot have been led to the admission
of the Gentiles by the means narrated in Acts x., xi.; if, on the other
hand, that narrative is authentic, the alleged command of Jesus cannot
be historical. Our canon decides for the latter proposition. For that
the subsequent practice and pre-eminent distinction of the Christian
Church, its accessibility to all nations, and its indifference to
circumcision or uncircumcision, should have lain in the mind of its
founder, is the view best adapted to exalt and adorn Jesus; while that,
after his death, and through the gradual development of relations, the
church, which its Founder had designed for the Gentiles only in so far
as they became Jews, should break through these limits, is in the
simple, natural, and therefore the probable course of things.
§ 69.
RELATION OF THE MESSIANIC PLAN OF JESUS TO THE SAMARITANS. HIS
INTERVIEW WITH THE WOMAN OF SAMARIA.
There is the same apparent contradiction in the position which Jesus
took, and prescribed to his disciples, towards the inhabitants of
Samaria. While in his instructions to his disciples (Matt. x. 5), he
forbids them to visit any city of the Samaritans, we read in John (iv.)
that Jesus himself in his journey through Samaria laboured as the
Messiah with great effect, and ultimately stayed two days in a
Samaritan town; and in the Acts (i. 8), that before his ascension he
charged the disciples to be his witnesses, not only in Jerusalem and in
all Judea, but also in Samaria. That Jesus did not entirely shun
Samaria, as that prohibition might appear to intimate, is evident from
Luke ix. 52 (comp. xvii. 11), where his disciples bespeak lodgings for
him in a Samaritan village, when he has determined to go to Jerusalem;
a circumstance which accords with the information of Josephus, that
those Galileans who journeyed to the feasts usually went through
Samaria. [817] That Jesus was not unfavourable to the Samaritans, nay,
that in many respects he acknowledged their superiority to the Jews, is
evident from his parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke x. 30 ff.); he
also bestows a marked notice on the case of a Samaritan, who, among ten
cleansed, was the only one that testified his gratitude (Luke xvii.
16); and, if we may venture on such a conclusion from John iv. 25, and
subsequent records, [818] the inhabitants of Samaria themselves had
some tincture of the messianic idea.
However natural it may appear that Jesus should avail himself of this
susceptible side of the Samaritans, by opportunely announcing to them
the messianic kingdom; the aspect which the four Evangelists bear to
each other on this subject must excite surprise. Matthew has no
occasion on which Jesus comes in contact with the Samaritans, or even
mentions them, except in the prohibition above quoted; Mark is more
neutral than Matthew, and has not even that prohibition; Luke has two
instances of contact, one of them unfavourable, the other favourable,
together with the parable in which Jesus presents a Samaritan as a
model, and his approving notice of the gratitude of one whom he had
healed; John, finally, has a narrative in which Jesus appears in a very
intimate and highly favourable relation to the Samaritans. Are all
these various accounts well founded? If so, how could Jesus at one time
prohibit his disciples from including the Samaritans in the messianic
plan, and at another time, himself receive them without hesitation?
Moreover, if the chronological order of the Evangelists deserve regard,
the ministry of Jesus in Samaria must have preceded the prohibition
contained in his instructions to his disciples on their first mission.
For the scene of that mission being Galilee, and there being no space
for its occurrence during the short stay which, according to the fourth
Evangelist, Jesus made in that province before the first Passover (ii.
1–13), it must be placed after that Passover; and, as the visit to
Samaria was made on his journey, after that visit also. How, then,
could Jesus, after having with the most desirable issue, personally
taught in Samaria, and presented himself as the Messiah, forbid his
disciples to carry thither their messianic tidings? On the other hand,
if the scenes narrated by John occurred after the command recorded by
Matthew, the disciples, instead of wondering that Jesus talked so
earnestly with a woman (John iv. 27), ought rather to have wondered
that he held any converse with a Samaritan. [819]
Since then of the two extreme narratives at least, in Matthew and John,
neither presupposes the other, we must either doubt the authenticity of
the exclusive command of Jesus, or of his connexion with the
inhabitants of Samaria.
In this conflict between the gospels, we have again the advantage of
appealing to the Book of Acts as an umpire. Before Peter, at the divine
instigation, had received the firstfruits of the Gentiles into the
Messiah’s kingdom, Philip the deacon, being driven from Jerusalem by
the persecution of which Stephen’s death was the commencement,
journeyed to the city of Samaria, where he preached Christ, and by
miracles of all kinds won the Samaritans to the faith, and to the
reception of baptism (Acts viii. 5 ff.). This narrative is a complete
contrast to that of the first admission of the Gentiles: while in the
one there was need of a vision, and a special intimation from the
Spirit, to bring Peter into communication with the heathens; in the
other, Philip, without any precedent, unhesitatingly baptizes the
Samaritans. And lest it should be said that the deacon was perhaps of a
more liberal spirit than the apostle, we have Peter himself coming
forthwith to Samaria in company with John,—an incident which forms
another point of opposition between the two narratives; for, while the
first admission of the Gentiles makes a highly unfavourable impression
on the mother church at Jerusalem, the report that Samaria had received
the word of God meets with so warm an approval there, that the two most
distinguished apostles are commissioned to confirm and consummate the
work begun by Philip. The tenor of this proceeding makes it not
improbable that there was a precedent for it in the conduct of Jesus,
or at least a sanction in his expressions.
The narrative in the fourth Gospel (iv.) would form a perfect precedent
in the conduct of Jesus, but we have yet to examine whether it bears
the stamp of historical credibility. We do not, with the author of the
Probabilia, stumble at the designation of the locality, and the opening
of the conversation between Jesus and the woman; [820] but from v. 16
inclusively, there are, as impartial expositors confess, [821] many
grave difficulties. The woman had entreated Jesus to give her of the
water which was for ever to extinguish thirst, and Jesus immediately
says, Go, call thy husband. Why so? It has been said that Jesus, well
knowing that the woman had no lawful husband, sought to shame her, and
bring her to repentance. [822] Lücke, disapproving the imputation of
dissimulation to Jesus, conjectures that, perceiving the woman’s
dulness, he hoped by summoning her husband, possibly her superior in
intelligence, to create an opportunity for a more beneficial
conversation. But if Jesus, as it presently appears, knew that the
woman had not at the time any proper husband, he could not in earnest
desire her to summon him; and if, as Lücke allows, he had that
knowledge in a supernatural manner, it could not be hidden from him,
who knew what was in man, that she would be little inclined to comply
with his injunction. If, however, he had a prescience that what he
required would not be done, the injunction was a feint, and had some
latent object. But that this object was the penitence of the woman
there is no indication in the text, for the ultimate effect on her is
not shame and penitence, but faith in the prophetic insight of Jesus
(v. 19). And this was doubtless what Jesus wished, for the narrative
proceeds as if he had attained his purpose with the woman, and the
issue corresponded to the design. The difficulty here lies, not so much
in what Lücke terms dissimulation,—since this comes under the category
of blameless temptation (πειράζειν), elsewhere occurring,—as in the
violence with which Jesus wrests an opportunity for the display of his
prophetic gifts.
By a transition equally abrupt, the woman urges the conversation to a
point at which the Messiahship of Jesus may become fully evident. As
soon as she has recognised Jesus to be a prophet, she hastens to
consult him on the controversy pending between the Jews and Samaritans,
as to the place appropriated to the true worship of God (v. 20). That
so vivid an interest in this national and religious question is not
consistent with the limited mental and circumstantial condition of the
woman, the majority of modern commentators virtually confess, by their
adoption of the opinion, that her drift in this remark was to turn away
the conversation from her own affairs. [823] If then the implied query
concerning the place for the true worship of God, had no serious
interest for the woman, but was prompted by a false shame calculated to
hinder confession and repentance, those expositors should remember what
they elsewhere repeat to satiety, [824] that in the Gospel of John the
answers of Jesus refer not so much to the ostensible meaning of
questions, as to the under current of feeling of which they are the
indications. In accordance with this method, Jesus should not have
answered the artificial question of the woman as if it had been one of
deep seriousness; he ought rather to have evaded it, and recurred to
the already detected stain on her conscience, which she was now seeking
to hide, in order if possible to bring her to a full conviction and
open avowal of her guilt. But the fact is that the object of the
Evangelist was to show that Jesus had been recognised, not merely as a
prophet, but as the Messiah, and he believed that to turn the
conversation to the question of the legitimate place for the worship of
God, the solution of which was expected from the Messiah, [825] would
best conduce to that end.
Jesus evinces (v. 17) an acquaintance with the past history and present
position of the woman. The rationalists have endeavoured to explain
this by the supposition, that while Jesus sat at the well, and the
woman was advancing from the city, some passer-by hinted to him that he
had better not engage in conversation with her, as she was on the watch
to obtain a sixth husband. [826] But not to insist on the improbability
that a passer-by should hold a colloquy with Jesus on the character of
an obscure woman, the friends as well as the enemies of the fourth
gospel now agree, that every natural explanation of that knowledge on
the part of Jesus, directly counteracts the design of the Evangelist.
[827] For, according to him, the disclosure which Jesus makes of his
privity to the woman’s intimate concerns, is the immediate cause, not
only of her own faith in him, but of that of many inhabitants of the
city (v. 39), and he obviously intends to imply that they were not too
precipitate in receiving him as a prophet, on that ground alone. Thus
in the view of the Evangelist, the knowledge in question was an
effluence of the higher nature of Jesus, and modern supranaturalists
adhere to this explanation, adducing in its support the power which
John attributes to him (ii. 24 f.), of discerning what is in man
without the aid of external testimony. [828] But this does not meet the
case; for Jesus here not only knows what is in the woman,—her present
equivocal state of mind towards him who is not her husband,—he has
cognizance also of the extrinsic fact that she has had five husbands,
of whom we cannot suppose that each had left a distinct image in her
mind traceable by the observation of Jesus. That by means of the
penetrative acumen with which he scrutinized the hearts of those with
whom he had to do, Jesus should also have a prophetic insight into his
own messianic destiny, and the fortunes of his kingdom, may under a
certain view of his person appear probable, and in any case must be
deemed in the highest degree dignified; but that he should be
acquainted, even to the most trivial details, with the adventitious
history of obscure individuals, is an idea that degrades him in
proportion to the exaltation of his prophetic dignity. Such empirical
knowingness (not omniscience) would moreover annihilate the human
consciousness which the orthodox view supposes to co-exist in Jesus.
[829] But the possession of this knowledge, however it may clash with
our conception of dignity and wisdom, closely corresponds to the Jewish
notion of a prophet, more especially of the Messiah; in the Old
Testament, Daniel recites a dream of Nebuchadnezzar, which that monarch
himself had forgotten (Dan. ii.); in the Clementine Homilies, the true
prophet is ὁ πάντοτε πάντα εἰδώς· τὰ μὲν γεγονότα ὡς ἐγένετο, τὰ δὲ
γινόμενα ὡς γίνεται, τὰ δέ ἐσόμενα ὡς ἔσται; [830] and the rabbins
number such a knowledge of personal secrets among the signs of the
Messiah, and observe that from the want of it, Bar-Cocheba was detected
to be a pseudo-Messiah. [831]
Farther on (v. 23) Jesus reveals to the woman what Hase terms the
sublimest principle of his religion, namely, that the service of God
consists in a life of piety; tells her that all ceremonial worship is
about to be abolished; and that he is the personage who will effect
this momentous change, that is, the Messiah. We have already shown it
to be improbable that Jesus, who did not give his disciples to
understand that he was the Messiah until a comparatively late period,
should make an early and distinct disclosure on the subject to a
Samaritan woman. In what respect was she worthy of a communication more
explicit than ever fell to the lot of the disciples? What could induce
Jesus to send roaming into the futurity of religious history, the
contemplation of a woman, whom he should rather have induced to examine
herself, and to ponder on the corruptions of her own heart? Nothing but
the wish to elicit from her, at any cost, and without regard to her
moral benefit, an acknowledgment, not only of his prophetic gifts, but
of his Messiahship; to which end it was necessary to give the
conversation the above direction. But so contracted a design can never
be imputed to Jesus, who, on other occasions, exemplifies a more
suitable mode of dealing with mankind: it is the design of the
glorifying legend, or of an idealizing biographer.
Meanwhile, continues the narrative (v. 27), the disciples of Jesus
returned from the city with provisions, and marvelled that he talked
with a woman, contrary to rabbinical rule. [832] While the woman,
excited by the last disclosure of Jesus, hastens homeward to invite her
fellow-citizens to come and behold the Messiah-like stranger, the
disciples entreat him to partake of the food they have procured; he
answers, I have meat to eat that ye know not of (v. 32). They,
misunderstanding his words, imagine that some person has supplied him
with food in their absence: one of those carnal interpretations of
expressions intended spiritually by Jesus, which are of perpetual
recurrence in the fourth gospel, and are therefore suspicious. Then
follows a discourse on sowing and reaping (v. 35 ff.), which, compared
with v. 37, can only mean that what Jesus has sown, the disciples will
reap. [833] We admit that this is susceptible of the general
interpretation, that the germ of the kingdom of God, which blossomed
and bore fruit under the cultivation of the apostles, was first
deposited in the world by Jesus: but it cannot be denied that a special
application is also intended. Jesus foresees that the woman, who is
hastening towards the city, will procure him an opportunity of sowing
the seed of the gospel in Samaria, and he promises the disciples that
they at a future time shall reap the fruits of his labours. Who is not
here reminded of the propagation of Christianity in Samaria by Philip
and the apostles, as narrated in the Acts? [834] That, even abstracting
all supernaturalism from our idea of the person of Jesus, he might have
foreseen this progress of his cause in Samaria from his knowledge of
its inhabitants, is not to be denied; but as the above figurative
prediction forms part of a whole more than improbable in an historical
point of view, it is equally liable to suspicion, especially as it is
easy to show how it might originate without any foundation in fact.
According to the prevalent tradition of the early church, as recorded
in the synoptical gospels, Jesus laboured personally in Galilee, Judea,
and Perea only,—not in Samaria, which, however, as we learn from the
Acts, embraced the gospel at no remote period from his death. How
natural the tendency to perfect the agency of Jesus, by representing
him to have sown the heavenly seed in Samaria, thus extending his
ministry through all parts of Palestine; to limit the glory of the
apostles and other teachers to that of being the mere reapers of the
harvest in Samaria; and to put this distinction, on a suitable
occasion, into the mouth of Jesus!
The result, then, of our examination of John’s Samaritan narrative is,
that we cannot receive it as a real history: and the impression which
it leaves as a whole tends to the same conclusion. Since Heracleon and
Origen, [835] the more ancient commentators have seldom refrained from
giving the interview of Jesus with the woman of Samaria an allegorical
interpretation, on the ground that the entire scene has a legendary and
poetic colouring. Jesus is seated at a well,—that idyllic locality with
which the old Hebrew legend associates so many critical incidents; at
the identical well, moreover, which a tradition, founded on Gen.
xxxiii. 19, xlviii. 22; Josh. xxiv. 32, reported to have been given by
Jacob to his son Joseph; hence the spot, in addition to its idyllic
interest, has the more decided consecration of national and patriarchal
recollections, and is all the more worthy of being trodden by the
Messiah. At the well Jesus meets with a woman who has come out to draw
water, just as, in the Old Testament, the expectant Eliezer encounters
Rebekah with her pitcher, and as Jacob meets with Rachel, the destined
ancestress of Israel, or Moses with his future wife. Jesus begs of the
woman to let him drink; so does Eliezer of Rebekah; after Jesus has
made himself known to the woman as the Messiah, she runs back to the
city, and fetches her neighbours: so Rebekah, after Eliezer has
announced himself as Abraham’s steward, and Rachel, after she has
discovered that Jacob is her kinsman, hasten homeward to call their
friends to welcome the honoured guest. It is, certainly, not one
blameless as those early mothers in Israel, whom Jesus here encounters;
for this woman came forth as the representative of an impure people,
who had been faithless to their marriage bond with Jehovah, and were
then living in the practice of a false worship; while her good-will,
her deficient moral strength, and her obtuseness in spiritual things,
perfectly typify the actual state of the Samaritans. Thus, the
interview of Jesus with the woman of Samaria is only a poetical
representation of his ministry among the Samaritans narrated in the
sequel; and this is itself a legendary prelude to the propagation of
the gospel in Samaria after the death of Jesus.
Renouncing the event in question as unhistorical, we know nothing of
any connexion formed by Jesus with the Samaritans, and there remain as
indications of his views regarding them, only his favourable notice of
an individual from among them (Luke xvii. 16); his unpropitious
reception in one of their villages (Luke ix. 53); the prohibition with
respect to them, addressed to his disciples (Matt. x. 5); the
eulogistic parable (Luke x. 30 ff.); and his valedictory command, that
the gospel should be preached in Samaria (Acts i. 8). This express
command being subsequent to the resurrection of Jesus, its reality must
remain problematical for us until we have examined the evidence for
that capital fact; and it is to be questioned whether without it, and
notwithstanding the alleged prohibition, the unhesitating conduct of
the apostles, Acts viii., can be explained. Are we then to suppose on
the part of the apostolic history, a cancelling of hesitations and
deliberations that really occurred; or on the part of Matthew, an
unwarranted ascription of national bigotry to Jesus; or, finally, on
the part of Jesus, a progressive enlargement of view?