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 THE 
 
 BIBLIOTHEOA SACRA. 
 
 ARTICLE I. 
 
 THE END OF LUKE'S GOSPEL AND THE BEGINNING OF 
 THE ACTS. TWO STUDIES. 
 
 BT THEODORE D. WOOLSEY, D.D.,LL.D., LATELY PRESIDENT OP TALE COLLEGE. 
 
 I. 
 
 At the close of his Gospel, Luke, or whoever may be the 
 author of the Gospel called by his name, subjoins imme- 
 diately to the account of the risen Christ's visit to the eleven, 
 on the evening of the resurrection day, the narrative of the 
 ascension. In doing this he gives no notice to the reader 
 that any interval of time passed between the two events longer 
 than that between early morning and early evening. At the 
 beginning of the second narrative, however, we find him 
 declaring that the ascension took place forty days after the 
 resurrection, and that there were repeated interviews between 
 Jesus and the apostles in this period of time. If Luke had 
 not written a second book, no other explanation (of the end 
 of the Gospel) could have been admitted, save that he con- 
 ceived of the ascension as taking place on the same day 
 with the resurrection. But the first book has been almost 
 uniformly interpreted by the second. There has been a 
 general agreement that Luke threw together in a summary 
 way, at the close of his first narrative, the last events which 
 he had intended to include in it, without pointing out their 
 distance from one another, — without that historical perspec- 
 tive, in short, which we should expect from a practised 
 
 Vol. XXXIX. No. 156.— October, 1882. 75 
 
594 THE END OF LUKE'S GOSPEL [Oct. 
 
 historian. Perhaps he designed to be more full when he 
 should continue his narrative of the events subsequent to 
 the departure of Christ from the presence of his disciples. 
 This continuation, or second book, he may have already 
 projected, and meanwhile Theophilus, an ' instructed' Chris- 
 tian, had already so much knowledge of the great facts of 
 the life of Christ that a brief notice was all that was here 
 demanded. The ascension pointed in two directions, — 
 towards the life on earth thus glorified at its close, and 
 towards the kingdom of heaven, begun by apostolic labors 
 and by the presence of the Holy Spirit, for which Christ's 
 going away was essential. 
 
 Very little difficulty has been found by most of the com- 
 mentators in attempting to reconcile the two narratives. 
 Thus, Euthymius Zigabenus, in commenting on Luke xxiv. 
 50, simply says : " He [Jesus] led them out not then, but 
 on the fortieth day after the resurrection. For the evangelist 
 passed over (jrapehpafjuev^) the intermediate events." And it 
 is enough to refer to Ellicott's lectures on the life of Christ 
 as expressing the current modern opinion on this point. 
 
 Meyer, however, a careful, able, honest, and Christian 
 scholar, — one who changed many of his opinions between 
 the publication of the first editions of his commentaries and 
 his death, — took quite another view of the relation between 
 the end of Luke and the beginning of Acts — a view which 
 he continued to take as long as he lived. There was a two- 
 fold tradition, he thought ; one of them to the effect that 
 Jesus ascended to heaven on the very day of the resurrection 
 (Luke xxiv. ; Mark xvi.) ; the other, that he remained on 
 earth quite a number of days (Matt. ; John), or, more 
 definitely, forty days (Acts i.) : " Luke in the Gospel fol- 
 lowed the first tradition, but in the history of the apostles 
 the second ; which, therefore, he first became acquainted 
 with after composing his Gospel, or, what is more probable, 
 tli en first made his own." 
 
 We might say here that the first Gospel makes no mention 
 at all of the ascension ; and the same is true of the fourth, 
 
1882.] AND THE BEGINNING OF THE ACTS. 595 
 
 as far as direct historical statement is concerned, although 
 the ascension is referred to more than once. And again, 
 the end of Mark seems to be founded chiefly on Luke, and 
 has in itself, we must believe, no independent authority. 
 Now, as there is no evidence from any other source except 
 the Gospel of Luke of an ascension in the evening of the day 
 of the resurrection, the most that can be said is that Luke 
 supposed when he wrote his Gospel that the ascension fol- 
 lowed the resurrection by a few hours, but that afterwards, 
 when he wrote the Acts, he discovered his mistake, or that 
 he now believed and " made his own " what he had doubted 
 before. 
 
 1. Our first inquiry will be : Can this be by any possibility 
 admitted, if we admit also- (what Meyer decidedly admits) 
 that the Gospel of „Luke and the Acts belong to the same 
 author, which may be' held to be as well established by 
 Zeller, Lekebusch, and others as the authorship of any books 
 of the New Testament, unless some of Paul's Epistles be 
 excepted ? We also assume that the person called Luke, 
 and spoken of in the Acts and in some of the Epistles as 
 Paul's companion, was, as Meyer believes, the author of the 
 two books mentioned. We further assume that the Gospel 
 of Luke, as Meyer holds, was composed between the seventieth 
 and the eightieth year of our era. This, however, is not 
 necessary to our argument ; for if we put it later, as the 
 Tubingen school have tried to do, the probability of two 
 traditions in respect to the time of the ascension becomes 
 less and less. 
 
 This companion of Paul, whom we will call Luke, and 
 who, as nearly everybody holds, in his narrative of events in 
 the life of 'Paul where he uses the pronoun " we " borrows 
 from no other person's journal, records his own companionship 
 with the great apostle, first, in Acts xvi., then again in Acts 
 xxvii. He goes with the apostle from -Philippi on his last 
 journey to Jerusalem, is with him at Caesarea, and went 
 with him to Rome. He was with him when the Epistles to 
 the Ephesians, Colossians, and Philemon were written, and 
 
596 THE END OF LUKE'S GOSPEL [Oct. 
 
 only Luke was at his side when the second letter to Timothy 
 (which I hold to be genuine) was penned, probably near the 
 close of the apostle's life. Thus his attendance on the apostle 
 must have included portions of the time between the years 
 52 and 62 a.d. ; and if the letter to the Colossians belongs 
 to a later period, his intimate acquaintance with the apostle 
 must have begun before the First Epistle to the Corinthians 
 was written, and have continued through several years after- 
 wards. That in those years of close intimacy with Paul 
 Luke had never heard of Christ's spending a number of days 
 on earth after his resurrection, while yet the apostle taught 
 the Corinthians the story of Christ in this shape, seems to 
 be entirely incredible. For it is manifest that the presence 
 of Christ among the twelve on the evening of the resurrection 
 (1 Cor. xv. 5) was that recorded by Luke as then taking 
 place ; and the manifestation of Christ to the five hundred 
 brethren, to James, and to all the apostles were all subsequent 
 to this. How, then, could Luke fail to know of these events 
 of such importance, which Paul knew of, and believed to 
 have taken place after the resurrection evening ? And how 
 could Luke have failed to find accounts of these subsequent 
 events in the narratives to which he refers in the prologue to 
 his Gospel ? 
 
 Considering, then, that the author of Luke's Gospel was 
 one and the same person with the author of the Acts, that 
 he was acquainted with the ascension when he wrote his 
 Gospel, and must have known long before what Paul taught 
 and received, in the many years of his familiar intercourse 
 with the apostle, we can accept of no other explanation save 
 that which looks on the end of chap, xxiv., probably from 
 vs. 44 onward, as containing a summary of occurrences 
 which, if historical exactness had been followed, were sepa- 
 rated from the resurrection by a considerable interval of time. 
 
 2. We may draw from the narrative in Luke xxiv. 13-35 
 a subsidiary argument which makes it probable that Luke 
 himself would have regarded the resurrection day as too 
 short for including the ascension also. Here we are directly 
 
1882.] AND THE BEGINNING OF THE ACTS. 597 
 
 concerned, not with the true state of the case, but with what 
 would naturally be the impressions of the evangelist. The 
 two disciples who went on that day to Bmmaus, distant sixty 
 stadia from Jerusalem, — or somewhat over seven English 
 miles, — reached their destination at a time which is described 
 in the words, " It is towards evening, and the day is far 
 spent." The description of the time may be, we allow, 
 incorrectly translated in the Authorized Version, and in the 
 recently published revision which follows it. 'Ecnrepa, Luke's 
 word for evening, like o^jria, which is alone used by the 
 other evangelists, has a meaning not exactly corresponding 
 with our evening. Both words may include a part of the 
 afternoon ; and here 7rpo9 implies that ecnrepa was not yet 
 reached. It was not the time denoted in the words inum- 
 brante vespera of Tacitus (Hist. iii. 19), nor the hetXr) 
 kairkpa of the Greeks, especially of the later writers (e.g. 
 Appian, Hispan. § 114), the later evening, but an earlier 
 part of the day. So while 6-fyLa in Matt, xxvii. 57 was con- 
 siderably later than the ninth hour, it was in Matt. xiv. 15 
 early enough for the feeding of the multitude before night- 
 fall. And yet in the same chapter it is used to denote a 
 time not long before dark. And again, Luke, in ix. 12, uses 
 the expression tj rj/juepa rjp^aro Kklveiv of a time early in the 
 afternoon, after which the feeding of the five thousand 
 took place. In the present case, it was late enough for the 
 disciples to use the time as a reason why the stranger should 
 stay with them, that is, to stay over night. Let us now 
 suppose that the walk to Bmmaus was commenced before 
 midday, and required three hours nearly for its completion, 
 as the interesting discourse would naturally make the progress 
 somewhat slow, and that an hour or an hour and a half was 
 consumed in the preparations for the meal and at the table. 
 Thus the return of the disciples cannot begin till after three, 
 or about half-past three o'clock. The return, — naturally at a 
 quicker pace than that of the morning's walk, — might be 
 accomplished by half-past five or a little later. Then the 
 interview of the risen Lord, and the walk of a mile and three 
 
598 THE END OF LUKE'S GOSPEL [Oct. 
 
 quarters to Bethany or Olivet, with the moments spent there 
 until the ascension, would bring that event to a time quite 
 too late, in the early part of April, to be fully discernible. 
 
 We do not, of course, mean to say that Luke made such 
 calculations as these, and sifted with such minuteness every 
 part of the history he was writing ; but it is fair to argue that 
 the compression of the events into the small space of time 
 allowed to them ought to have been felt by the evangelist to 
 be a crowding of events together which needed an explanation. 
 Supposing the resurrection and the ascension to be myths, it 
 would be easy to say that their relations to one another 
 might be loosely adjusted ; but if they were real events, no 
 such difference of traditions as Meyer conceives of seems to 
 be possible. And here we can appeal to John xx. 19-23, as 
 containing the narrative of the same scene which Luke records 
 (xxiv. 36), and as harmonizing with it substantially in regard 
 to time. Only the time of day which we have assigned to 
 the narrative in Luke, in order to give all fair weight to the 
 possibility of the ascension taking place that same evening, 
 would need to be brought down somewhat later in the evening. 
 
 3. We cannot reconcile the beginning of the Acts, on 
 Meyer's view, with what one would expect from a conscien- 
 tious man. If Luke had become convinced, after finishing 
 his Gospel, that he had misstated a very important portion 
 of the history of the Lord, he would have corrected the unin- 
 tentional errors to which he had in his Gospel given currency. 
 Instead of doing this, he refers to his Gospel in a way that 
 puts a stamp of truth on it, and he seems unconscious of 
 having said anything which he would now retract. The 
 former narrative contained, he says, an account of the works 
 and words of Jesus until the day when, after giving charges 
 to his apostles, he was taken up into heaven ; and then 
 comes in a statement of what he did, and how long he stayed 
 on the earth in a visible form. If verse 3 is intended as 
 an alteration of his earlier book, it is inserted, we must 
 believe, in an underhand way. He identifies the two accounts, 
 and makes no explanations. He ought certainly to have 
 
1882.] AND THE BEGINNING OF THE ACTS. 599 
 
 omitted, in that case, the words afcpift<o<i and ttjv d<T<baXeiav 
 in his prologue, or have altered the end of the last chapter 
 of his Gospel. 
 
 4. The considerations thus far advanced are confirmed 
 by a peculiarity of Luke's composition, which appears chiefly 
 in the Acts, where as a writer he was freer and more inde- 
 pendent than in the structure of his Gospel. This peculiarity 
 appears when he makes mention • of the same event more 
 than once, and may be described as the introduction of new 
 particulars into the second or repeated narrative. The com- 
 parison of examples of this peculiarity will lead us to 
 conclude that he did this purposely. The cause lay not in 
 his forgetting particulars at the first mention of an occur- 
 rence and supplying the defect afterward, nor in following 
 two manuscript authorities. It may be accounted for by his 
 taste for lively narration, or by a desire to make mention of 
 things at a place where they are especially needed. In sup- 
 port of this last explanation it may be alleged that in nearly 
 all the cases the second mention (or the third, in one 
 instance) is found in speeches coming "directly from the 
 principal person in the history. But we by no means assign 
 any great weight to these suggestions, and are content to set 
 forth the facts as they are. 
 
 Another less obvious peculiarity of Luke is a tendency to 
 summarize, where many writers would have expressed some- 
 thing at greater length that they might avoid a certain 
 incorrectness of expression. The most noticeable example 
 of this is found in Acts xiii. 29 : " And when they [see vs. 
 27] had fulfilled all tilings that were written of him, they 
 took him down from the tree, and laid him in a tomb." 
 Here the several actors who caused the death of Christ are 
 grouped together [see vs. 28] with Joseph of Arimathaea, 
 who actually took him down from the tree and laid him in 
 the tomb. A person unacquainted with the narratives of the 
 Gospels would think that they who procured Christ's con- 
 demnation buried him also ; but Luke did not think so. 
 Joseph was waiting for the kingdom of God, and had not 
 
600 THE END OF LUKE'S GOSPEL [Oct. 
 
 concurred with Christ's enemies ; (see Luke xxiii. 50-53, 
 where /cadeXcop and edijicev are the words used in Acts, only 
 that they are in the singular in the Gospel.) 
 
 Another example, which no one could misunderstand, is 
 found in Luke i. 80, " and the child grew and waxed strong 
 in spirit, and was in the deserts till the day of his showing 
 unto Israel." Here the child was, without question, not in 
 the deserts from his infancy upward, but the three predicates 
 are joined together, for brevity's sake, by one subject, to 
 traihlov. 
 
 But to return to the more important peculiarity of Luke 
 which we noticed just above : the first example of it we draw 
 from chapters x. and xi. of the Acts. In chapter x. certain 
 Christian brethren accompany Peter to Caesarea, and the 
 narrative consists of a simple statement of facts, together 
 with the speech of Peter touching the leading points of the 
 gospel. In xi. 12, " certain brethren " are spoken of as 
 " these six brethren," who went to Jerusalem with the 
 apostle, no doubt, to corroborate his words spoken in his 
 own defence. But of more importance is the new matter 
 in xi. 16, where we first learn that Peter's prejudices against 
 baptizing Cornelius gave way on the recollection <3f the Lord's 
 words (Acts i. 5) respecting the baptism with the Holy Spirit. 
 
 Another instance of this peculiarity is found in the three- 
 fold narrative of the conversion of Paul. Two of these are 
 given to us as coming in public addresses from the apostle 
 himself. Both of them Luke might well have heard ; since 
 he went to Jerusalem with the apostle, where one of them 
 was spoken, and may have been with him at his hearing 
 before Agrippa, as he was certainly with Paul on the voyage 
 to Italy. In the historical narrative (chap, ix.) we find only, 
 "I am Jesus whom thou persecutest," without the words " it 
 is hard for thee to kick against the pricks." These words 
 belong to the speech before Agrippa, and are, without ques- 
 tion, intruded into chap. ix. by some harmonizing copyist, 
 but are found in no Greek manuscript. 
 
 The remaining: new matter in chap, xxvi., besides these 
 
1882.] AND THE BEGINNING OF THE ACTS- 601 
 
 words, is the specification of the time when the vision appeared 
 
 to Paul. " At midday I saw a light from heaven," and 
 
 the very important commission to preach the gospel of for- 
 giveness to the Gentiles. In chap. ix. nothing is said of this ; 
 but Ananias is told by the Lord Jesus that " Saul is a chosen 
 vessel to carry Christ's name before Gentiles and kings and 
 the children of Israel." 
 
 And again, when the speech in chap. xxii. is compared 
 with the narrative in chap. ix. we find several differences, 
 such as that touching the effect of the vision on Paul's com- 
 panions ; the important addition giving an account of the 
 apostle's trance at Jerusalem ; and his new commission to 
 preach the gospel to the Gentiles. This last particular, of 
 course, could not appear in chap. ix. ; but it shows either the 
 freeness of Luke in treating his materials, or his fidelity in 
 introducing his matter when it came in his hearing from the 
 apostle's lips, or possibly his use of detached portions on 
 what he judged the proper occasion, — all of which portions 
 may have been familiar to him in his long intercourse with 
 Paul. He might have narrated everything in chap. ix. ; but 
 he chose, from some reason or other, to reserve it and let it 
 come from the apostle himself. 
 
 Another instance, and the last that we shall adduce, of 
 this peculiarity is furnished by comparing Acts xix. 21, 22 
 with xxiv. 17. From the first passage we learn Paul's purpose 
 to go through Macedonia and Achaia, and that before starting 
 on his journey he had sent two of his helpers to the first 
 mentioned province. From the second passage, it appears 
 that he effected his purpose, and, as he had intended, was 
 soon on his way to Syria (xx. 2, 3), Jerusalem being his 
 objective point. If, now, we possessed no other information 
 in regard to his movements, we should take it to be nothing 
 strange that his tour extended over the countries of Europe 
 where he had planted churches, and that he had the best of 
 reasons for visiting the holy city. On discovering, however, 
 from the Epistles to the Romans (xv. 25-28) and the Corin- 
 thians (1 Cor. xvi. 1 ; 2 Cor. viii. ; ix.), that these journeys, 
 
 Vol. XXXIX. No. 156. 76 
 
602 THE END OF LUKE'S GOSPEL [Oct. 
 
 aside from the ordinary work of the apostle, had in view the 
 special object of making collections for the poor Christians 
 at Jerusalem, we should wonder at Luke's making no mention 
 of this important object, which in its consequences gave a 
 new turn to Paul's life afterward. But as we read onward 
 from the bare notice (xx. 1, 2) of his visit to Macedonia and 
 Greece, and reach his defence of himself before Felix (xxiv. 
 17), we find that it is there brought out, in the words, " Now, 
 after many years, I came to bring alms to my nation, and 
 offerings." Luke postpones this mention of Paul's special 
 business at Jerusalem until after he had been through all the 
 trying scenes there, and had been conveyed to Caesarea. He 
 must have had the facts in his mind all the while, as he had 
 come to Jerusalem with the apostle. 
 
 Is it possible, after the considerations brought forward in 
 this study, to doubt that Luke was perfectly aware, when he 
 closed his first book, that Christ did not ascend to heaven on 
 the evening of the resurrection day ? Is it not quite credible 
 that he made his brief summary of events that took place 
 until after the ascension, with the intention of speaking of 
 them, or of some of them, again in a second narrative, to 
 which they would be an appropriate beginning ? And is not 
 the relation of the end of the Gospel and the beginning of 
 the Acts explained by his habit of composition when he felt 
 called to make a renewed mention of the same portion of the 
 evangelical history ? 
 
 II. 
 
 SOME REMARKS ON ACTS I. 1-12, ESPECIALLY, ON THE WORD 
 cruva\i£6|ievos. 
 
 The ascension of our Lord is the event which separates 
 between his personal and his spiritual presence in the world. 
 When lie committed the interests of the kingdom of heaven 
 on earth directly to his apostles, he left them not alone but 
 promised them the Holy Spirit. This promise was the prin- 
 cipal subject of his last words with them before he went to the 
 garden ; he repeats it after his resurrection. But when the 
 Spirit was to come and, in a sense, to take his place he did not 
 
1882.] AND THE BEGINNING OF THE ACTS. 603 
 
 at once let them know. For a time his plan seems to have been 
 to appear to them as to a whole body, or to portions of them, 
 or to large numbers of believers, or to single persons, in 
 order that the belief in his resurrection might be deeply fixed 
 in their minds. He did not even detain them in Jerusalem 
 during this time of waiting, but suffered them to revisit their 
 homes in Galilee, and recruit themselves, before the great 
 work in Jerusalem should begin. They were, in fact, not 
 yet fitted for their work ; and this interval was the time of 
 preparation. It continued forty days ; during which, from 
 time to time, he appeared to them, or to some of them, 
 making them sure that he still had an earthly form. Luke's 
 expression is, Be rjp,epcov TecraapaKovra oTnav6p,evo<i auTot?, 
 that is, " at intervals through forty days making his appear- 
 ance to them, or letting himself be seen by them." Or as 
 Chrysostom explains it (Op. ix. 18, ed. Migne), " Luke did 
 not say ' forty days,' but hi rjp.epoov TecraapaKovra- icpiararo 
 yap, ical a(^L7naro (or afyicnaio) iruXivr Aid is thus used in 
 Acts v. 19, where an angel of the Lord opens the doors of 
 the prison, hia vvktos ; and in Acts xvii. 10, where the disciples 
 sent Paul out from Thessalonica, not through, but at some 
 time in the night, by night. So in xvi. 9, a vision appeared 
 to Paul, htd vvktos, certainly not continuing through the night. 
 And so in Acts xiii. 31, " who was seen for many days," iiri 
 denotes in a space of time reaching over many days (cf . xvi. 
 18). So in Latin per is used ; as in Sueton. Caes. § 45, " per 
 somnum exterreri solebat," not through, but in sleep. 
 
 Either one or two of these visits of the Lord Jesus are 
 especially noticed by Luke. From verse 6 onwards, the place 
 of his meeting with his apostles was Mount Olivet, which Luke 
 called Bethany in his Gospel ; and it is remarkable that he 
 makes in his second narrative (Acts i. 12), no mention of the 
 place, taking it for granted that Theophilus must have remem- 
 bered what was said in the first narrative (Luke xxiv. 50). 
 It is worthy of notice, also, that he conceives of the apostles' 
 return to Jerusalem as being made towards a common upper 
 room, and that others besides — the women, and Mary the 
 
604 THE END OF LUKE'S GOSPEL [Oct. 
 
 mother of Jesus, and his brethren — were with them. Why 
 should these women come to the feast of Pentecost a number 
 of days beforehand, unless a summons had been sent to them, 
 (either individually by him or by some apostle), from the 
 risen Saviour ? 
 
 Going back now to verses 4 and 5, we ask whether the 
 meeting of Christ with his apostles there mentioned was the 
 same with that spoken of in verse 6, or, in other words, was 
 it on the resurrection day, or was it some earlier meeting at 
 Jerusalem ? and what sense are we to give to <Tvva\i%6fievo<; ? 
 The great body of Protestant commentators hold to a refer- 
 ence in verse 6 to verse 4, as speaking of the same gathering. 
 Meyer considers that which is spoken of in verse 6 to be a 
 later meeting on the resurrection day. The Greek inter- 
 preters explain avvakityfievos as meaning " while taking 
 food with them " ; the Latin interpreters, the Vulgate, the 
 Catholic church, and some few Protestants, among whom so 
 able a commentator as Meyer is to be counted, agree with 
 the Greeks. Our Authorized Version and the new revision 
 insert the marginal note " eating with them." It is to thpse 
 two points that the rest of this study will be devoted. 
 
 1. Do verses 4 and 6 refer to the same gathering of Christ 
 and his apostles, or must the narrative of a later day begin 
 at verse 6 ? This point may be considered without discuss- 
 ing the meaning of the word <rvvaXi{,6iievo<; immediately ; 
 for, whether we render it " while taking meat with, or being 
 assembled together with" in both cases there is a certain 
 abruptness and want of connection between the three first 
 verses and the fourth. We may naturally conceive that " the 
 things pertaining to the kingdom of God " was the leading 
 thought in Luke's mind, and that verse 4, as well as the 
 following ones, bears on that important point. But this 
 Christ would do on occasions when he met with his dis- 
 ciples ; and this, without question, was one cause of his 
 remaining on earth. One of these meetings is now spoken 
 of, and is loosely connected with the preceding part of the 
 narrative by teal. But the whole matter turns on verse 6, — 
 
1882.] AND THE BEGINNING OF THE ACTS. 605 
 
 on ol fiev ovv avveXOovres r/pooToav. Here observe, first, that 
 in some passages where fiev ovv are found in connection with 
 ol and a participle, the ol and the participle are together the 
 subject ; and in others ol is the subject, and the participle 
 expresses the secondary or qualifying notion. Examples of 
 this latter relation between the two occur in Acts via. 25, 
 " they, therefore, when they had testified and spoken " ; in 
 xv. 30 ; xxiii. 31, and in the present instance. In xvii. 30 ; 
 xxiii. 22 ; xxvi. 4, 9, there is no associated participle (6 fiev 
 ovv ^tXtap^o?, rovs fiev ovv %p6vov<>, rrjv fiev ovv fSicoaiv fiov, i'yoj 
 fiev ovv). In the example in verse 6, the sense is not they 
 who came together, but ol alone is the subject : " they, there- 
 fore, when they came together," not, as De Wette takes it, 
 " Die nun so zusammen gekommen waren." For the formula 
 fiev ovv cf. A. Buttmann, § 149, 16. Ovv evidently refers back 
 to verse 4, or rather to avrois in verse 4 ; and verse 4 itself 
 is shown, by being placed after the mention of the appearances 
 of Christ through forty days, not to refer to the evening of 
 the resurrection day. When, therefore, we notice the connec- 
 tion between verses 4 and 6, we can hardly help believing 
 that the apostles came together, by appointment or direct 
 suggestion to their minds, as in the case recorded by Matthew 
 (xxviii. 16), to 6'po9, ov erd^cno avrols 6 'I^croO?. They had 
 not remained in Jerusalem since the week after the crucifixion ; 
 but now, when the outpouring of the Spirit was at hand, they 
 are summoned to meet the Lord for the last time on earth. 
 2vve\66vTes implies that they were scattered before, — and 
 we may suppose that they were summoned from their old 
 homes in Galilee, and with them the women, who might not 
 have gone to the pentecostal feast on ordinary occasions. 
 The time of this convention was the morning of the ascen- 
 sion day. 
 
 2. But what is the meaning of o-vvdkitpfievosl In order 
 to answer this question we must draw upon our reader's 
 patience, for the word has a very curious history which 
 cannot be dispatched in a few words. 
 
 There are three verbs in Greek having the common form 
 
606 THE END OF LUKE'S GOSPEL [° ct - 
 
 a\i£(o, two of them beginning with d, and the other with a. 
 'Akcfo or aklco, a rare word, meaning to roll, is represented 
 in the classics by the derivatives, cSkcvSeco, akivBijOpa (rolling 
 place for horses) ; and i^akiaas, e^rfkaca, the three last of 
 which occur in Aristophanes. With this we have no concern. 
 Of the other two, aklfo, collect tog-ether, with its compound, 
 awaXi^w, 1 in good use from Herodotus downward, has a com- 
 mon origin with a\rj<i, confertus, with akia (some rjkia), an 
 assembly, or gathering, and with rjkiala, a place where the 
 Athenian dikasts first met, whence they are called Heliasts. 
 
 The words akl^oa, avvaklfo, collect, assemble, with no 
 more difference of sense than their more common syno- 
 nymes, aOpoi^w, avvadpotfo, appeared first in Empedocles, 
 Herodotus, and Hippocrates, and stood their ground 
 down to the latest period of Greek literary composition ; 
 although the explanation of them in glossaries and lexica 
 seems to show that they were not terms of common life in 
 later times. There are sixteen instances of them in Herod- 
 otus, four in Hippocrates, one in a fragment of Empedocles, 
 several in Xenophon, one in Plato (Cratylus, 409 A), and 
 two in Euripides. Aristophanes has avvakidfo, a Doric 
 equivalent to crvvakifo. 2 Some of the later writers who 
 use one or the other of them are Josephus, Antiq. xix. 
 7,8 ; 9, 4 ; Lucian, De Luctu, chap. 7 ; Appian, Hispan. § 61, 
 de B. C. i. § 132 ; iv. 65 ; v. 140 ; Plutarch de Plac. Philos. 
 (902), where it is said that in the process of sifting, things 
 such as seeds, eVl to avrb avvakl^erai, so that in sifting, 
 beans and chick-peas, in a body, take different places. So 
 again Jamblichus (in Vit. Pythag.) speaks of a class of 
 persons " who gather together for the sake of sight-seeing," 
 avvakitppLevov tottcov Seas eveica ; and Athenaeus, lib. ii. p. 40, 
 C, explains dakia by the fact that OeSiv yapiv ifkiCpvro ; intend- 
 ing to say, if I understand his words, that it was composed 
 of #eo? and akia, denoting a sacred banquet. The verb akifyo 
 
 1 Other compounds, ai>a\i(ai (see below) and i£a\l(w, a conjecture of Valcke- 
 naer, Schol. in Nov. Test., p. 301, perhaps had no existence. 
 
 2 Comp. Ahrens de (Jr. Ling. Uialectis, lib. ii. p. 90. 
 
1882.] AND THE BEGINNING OF THE ACTS. 607 
 
 occurs also in Theodoret, Hist. iii. 1 and iii. 15. For other 
 passages where d. or avva. occurs in ecclesiastical writers, 
 comp. Sophocles (lexicon, s. v.). I have noticed o-vvoXutls, 
 which is not to be found in the common lexicons, in the life 
 of Nicephorus by Ignatius (de Boor's Niceph. Opusc. Lips. 
 188). 
 
 Nowhere does a middle form of d\[%. or <rvva\i%. colligo, 
 occur, although many interpreters have regarded the parti- 
 ciple in Acts i. 4 as belonging to the middle voice of this 
 verb. 1 In fact, no such form was needed, since the passives 
 of a number of verbs, meaning to gather, freely take a neuter 
 or deponent signification in Greek ; so in Latin, congregor is 
 neuter in such examples as Tacitus, Ann. i. 30. Nor need 
 we go beyond the New Testament for parallel instances. 
 Hvvdya) is so used in John xviii. 2 (and Jesus 7ro\\.a/a9 
 avvifyOr) eicel, etc.), and in other places noticed by Grimm s.v. 
 So also Josephus says, (de Bel. Jud. vi. 6), iroXKol /cat 
 avveUoaih adpoityvrai, " they assemble twenty together," to 
 eat the passover. 
 
 Besides this dXl^eo, there is another similar form from a\?, 
 denoting to salt, or to make salt, to give salt to, in which last 
 sense Aristotle uses it in his Hist. Animal, viii. 10. In the 
 other sense it occurs in the New. Test, twice or three times, 
 in Matt. v. 13, and in Mark ix. 49, where some authorities 
 insert it twice. In the Septuagint it is found in Lev. ii. 13, 
 to which one of the examples in Mark seems to refer. It is 
 found also in Ezek. xvi. 4, ov8e dXl rfKia6r)<i, and in Isa. Ii. 6, 
 in the version of Symmachus, who mistook the meaning of 
 his original. Another passage is found in Ezra (iv. 14), 
 which the Septuagint entirely leaves out, but which the Com- 
 plutensian edition gives us in a translation of the Hebrew, 
 by KaX vvv ouv Ka6a><; akas rov vaov rjXicrdfieda (where vaov 
 stands for the Hebrew word ^"T?, here denoting palace, and 
 which the margin of King James's version correctly renders), 
 <; we are salted with the salt of the palace " = we receive the 
 king's salt, or salary. 
 
 1 Comp. ffvvaKiadfiivov in Manetho, below, which cannot be from this verb. 
 
608 THE END OF LUKE'S GOSPEL [Oct. 
 
 A compound verb directly derived from d\t£o>, to salt, has 
 evaded my search. There is, however, as I must believe, a 
 rare verb avvaXl^ofiat, in the middle voice, tracing its paternity 
 to <rvvdko<i, taking salt with, which Philoxenus has preserved 
 in a gloss (Eng. ed. of Stephanus, vol. viii.), and explains by 
 consalineus, a Latin word of equal rarity. From this a 
 middle or deponent form may be readily derived, denoting 
 the taking of salt, or a meal, icith another? 
 
 The quantity of the a in these forms deserves notice. 
 " A\<i and its derivatives have a short alpha ; akr)$, aki^w, 
 colligo, and words connected with them, a long alpha, 
 with the exception of aXis. This is expressly asserted in 
 the Etymol. Mag. ed. Sturz. (marginal page 61, line 50), 
 and is confirmed by a line of Empedocles which Macrobius 
 cites (Saturnal. i. 17), where Macrobius says that " the sun 
 is called rpuo? on o~vvaXi,a6e.vro<i ttoWov irvphs Trepnrdkel, ut 
 ait Empedocles, ovveic dvaXtadeU peyav ovpavov afXpLTroXevet." 
 The sense of the verse is that, because consisting of collected 
 or conglobated fire, he travels round the great heaven. Sturz 
 in his Empedocles and in his ed. of the Etymol. Mag. alters 
 this into dXX J 6 p,ev aXiadeh etc., but the quantity is not 
 thereby affected. A later testimony to the length of the a 
 in aXifo, colligo, is given by Euripides, Here. Fur. 411, 412, 
 compared with the antistrophe, 428, 429, where fitoTov ouS' 
 efia iraXiv answers to ayopov aXicras (plXcov. Accordingly, in 
 the Heraclidae, v. 404, where Scaliger and Barnes read avva- 
 \io~as, Musgrave and Elmsley put into the text et? ev aXio-as, 
 which suits the end of a trimeter better, and is received by 
 later scholars. 2 
 
 The interest of this discussion, as far as passages in the 
 
 1 Thus eu077/ua>i', evdrjixoveofmi, Plato (the active is quite late) ; ewAa#7js, 
 evAa/ieo/nai j (TvveSpia, avvi^pido^ai ; avvocppvs, trvvo<ppv6ofxai. But the examples 
 are not numerous. The derivation is easier from avvaKos, as far as the sense is 
 concerned, than from <jw-a\i£t», and no <rvva\i(co, 1 take salt with, is found. 
 
 2 'A\rjs has a long alpha in a fragment of Callimachus (in No. 86 of Bentley's 
 Coll., ed. Ernesti, ii. 458), in a choliamhic verse. In a corrupt fragment of 
 Hesiod preserved by Strabo (vii. p. 322), e« yairjs aAe'oi/s, a would be short if 
 aAe'as were the true reading, but modern editors of Strabo have altered it into 
 i< ya'tris \dovs. 
 
1882.] AND THE BEGINNING OF THE ACTS. 609 
 
 Scriptures are concerned, lies in the word avvaXta-Oco of an 
 anonymous translator of Ps. cxli. 4, preserved in Origen's 
 Hexapla (Migne's Origen, vi. 1133), and in Acts i. 4, — 
 mainly in the latter. In the Psalm, where Symmachus and 
 our version give the correct meaning, the Sept. according to 
 the Cod. Alex, has ov fir) avvSvdaco fierd tcov eicXeicToiv avrwv, 
 the Cod. Vat. has avvSoidato, and the Sinaitic, ivhoidaoo ; 
 which last reading looks like a copyist's blunder. Sym- 
 machus has fir) av/jLcfxiyoL/jLi tcl i)hka, and the anonymous trans- 
 lator, fir) avvaXccrdo) iv rals reprrvorrjatv aiiTwv. The sense 
 here seems to be, may I not gather ivith them at their delights, 
 or delicacies. The translation may 1 not eat ivith, however, 
 has been given to the word here, which is wholly improbable ; 
 for if avvaXi^ofiai eat with, exists, it is certainly found in 
 the first aorist middle, and a word in so little use would not 
 be likely to have the passive and the middle aorist forms 
 both. The Syriac has a form from a root answering to the 
 Hebrew fi^a , I will not eat salt with, or, possibly, to make a 
 covenant with (?) ; while the Hebrew has or& , eat with. 
 
 The early translations seem to follow the Septuagint. Thus 
 the Old Latin, as given by Sabatier from two mss., is combi- 
 nabo, and Augustine in his enarratio of Ps. cxl. (cxli.) 
 combinabor, explaining the passage of the wicked, " cum 
 quibus non est habenda societas." Jerome gives the sense 
 of the Septuagint in the words of the Vulgate, " non com- 
 municabo cum electis suorum." The interpretation of The- 
 odoret is ifiol fir) etrj Tt<? 77/009 avrom koivoovicl. We have 
 thus a singular puzzle. How came the Septuagint to give 
 (Tvvhvdaoy, which must mean pair or join with, for the Hebrew 
 verb denoting to eat ? This word probably determined the 
 word avvaXiadco of the anonymous translator ; and yet the 
 Syriac may be appealed to, in connection with Symmachus, 
 to show that the translator meant may I not eat ivith. All 
 the Greek versions mistake in respect to the word rendered 
 dainties or delicacies. Whether any further light may be 
 shed on this point, I know not ; but it is altogether most 
 probable that avvaXiado!) is from avvaXityd, colligo. The 
 
 Vol. XXXIX. No. 156. 77 
 
610 THE END OF LUKE'S GOSPEL [Oct. 
 
 translator took the word denoting to gather or assemble ivith, 
 and expressed the sense which, as he thought, belonged to 
 the text, that of meeting with persons in their festivities. 
 
 But are there any other instances of the occurrence of 
 avvaXi^o/jLcu, comedo, in the Greek language ? I must believe 
 that there are two, one of them belonging to the second, and 
 the other to the fifth, century of our era. Besides these 
 there are none to be found, -unless in quite late periods ; and 
 I have fallen upon no trace of these, if there are any. One 
 tolerably, if not altogether, clear example of such a verb in 
 such a sense is found in Manetho's astrological poems. 
 These productions, composed under the Roman empire, are 
 divided into three portions : the first, consisting of the 
 second, third, and sixth books, was written, according to the 
 most recent editor, Kochly, not before M. Antoninus nor 
 after Alexander Severus, and probably in the reign of the 
 latter (between a.d. 138 and 235) ; the fourth book must 
 have been written before Valens, who died in 378 ; while the 
 first and fifth books of the old editions, called the fifth and 
 sixth by Kochly, were written after the fourth, thus belonging 
 to the end of the fourth or to the fifth century. 1 The pas- 
 sage containing the word from <rvvaXl%o/j,ai occurs just at the 
 end of Kochly's sixth, or the older editor's fifth, book. The 
 author is speaking of a woman born under the conjunction 
 of certain heavenly bodies, and says that she will be 7r%ta 
 \wypa> <yafieTjj crvvdX.i^6fM€vov /caKorjdes. The Latin translator 
 renders the participle by congregans ; being ignorant, it 
 would seem, that the short alpha demands a derivation of 
 the word from a\$. If, then, any word from that root 
 existed, this must be referred to it; unless the author or 
 authors, whom Kochly declares to be " ignorantia metrorum 
 et ingenii stupore simillimos," mistoook the quantity of the 
 second syllable. We have seen that the same error in regard 
 to metre was found in the early text of Euripides, but the 
 sense and measure concur in favoring the derivation from aA.?. 
 
 1 Compare Kochly's preface to his Didot edition, pp. vi, xvii, xl. The same 
 recension appears in a small volume of the Teubner Series of Greek writers. 
 
1882.] AND THE BEGINNING OF THE ACTS. 611 
 
 The only other instance hitherto adduced where avvaXt- 
 fy/jiai, eat with, is to be found, occurs in the Clementines ; not 
 in the passage from the sixth Homily which Meyer cites, — 
 where nothing of the kind is to be found, unless it be dXcbv 
 /jueTaAafieiv, at the end of the Homily, — but in a passage 
 repeated in Homily xiii. § 4, and in the two Epitomes, the 
 older of which appears in Cotelerius, and the new one, 
 almost identical with it, was published by Dressel from an 
 Ottobonian Ms. of the Vatican. Besides these three places, 
 which are but three forms of a single original, avvaXi^ofjun, is 
 used in the epistle of Clement to James, which precedes the 
 Homilies (§ 15), in the old classical sense. 
 
 Beginning with this last mentioned place, we find the 
 Christians to be there compared to persons on the deep. 
 They are told to expect all manner of afflictions, as sailing 
 on the great and troubled sea, which is the world ; being 
 sometimes despondent, persecuted, hungry, thirsty, naked, 
 scattered, in great straits ; sometimes, again, united, collected 
 together, enjoying quiet («ai 7raX.1v ore fiev evovixevoi, avvaXt- 
 ^ofjuevot, r)(Tvxd£ovTe<i~). Another reading, which Dressel pre- 
 fers, is avvavXi^ofievot, a common word which is intruded into 
 the text in the three other places presently to be examined, 
 as well as in Acts i. 4, and elsewhere. The reading given 
 above is plainly best suited to the context, being demanded 
 by (TKopmtpixevoi in the previous part of the sentence. And 
 in the free translation attributed to Rufinus (in Migne's 
 Clement, under the text), — quippe qui et dispergendos se 
 nonnunquam noverint, sed aliquando etiam congregandos," 
 — the same reading is supported. 
 
 Putting this passage out of account, we come to the three 
 others. In them all Peter tells Clement's mother that, so 
 long as she is a heathen and unbaptized, she cannot eat with 
 the Christians. Even relatives for that reason must be 
 separated at table. But when they are baptized, rore 8rj 
 clvtoIs teal avvaXitpfieOa (avvavk. in Epit. 1., rore avrols ac- 
 cording to Epit. 2 and Horn. xiii. § 4). It might be claimed, 
 possiblv, that the sense of Epit. 1 is then we even lodge with 
 
612 THE END OF LUKE'S GOSPEL [Oct. 
 
 them, i.e. not only take food, but lodge. But this cannot be 
 the sense or the reading. For here the Recognitiones will 
 show how Rufinus understood the disputed word, and that 
 he read avvaX., not crvvavX. The passage is translated by 
 Rufinus from a text of the lost avayvwpio-eis, or Recogniti- 
 ones, closely similar to that of the Epitomes and the Homily. 
 We transcribe a part of it from Gersdorf's edition of the 
 Recognitiones (Lib. vii. § 29, p. 167) : " Sed et illud obser- 
 vamus, mensam cum gentilibus non habere communem [in 
 Horn, and Epit. TpaTri^qq iOvifcfis fxrj i±erej(eiv] , nisi cum credi- 
 derint et recepta veritate baptizati fuerint, ac [?] trina 
 quadam beati nominis invocatione consecrati ; et tunc cum 
 eis cibum sumimus [Horn, and Epit. avvaXi^6/jbe6a, with the 
 variant crvvavX., as before]. Alioquin etiam si pater aut 
 mater sint, aut uxor aut filii aut fratres, non possumus cum 
 eis mensam habere communem [avveaTtaaOai^ . Quia ergo 
 religionis causa praecipua hoc facimus, non tibi injuriosum 
 videatur, quod non potest films tuus una tecum sumere cibum 
 [to firj crvveaTiaadal aoc] , usquequo eadem tibi sit quae illi 
 sententia fidei." 
 
 It is almost certain that Rufinus, who has the words " cum 
 eis cibum sumimus" in his text, must have there found 
 awdXi^ofieda, and not avvavki^o^eOa. And that he thought 
 that there were two verbs with the same letters is shown by 
 the translation given on another page, congreg-andos, to the 
 word avvaX^ofxivov^ occurring in the letter of James to 
 Clement, — if the translation there given be really his. 
 
 The force of the argument from the sanction given to the 
 meaning eat with by Rufinus might be broken by showing 
 that the word avvaX. with this sense was a late interloper 
 into the Greek language. We regard this to be quite pos- 
 sible ; but as the time of its entrance into the Greek language 
 cannot be shown ; and as it certainly was in existence before 
 the Clementines were written in the second century of our 
 era, and before or as soon as the Old Latin versions of the 
 New Testament appeared, it might easily have imposed upon 
 the more ignorant of the early translators. 
 
1882.] AND THE BEGINNING OF THE ACTS. 613 
 
 But may there not be force in a remark of Casaubon (in 
 his Animadv. in Athen. ii. ch. 3) on a passage of Athenaeus 
 already cited (supra p. 606). The great scholar there says, 
 " Etsi aki^eadaL et avvaXitpadai generali notione congregari 
 significant, sine finis discrimine, fuere tamen qui de conveni- 
 entibus ad coenam condictam proprie putarent "usurpari. Ita 
 usus est Athenaeus ilia voce." Here it is noticeable that 
 Casaubon was not acquainted with the argument for two 
 verbs, identical in form, from the length of the alpha. And, 
 moreover, the derivation of dakia from debs-aXta would not 
 now be thought to deserve attention. Valckenaer, however, 
 in his Scholae in Act. Apostol. (Select, e Schol. Yalck. i. 362, 
 Amstel. 1815) follows Casaubon in his view of the meaning 
 of the participle, besides adopting the reading avvaXttppevoLs 
 proposed by Hemsterhuis. " Because," says he, " those who 
 used a common table were said aXcov jxeTaXafielv, hinc factum 
 ut aXL^eadai et avvakiC,. coeperint in usu significare in unum 
 locum congregari cibi capiendi gratia. Et hinc manifestum 
 erit cur vetus interpres Latinus reddideret convescens." But 
 he prefers the reading of Hemsterhuis, and understands it of 
 the sacred supper. But in his Opuscula (ii. 277) he rejects 
 the conjecture avvaXtfrfievois, because the Christian Fathers 
 found the nominative in their copies, and understood the 
 word as denoting familiariter cum aliquo vivere, ejusdem 
 mensae participem ; salem simul edere, and supposes without 
 reason that Peter's words in Acts x. 40, 41 are to be ex- 
 plained by this passage. He also refers to the Clementine v 
 (Horn. xiii. § 4) as supporting the same use of the word. 
 But he does not seem to affirm positively that two words 
 from two different roots existed. 
 
 We come now, in the next place, to the inquiry how far 
 the word avvaXi^ofMat, eat with, is recognized in the ancient 
 lexica and glossaries. The answer must be that for the 
 greater part they make no mention of such a word, and seem 
 not to know that it exists. They generally explain akifa, 
 colligo and cvvaXifo by adpolfa, avvaOpol^co, and avvdyco. 
 Thus Photius, Hesychius, Suidas. In Hesychius we notice 
 
614 THE END OF LUKE'S GOSPEL [Oct. 
 
 that avva\iadel<; 7 crvvadpoicrdei's, and crvvayQeL<i serve to inter- 
 pret avva\i£6fxevo<i, which leads to a suspicion that the present 
 in Acts i. 4 is thus explained by the aorist. In the Onoraas- 
 tikon of Julius Pollux, among the words for partaking of 
 food this does not appear, as was remarked long ago by Eras- 
 mus. In the Etymologica, the Magnum and Gudianum, we 
 find %vvaXi^6iAevoL or %vvav\i%6fievot explained by avvaOpoi- 
 tyfievoi ?} avveadiovTes, and then irapa toi><? okas is added to 
 show how it could be synonymous with o-vveadiovTa. 
 
 Coming to the works of Christian writers, we fail to find 
 in those of the ante-Nicene age any reference to the word as 
 occurring in our text, or to the verse itself. Luke xxiv. 37-39 
 is cited by Tertullian (Adv. Marcion., iv. § 43), and Acts x. 
 41 is cited in the Ignatian epistle to the church at Smyrna. 
 And may it not be fairly argued that if the meaning of eating 
 with had been already fastened on this word we should have 
 known of it by more than one citation of that early period ? 
 
 There can, however, be no question that such a sense was 
 attached to it some time in the second century. The early 
 Latin expresses the word by vescor, or by convescor, which 
 Jerome adopted. Another word translating it into Latin 
 is conversor, which seems to point towards awavXitpiievos. 
 Simul convivens appears in the Cod. Bezae (D) although D 
 itself has o-vvakiafcofievcx; in this place. In the Latin version 
 of the Cod. Laudianus (E of Acts) vescens appears ; with 
 which the venerable Bede agrees, who, as Dr. Scrivener, after 
 Dr. Mill, thinks (Introd. 2d ed. p. 147), must have had this 
 manuscript before him when he wrote his Expositio Retrac- 
 tata of the Acts. The Eastern versions seem all to agree 
 with the Greek interpreters of the post-Nicene period in 
 rendering this word by some equivalent to partaking of food. 
 
 After the Nicene period the authority of Chrysostom and 
 others helped the general spread of this explanation. Chrys- 
 ostom refers to Acts i. 4 in at least five different passages. 
 It occurs twice in the first Homily on Acts (§§ 3, 6, Op. 
 Chr. ed. Migne, ix.), three times in that in Princip. Act. iv. 
 (§,§104, 107, Migne iii. 1). In the first passage he says: 
 
1882.] AND THE BEGINNING OF THE ACTS. 615 
 
 " Nor was he [Luke] content with the forty days, but he 
 adds also a table, in reference to which, as he proceeds, he 
 uses the words Kal avva\i%6/jLevo<i avrols. And this the apostles 
 always regard as a proof of the resurrection." Again, in 
 §6 Chrysostom says (p. 22 ed. Migne), " Inasmuch, then, 
 as we take food with Christ, and have a common table with 
 him [<Jvva\t£6/j,evoi Xptcrra> Kal rpairkty)*; Koivcovovvre^ " ; 
 where he evidently refers to this passage, although he is 
 speaking of Christian baptism. In the other three places he 
 explains the word by koivcovwv t paired, or by Tparre^qs only, 
 or by ov Seo/xevos Tpaire^ erproyev. The word is constantly 
 interpreted by him, as if the people did not understand it. 
 
 Theophylact on Acts i. 4 says that in a space of forty days 
 avTols avv7]\l^6TO koivcovwv dXcbv Kal koivcovwv Tparre^rj^, where 
 he arbitrarily joins crvvaX. with forty days, and conceives of 
 Christ as partaking of food with the apostles through that 
 period ; whereas the word is used of a single event. Oecu- 
 menius gives the same explanation, which is found also in 
 the Panarion of Epiphanius (in Haeres. 66, § 35, and prob- 
 ably in Haeres. 20, § 3). Theodoret, again, — who, as we 
 have seen, uses the word avvdX., colligo, — gives the sense 
 of eating- with to it in this passage in the Dialogue Incon- 
 fusus (ed. Sirmond-Schultze, iv. 119). After citing the first 
 words of vs. 4, he adds that Peter more distinctly says, " ' We 
 who eat and drank with him after he rose from the dead ' 
 (Acts x. 41). For," continues Theodoret, " since to eat is 
 a peculiarity of those who have to do with the present life, 
 the Lord of necessity proved his resurrection to those who 
 hold not the truth by eating and drinking." And this he 
 supports by Christ's ordering something to be given to the 
 daughter of Jairus, and by having Lazarus, whom he raised 
 from the dead, his companion at a feast. 
 
 We reach the conclusion that there was a verb identical in 
 form with the passive or middle of o-vvaXlfo* collig-o, of late 
 origin as far as can be known, and of extremely limited use. 
 The importance given to it by esteemed and learned Fathers 
 does not seem to have given it any currency ; at least, I 
 
616 THE END OF LUKE'S GOSPEL [Oct. 
 
 cannot find that it went down into the Middle Ages. Soph- 
 ocles in his lexicon has no place for it, and I cannot find it 
 in modern Greek lexicons. It seems very improbable that 
 Luke should have used such a word. 
 
 But why did he use o-vvaXcZpfxevos, assembling' with, when 
 the verb occurs nowhere else in his writings or in the New 
 Testament, and so many synonymes were at hand ? I am 
 unable to give an answer; unless, possibly, it was associated 
 in the evangelist's mind with the collecting' or mustering of 
 the apostles — a sense which it has in the classics. But no 
 answer is due to those who would discover in this form a 
 word of the very greatest rarity. 
 
 The use of the present participle is Meyer's principal argu- 
 ment against giving the sense of gathering to the word ; 
 while if we could translate it taking bread with them, the 
 tense would be all right. But the verb in the passive with a 
 deponent meaning can denote, if I mistake not, both the 
 transitory act of being assembled or meeting with another, 
 and the permanent condition of being in a meeting ; so that 
 <Tvva\i£6/jLevos = ore avvrfkl^ero might be used here without 
 grammatical difficulty. A somewhat parallel passage, in this 
 respect, occurs at the very end of the Iliad : 
 
 ev crvvayeipofAevoi halvvvr epiicvhea Salra 
 
 where the modern editions since Heyne have generally pre- 
 ferred this reading to o-wayetpdfievoi. 
 
 It seems harsh in English to speak of a single person 
 being assembled, or having been assembled, with others. 
 But this need not trouble us in Greek, at least in the Greek 
 of the New Testament. Thus Jesus avvrrx&t) /juera rtav 
 fMa6r]T(ov avrov (John xviii. 2), which our English translators 
 render resort, perhaps to avoid harshness of expression. 
 
 It may be, also, that the substitution by early interpreters 
 of the meaning eating with for being assembled ivith had 
 reasons of its own. The passage in Luke xxiv. 42-53, by 
 disregarding the marks of time, may have led many to think 
 that the narrations in Acts i. 4 and Luke xxiv. 49 were 
 identical. This, when the word avvaXi^ofxat, eat with, was 
 
1882.] AND THE BEGINNING OF THE ACTS. 617 
 
 discovered, helped to establish a false harmony. And Acts 
 x. 41 aided in giving currency to this meaning, which the 
 word in Luke was not conceived to have from the beginning. 
 The text thus became — honestly on the part of the inter- 
 preters — a convenient ally to those other texts which estab- 
 lished the human, sensuous nature of our Lord, against 
 heretics, who denied it or made as little of it as possible. 
 
 A somewhat subjective difficulty which some persons cannot 
 fail to find in the interpretation of crvvdk. by eating with, and 
 which we share in, is this : As vs. 4 is closely joined with 
 vs. 6, and vs. 6 points to the day of the ascension, it must 
 follow that our Lord took food on the very day of that great 
 event. But as his taking food after the resurrection is 
 clearly intended to be a proof of his being in a body (comp. 
 Luke xxiv. 41, 42), the reason for his so doing had already 
 ceased. No one doubted who he was when they were 
 assembled in Jerusalem or at Mount Olivet. It seems thus 
 to have then become uncalled for and gratuitous. 
 
 We have finished our proposed task, except that we had 
 intended to prepare, and had actually prepared at some 
 length, a sketch of the history of the interpretations of this 
 passage, which would be chiefly confined to the opinions of 
 Protestant commentators, since Jerome's convescens has held 
 the Catholic church in fetters. It is singular, however, that 
 a Catholic, Laurentius Valla, the celebrated humanist, first 
 broached a new opinion respecting Acts i. 4 and the word 
 avvaXitpnevos. Erasmus adopted his opinion, and since his 
 time Protestants have very generally given up the early ex- 
 planation. But they have not all been successful in their 
 treatment of the word. Some, as Calvin and Erasmus, — 
 the latter doubtingly, since he translated it by congregans se 
 cum Mis, and by congregans illos in idem loci, — resort to 
 the middle voice for an interpretation of the word. Others 
 neglect the tense, which creates the difficulty. Rosenmiiller 
 has quum congregasset, as if it were an aorist ; with whom, 
 in substance, Bloomfield (Jiaving gathered together'), Hein- 
 richs (in Koppen's New Testament), Kuinol, and ' Olshausen 
 
 Vol. XXXIX. No. 156. 78 
 
618 THE END OF LUKE'S GOSPEL. [Oct 
 
 agree ; several of whom also regard it as in the middle. 
 Other opinions may be found in the Critici Sacri, or in J. C. 
 Wolff's Curae Philologicae. Bengel has conventutn ag-ens ; a 
 considerable number, conveniens cum Mis, its equivalent ; to 
 which two latter renderings there can be no objection. 
 De Wette gives indem er mit ihnen versamme.lt ward, and 
 remarks that Theophylact in his interpretation KoivwvGiv aXdv 
 followed a false etymology. Alford follows this remark, 
 without giving any interpretation in English. Plumptre, 
 in Ellicott's series, thinks that Jerome's convescens rests on 
 a mistaken etymology. But the question of sense precedes 
 that of etymology, provided two words with the same form 
 existed. Jacobson, in the Speaker's Commentary, notices 
 the marginal reading of the Authorized Version, and simply 
 states that Josephus assigns to the word the meaning pre- 
 ferred in the text. Howson, in Schaff's Popular Commentary, 
 goes back to the signification eating with of the margin, and 
 thinks the authority of Chrysostom with his followers, and 
 of Jerome, decisive in the matter. Thus in the latest com- 
 mentary the new direction given by Meyer is accepted, and 
 some others have followed the same able leader. Whether 
 it shall be thought that we have given good reasons for a 
 different judgment or not, this will be the most remarkable 
 instance in which a word nearly unknown to the Greek lan- 
 guage, not even mentioned by modern lexicographers either 
 of classical or of New Testament Greek — (the Paris ed. of 
 Stephanus, Robinson, Grimm), has found a footing in the 
 exegetical works and the versions of more than one church. 
 You may search for it in the early times, and you find it 
 everywhere ; you may search for it in Greek, outside of this 
 passage, and except in two obscure authors you find it 
 nowhere. 
 
 We close this Article with a very brief statement of the 
 order of events as they seem to arrange themselves after the 
 second Lord's day succeeding his resurrection. 
 
 1. The apostles returned to Galilee. There they had the 
 interview with Christ recorded in John xxi. At this time, 
 
1882.] MONOTHEISM AMONG THE GREEKS. 619 
 
 also, the great gathering with the body of the Galilean 
 disciples may have taken place, " as Jesus had appointed." 
 
 2. By a similar appointment, forty days after the resur- 
 rection, he met at Jerusalem the apostles and some others 
 of his nearest friends, especially the most devoted Christian 
 women, with his mother and his brethren. We have already 
 remarked that the presence of these female Christians at the 
 feast of pentecost, and so long before the feast, is fully ac- 
 counted for by a. summons from the Lord. 
 
 3. The events between vs. 4 and vs. 12 all occurred on 
 ascension day, and from this time it was that they waited for 
 the promise of the Spirit to be fulfilled, which should begin 
 the' spread of the new kingdom of Christ. /£\$S ^ M/#| 
 
 APR 8 191 
 
 ARTICLE II. V&(7», , a 
 
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MONOTHEISM AMONG THE 
 GREEKS. 
 
 V. 
 
 BY DR. EDWARD ZELLER. TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY 
 
 EDWIN D. MEAD. 
 
 The subject with which the present Article has to deal 
 has claims upon our interest from more than one side. If it 
 is a grateful task, in and for itself, to follow the history of 
 the human mind in one of its highest relations and among one 
 of the most cultured peoples, the attraction of the task is greatly 
 enhanced if it is connected with other questions of the most 
 universal importance. And this is precisely the case in the 
 present instance. The history of religion has to do with no 
 more important fact, none which takes deeper hold of the spir- 
 itual and moral life of mankind, than the origin of monothe- 
 ism and the rise of Christianity, but also none the thorough 
 historical understanding of which is attended with greater 
 difficulties. It is then fortunate that we meet, in a people 
 so well known as the Greeks, a process which offers for 
 the one of these facts — the genesis of monotheistic faith — 
 
620 MONOTHEISM AMONG THE GREEKS. [Oct. 
 
 at least an analogy ; while, at the same time, it contains 
 one of the essential presuppositions by which the other — 
 the origin of Christianity — is historically conditioned. If 
 we see how the faith in the unity of the divine nature was 
 developed among the Greeks from polytheism, we shall like- 
 wise find more comprehensible the same faith among other 
 peoples, — even though it may have made its appearance among 
 these in another way and under other conditions ; and if 
 Christianity found a definite form of this faith already existing 
 in the province of Hellenic culture, we shall be able the more 
 easily to explain how it could not only conquer the Hellenic 
 portion of the old world in a comparatively short time, but 
 also how it could itself become what it is. 
 
 The Greek religion was originally, as is well known, and 
 like all natural religions, polytheism. But the human spirit 
 cannot long rest satisfied with the mere multiplicity of divine 
 natures. The empirical connection of all phenomena, and 
 the need of a fixed moral order in the world, early necessi- 
 tate the reduction of the multiplicity, in some way, to unity. 
 We find, therefore, in all religions which have only worked 
 themselves in some measure out of the first rude condition 
 the faith in a supreme divinity, a king of gods, who is com- 
 monly not thought of as simply dwelling in the heavens, but 
 is really the all-embracing heaven itself. And the world 
 of Greek divinities, so far as our knowledge extends, is 
 brought to a point of unity in Zeus, the lightning-launching 
 god of heaven. The nature of this god, however, appears in 
 the older popular faith, as the Homeric and Hesiodic poems 
 represent it, to be limited in a threefold relation. In the 
 first place, he has above him the dark power of Fate, to which 
 he has to subject himself, against his will and with grievous 
 complaint, as at the death of his son Sarpedon, when he 
 cries : " Woe is me, woe, now Fate wills that Sarpedon, to 
 me dearest of men, shall be slain by Patroclus, the son of 
 Menoetius." Further, he has beside him, in the other Olym- 
 pians, a rather insubordinate aristocracy, to which he is, 
 indeed, decidedly superior in force and sovereignty, but 
 
1882.] MONOTHEISM AMONG THE GREEKS. 621 
 
 which in particular things not rarely contradicts or circum- 
 vents him, disturbs his plans, and puts hinderances in the 
 way of their execution. To this double limitation, however, 
 Zeus is subject, in the third place, only because his nature 
 is in itself limited, because he is not yet endowed with the 
 entire fulness of that spiritual and moral perfection which, 
 where it is once received as indispensable in the conception 
 of Deity, immediately excludes every thought of a limitation 
 of the divine power. 
 
 The Homeric Zeus is, indeed, a moral being, — the pro- 
 tector of right, the avenger of crime, the shield of states, the 
 source of law and custom on earth, the father of gods and 
 men. But, aside also from the fact that the divine rule of 
 the world is not here free from despotic arbitrariness, — that 
 Zeus has two vessels in his store-room, as the proverb goes, 
 one of good things and the other of evil, and deals out 
 according to his discretion , — what judgment must a thoughtful 
 Greek of the subsequent time have passed upon the king of 
 the gods, who, now in Here's arms, now with mortal women, 
 forgets the affairs of his government ; who afflicts men with 
 evils of every sort because Prometheus had deceived him in 
 the sacrifice ; who dooms the Achaian army to defeats to 
 please Thetis ; who sends a deceiving dream to Agamemnon, 
 in order to animate him for the combat, etc. ? The weak- 
 nesses of sensuous and finite nature appear far too glaringly 
 in these old Greek gods, and even in the highest god, to 
 allow the germ of a higher conception, — which surely is 
 not lacking even in the Homeric theology, — to come to 
 development without a thorough-going change ; and if the 
 most offensive narrations are to be interpreted in great part 
 as the personification of existences and forces of nature, — 
 the transformation of natural events into a history of the 
 gods, — this origin of the myths was still hidden from the 
 consciousness of the Greek people itself ; to this they appeared 
 with the claim to be a faithfully true delineation of the divine 
 world. In the mysteries, too, which in modern times have 
 been not seldom regarded as the school of a purer religious 
 
622 MONOTHEISM AMONG THE GREEKS. [Oct. 
 
 faith, such a faith is surely not to be found ; as, indeed, it 
 is in and for itself a strange idea that in the worship of 
 Demeter or of Dionysius a monotheistic creed could have been 
 communicated. This secret service, moreover, first attained 
 a higher significance for the life of the Greek people after 
 the sixth century, i.e. precisely from the time in which the 
 gradual purification of the popular faith and its approach to 
 monotheism began. 
 
 This purification was accomplished in two ways : on the 
 one hand, the representations of Zeus and his government 
 of the world were elevated and refined, and thus the mono- 
 theistic element, which lay in polytheism itself without 
 deranging its foundations, was elevated, the polytheistic 
 element being subordinated to it. On the other hand, the 
 multiplicity of gods and the anthropomorphism with which 
 the popular faith had environed the gods were opposed. In 
 the first of these ways the poets worked, seeking to improve 
 the mythology at the very time it was most complete. The 
 philosophers united with this the second way; and from 
 this union proceeded that more spiritual faith, which, ex- 
 tending itself from the time of Socrates and Plato in ever 
 widening circles, had become, wherever the influence of the 
 Hellenic mind reached, the religion of the cultured classes 
 before the appearance of Christianity. 
 
 Poetic imagination created the Greek gods and the mythical 
 history of the gods ; and it was for the most part the poets 
 by whom this mythology, so readily answering all their 
 wishes and adapting itself with such charming facility, was 
 perfected and fostered. But it was also these same poets 
 who transformed and ennobled it, removed the too rude 
 features, filled the traditions of the olden time with the moral 
 perceptions of more highly educated centuries. Indeed, 
 the great poets of the Greeks were at the same time their 
 first thinkers, the " wise men," as they are so often called, 
 the oldest and most popular teachers of the nation. This 
 idealizing must needs touch, first of all, the figure of Zeus, 
 in which, to the Hellene, everything great and sublime, all his 
 
1882.] MONOTHEISM AMONG THE GREEKS. 623 
 
 highest conceptions of sovereign power and wisdom, of cos- 
 mic regulation and moral order, were condensed. But the 
 higher Zeus was placed, the more completely the mythical 
 anthropomorphisms fell back behind the idea of a perfect 
 being, a righteous, gracious, omniscient ruler of the world ; 
 the more completely, too, was monotheism developed from 
 polytheism. 
 
 The older poets had, indeed, as we have remarked, praised 
 Zeus as the guardian of right, the representative of moral 
 laws. What Homer and Hesiod had said in this connection, 
 the later poets repeat with stronger emphasis. Zeus beholds, 
 as we read in Archilochus (700 B.C.), the deeds of men, the 
 just and the godless ; indeed, the wickedness and the up- 
 rightness of the animals do not escape his notice. We must 
 commit all things to his hands. He is, as Terpander says 
 a little later, the beginning and the guide of all. He has, as 
 Simonides of Amorgos sings, the end of all things in his 
 hand, and orders all things as he will. But the further we 
 descend in time, the more strongly do we see this thought 
 developed. Zeus gradually becomes exclusively the supporter 
 of a moral order of the world, the idea of which is freed from 
 the gloom of the old belief in fate, and from the caprice of 
 arbitrary tyranny. Fate, which according to older repre- 
 sentation stood behind and above him, melts into unity with 
 his will ; the other gods, who still in Homer oppose his 
 purposes in so many ways, become willing instruments of his 
 world-ruling activity. Thus even Solon (590 B.c) teaches 
 us that Zeus watches over all things, and punishes all 
 wickedness ; but that he does not fly into a passion over single 
 things, like a man, but suffers wrong to heap itself up before 
 the punishment breaks in. So, a hundred years later, the 
 Sicilian poet, Epicharmus, sings : " Nothing escapes the 
 eye of Deity, of that mayest thou be sure ; it is God who 
 watches over us, and to whom nothing is impossible." 
 
 Still more decidedly does this purer idea of God appear in 
 the three great poets whose lives fill the period from the last 
 third of the sixth till toward the end of the fifth century, — 
 
624 MONOTHEISM AMONG THE GREEKS. [Oct. 
 
 Pindar, Aeschylus, and Sophocles. Everything comes from the 
 Deity alone, says. Pindar ; Zeus sends to mortals everything 
 which happens to them ; he grants success, and sends mis- 
 fortune ; he is able to let clear light spring from black night, 
 and to veil the pure brightness of day in thick darkness. 
 Nothing that man does is hidden from Deity ; only when 
 it points out the way is blessing to be hoped for ; in its hand 
 lies the result of our labor ; from it alone spring all virtue 
 and wisdom. In the same sense speaks Aeschylus. The 
 sublimity and omnipotence of Deity, the inevitable fulfilment, 
 the crushing power, of its judgment are impressed by all his 
 tragedies. What Zeus says is done ; his will is infallibly 
 accomplished ; no mortal has any power against him ; none 
 can escape his decrees. The other gods all act in his service ; 
 his dominion is also acknowledged in the end, in voluntary 
 submission, by the most opposed powers, even by the titanic 
 defiance of a Prometheus. These thoughts have with Aes- 
 chylus such deep and prevailing significance that it would not 
 be difficult, in spite of the polytheistic faith as to which this 
 man of antique honor — this man of Marathon and Salamis — 
 had no doubts, to gather from his poems, with little change 
 of form, the ground features of a pure and lofty monotheism. 
 That which stands before all else in these works is the 
 idea of the divine justice. If even Aeschylus is not yet 
 entirely free from the ancient conception of a jealousy in the 
 Deity, — if we still also read in him that God inflicts mis- 
 fortunes upon mortals as the very means of working their utter 
 ruin, — the ruling tenor of his works leads us, nevertheless, 
 to recognize the connection of misfortune with guilt, the 
 high justice of the divine judgment. As the man acts, so 
 must he suffer. He whose heart and hand are pure moves 
 sorrowless through life ; but retribution surely comes upon 
 the wicked, now with a sudden stroke, now with slow pres- 
 sure. The Erinnyes control the fate of men ; they drain the 
 vital powers of the criminal ; they cling without rest to the 
 soles of his feet ; they throw around him the snare of madness ; 
 they follow his track to the very grave. But the diviue grace, 
 
1882.] MONOTHEISM AMONG THE GREEEKS. 625 
 
 even with Aeschylus, is able to overcome the strength 
 of the penal law, and even an Orestes is, in the end, freed 
 from the curse with which matricide had loaded him. In 
 this Aeschylus is, indeed, conscious that he transcends the 
 original character of the Greek religion ; but with a most 
 noteworthy, and deeply poetical turn, he transfers the change 
 which, partially through his own instrumentality, took place 
 in the religious mind of his people, to the divine world itself. 
 He makes use of the old, obscure legends of a struggle 
 between the old gods and the new, in order to show us, in 
 profound representations, how the awful law of the Eumen- 
 ides gave place, in consequence, to a milder and more human 
 system ; how the original despotism of Zeus was transformed 
 into a benevolent, moral rule of the world. 
 
 The fairest blossoming of this gentler spirit appears in 
 the works of Sophocles. As no other poet brought classic 
 art to such harmonious perfection, so there is no nobler 
 representative of a pure religious faith, so far as this was 
 possible on the ground of a Greek polytheism. With a feeling 
 of the purest piety Sophocles delineates the gods, whose 
 power and law encompass human life. All things come from 
 them — the good and the evil ; no mortal can withstand their 
 never-changing power ; no act nor thought can escape their 
 all-seeing eye ; none can venture to transgress their eternal 
 laws. From the gods spring all wisdom ; they guide us ever 
 to the right. Their dispensations man may bear with resig- 
 nation ; he may commit all sorrow to Zeus ; beyond the 
 limits of man's nature he need not aspire. These propo- 
 sitions it is, and such as these, which cheer us so repeatedly 
 in Sophocles, but which we also meet not rarely in other 
 poets of that period. The bounds of Greek polytheism are 
 by this certainly not transcended ; yet still we must form 
 another conception of the faith which expresses itself in this 
 manner, than that which is commonly connected with the 
 name of heathenism. The many gods are here, in the end, 
 only the representatives of the one " Divine," or Deity. 
 From their action in the world the caprice and conflict of 
 Vol. XXXIX. No. 156. 79 
 
626 MONOTHEISM AMONG THE GREEKS. [Oct. 
 
 which Homer is able to tell us so much has disappeared. 
 There is one moral order of the world, which uses now one 
 god, now another, as its instrument. The plurality of gods 
 remains as the imagery of faith ; but the discord which it 
 threatened to create in the religious consciousness is in great 
 part avoided. 
 
 It was also of great importance for the moral character of 
 the religious convictions that, together with this development 
 of the idea of God, the faith in a future recompense became 
 stronger and more widely spread. In Homer and Hesiod only 
 the barest beginnings of this doctrine are to be found. It 
 first attained higher significance in the Eleusinian, but especially 
 in the so-called Orphic, mysteries — a later branch of this 
 form of worship, belonging seemingly, in its origin, to the 
 sixth or seventh century B.C. ; and in Pythagoreanism, which 
 in the first place had its rise likewise from moral-religious, 
 not from scientific, motives. The form, as well as the 
 content, of this faith, whose history we cannot here follow 
 further, was surely, in the first place, somewhat confused 
 and cloudy ; with the Orphean s and Pythagoreans it was 
 joined with the mythical doctrine of the transmigration of 
 souls ; and that which was to decide future happiness or 
 misery was, at least with the former, less moral worth or 
 worthlessness than the relation to the secret services and to 
 the asceticism bound up with them. He who had received 
 initiation, who had kept himself from eating meat and the 
 like, who had followed certain external rules of life, should 
 in the future sit at table with the gods in the lower world ; 
 but the unconsecrated, on the contrary, should be cast into 
 a slimy pool. But even by the Pythagoreans the belief in 
 immortality was used in a more purely moral sense. In 
 Pindar it contains the strongest moral incitements. Aeschy- 
 lus's picture of the divine judgment concludes with the 
 threat that even death does not free the criminal from the 
 spirits of vengeance. Sophocles makes frequent reference 
 to the recompense after death. And in Euripides we find 
 the words : " Who knows whether, in truth, death be not life, 
 
1882.] MONOTHEISM AMONG THE GREEKS. 627 
 
 but life death ? " It is very clear how greatly the thought 
 of the divine justice must needs win strength through this 
 extension of its operations, and how much more actively 
 the unity of the divine must have presented itself to con- 
 sciousness when one and the same moral order embraced 
 the living and the dead. 
 
 Greatly, however, as the older form of the Greek religion 
 was thus ennobled, its polytheistic basis, as has been said, 
 was not immediately touched by this development of the 
 monotheistic element, which also lay in it. Another and a 
 bolder course was taken by philosophy. 
 
 The Greek philosophy did not grow up, like the Christian, 
 in the service of theology ; its oldest representatives did not 
 wish to defend or explain religious belief, but to investigate 
 the nature of things. In so far they had no such immediate 
 occasion to express themselves concerning the content of 
 that belief as their Christian successors had. But since in 
 their explanation of nature they fixed attention upon the 
 world as a whole, in order to determine its ultimate grounds, 
 they all proceeded expressly or tacitly from the presuppo- 
 sition of a unified, world-forming force, whether they thought 
 of this as bound up with the material substance or separated 
 from it — whether they designated it as Nature, or Deity, or 
 in some other way. And several of them declared expressly 
 that this force was to be sought only in the highest reason, 
 only in the Infinite Spirit ; most decidedly, and with the 
 clearest scientific consciousness, among the pre-Socratic phi- 
 losophers with whom we first have to do here, did Anaxagoras, 
 the friend of the great Pericles, who lived in Athens until 
 toward the end of the Peloponnesian war do this. 
 
 Towards the popular religion these men assume various 
 attitudes, according to their own various characters. Many 
 of them pursued the course of their scientific investigations, 
 without defining their exact relation to the popular faith, 
 and usually, indeed, without even settling the matter for 
 themselves. Others leaned upon the popular representa- 
 tions so far as to use them for certain philosophical con- 
 
628 MONOTHEISM AMONG THE GREEKS. [Oct. 
 
 ceptions, treating the two as directly equivalent. And so it 
 is naturally the form of Zeus, again, in which the ultimate 
 ground of all things, the unity of the cosmical system, and 
 of the forces working in the world are brought to view. 
 Democritus makes the attempt to explain the gods them- 
 selves, along with the belief in the gods, from the pre- 
 suppositions of his materialistic doctrine of nature : Through 
 a concurrence of atoms, like that to which all else owes its 
 existence, had risen also natures of superhuman form and 
 greatness, whose appearance had called forth the belief in 
 gods. And in like manner Empedocles causes the gods, 
 ' b the long-living, the most honored," to be formed out of his 
 four elements, like animals and men and all other things. 
 To us, with our purer idea of God, these are most astonishing 
 positions ; but not so to the Greeks, in whose mythology, 
 from „the beginning, the generation of the various races of 
 gods holds an important place, and among whom Pindar 
 sings : " The race of men is one, the race of gods another ; 
 but one mother gave birth to both." In this no attack was 
 intended upon the popular faith. 
 
 Very decidedly, on the contrary, does this latter inten- 
 tion appear in the utterances of a man who belongs among 
 the most remarkable phenomena in the history of the Greek 
 consciousness — Xenophanes. This philosophical poet, the 
 founder of the so-called Eleatic school, whose long life extends 
 from the first decades of the sixth to beyond the beginning 
 of the fifth century, was led, according to all advices, purely 
 through his own reflection, to the most thorough-going doubts 
 concerning the religion of his people. What impels him to 
 this is not simply the likeness of gods to men, with their 
 frequent excessive weaknesses, but also their multiplicity as 
 such. Mortals believe, he says, that the gods are generated, 
 as though it were not alike godless to speak of them as 
 having become or as to die. And he expressed himself in 
 the same sense, according to Aristotle, concerning the sac- 
 rifice and the lamentation for the sea-goddess, Lcucothea : If 
 men deem her mortal, they should not sacrifice to her ; if they 
 
1882] MONOTHEISM AMONG THE GREEKS. G29 
 
 deem lier a divinity, they should not lament for her. The 
 contradiction in the religion, in assuming a divinity, an 
 infinite, and at the same time attributing to it finite conditions 
 and properties, proves to the philosopher that this religion 
 cannot be the true one. A similar contradiction, however, 
 is pointed out by him in many other features of the 
 Greek religion. As men think of the gods as having become, 
 so they regard them as changeable. Motion in space is as- 
 cribed to them, when they are allowed to descend from heaven 
 to earth, to visit this or that place of their worship, to 
 appear here or there to render assistance, etc. It were not 
 seemly for deity, he declares, to wander now here, now 
 there ; it can only remain unmoved in one place. Yet more 
 strikingly in contradiction to his idea of the divine is the 
 attribution to it of a human or of any outward form. Men 
 lend the gods, he said, their own form, feeling, and voice, 
 and each people lends them its own : the negroes think the 
 gods black and flat-nosed ; the Thracians think them blue- 
 eyed and red-haired ; and if the horses and oxen could paint, 
 — he adds with bitter sarcasm, — they would, without doubt, 
 represent them as horses and oxen. And it goes almost worse 
 still with the gods in the depiction of their moral nature. 
 " Hesiod and Homer attribute everything to the gods which 
 redounds to the shame of men and calls forth censure — 
 thievery, adultery, and mutual deception." But not alone 
 these weaknesses and the likeness to men ; the multiplicity 
 of gods as such is inconsistent, according to the purer 
 insight of Xenophanes, with the conception of the divine 
 nature. Deity, he shows, must be the most perfect ; there 
 can, howerer, be but one most perfect. Deity can only rule, 
 it cannot be ruled ; the existence, therefore, along with the 
 highest, all-ruling God of other gods, subordinate to him, 
 cannot be admitted. He is therefore himself able to think 
 of but one God, who is high above all finite things. " One 
 God," he sings, " among gods and among men, " is the 
 highest, not to be compared, in form or in thought, with 
 mortals," — a God who, as it is said in another place, is all 
 
630 MONOTHEISM AMONG THE GREEKS. [Oct. 
 
 eye, all ear, all thought, who " rules all, untroubled, with the 
 intelligence of his understanding." Thus monotheism here 
 first appears with full consciousness, in fundamental opposi- 
 tion to the polytheism of the Greek popular faith and the 
 humanization of the gods. From the conception of the 
 divine nature were derived, through simple reasoning, the 
 conclusions which could but shake to its centre the whole 
 existing religion. 
 
 It must surely excite our deepest astonishment to find such 
 pure and lofty conceptions of the divine, so clear a conscious- 
 ness of that which the idea of God demands, in the midst of 
 a polytheistic people, five hundred years before Christ, in a 
 period in which scientific investigation had scarcely attempted 
 its first uncertain steps. The historical effect of this phe- 
 nomenon also we must not estimate too low. The attacks 
 of Xenophanes inflicted a wound upon the Greek polytheism 
 from which it never recovered ; and if, indeed, this phi- 
 losopher, with his bold doubts concerning the nature of the 
 existing religion, stands for a time almost alone, he does not, 
 on the one hand, entirely lack followers in the next fifty 
 years ; and further, those doubts grew up, in the end, to a 
 power against which the popular religion had no means of 
 resistance to oppose beyond the habit of the masses and 
 isolated violent measures which were entirely without general 
 effect. 
 
 A few decades after Xenophanes, we meet the Ephesian 
 philosopher Heraclitus, — not exactly on the same way, to 
 be sure, but still on a way that lies nearly enough to it. The 
 plurality of gods is not, indeed, expressly attacked by him, 
 far as he is above it, with his idea of the universal, all- 
 directing reason ; but the religious rites bound up so closely 
 with the belief, the animal sacrifices and the image-worship, 
 receive his decided censure ; and concerning the poets whose 
 works were for the Hellenes the most sacred religious sources, 
 — concerning Homer and Hesiod, — he is unable to express 
 himself strongly enough. 
 
 Somewhat later, about the middle of the fifth century, wc 
 
1882.] MONOTHEISM AMONG THE GREEKS. 631 
 
 hear the thoughts, and indeed the very expressions, of the 
 old Eleatic sound through a fragment of Empedocles, which 
 speaks of Apollo, or indeed of the highest God, — for we do 
 not know which, — " Him can man not approach, neither view 
 with the eyes nor touch with the hands ; for no human body 
 and no limbs pertain to him, but he is a pure, holy, incom- 
 prehensible spirit, who with quick thoughts hastens through 
 the universe." At the same time begins that Aufklaerung- 
 whose most outspoken representatives we are accustomed to 
 designate as the Sophists — a movement which in a short 
 time penetrated every department of Greek life and 
 every grade of society, thoroughly shattered the traditional 
 customs and convictions, and opened a vigorous attack from 
 the inquiring upon the religious faith. We find the very 
 first mouth-piece of the Sophists, Protagoras, beginning one 
 of his works with the declaration that concerning the gods 
 he has nothing to say, — neither that they exist nor that they 
 do not exist, — for the subject is too dark, and human life is 
 too short, for a thorough investigation. Another of the more 
 famous Sophists, Prodicus, sought to show how men came to 
 the belief in the gods through reverence for useful and bene- 
 ficial natural objects ; while Critias, a scholar of the Sophists, 
 represented religion, in one of his dramas, as the invention 
 of shrewd legislators, who wished to gain from the fear of 
 divine retribution a support for the working of their laws. 
 And this last was, indeed, in the circles to which the in- 
 fluence of the Sophistic Aufklaerung extended, the most 
 current opinion. As in all other political institutions and 
 customs, so also in religion, this school saw only the product 
 of arbitrary agreement, and this the variety of religions 
 seemed to them to prove. If the belief in the gods sprang 
 from the nature of man, all men, according to their opinion, 
 must worship the same gods ; that it is precisely from the 
 nature of the human mind and from the natural conditions 
 of its development that the variety of religions, like that of 
 all other historical forms of life, proceeds, — of this these 
 Greek Aufklaerers had as little understanding as their modern 
 successors. 
 
632 MONOTHEISM AMONG THE GREEKS. [Oct. 
 
 But however superficially they might proceed in this con- 
 nection, the spirit of the time came so strongly to their assist- 
 ance in the intellectually most important Greek cities, and 
 their way of thinking was so little confined to the schools, 
 that about the time of the Peloponnesian war, — and not in 
 Athens alone, — it is to be looked upon as the prevailing view 
 among the educated classes. 
 
 That which the Sophists delivered in their writings and 
 pompous speeches, the poets preached in another form, with 
 the most important and general effect, from the theatre. 
 While a Sophocles raised, in his tragedies, a monument no 
 less of his pious feeling than of his art, we find his younger 
 contemporary, Euripides, the scholar of Anaxagoras, mixing 
 with many fine religious and moral passages a mass of doubts 
 on dogmatic and moral points. We meet in him such a 
 naturalistic treatment of the myths that it becomes unde- 
 niably apparent how far removed he is from the stand-point 
 of the old religion. The comedian Aristophanes rails with 
 passionate vehemence against him and against all the mod- 
 erns, among whom he even reckons Socrates. And we 
 cannot doubt that, with his zeal for the old customs and the 
 old faith, he was in his way earnest. But is it to be 
 called restoring the reverence for the gods, when one sacri- 
 fices them with such wild wantonness as Aristophanes to 
 the laughter of the spectators ; when one uncovers the 
 nakedness of their humanness so glaringly and roughly as 
 he ; when one draws them so far into all the smut of 
 the low and vulgar ? And that this part of his pieces found 
 far more sympathy among his hearers than the exhortations 
 to a return to the good old time and its faith, — that, even 
 in the first decade of the Peloponnesian war, it was accounted 
 by very many in Athens as decidedly unrefined and old- 
 fashioned to still believe in the gods, he tells us himself. If 
 even his pious, and often so superstitious, older contemporary, 
 Herodotus, holds himself by no means free from the influences 
 of the rationalistic Aufklaerung-,we see in a Thucydides how, 
 toward the end of the fifth century, the deepest earnestness of 
 
1882.] MONOTHEISM AMONG THE GREEKS. 633 
 
 feeling, the sublimest moral contemplation of the world, could 
 exist along with an utter absence of that mythical element 
 which is so indispensable to the old Greek religion ; yet even 
 this historian sets before our eyes in striking pictures the 
 confusion of all moral ideas, the disappearance of piety and 
 faith, the prevalence, during the internal struggles of the 
 Greek states, of a bald selfishness. 
 
 The Sophists, with their attacks on the popular faith, are 
 only the foremost champions of a way of thinking which, pre- 
 pared for in that time from the most various sides, is not to 
 be regarded as the work of these individuals, but only as the 
 product of the entire historical development. So much the 
 less was it to be expected that isolated interferences of 
 political power, — prosecutions such as were instituted even 
 in the lifetime of Pericles, by the political opponents of that 
 statesman, against Anaxagoras, and later against Protagoras 
 and Socrates, — would oppose a lasting barrier to the inno- 
 vations. Certain individuals fell victims to these charges. 
 Anaxagoras and Protagoras were forced to leave Athens ; 
 Socrates drank the hemlock ; but the diffusion of the views 
 of these men was not checked, but promoted, by persecu- 
 tion. When Protagoras fled from Athens, about the year 410 
 B.C., the unbelief which was persecuted in him had long shot 
 forth in that city the deepest and most wide-spreading roots. 
 A restoration of the popular religion in its former import 
 had already become an impossibility ; but beyond the stand- 
 point of the Sophists it was certainly possible to advance, 
 when deeper spirits and profounder thinkers took up the 
 task which the Sophists had handled one-sidedly and un- 
 satisfyingly. 
 
 Such a profounder thinker was Socrates. This great 
 philosopher endeavored, indeed, on principle, to abstain from 
 all theological investigations. The human reason, he believed, 
 is not in a position to fathom the nature and the works of 
 Deity, and this research also has no use ; and he censured 
 the natural philosophers for thinking that they could come 
 upon the traces of the workings of the gods. He wished, 
 Vol. XXXIX. No. 156. 80 
 
634 MONOTHEISM AMONG THE GREEKS. [Oct. 
 
 for his part, to limit himself to the things which concern 
 human life and human duties. But since he reckoned 
 among these duties, before all else, piety and reverence 
 towards the gods, he was compelled to form a definite opinion 
 concerning Deity and its relation to man ; and since he could 
 naturally proceed in this only in accordance with his general 
 principles, he became, almost against his will, the author of 
 a theology, which, in spite of its scientific deficiencies, became 
 of great importance for the following time. As he was 
 accustomed to estimate the worth of human actions according 
 to the reasonableness of their purposes, so he sought also in 
 the universe, in the first place, for the purpose which every- 
 thing has to serve ; this he is to be believed to recognize in the 
 welfare of man. He came thus to the conviction that the 
 world can only be the work of an almighty, all-gracious, 
 all-wise, all-knowing Being ; a Being whose reason as far 
 transcends ours as the greatness of the world in which it is 
 inherent exceeds the greatness of our body ; whose eye pene- 
 trates all ; whose care embraces all, the greatest and the 
 smallest alike. Socrates had in this no need to inquire more 
 closely into the relation of this rational faith of his to the 
 popular religion, to which he was uprightly attached. He 
 speaks, according to the manner of the Greeks, without dis- 
 tinction, now in the plural of the gods, now in the singular 
 of God or the Divine ; he is convinced that the gods rule all 
 things for our best, that we have to resign ourselves uncon- 
 ditionally to their dispensations, unconditionally to obey 
 their commands ; and as to the worship of the gods, he quiets 
 himself with the remark that a pious disposition is the best 
 religious service ; that, for the rest, each may worship the 
 Deity according to the custom of his people. Still, it is not 
 to be denied that his religious faith proceeds, in the main, 
 from the unity of the divine. He does not deny the many 
 gods of the popular religion ; much- rather, he believed in 
 them, without doubt, in all earnestness ; but above these 
 many gods rises the one world-forming reason so decidedly, 
 as the essential, as that which for the ordering of the world 
 
1882.] MONOTHEISM AMONG THE GREEKS. 635 
 
 and the moral work of man is alone decisive, that they 
 appear beside it almost as useless additions. 
 
 Socrates himself, in a declaration which Xenophon has 
 given us, distinguishes thus between the two, when he says 
 that the other gods, as well as the Former and Preserver of 
 the universe, evince their kindness to us, without revealing 
 themselves to our gaze. The main point for him lies in the 
 conviction that everything in the world and in human life is 
 ordered according to the best purposes, with perfect reason, 
 according to a unified plan ; whether there be only one Being 
 from whom this order proceeds, or whether there be under 
 the highest Deity other divine beings who serve as assistants, 
 is a question whose investigation troubles him little, because 
 it seems to him to be of no consequence for his practical 
 religious needs. For his own part, however, he could but be 
 inclined to give preference to the second postulate, for the 
 reason that it best agreed with the faith of his people, from 
 which he held it to be neither necessary nor permissible 
 to separate himself. The unity of God is thus connected 
 with the plurality of the popular gods in the way which had 
 been approximated through the mythology, and in which the 
 poets had already taken the lead of the philosophers ; the 
 many gods are placed in a thoroughly subordinate relation 
 to the One ; they have only to represent, in the separate 
 portions of the world and in the various relations of human 
 life, that reason which is viewed as universal, the power 
 embracing the universe, in the highest sense God. 
 
 To this course Greek philosophy, in the great majority of 
 its representatives, remained true. There were, indeed, cer- 
 tainly not lacking among them those who assumed a bolder 
 attitude towards the popular religion. If Socrates had dis- 
 tinguished the highest God from the remaining gods, his 
 scholar, Antisthenes, declared, with the Eleatics, that there 
 is in truth only one God, whom we may not represent to 
 ourselves in human form ; popular opinion alone had created 
 the many gods. And he himself, as well as his followers, 
 the Cynics, distinguished themselves by a free-thinking which 
 
636 MONOTHEISM AMONG THE GREEKS. [Oct. 
 
 we also find again later among the Cynics of the Roman 
 imperial period, while they sought to use the mythical tra- 
 ditions for moral purposes by a free allegorical exposition. 
 Another Socratic, Aristippus, who also strayed far in other 
 respects from the genuine Socratic doctrine, followed with 
 his school the sceptical views of Protagoras. 
 
 Of the later schools of the Alexandrian and Roman 
 periods, the Sceptics and Epicureans are those who opposed 
 themselves as Aufklaerers to the popular religion. The first 
 could not, indeed, logically raise positive objections to the 
 existence of the gods ; but they declared it to be incapable of 
 proof, like every other scientific proposition ; and Carneades 
 especially, the most acute of the old Sceptics, in the second 
 century before Christ, raised objections against the common 
 conception of God, in the controversy with the theology of 
 the contemporaneous Stoical school, which have not even yet 
 entirely lost their significance. The numerous school of 
 the Epicureans, which extended itself especially among the 
 Romans, withdrew from the popular faith on another side. 
 These philosophers had no desire to question the existence 
 of the gods ; they declared this much rather to be quite 
 incontrovertible. But, in order that the principle of a purely 
 physical explanation of nature might not be at all prejudiced, 
 and in order to cut away the roots of the superstitious fear 
 of Deity, they held it to be necessary to explain away every 
 influence of the gods upon earthly things. The gods were 
 said to dwell in blessed rest, as objects of a disinterested 
 reverence, in the empty spaces between the worlds, untouched 
 by our affairs, and not intrenching upon them ; whereas 
 within the worlds everything was said to be governed partly 
 by accident, partly by blind natural necessity. 
 
 From this belief, which was scarcely distinguished in its 
 practical effects from atheism, monotheism had nothing to 
 hope. The Epicureans opposed it with the same mockery 
 as the myths of the popular religion ; and just as little could 
 the doubts of the Sceptics concerning the popular conceptions 
 advance a purer faith, since they held the existence of one 
 
1882.] MONOTHEISM AMONG THE GREEKS. 637 
 
 God and the existence of many gods to be equally indemon- 
 strable. These schools, therefore, promoted the cause of 
 monotheism only mediately, so far as they contributed, by 
 breaking to pieces the existing religion, to pave the way for a 
 new. 
 
 This way of thinking, however, as has been remarked, did 
 not have the mastery in Greek philosophy. The most im- 
 portant of the post-Socratic philosophers followed much rather 
 the course, which Socrates had already chosen, of reconciling 
 polytheism with monotheism. Yet, at the same time, they 
 went beyond Socrates, through opposing themselves much 
 more freely than he to the popular religion, and insisting 
 much more distinctly upon its purification through philosophy. 
 In this connection, however, no other exercised so profound 
 an influence upon the development of the religious conscious- 
 ness — an influence extending itself over many centuries — 
 as the great scholar of Socrates, Plato. This philosopher's 
 religious view Or Welt-anscltauung is, in its fundamental 
 determinations, a highly pure and spiritual monotheism. 
 Above and behind the phenomenal world there lies, according 
 to him, the world of eternal, immaterial, unchangeable es- 
 sences — the ideas; and at the head of the united world of 
 ideas stands the good, the infinite essence, which is the 
 ground of all thought and all being, which gives to all things 
 their reality and to our conceptions their truth, towards 
 which all our thoughts and activities in their innermost 
 nature tend, — if, indeed, we are able to behold it only with 
 difficulty in its pure form, and, for the most part, only in its 
 images and effects. From the good Plato's world-forming 
 Deity does not substantially differ, and it is the idea of the 
 good by which his conception of Deity is everywhere pene- 
 trated and determined. Goodness is the most essential 
 attribute of Deity ; out of goodness it has formed the world ; 
 with goodness and wisdom it directs human destiny, in the 
 small as in the great. He who imitates, by purity of life, its 
 goodness and perfection must in the end be served by all 
 things for the best. By the idea of the good are our con- 
 
638 MONOTHEISM AMONG THE GREEKS. [Oct. 
 
 ceptions of Deity to be measured ; according to it, are our 
 duties to Deity to be judged. The Deity is not jealous 
 of human happiness, as the popular belief in fate imagined ; 
 for the good is without envy. It cannot change itself, and 
 cannot show itself other than it is, because the perfect is 
 unchangeable, and all untruth is foreign to it. It must be 
 throughout a spiritual nature, high above liking and dislike, 
 untouched by every evil ; of its power, its goodness, its 
 wisdom, its holiness, its justice, we may form only the loftiest 
 and purest conceptions ; the myths, which ascribe human 
 weaknesses, passions, and mistakes to the gods, we must 
 oppose as unworthy fables. True worship also can consist 
 only in pure feeling and virtuous life, not in prayers and gifts, 
 with which unreasonableness hopes to honor the gods and 
 baseness hopes to bribe them. 
 
 We must admit that these are principles than which purer 
 can scarcely be found, even on Christian ground ; and, 
 indeed, these Platonic apothegms have served the teachers 
 of the Christian church for centuries as a rule for their 
 representations of the Deity and for their comprehension of 
 biblical narrations. A philosopher who held such views 
 had essentially outgrown Greek polytheism. None the less, 
 however, Plato will not abandon it unconditionally. And 
 even his system offered him certainly a few points of con- 
 nection. On the one hand, there stand under and alongside 
 the Deity, or the good, the other ideas, which he also indeed 
 designates as the eternal gods ; on the other hand, Plato 
 could not forsake the popular view, according to which the 
 constellations, in the unchanging regularity of their course, 
 were accounted living beings, in which a far higher reason 
 was immanent than in man ; and he likewise holds the 
 universe to be a living being, from whose soul are derived 
 the souls of all individuals. The constellations are there- 
 fore, as he says, the visible gods, and he calls the world 
 the god that has become, whose beauty and perfection he 
 cannot sufficiently praise. The remaining gods of the Greek 
 popular faith, on the contrary, — an Apollo, a Here, an 
 
1882.] MONOTHEISM AMONG THE GREEKS. 639 
 
 Athene, etc., — he considers, as he unambiguously gives us 
 to understand, as mythical forms. But even these he will not 
 have removed, on that account, from the public religious 
 worship, and he will have the belief in them made the 
 foundation of public education ; for men, he says, must in 
 the first place be educated through untruths, afterwards 
 through the truth — first through myths, then through sci- 
 entific knowledge. He, therefore, who does not # arrive at 
 the latter — and this is the case with the mass of men — 
 remains throughout life relegated to the myths and the form 
 of worship corresponding to them. Only so much the more 
 earnestly does the philosopher urge that the myths themselves 
 be purified, from moral and philosophical points of view — 
 that everything morally detrimental and unworthy of the 
 divine be removed from the religious tradition and from the 
 worship ; and precisely here lies the main ground of the 
 severity of his judgments upon the great poets of his people, 
 and the strictness with which he refuses a Homer and a 
 Hesiod admittance to his state. As poets, he would perhaps 
 tolerate them ; as teachers of religion, he must reject them. 
 
 Everything taken together, his position in relation to our 
 question is consequently this : He is himself a monotheist, 
 and this monotheism scarcely suffers a limitation through 
 the doctrine of the higher nature of the constellations ; for 
 these visible gods stand essentially in similar relation to the 
 one invisible God as man or any other of the finite beings. 
 As a religion for the people, on the contrary, he deems the 
 Hellenic polytheism indispensable ; but he demands as the 
 condition of its admissibility that it be subjected to a thorough 
 reform, and be brought by this, as far as possible, into 
 harmony with that monotheism in its workings. 
 
 Aristotle is at one with Plato in all main points. The 
 doctrine of the unity of God is still more distinctly expressed 
 by him than by Plato. As the world is only one, he points 
 out, it must also be moved by one highest cause ; and this 
 cause, as he further deduces, can only be extramundane, pure 
 spirit, working in uninterrupted, never-slumbering activity 
 
640 MONOTHEISM AMONG THE GREEKS. [Oct. 
 
 of thought. At the same time, the determination that the 
 Deity must be a personal Being comes out more expressly in 
 lim than in Plato, and is more deeply grounded in his entire 
 system. The Socratic-Platonic belief in providence, on the 
 contrary, is essentially limited. The Deity is, indeed, ac- 
 cording to Aristotle, the first moving cause, which gives 
 .mpetus to the revolution of the heaven, and the highest 
 ^ood, to which all tends. There rules, indeed, in nature, a 
 aniversal activity, working unconsciously from within ac- 
 cording to a purpose, and in human life a natural connection 
 }f moral worth with inward happiness ; but for an immediate 
 mtrenchment of Deity upon the course of the world, extending 
 to particulars, there is no place in the Aristotelian system. 
 Alongside the highest God Aristotle also accepts a number 
 of other eternal beings, in the spirits of the heavenly spheres, 
 as he also declares the universe to be without beginning and 
 imperishable, since the divine activity in the world must lie 
 even as eternal as Deity itself. To these spirits of the stars 
 he also refers the polytheistic faith, so far as he concedes it 
 any truth. " All things remaining, however," he says, " are 
 mythical additions for winning the masses, made for the sake 
 of legislation and common needs." We have therefore here, 
 likewise, a monotheism which is but little modified by the 
 acceptance of spirits of the stars, and which is chiefly dis- 
 tinguished from the Platonic only by a severer, less imagina- 
 tive character — a monotheism which has for itself no need 
 of the popular religion, but which still tolerates it as a 
 political . necessity, and leaves open for it certain points of 
 connection in its own system. 
 
 In the next great Greek school of philosophy, the Stoic, 
 this monotheism becomes pantheism. One Being there is, 
 according to the Stoical teaching, from which proceed the 
 matter and the form of all things, and which at the end of 
 this world-period will take all back into itself, in order, after 
 the expiration of a fixed time, to create the same world anew, 
 and to continue to all eternity the succession of things, as it 
 has endured from eternity. This Being is at the same time 
 
1882.] MONOTHEISM AMONG THE GREEEKS. 641 
 
 the primitive substance and the primitive force ; it is the 
 creative fire, which in its transformation produces the re- 
 maining elements ; but it is also the highest spirit, the 
 reason and the law of the world, the Deity. Everything 
 which exists has become from this Divine Being, and is sus- 
 tained by it. All natural forces and all spirits are only 
 portions of the one force which pours itself through all. So 
 far now as a divine force works in everything, everything can 
 be made an object of religious worship, be personified as a 
 Deity ; but since in truth it is only one force, which appears 
 under different forms in all things, these divine forms may 
 not be treated as independent personal beings, but only as 
 mythical representations of natural forces, which, having 
 risen from the one source of the divine nature, stream in a 
 thousand branches through the universe. From this double 
 point of view is the conception of religion determined in the 
 Stoical school. On the one hand, they oppose to Scepticism 
 and Epicureanism the substance of the popular faith ; they 
 seek to show that the representations of the gods and the 
 myths, which are indeed apparently most unworthy and un- 
 reasonable, have their good sense ; they endeavor to defend 
 the belief in prophecy and similar things. On the other hand, 
 however, they cannot sanction all this in the same sense which 
 it had in the faith of the people. In place of the gods appear 
 natural things — the stars, the elements, the fruits of the 
 earth, great men, and the benefactors of mankind; in place of 
 the immediate divine revelations appear the natural foretokens 
 of future events, which the wise and experienced can recog- 
 nize and explain by means of the connection and consistency 
 of all things. Their treatment of the popular religion is 
 therefore a continual explaining around the same ; they are 
 the chief authors of that allegorical mode of interpretation 
 which passed from the Greeks to the Jews, and on to the 
 Christians, and has created with both so much confusion. 
 A pantheistic monotheism seeks here to come to terms with 
 polytheism by artificial means. But that the two are none 
 the less of different nature is not entirely hidden even among 
 Vol. XXXIX. No. 156. 8i 
 
642 MONOTHEISM AMONG THE GREEKS. [Oct. 
 
 the Stoics. From them, also, we receive not only many fine 
 passages concerning the Deity, the worthlessness of a merely 
 outward service, and the necessity of a spiritual worship, but 
 also very sharp and free judgments concerning the myths 
 and the public worship ; but the school as a whole had too 
 little critical sense to become perfectly clear as to its relation 
 to the popular religion. 
 
 In Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics we have become ac- 
 quainted with the three main sources of the religious views 
 to which for many centuries, in the Graeco-Roman and the 
 Graeco-Oriental world, all those held to whom the popular 
 religion was too crude and dull, irreligion too comfortless 
 and void. In the eclecticism of the Roman period the 
 doctrines of these men were mixed in the most various com- 
 binations. At the same time, however, even among the 
 philosophers, the disposition became more and more extended 
 to lean upon the positive religion, and to expect from divine 
 revelation the communication of truth, as to the independent 
 discovery of which the weary thought had already, since the 
 appearance of Scepticism, begun to despair. And the further 
 Deity was removed above everything finite and earthly, by 
 the purer idea of God in the Platonic and Aristotelian school, 
 the more forcibly was the need felt of finding a mediation 
 between the two in such natures as should be higher than 
 man, but at the same time should stand nearer to the world 
 and man than Deity. Hence the importance now won by the 
 belief in demons. This belief had been formerly only a subor- 
 dinate element of the popular religion — was, indeed, made use 
 of occasionally by the philosophers, as by Plato, but remained 
 foreign to their own convictions. It now became a subject 
 of the most earnest religious interest. Of the one God of the 
 philosophers there existed too high conceptions to allow of the 
 venture to weave him, with his activity and his essence, into 
 the course of nature and human affairs. The gods of the 
 people, who were said to be woven into both, it was impos- 
 sible, for that very reason, to treat as gods in the strict and 
 full sense. But the need which polytheism had begotten was 
 
1882.] MONOTHEISM AMONG THE GREEKS. 643 
 
 not yet removed ; the habit of bringing the divine to view in 
 sensible presence and defined appearance could not be broken. 
 What else remained but to place a number of subordinate 
 beings beside the Deity, who should constitute the bond 
 between it and the world ; since they carried the divine 
 forces over into the finite, and took the particular parts of 
 the world and individual men under their special protection ? 
 These beings are the demons. They are the old gods of 
 polytheism, but stripped of their independent lordship, subor- 
 dinated to the one monotheistic God, as his servants and 
 instruments. Since the demons take the place of the gods 
 for the religious consciousness, polytheism declares itself 
 ready to subject itself to monotheism, in case the latter is 
 disposed to vouchsafe it at least a subordinate place within 
 itself. 
 
 This disposition was just then widespread in the sole 
 strictly monotheistic religion of antiquity — Judaism. In 
 the centuries immediately succeeding the Babylonish cap- 
 tivity a new element had penetrated into the circle of Jewish 
 conceptions, in the belief in angels and devils, which offered 
 the polytheistic mode of thought a certain satisfaction inside 
 of monotheism. Between the old gods, who had subjected 
 themselves as demons and lower divinities to a higher god, 
 and the ministering spirits who now surrounded the one God 
 of Judaism, the difference was so slight that nothing essential 
 seemed to stand in the way of a blending together of the 
 two. And, indeed, the Jewish Alexandrians began already 
 to set forth a theory concerning the divine forces, and con- 
 cerning the bearer of all these forces, the Logos or Word of 
 God, in which the Jewish belief in angels entered into the 
 closest union with the Greek belief in demons, and with the 
 philosophers' doctrines of the ideas and the universal, all- 
 penetrating divine reason (the divine Logos). 
 
 But preparation for this blending of the religions was also 
 made from yet another side. Partly by the mixing of peoples 
 in the Alexandrian and Roman time, partly by the Greek 
 philosophy, the barriers were broken through, which until 
 
644 MONOTHEISM AMONG THE GREEKS. [Oct 
 
 then held the nations separated from one another in self- 
 sufficient exclusiveness. The Hellene had to accustom him- 
 self to acknowledge also among the barbarians the moral 
 and spiritual qualities, on the presumed sole possession of 
 which his proud contempt of everything not Greek had hitherto 
 propped itself. The Jew was constrained to doubt the ex- 
 clusive choice of his people, after he met among the Greeks 
 a surpassing spiritual culture, which was also a gift of God, 
 and an insight in religious things, with the acknowledgment 
 of which his national vanity contented itself, sorrowfully 
 enough, through the groundless pretence that the old wise 
 men of Greece had borrowed their treasures from the Jewish 
 prophets and the Old Testament writings. Thus the knowledge 
 gradually broke in — the lasting extension of which is to be 
 ascribed before all to the Stoical school, to its immortal 
 merit — that all men, by reason of their rational character, 
 are of the same nature and stand under the same law ; that 
 they have the same natural rights and the same moral duties ; 
 that they are all equally to be considered as children of God, as 
 citizens of one and the same commonwealth, which embraces 
 all mankind. Men learned to conceive the relation of man to 
 God as an immediate and inner one, to view the service of 
 the devout heart and the virtuous life as more essential than 
 the national form of worship, to dispense with priestly medi- 
 ation for the communion of man with God. This purification 
 of the morally religious consciousness was first perfected in 
 comprehensive manner among the Greeks and through the 
 Greek philosophy ; but even Judaism had not shut herself 
 up from it ; and since the second century before Christ a 
 party had appeared here, in the Essenes, which, in undeniable 
 connection with the Greek new Pythagoreanism, and through 
 this with the collective philosophy of that time, devoted itself 
 to an inner, solitary piety, directed to poverty and renuncia- 
 tion, to universal philanthropy and the removal of all in- 
 equality among men ; was indifferent, on the contrary, to 
 the national Messianic hopes, rejected the entire principle of 
 sacrifices, — the central point of the Jewish religious service, 
 
1882] MONOTHEISM AMONG THE GREEKS. 645 
 
 — and opposed to the hierarchical institutions of Judaism 
 a monastically organized union of ascetics. 
 
 This change in the moral consciousness, however, stands 
 in the closest connection with the development of the con- 
 ceptions of Deity. When, in place of the many gods, there 
 appeared the one God whose kingdom is the entire world, 
 it became necessary also that one divine right and law should 
 embrace all men ; consequently not only did national particu- 
 larism have to fall, but also the universal service of the devout 
 life appeared as the essential, in opposition to particular and 
 external rituals. Even so, vice versa, when the consciousness 
 of the brotherhood and equality of all men was arrived at, 
 it was impossible to hold fast to the diversity of gods ; if 
 mankind is but one, — if it has one end and stands under 
 one law, — it can be only one and the same power by which 
 all men are created and ruled. The belief in the unity of 
 God and the belief in the equality of all men and their moral 
 duties condition each other reciprocally ; both developed 
 together in the old world, and thus prepared for Christianity 
 the ground in which it could not plant the germ of a new 
 religion and a new moral life, as it were, from without, but 
 out of which alone it could itself grow and draw its nourish- 
 ment according to the laws of historical development. 
 
 But, important as the place is which Greek philosophy fills 
 among the forces which prepared the way for Christianity, — 
 when this itself appeared in its distinctness, and declared war 
 upon the polytheistic popular religions of the earlier time, 
 then it was precisely this philosophy which became the last 
 champion of paganism. We certainly cannot say this without 
 limitation. Not a few philosophically educated men went 
 over to the new religion; very many more acquired, as 
 Christians, in the schools of the philosophers the scientific 
 culture which they needed for the defence and the theological 
 formulation of their faith. The Hellenic philosophy thus 
 worked not only outside the church and against the church, 
 but also in it and for it. And a more careful investigation 
 would show that its influence on the Christian theology and 
 
646 MONOTHEISM AMONG THE GREEKS. [Oct. 
 
 Christian usage was from the beginning incomparably more 
 extensive and permanent than is generally conceived. But 
 the majority of the Greek philosophers regarded a faith which 
 appeared to them in the positive part of its creed as supersti- 
 tion, and in its attack upon the existing religions as mis- 
 chievous, with profound contempt ; and as this faith grew 
 into a threatening, and finally conquering power, they opposed 
 it with bitter hatred. 
 
 About the middle of the third century Greek philosophy 
 gathered together, for the last time, in the Neo-Platonic 
 school, all the forces which yet remained to it. The doctrinal 
 system of this school appears, in its theological content, as 
 an acute, accomplished attempt to unite the philosophical 
 monotheism with that polytheism from which the Hellenic 
 feeling cut itself loose with so great difficulty. The mode of 
 union is nearly related to that which we have already noticed 
 in the Stoical teaching, if, indeed, the more particular deter- 
 minations have a different purport. One Supreme Being is 
 assumed, indeterminable, incomprehensible, inconceivable, 
 but at the same time the source of all existence and the seat 
 of all perfection. By him proceeds, by an overflowing of his 
 fulness, by a naturally necessary working of his power, the 
 gradation of the finite ; but the farther things are removed 
 from their source, the more mediums lie between the two, 
 the more imperfect they become, till in the end the pure 
 light of the divine forces goes out in the darkness of matter. 
 All things consequently form a gradual succession, of dimin- 
 ishing perfection. All are sustained by divine forces ; but 
 these are apportioned to them in different measure and dif- 
 ferent purity. For this very reason, however, say the New- 
 Platonists, is it necessary that we press upward from the 
 lower stages, through the intermediate, to the higher ; that 
 we allow ourselves to be led, in regular ascent, from the 
 lower gods to the highest God ; that we despise not the 
 sensuous mediums of spiritual goods. And since they explain 
 the Greek and Oriental divinities, with all the arbitrariness 
 of the established allegorical exposition, into the abstract 
 
1882.] MONOTHEISM AMONG THE GREEKS. 647 
 
 categories of their metaphysics ; since they seek the natural 
 medium of a higher life not in the knowledge and cultivation 
 of the real, but in the ritualistic proceedings of all the popular 
 religions and mysteries, in sacrifices and prayers, prophecy 
 and consecration, image-worship and theurgy, everything 
 rude and fantastic out of the mythology, all the externalities 
 of worship, all the varied superstition of thousands of years 
 find in their system an artificial justification. Against the 
 purer doctrine and moral force of Christianity this system 
 could not long hold its ground ; but so great was the under- 
 lying power of the Greek spirit, which had become wearied 
 and in so many respects untrue to itself, that the vic- 
 torious church, even during the conflict, took up into itself 
 the same philosophy which had made the Hellenic ground 
 so hard to conquer. New-Platonism was conquered, so 
 far as it had identified itself with paganism ; as a form of 
 Christian speculation, the church itself appropriated it. To 
 the writings which a Christian New-Platonist, about the year 
 500, fathered upon Dionysius the Areopagite the church paid 
 the highest reverence. The church defended its dogmas, its 
 sacraments, its hierarchical institutions with the same prin- 
 ciples which it had had before to fight in its pagan opponents. 
 On this side, indeed, the influence of the Greek nature may 
 be traced up to the present. Far more important, however, 
 certainly, is the service which Greek science rendered to all 
 after time in the opposite direction, through the refining of 
 religious ideas and the purification of moral conceptions. 
 And of this service I trust that I have given, in the narrow 
 bounds prescribed me, a not altogether unsatisfactory repre- 
 sentation 
 
648 \ THE TRIAL OF CHRIST. [Oct. 
 
 APR 8 1926 
 
 ARTICLE III. 
 
 THE TRIAL OF CHRIST: 1 A DIATESSARON WITH 
 DISSERTATIONS. 
 
 BY HENET C. VEDDER, OF THE EXAMINER'S EDITORIAL STAFF, NEW YORK. 
 DlATESSARON. 2 
 
 And immediately, while he is still speaking, cometh Judas Iscariot, 
 one of the twelve, and with him a great multitude with swords and staves, 
 Matt xxvi 47 an( ^ w ' tn lanterns and torches, having received the band 
 Mark xiv. 43. an d officers from the chief priests and scribes and phar- 
 Luke xxii. 47. isees and elders of the people. Then the band and 
 John xviii. 3,12. the captain and the officers of the Jews took Jesus and 
 bound him. 
 
 And they led him to Annas first, for he was father-in-law to Caiaphas, 
 who was high-priest that year. Now Caiaphas was he 
 ' ' who gave counsel to the Jews that it was expedient that 
 one man should die for the people. 
 
 And they that had laid hold of Jesus led him away to Caiaphas, the 
 high-priest, where the chief priests and the scribes and the elders assem- 
 bled. The high-priest then asked Jesus of his disciples and of his doc- 
 trine. Jesus answered him : I have spoken openly to the world ; I ever 
 Matt. xxvi. 57. taught in the synagogue and in the temple, whither all 
 Mark xiv. 53. the Jews resort ; and in secret have I said nothing. Why 
 Luke xxii. 54. askest thou me? Ask them who heard me what I have 
 John xviii. 19-24. gaid unto them# Bel]old j tliey know wbat j said> And 
 
 when he had thus spoken, one of the officers who stood by smote Jesus 
 with the palm of his hand, saying, Answerest thou the high-priest so ? 
 Jesus answered him : If I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil ; 
 but if well, why smitest thou me ? Now Annas had sent him bound 
 unto Caiaphas, the high-priest. 
 
 Now the chief priests and the whole Sanhedrim kept seeking 3 for false 
 witness against Jesus, in order to put him to death, and found none. 
 
 1 A brief section recording the arrest of Jesus is prefixed to the account of the 
 trial. The reason will appear in the sequel. 
 
 2 The translation is that of the A. V., changes being made only when greater 
 faithfulness to the Greek demanded them. The Greek text followed is that of 
 Tischendorf 's eighth edition. 
 
 3 e^rjTOVf. 
 
1882.] THE TRIAL OF CHRIST. 649 
 
 For many kept testifying falsely * against him, yet their testimony agreed 
 not. At last there came two and bare false witness against him, saying : 
 We heard this fellow say, I will destroy this temple of God, that is 
 made with hands, and within three days I will build another made with- 
 out hands. But neither so did their witness agree. And the high-priest 
 stood up in the midst and asked Jesus, saying : Answerest 
 
 thou nothing ? What witness these against thee ? But _,* ," XXV1- ~ • 
 . . "°, . , ° , . , , Mark xiv. 55-64. * 
 
 Jesus held his peace and answered nothing. And 
 
 again the high-priest asked him, saying, I adjure thee by the living God, 
 that thou tell us if* thou be the Christ, the Son of God ! Jesus saith unto 
 him : Thou hast said. Moreover, I say unto you, hereafter shall ye see 
 the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming upon the 
 clouds of heaven. Then the high-priest rent his clothes, saying : He hath 
 spoken blasphemy ! What further need have we of witnesses ? Behold ! 
 now have ye heard his blasphemy. What think ye ? And they all con- 
 demned liim, saying, He is guilty of death. 
 
 And the men that held him mocked him ; and some began to spit in his 
 face and to blindfold him, and to buffet him, and to say Matt, xxvi.67 68. 
 unto him : Prophecy unto us, thou Christ, Who is he Mark xiv. 65, 66. 
 that smote thee. And many other tilings blasphemously Luke xxii. 63-65. 
 spake they against him. And the servants did strike him with the 
 palms of their hands. 
 
 And straightway in the morning, as soon as it was day, all the chief 
 priests held a consultation with the elders and the scribes 
 and the whole Sanhedrim, and took counsel against 
 Jesus, to put liim to death. And they led him away 2 into the Sanhedrim, 
 saying, If thou art the Christ tell us. And he said unto them : If I tell 
 you ye will not believe"; and if I ask you ye will not answer. Hereafter 
 the Son of Man shall be sitting on the right hand of the power of God. 
 Then said they all, Art thou then the Son of God ? 
 And he said to them, Ye say that I am. And they 
 said, What further need of testimony have we ? For we ourselves have 
 lifard from his own mouth. 
 
 And the whole Sanhedrim rose up, and having bound Jesus led him 
 
 away from Caiaphas to the pretorium, and delivered him to Pilate, the 
 
 governor. And it was early. And they themselves Matt, xxvii. 2. 
 
 went not into the judgment-hall, lest they should be Mark xv. 1. 
 
 defiled ; but that they might eat the passover. Pilate Luke xxiii. 1. 
 
 therefore went out unto them, and saith, What accusa- Jolm XVUI 28- 
 
 tion bring ye against this man ? They answered and said, If he were not 
 
 a malefactor we would not have delivered him up to ...„„„„ 
 
 ™ . , ^.., , rr, , i- i John xviu. 29-32. 
 
 thee. Then said Pilate unto them, Take ye him and 
 
 judge according to your law. The Jews, therefore, said unto him, It ia 
 
 1 ctyeuoojuapTupow/. 2 avr)jayov, Luke xxii. 66. 
 
 Vol. XXXIX. No. 156. 82 
 
650 THE TRIAL OF CHRIST. [Oct. 
 
 not lawful for us to put any man to death : that the saying of Jesus might 
 
 be fulfilled, which he spake signifying what death he should die. And 
 
 they began to accuse him, saying : We found this fellow 
 
 perverting our nation, and forbidding to give tribute to 
 
 Caesar, and saying that he himself is Christ, a king. 
 
 Then Pilate entered into the judgment-hall again, and called Jesus. And 
 jesus stood before the governor, and the governor asked liim, saying, Art 
 thou the King of the Jews ? Jesus answered, Of thyself sayest thou this, 
 or did others tell it thee of me ? Pilate answered : Am I a Jew ? Thine 
 own nation and the chief priests have delivered thee unto me ; what hast 
 thou done ? Jesus answered : My kingdom is not of 
 this world. If my kingdom were of this world, then 
 would my servants be fighting that I should not be delivered to the Jews; 
 but now is my kingdom not from hence. Pilate therefore said unto him, 
 Art thou a king, then ? Jesus answered : Thou sayest that I am a king. 
 To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I 
 should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth 
 my voice. Pilate saith unto him, What is truth ? And when he had said 
 this he went out again unto the Jews. 
 
 And the chief priests and elders accused him of many things, but he 
 answered nothing. Then said Pilate unto him: Answerest thou nothing ? 
 
 Hearest thou not how many things they witness 
 Matt, xxvii. 12-14. . , ,, „ -,, . T ... 
 
 ,. , „ _ against thee i rsut Jesus vet answered him never a 
 
 Mark xv. 3-5. ° J 
 
 word, insomuch that the governor marvelled greatly. 
 
 Then said Pilate to the chief priests and to the people : I find no fault in 
 
 this man. And they were the more fierce, saying : He 
 
 T , v "... ' ' ' stirreth up the people, teaching throughout all Jewry, 
 John xvni. 38. ,..,>, ,., 
 
 beginning from Galilee to this place. 
 
 When Pilate heard, he asked if the man were a Galilean. And as soon 
 
 as he heard that he belonged to Herod's jurisdiction, he sent him to Herod, 
 
 who himself was also at Jerusalem at that time. And when Herod saw 
 
 Jesus he was exceeding glad, for he had been for a long season desirous 
 
 to see him, because he had heard of him, and was hoping to see some 
 
 miracle done by him. Then he questioned with him in 
 u ^.e xxm. „. man y wor( j s? k u t h e answered him nothing. And the 
 chief priests and the scribes stood accusing him vehemently. And Herod 
 with his men of war set him at naught and mocked him, and arrayed him 
 in a gorgeous robe and sent him again to Pilate. And the sam« day 
 Herod and Pilate were made friends together, for before they were at 
 enmity between themselves. And Pilate, when he had called together 
 the chief priests and the rulers and the people, said unto them : Ye have 
 
 brought this man unto me as one that perverteth the peo- 
 
 ' pie ; and behold ! I, having examined him before you, have 
 
 found no fault in this man touching those things whereof ye accuse 
 
1882.] THE TRIAL OF CHRIST. 651 
 
 him — no nor yet Herod, for he sent him to us; and lo ! nothing 
 worthy of death is done unto him. I will therefore chastise him and 
 release him. 
 
 Now at the feast the governor was wont to release unto the people a 
 prisoner, whom they would. And they had then a notable prisoner, 
 named Barabbas, bound with them that had made insurrection with him, 
 who had committed murder in the insurrection. And the multitude com- 
 ing up began to desire him to do as he was wont to do Matt, xxvii. 15-23. 
 unto them. Therefore, when they were gathered to- Mark xv. 6-14. 
 gethered, Pilate said unto them, Whom will ye that I Luke xxiii. 19-23. 
 release unto you, Barabbas or Jesus, the King of the "* onn xvm - 39 > 40 - 
 Jews, who is called Christ ? (For he knew that for envy they had deliv- 
 ered him.) But the chief priests and elders persuaded the multitude that 
 they should ask Barabbas and destroy Jesus. And Pilate answered and 
 said again unto them, Whether of the twain will ye that I release unto 
 you ? And they cried out all at once, saying, Away with this man, and 
 release unto us Barabbas. Pilate, therefore, willing to release Jesus, 
 spake again to them: What shall I do then with Jesus who is called 
 Christ, whom ye call the King of the Jews ? And they cried out again, 
 Crucify him, crucify him. Then Pilate said unto them the third time: 
 Why, what evil hath he done ? I have found no cause of death in him. 
 I will therefore chastise him and let him go. And they were instant with 
 loud voices,' crying out the more exceedingly, Crucify him. 
 
 Pilate, seeing that he can prevail nothing, but rather a tumult is made, 
 took water and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am inno- 
 cent of this blood, see ye to it. Then answered all the people and said, 
 His blood be upon us and upon our children. And Pilate wishing to con- 
 tent the people, released unto them him that for sedition Matt, xxvii. 21-26. 
 and murder was cast into prison, whom they had de- Mark xv. 15-19. 
 sired ; but Jesus he delivered to their will. Then Luke xxiii. 24, 25. 
 Pilate therefore took Jesus and scourged him. Then xlx " ~* " 
 
 the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the common hall, called 
 pretorium, and gathered unto him the whole band. And they stripped 
 him and put on him a scarlet robe. And when they had platted a crown 
 of thorns they put it upon his head, and a reed in his right hand. And 
 bowing the knee before him they did homage to him and mocked him, 
 saying, Hail, King of the Jews ! And they spat upon him, and smote 
 him with their hands, and took the reed and smote him on the head. 
 
 Pilate therefore went forth again, and said unto them, Behold ! I bring 
 him forth unto you that ye may know I find no fault in him. Then came 
 Jesus forth, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. And Pi- 
 late saith unto them, Behold the man ! When the chief priests therefore 
 and officers saw him, they cried out, saying, Crucify him, crucify him. 
 Pilate saith unto them, Take ye him and crucify him, for I find no fault 
 
652 THE TRIAL OF CHRIST. [Oct. 
 
 in him. The Jews answered him, We have a law, and by that law he 
 ought to die, because he made himself the Son of God. 
 John xix. 4-12. Wljen pji ate therefore heard that saying he was the more 
 afraid and went again unto the judgment-hall, and saith unto Jesus, 
 Whence art thou ? But Jesus gave him no answer. Then saith Pilate 
 unto him : Speakest thou not unto me ? Knowest thou not that I have 
 power to crucify thee, and have power to release thee ! Jesus answered : 
 Thou hast no power at all against me, except it were given thee from 
 above ; therefore he that delivered me unto thee hath the greater sin. 
 And from thenceforth Pilate sought to release him, but the Jews cried 
 out, saying : If thou let this man go, thou art not Caesar's friend. Who- 
 soever maketh himself king speaketh against Caesar. 
 
 When Pilate therefore heard these words, he brought Jesus forth and 
 sat down upon the bema, 1 in a place that is called the 
 John xix. 13. p avement) b u t in the Hebrew Gabbatha. When he was 
 set down upon the bema, his wife sent unto him, saying: Have thou noth- 
 ing to do with that just man ; for I have suffered many 
 Matt. xxvn. 19. jjjjjjjgg ^jg j a y in a (j ream because of him. And it was' 
 
 the preparation of the passover, about the sixth hour ; and he saith unto 
 the Jews, Behold your King ! They therefore cried out, 
 
 John xix. 14-16. Awav> away> cruc ify bim ! Pilate saith unto them, Shall 
 I crucify your King? The chief priests answered, We 
 
 have no king but Caesar. Then delivered he him, therefore, unto them 
 
 to be crucified. 
 
 Dissertation I. — Chronology of the Trial. 
 To fix the exact order of the events narrated by the evan- 
 gelists is not the easiest of tasks. The difficulty will be 
 more apparent if the several accounts, briefly summarized, 
 are placed in parallel columns : 
 
 MATTHEW. MARK. LUKE. JOHN. 
 
 Jesus is led to Jesus is led to Jesus is led to Jesus is led to 
 " the high-priest," " the high-priest." " the high-priest's Annas first. "The 
 Caiaphas. The Sanhedrim palace," where he high - priest " ex- 
 assembles. Jesus is mocked. At day- amines him. He is 
 is tried, convicted, break the Sanhe- led from Caiaphas 
 and insulted. In drimassembles.and to the pretorium of 
 the morning the Jesus is led away Pilate. 
 Sanhedrim reas- to it. He is tried, 
 sembles and leads convicted, and at 
 Jesus to Pilate. once led to Pilate. 
 
 This certainly looks discouraging. Sceptical critics declare 
 1 M friiiiwros, in the judgment-seat. — A. V. 
 
1882.] THE TRIAL OF CHRIST. 653 
 
 that these conflicting accounts cannot possibly be harmonized. 
 On closer examination, however, many of the difficulties 
 vanish. None of the writers pretends to give a complete 
 account of the trial, but each one gives such items as 
 especially impressed themselves upon his mind. Two ques- 
 tions only are at all difficult of solution : Where did the 
 examination by the high-priest described by Luke take place ? 
 and, Does Luke describe the same trial as that recorded 
 by Matthew and Mark ? 
 
 The first of these questions is the harder to answer, as 
 there is such a delightful difference of opinion among com- 
 mentators and critics on this point. Many hold that the 
 high-priest was no other than Annas, and that after this 
 preliminary examination before him Jesus was led away to 
 Caiaphas, before whom the real trial took place. So Meyer, 
 Wieseler, Lange, Neander, Ellicott, Alford, Godet. Others 
 are equally positive that we have no record of the proceedings 
 before Annas, and that the preliminary examination was con- 
 ducted by Caiaphas, the high-priest. So De Wette, Tholuck, 
 Liicke, Friedlieb, Gresswell, Robinson, Gardiner. When so 
 many and so learned doctors disagree, there seems to be no 
 Way for those of humbler pretensions but to examine the 
 evidence on both sides, and to decide, with becoming modesty, 
 each for himself. 
 
 The decision of this mooted point depends mainly upon 
 the interpretation of two passages. The first of these is 
 John xviii. 19 : 'O ovv ap%iep€vs rjpcorrjae rbv 'Irjcrovv irepl 
 rwv fxadrjTcov avrov teal irepl tj}? StSa^? avrov. The other 
 is John xviii. 24 : ' AirearetXev ovv avrov 6 "Avvas SeSefievov 
 7r/3o? Kaidcjxzv rbv ap-%iepea. Now whom does John call 6 
 apxtepevs, Annas or Caiaphas ? The following reasons have 
 been given for supposing that Annas is meant : First, that 
 term is applied to Annas both before and after this (Luke 
 iii. 2; Acts iv. G). But this is hardly conclusive ; for the 
 question is as to John's usage of the term. 1 Secondly, John 
 calls Caiaphas ap%Lepev<; rod ivcavrov itceivov (xviii. 13). 
 
 1 See Alford and Meyer, in loco. Compare also Andrews, Life of Our Lord, 
 p. 486. 
 
654 THE TRIAL OF CHRIST. [Oct. 
 
 Neander 1 considers this proof that John intends to make 
 a distinction between Annas, the high-priest de jure, and 
 Caiaphas, the high-priest de facto. On the other hand, it 
 is certain that John nowhere calls Annas the high-priest, 
 unless here. And we can hardly suppose that he applies that 
 title to Annas here ; for in the second of the two passages 
 above quoted he expressly calls Caiaphas the high-priest, 
 without any qualification whatsoever. The usage of Matthew 
 is the same (xxvi. 57). We conclude, then, that the natural 
 interpretation of John's language is clearly in favor of the 
 supposition that the ap^iepev^ in question was Caiaphas, and 
 not Annas. This conclusion is rendered only less than 
 certain by the second of the two passages cited, which is ren- 
 dered in the King James version, " Now Annas had sent 
 him bound unto Caiaphas, the high-priest." The particle 
 ovv is wanting in the Textus Receptus ; consequently, many 
 have held that airecrrecXev should be translated as a simple 
 aorist, " Annas sent him bound," etc. This would make it 
 necessary to regard the preliminary examination as having 
 taken place before Annas. But, though many have held this 
 opinion, few hold it now; for airkareCkev ovv avrov k.t.X. is 
 unquestionably the true reading. It has the support of a, B, 
 C (pr. man.'), L, X, A, the Syriac and Ethiopic versions, and 
 is adopted by Tischendorf , Tregelles, and Alford. Moreover, 
 the use of the aorist as a pluperfect is not infrequent. 2 
 Compare with the use of aireareiXev, ehrjaev and Wero in 
 Matt. xiv. 3 ; and of e&co/cev, xxvi. 48 ; of virrjvrrjo'ev, in John 
 xi. 30 ; and of r^Tolfiaaav, in Luke xxiv. 1. Another cor- 
 roborative circumstance is found in the following considera- 
 tion : If the examination took place before Caiaphas, then 
 Peter's denial also occurred there. This does away with the 
 clumsy and improbable hypothesis that Annas and Caiaphas 
 occupied different apartments in the same palace — a hypothesis 
 to which those have been driven who hold the opposite view. 
 
 1 Lift of Christ (Am. ed.), p. 410, note. 
 
 2 Vid. Winer, Grammar of N. T. Greek, p. 275, and Buttmann, p. 200. In 
 classical Greek, vid. Thucyd. i. 102 ; Xen. Anah. i. 2. 24 ; Demos. (Keiske'sed.), 
 576. 18 ; ristoph. Nub. 238. Cf. also Crosby's Greek Grammar, $ 580. 
 
1882.] THE TRIAL OF CHRIST. 655 
 
 There is something ludicrous in the statement, " Now Annas 
 sent him away bound to Caiaphas," if the sending away con- 
 sisted in a removal from one apartment to another in the 
 same house. 
 
 We have now to answer the second question — Does Luke 
 describe the same trial as that recorded by Matthew and 
 Mark ? It seems clear, from the statements of Matthew and 
 Mark, that there were two sessions of the Sanhedrim — one 
 during the night, and the other early in the morning. The 
 preliminary examination before Caiaphas took place while 
 the Sanhedrim was assembling. 1 When it had assembled 
 a formal examination or trial was instituted, which Matthew 
 and Mark describe at considerable length. At daylight the 
 Sanhedrim reassembled, and after a brief examination Jesus 
 was formally condemned. This scene is probably the one 
 described by Luke, and is barely hinted at by Matthew. The 
 similarity between Luke's account of the morning session 
 and the descriptions that Matthew and Mark give of the 
 night session has led many to suppose that there was really 
 but one session. It is to be borne in mind, however, that 
 Matthew and Mark state that at the night session the Jews 
 attempted to find testimony against Jesus, and failed miser- 
 ably. He was finally condemned out of his own mouth. 
 When they reassembled in the morning to pass formal 
 sentence upon Jesus, what could be more natural than that 
 they should again ask him the fatal question, and that he 
 should repeat substantially his former answer ? 
 
 The most probable order of events, then, is as follows : 
 Jesus is led to Annas, who sends him bound to Caiaphas ; 
 while the Sanhedrim is assembling Caiaphas examines Jesus; 
 the Sanhedrim having assembled, Jesus is tried and con- 
 demned ; a recess is taken, during which Jesus is abused by 
 
 1 Cf. Matt. xxvi. 57 and Mark xiv. 53. Matthew says that the Sanhedrim 
 assembled (cruvf]xQ r l< Ta '')> an( i proceeds at once to the formal trial. Mark says, 
 with his usual accuracy, the Sanhedrim are assembling (awfpxovrai) when Jesus 
 is brought to Caiaphas. It should seem, then, that this examination took place 
 while the Sanhedrim was assembling, and so soon as a quorum got together the 
 trial proceeded. 
 
656 THE TRIAL OF CHRIST. [Oct. 
 
 the rabble ; in the morning the Sanhedrim reassembles, re- 
 examines Jesus, passes formal sentence upon him, and leads 
 him away to Pilate. The trial before the Roman governor 
 presents no chronological difficulties of importance, and need 
 therefore claim none of our attention at present. 
 
 Dissertation II. — Legal Aspects of the Trial. 
 
 The trial and execution of a man is a most awful scene. 
 In it men solemnly discharge the most solemn trust com- 
 mitted to governments by God. It is obvious that so weighty 
 a matter should be conducted decently and in order. No 
 haste should deprive the accused of a fair opportunity of 
 defence. No passion or prejudice should sway judge or 
 jury, and so prevent an impartial verdict. The guilt of the 
 accused should be clearly proved by trustworthy witnesses, 
 and if a reasonable doubt of his guilt remain justice should 
 be tempered with mercy. This is the ideal trial, of which 
 the reality may indeed always fall short, but which every 
 trial should as nearly as possible realize. This ideal is 
 clearly recognized in the Jewish criminal procedure, as laid 
 down in the law and supplemented in the Talmud, and as ex- 
 pounded by the ablest Jewish writers, both ancient and modern. 
 Salvador, a Jewish writer, in his Histoire des Institutions de 
 Mo'ise et du peuple Hebreu, gives two admirable chapters on 
 the penal code of the Jews. According to him, there were 
 four rules which were fundamental in Jewish criminal ju- 
 risprudence: (1) strictness in the accusation; (2) publicity 
 in the discussion ; (3) full freedom granted to the accused ; 
 (4) assurance against all dangers of errors of testimony. 1 
 In later times so completely was the accused hedged about 
 by legal safeguards, that conviction in capital cases became 
 almost impossible, and the saying arose that " the Sanhedrim 
 which condemns a man to death, even once in seven years, is 
 a slaughter-house." 2 A trial conducted according to the 
 spirit of these rules could not fail of being a fair one. 
 
 But this was not all. Specific and minute rules were laid 
 
 i I. 365. 2 Mishna, Treatise Makhoth. 
 
1882.] THE TRIAL OF CHRIST. 657 
 
 down for the conduct of the trial. These were afterwards 
 embodied in the Mishna ; and the passage, as quoted by 
 Surenhusius, is so significant that it is subjoined nearly in full : 
 
 " Money trials and trials for life have the same rules of 
 inquiry and investigation. But they differ in procedure in 
 the following points : The former require only three, the 
 latter three and twenty, judges. In the former, it matters 
 not on which side the judges speak who give the first opinions ; 
 in the latter, those who are in favor of acquittal must speak 
 first. In the former, a majority of one is always enough ; 
 in the latter, a majority of one is enough to acquit, but it 
 requires a majority of two to condemn. In the former, a 
 decision may be quashed on review (for error), no matter 
 which way it has gone ; in the latter, a condemnation may 
 be quashed, but not an acquittal. In the former, disciples 
 of the law present in the court may speak (as assessors) on 
 either side ; in the latter, they may speak in favor of the 
 accused, but not against him. In the former, a judge who 
 has indicated his opinion, no matter on which side, may 
 change his mind ; in the latter, he who has given his voice 
 for guilt may change his mind, but not he who has given his 
 voice for acquittal. The former (money trials) are com- 
 menced only in the daytime, but may be concluded after 
 nightfall ; the latter (capital trials) are commenced only in 
 the daytime, and must also be concluded during the day. 
 The former may be concluded by acquittal or condemnation 
 on the day on which they have begun ; the latter may be 
 concluded on that day if there is a sentence of acquittal, but 
 must be postponed to a second day if there is to be a con- 
 demnation. And for this reason capital trials are not held 
 on the day before a Sabbath or a feast-day." 1 
 
 " If a man is found innocent, the court absolves him. But 
 if not, his judgment is put off to the following day. Mean- 
 time the judges meet together, and, eating little meat and 
 drinking no wine during that whole day, they confer upon 
 the cause. On the following morning they return into court 
 
 1 Mishna, De Syncdriis, iv. 1. 
 Vol. XXXIX. No. 156. 83 
 
658 THE TRIAL OF CHRIST. [Oct. 
 
 [and vote over again, with the like precautions as before]. 
 
 If judgment is at last pronounced, they bring out the 
 
 man sentenced to stone him. The place of punishment is to 
 be apart from the place of judgment (for it is said in Lev. 
 xxiv. 14, 'Bring the blasphemer without the camp'). In 
 the meantime an officer is to stand at the door of the court 
 with a handkerchief in his hand ; another, mounted on 
 horseback, follows the procession so far, but halts at the 
 farthest point where he can see the man with the handker- 
 chief. [The judges remain sitting], and if any one offers 
 himself to prove that the condemned man is innocent he at 
 the door waves the handkerchief, and the horseman instantly 
 gallops after the condemned, and recalls him for his defence." l 
 Most of these principles, as is admitted by modern Jewish 
 writers, were as firmly established in Christ's day as when 
 they were finally committed to writing in the Mishna. It 
 only remains to inquire how far these principles were observed 
 in the trial of Jesus. And it will not be amiss to consider, 
 by way of preliminary, whether the Sanhedrim was in a 
 frame of mind that made a fair trial a possibility. From an 
 examination of the facts at our command, only one conclusion 
 can be drawn. Early in the second year of Christ's ministry 
 the Jews sought to kill him, and similar attempts were fre- 
 quently made during the rest of his life (John v. 16 ; cf. vii. 
 1, 19, 20 ; viii. 40, 59 ; x. 31). John, especially, is very 
 explicit on this point. The terrific denunciations which 
 Jesus had launched at the hypocrisy of the pharisees had 
 aroused their unbounded wrath. Their hatred had burned 
 fiercer and fiercer, until, after the raising of Lazarus, they 
 resolved to put him to death (John xi. 47-54). But Jesus 
 was exceedingly popular. His teachings had taken deep 
 hold upon the people (Luke viii. 40 ; Mark xii. 37 ; John 
 xi. 48 ; xii. 19). Unless he could be rendered odious in the 
 eyes of the multitude, the rulers well knew that any attempt 
 against him would recoil upon their own heads. They 
 accordingly sought pretexts against him in various ways. 
 
 1 Mishna, De Synedriis, v. 5 and vi. 1. 
 
1882.] THE TRIAL OF CHRIST. 659 
 
 They endeavored to embroil him with the Roman govern- 
 ment by asking him if it were lawful to pay tribute to Caesar. 
 Note the craft implied in Matthew's description of the scene : 
 " Then went the pharisees, and took counsel how they might 
 eutangle him in his talk " (xxii. 15). Luke is even more 
 explicit : " And they watched him, and sent forth spies 
 (rcadirovs), which should feign themselves just men, that 
 they might take hold of his words, that so they might deliver 
 him unto the power and authority of the governor " (xx. 
 20). Finally, during the passover they assembled and " con- 
 sulted that they might take Jesus by subtlety (BoXw, by fraud), 
 and kill him. But they said, Not on the feast-day (^ iv jfj 
 iopTT)) lest there be an uproar among the people" (Matt. xxvi. 
 4, 5). When Judas offered to betray his master, this objection 
 was done away with. If the rulers could seize Jesus secretly, 
 and try and condemn him upon some charge or other before 
 the people could know what was going on, the ever fickle 
 rabble might be persuaded to acquiesce in their action. So, 
 at least thought the Sanhedrim, and the sequel proved the 
 plan well laid. It is evident, then, that the Sanhedrim was 
 not at all disposed to grant Jesus a fair trial. The case was 
 prejudged. The verdict was already determined. The rulers 
 had resolved to destroy Jesus, and the trial was but a trial 
 for appearances' sake. The whole scene was a solemn farce. 
 An examination of the trial would be incomplete without 
 a glance at the arrest of Jesus ; for this arrest has a most 
 significant bearing upon the after proceedings. The arrest 
 was marked by secrecy and stealth. Midnight was selected 
 as the most favorable time. This does not of itself prove 
 the arrest to be illegal, because a legal arrest might have 
 been made at night for the sake of avoiding an uproar 
 among the people. But the posse comitatus was a mere mob 
 {o-^Xo'i, Mark xiv. 43), armed with swords and clubs (J;vXwv, 
 Mark xiv. 43) which they had hastily snatched as they 
 rushed along. To be sure, John says that Judas was at- 
 tended by the band and officers, and this would seem to 
 imply some sort of order, as " the band " undoubtedly refers to 
 
660 THE TRIAL OF CHRIST. [Oct. 
 
 the band of Levites who formed the guard of the temple. 1 
 The leader of the band John calls ^A-tap^o?, captain. With 
 this band came also the vTrriperai, or officers, 2 who were to 
 make the arrest. But along with these — or rather, mingled 
 with these — came a disorderly rabble, composed of the 
 loungers about the temple and the " roughs " of Jerusalem. 
 So little did the whole affair look like a legal proceeding, so 
 much did it look like mob-law, that the disciples prepared to 
 resist those who attempted to arrest Jesus. This they would 
 hardly have ventured to do had the arrest been regular and 
 legal. This view is still further confirmed by the fact that 
 Peter was not arrested for his resistance to the officers, nor 
 molested when afterwards recognized in the palace of the 
 high-priest. 
 
 The Preliminary Examinations. 
 
 As only John mentions the examination before Annas, — 
 
 and even he barely mentions it, — we may pass it by with 
 
 the remark that such an examination was extra-judicial, if 
 
 not illegal. Annas, we are informed by Josephus, 3 had been 
 
 1 Many commentators have supposed that the phrase ha$a>v tV aireTpav is to 
 be referred to a cohort of Roman soldiers, but there is no evidence in favor of 
 such an opinion. To be sure airupa is everywhere else in the New Testament 
 used to designate a Roman cohort, but in each case the word is qualified by the 
 addition of some distinctive terra (cf. Acts x. 1 ; xxi. 31 ; xxvii. 1). Of itself, 
 the word is indefinite, meaning any band of armed men. Josephus uses a-irupa 
 to designate the Levitical temple guard, which is referred to in the following 
 Old Testament passages : Ps. cxxxiv. 1 ; 2 Kings xii. 9 ; xxv. 18; 1 Chron. ix. 
 17, 27 sq. ; 2 Chron. xxxv. 8. Tjie term airelpa is applied to this guard in the 
 Apocrypha : Judith xiv. 1 1 ; 2 Mac. viii. 23. As for the terms x i ^' ia PX 0S an( l 
 (TTpaTrtyis nothing could be plainer than that they are not used in a strict mili- 
 tary sense. Josephus frequently uses them to designate the officers of the tem- 
 ple guard. Vid. Bell. Jud., ii. 12, 16 ; vi. 5. 3; Antiq. xx. 6. 2 ; cf. 1 Esdras 
 i. 9 and 2 Mac. iii. 4, where apparently the same officer is called irpocnaT-qs tov 
 iepov. If the band had been Roman soldiers the Sanhedrim must have applied 
 to Pilate for them. This would have necessitated charges against Jesus. That 
 the Sanhedrim had made no such application and brought no such charges is 
 amply proved by Pilate's question on the following morning, " What accusa- 
 tion bring ye against this man ? " He knew of no charge against Jesus up to 
 that time. If, then, there were any Roman soldiers present — as is by no means 
 unlikely — they belonged not to the ffirslpa but to the 6x^os. 
 
 2 The virqpfTai seem to have corresponded closely in their functions to the 
 Roman lictors. 
 
 8 Antiq., xviii. 2. 2. 
 
1882."! THE TRIAL OF CHRIST. 661 
 
 deposed from the priesthood some time previously, and had 
 therefore no jurisdiction in the case. 
 
 To one accustomed to the methods of modern criminal 
 jurisprudence there would seem to be nothing illegal in an 
 examination by Caiaphas, the de facto high-priest. In France, 
 in England, or in our own country, for example, an accused 
 person on his arrest is taken before a magistrate, and an 
 examination follows. If sufficient evidence is produced to 
 render his guilt probable, he is committed for trial by the 
 magistrate, or admitted to bail, if the nature of the offence 
 permits it. If, on the contrary, the evidence is frivolous, or 
 the prisoner's innocence probable, he is discharged at once. 
 But in the Jewish law this was not the procedure. It was 
 the right of the accused to be free from all investigation 
 until he was brought to trial before the Sanhedrim. This 
 is considered by Salvador one of the strong points of He- 
 brew law. He says : " The accused man is not submitted to 
 secret examinations, in which through his trouble the inno- 
 cent might furnish deadly weapons against himself." J It 
 goes without saying, however, that if Jesus was to be sub- 
 jected to an illegal examination, the high-priest was bound 
 to see that it was fairly conducted. Caiaphas does nothing 
 of the kind. He calls for no witnesses, but begins to question 
 Jesus about his disciples and doctrine, hoping thus to find 
 some pretext for an accusation. This well-laid plan is over- 
 turned by the straightforward, almost brusque, answer : " I 
 have spoken openly to the world ; I ever taught in the syna- 
 gogue and in the temple whither all the Jews resort ; and in 
 secret have I said nothing. Why askest thou me ? Ask 
 them who heard me what I have said unto them ; behold, 
 they know what I said." In these words Jesus demanded, 
 as was his right, that the accusations against him should be 
 made good by competent witnesses. He declined to give 
 evidence against himself. Irritated by this bold reply and 
 its implied rebuke, one of the bystanders — an officer of the 
 Sanhedrim, John says (xviii. 22) — smote Jesus in the face. 
 
 i i. 366. 
 
662 THE TRIAL OF CHRIST. [Oct. 
 
 This indignity was in clear defiance not only of the spirit, 
 but of the letter, of Jewish law. On a similar occasion the 
 high-priest commanded Paul to be smitten, when the apostle's 
 fierce wrath flamed forth in a scathing denunciation : " God 
 shall smite thee, thou whited wall : for sittest thou to judge 
 me after the law, and commandest me to be smitten contrary 
 to the law ? " It may be pleaded that this was the act of a 
 single individual, for which neither the Sanhedrim nor the 
 high-priest can be held responsible. But was the officer who 
 had so offended the majesty of the law by smiting an uncon- 
 demned person rebuked by high-priest or Sanhedrim ? Their 
 very silence approved the act. Let the reader picture to 
 himself, if he can, a similar case in one of our own courts — 
 the sheriff smiting the prisoner at the bar, and the court 
 looking on in complacent and approving silence ! 
 
 The Trial before the Sanhedrim. 
 
 The time of the trial was illegal. No point is more certain 
 with reference to Jewish laws than that trials by night were 
 strictly prohibited. The passages already quoted from the 
 Mishna are quite sufficient to establish this point, and there 
 are numerous others. Lightfoot quotes the following passage 
 from the Talmud : " Judicia capitalia transigunt interdiu, et 
 finiunt interdiu." 1 A gloss on this passage says : " Ne 
 judicent vesperiis Sabbati, nee vesperiis diei festi." Schottgen 
 quotes the following : " Sessiones judicii instituendae sunt in 
 mane." 2 With these statements all Jewish writers who 
 have treated of this subject agree. 3 Maimonides says : " Ju- 
 dicia neque noctu, neque sabbato, peragere licitum erat — non 
 inchoant judicia noctu." 4 
 
 Again, the place of the trial is illegal. This night session 
 of the Sanhedrim was held in the palace of Caiaphas. Of this 
 fact the evangelists leave us in no doubt. But Jewish tradi- 
 
 1 Gem. Babyl. Sanhedr. iv. 1, vid. Hor. Heb. in Matt, xxvii. 1. 
 
 2 Hor. Heb. in John xviii. 28. 
 
 8 Cf. Salvador, Livre iv. chapitre 2, Administration de la Justice, passim. 
 4 Vide Gresswell's Dissertations, Vol. iii. p. 205. 
 
1882.] THE TRIAL OF CHRIST. 663 
 
 tion, with one voice, affirms that no trial was legal, and no 
 sentence valid, unless the trial was held and the sentence 
 pronounced in the gazzith (rw), or council-chamber, in the 
 temple. So firmly was this custom established that it had 
 all the force of a law, and " to migrate from the gazzith " is 
 synonymous with losing the power of capital punishment. 
 Thus Lightfoot quotes from the Talmud : " Quadraginta 
 annis ante excidium Templi, migravit Synedrium, et sedit in 
 Tabernis." x A gloss in this passage says : " Cum ergo non 
 sederunt in conclavi gazzith, non judicarunt de iis [poenis] 
 et sic cessarunt judicia ista mulctativa." Another gloss is 
 substantially the same : " Non judicarunt de capitalibus in 
 Synedriis inferioribus in aliqua civitate, nisi dum sederet 
 Synedrium magnum in conclavi gazzith." 
 
 The conduct of the trial was grossly illegal. The Sanhe- 
 drim sought long and diligently for evidence, but found 
 themselves unable to substantiate any valid charge against 
 Jesus. Witnesses could be obtained in abundance, — wit- 
 nesses only too ready to accuse the prisoner of more than 
 one crime, — but, unfortunately, their testimony did not 
 agree. Finally, there came forward two. who testified that 
 they heard Jesus say : " I will destroy this temple that 
 is made with hands, and within three days I will build an- 
 other that is made without hands." Yet even in this, as 
 Mark significantly adds, the testimony did not agree. The 
 evidence of the suborned witnesses was worthless. The plot 
 of the pharisees proved an utter failure. So when the high- 
 priest exclaimed, " Answerest thou nothing ? " Jesus remained 
 silent. There was no need of an answer ; the confused and 
 contradictory testimony confuted itself. Thereupon Caiaphas, 
 enraged at the failure of the plot, fearful that Jesus might 
 after all escape for want of evidence against him, as a last 
 
 1 Abodah Zarah, viii. 2 ; Hor. Heb. in John xviii. 31. This passage is quoted 
 here merely to illustrate a verbal usage. No opinion is intended to be ex- 
 pressed as to the accuracy of the historical statement. In point of fact, the 
 statement is believed to be untrustworthy, and the reasons for this belief are 
 given below in the third Dissertation. 
 
6C4 THE TRIAL OF CHRIST. [Oct. 
 
 resort administers the Sanhedrim oath 1 : u I adjure thee by 
 the living God that thou tell us if thou be the Christ, the 
 Son of God." Here is a flagrant violation of a fundamental 
 maxim of all criminal jurisprudence. All civilized codes, at 
 least, agree that a man is to be held innocent until he is 
 proved guilty. No code of laws permits a judge to place the 
 accused under oath in order to compel him to give testimony 
 against himself. Jewish law and Jewish tradition are alike 
 clear on this point. Two trustworthy witnesses, at least, 
 were required for conviction — "At the mouth of two wit- 
 nesses shall he that is worthy of death be put to death ; but 
 at the mouth of one witness he shall not be put to death," 
 wrote the great lawgiver of Israel (Deut. xvii. 6). " One 
 witness is no witness," says the Talmud ; and Salvador dis- 
 tinctly says : " Our law never condemns on the simple avowal 
 of the accused." But the high-priest had resolved that, on 
 one pretext or another, Jesus should be put to death. Justice 
 had no place in his plans. Caiaphas has forced Jesus to do 
 one of two things. He must answer in the affirmative, and 
 criminate himself, or he must answer in the negative, and 
 publicly renounce his Messianic claims. In the one case, 
 the Sanhedrim will have a pretext for putting him to death ; 
 in the other, the Jewish hierarchy need fear no longer 
 the pseudo-Messiah. To the adjuration Jesus responded : 
 "Thou hast said" — a Hebraistic form of emphatic affirma- 
 tion. He well knew that these words, in which he proclaimed 
 his Messiahship and divinity, would be his death-sentence ; 
 nevertheless, the Everlasting sware by himself that he was 
 the promised one who should redeem his people. For this, 
 the watchword of redemption, Israel had longed and waited 
 for many weary centuries ; now it is heard only to be repu- 
 diated. That declaration to which saints and patriarchs had 
 
 1 It is universally admitted that this was the usual form of administering that 
 oath. By the simple yea or nay the witness took the oath upon himself, and 
 swore by the living God that his testimony was true. Grotius says (in loco) : 
 e£opid(eii', Hehraice yOTUin , modo est jurejurando adigere, interdum verum 
 obsecrare. With this compare Michaelis, Laws of Moses, § 302, and Selden's 
 chapter I)e Juramentis, in his book on Sanhedrims. 
 
1882.] THE TRIAL OP CHRIST. 665 
 
 looked forward with yearnings unspeakable is reckoned a 
 crime worthy of death. For, when the high-priest heard the 
 answer, he rent his clothes in simulated horror, exclaiming : 
 " He hath spoken blasphemy ! What further need have we 
 of witnesses ? Behold, ye have heard the blasphemy. What 
 think ye ? " And the entire Sanhedrim shouted, with one 
 voice, " He is nia fflist (a man of death)." 
 
 The mockery and insults which ensued are so manifestly 
 illegal, and so disgraceful withal, that Salvador says of them : 
 " As to the ill-treatment which followed the sentence, it ivas 
 contrary to the spirit of the Jewish law ; and it is not in the 
 course of nature that a senate composed of the most respect- 
 able men of a nation, who, however they might have been 
 deceived, yet intended to act legally, should have permitted 
 such outrages against him whose life was at their disposal. 
 The writers who have transmitted to us these details, not 
 having been present at the trial, have been disposed to exag- 
 gerate the picture, either on account of their prejudices or to 
 throw greater obloquy on the judges." 1 It is enough for 
 our present purpose that these acts are acknowledged to have 
 been outrages, and are conceded to be illegal. It is not in 
 our province to contend for the credibility of the Gospels ; 
 that is taken for granted. 
 
 We come now to the morning session. The Jewish law 
 ordained that final sentence should not be passed upon a 
 criminal on the same day with the trial. This wise provision 
 was made, no doubt, in order that, if a trial had been held in 
 haste or in the heat of passion, the Sanhedrim might have 
 an opportunity to reconsider, and, if advisable, to reverse 
 their first decision. This provision is laid down in the most 
 explicit terms by the Talmud, and is recognized repeatedly 
 in the works of Jewish writers on jurisprudence. " Judicia 
 de capitalibus finiunt eodem die, si sint ad absolutionem ; si 
 vero sint ad damnationem, finiuntur die sequente," is one of 
 the maxims of the Talmud. 2 A favorite saying among the 
 
 1 Cf. Institutions du Moise, etc. Livre, iv. ch. 3, passim. 
 
 2 Moed. Katon., v. 1 . Lightfoot, ubi supra. 
 Vol. XXXIX. No. 156. 84 
 
6G6 THE TRIAL OF CHRIST. [Oct. 
 
 rabbins was : " Beatus est judex qui fermentat judicium 
 suum " ; and a gloss explains this as meaning " qui judicium 
 moratur, et pernoctare facit, ut ventilet veritatem." Salvador 
 even says that the judges were to postpone sentence until the 
 third day. Notwithstanding their fiery haste, the Jews seemed 
 to feel that some little show of complying with the legal forms 
 was needful, and accordingly in the morning they led Jesus 
 away into the council-chamber 1 to ratify their previous action. 
 But this was only an evasion of the law. The Jewish day is 
 reckoned from sunset to sunset. Therefore the trial held in 
 the night and the sentence passed in the morning fell within 
 the same day. This morning session, like everything else 
 connected with the trial, was a farce — a pretence only of 
 conforming to legal procedure. It is quite possible that the 
 Sanhedrim would have dispensed altogether with the second 
 session had not more summary proceedings been out of the 
 question. It was impossible for them to take Jesus before 
 Pilate until morning ; 2 and this fact may have caused the 
 delay, more than any lingering respect for legal forms. 
 They " e'en made a virtue of necessity," as many other folk 
 have been compelled to do. 
 
 As to the trial before Pilate, there needs no proof that 
 sentence was finally pronounced without the slightest evidence 
 of guilt, in clear violation alike of law and of justice, since 
 Pilate himself said as much again and again. 
 
 Dissertation III. — The Jewish Autonomy. 
 The trial of Jesus by Pilate gives rise to a question re- 
 
 1 It has been generally supposed that the scene of the trial was not changed 
 — that after the night trial was over Jesus was removed from the hall and 
 mocked, and in the morning was led back [avnyayov) into the hall, where the 
 Sanhedrim had reassembled. But Tischendorf, Tregelles, and Alford read not 
 avhyayov (T. R.), but inrriyayov, following N, B, D, K, T, etc. The onrd would 
 seem to indicate that Jesus was led away to some little distance. It is most 
 probable, therefore, that this morning session was held in the gazzith, or coun- 
 cil-chamber of the temple. Cf. Gresswell's Dissertations, Vol. iii. p. 204. 
 
 2 Sepp quotes (Leben Jesu, Vol. iii. p. 484), from Roman writers to prove 
 that, according to Roman law, a night trial was illegal. Macrobius says : 
 Magistratus post meridiam noctem auspicantur et post exortum solem agunt. 
 Senatus consulta ante exortum solem aut post solis occasum facta, rata non 
 esse. — Saturn, i. 3. 
 
1882.] THE TRIAL OF CHRIST. 667 
 
 garding the Jewish autonomy after the Roman conquest. 
 Did the Sanhedrim have jurisdiction over capital offences 
 against Jewish law ? With rare exceptions, commentators 
 and historians have answered this question in the negative. 
 At the very least, they have held that the jurisdiction of the 
 Sanhedrim was only nominal — that the form of trial and 
 condemnation might be gone through, but that sentence of 
 death could not be executed without the Roman procurator's 
 approval. It may therefore seem presumptuous to call in 
 question so time-honored a conclusion ; and yet, in this scep- 
 tical age, the mere antiquity of a theory goes for little. A 
 new survey of the evidence for and against this particular 
 theory can at any rate do no harm, and may lead us to clearer 
 conceptions of the relations between the Jewish nation and 
 their Roman conquerors. Let us first, then, examine the 
 grounds for the opinion that at the time of Christ's trial the 
 Jews had lost their autonomy, at least so far as the jus 
 gladii is concerned. 
 
 Josephus relates the following incident : After the death 
 of Festus, Albinus was appointed procurator of Judea by 
 Nero. Before his arrival Ananus, the high-priest, — whom 
 Josephus describes as " a bold man in his temper and very 
 insolent," — convened the Sanhedrim, and brought before 
 that body James the brother of Christ and others, who were 
 condemned to death, and stoned. When Albinus arrived he 
 caused Ananus to be deposed from the priesthood, on the 
 ground, as Josephus states, " that it was not lawful for Ananus 
 to assemble a Sanhedrim without his [the procurator's] con- 
 sent." l This is often quoted as settling the whole question. 
 But observe, Josephus says nothing explicitly about the 
 power of life and death, and this very silence furnishes a 
 presumption that the Jews had not lost their autonomy. 
 The misdemeanor of the high-priest was not that he put to 
 death a criminal without the procurator's sanction, but that 
 he assembled the Sanhedrim without such sanction. This is 
 not a distinction without a difference ; for Selden considers 
 
 1 Antiq., xx. 9. 1. 
 
668 THE TRIAL OF CHRIST. [Oct. 
 
 it probable that the procurator in the beginning of his rule 
 sanctioned the assembling of the Sanhedrim once for all, and 
 formally empowered it to try and punish all offenders against 
 its own laws. 1 At all events, this incident is no very strong 
 evidence for the theory that we are considering. 
 
 The Talmud is held to furnish more conclusive testimony 
 on this point. Selden quotes from the Jerusalem Gemara : 
 " Traditio. Quadraginta annis ante vastatum Templum, ab- 
 lata sunt judicia capitalia ab Israele." 2 At best, this state- 
 ment is only a vague tradition, which was not committed to 
 writing for several centuries after the event it professes to 
 record. But the Talmud is not even consistent on this 
 point ; for another passage, quoted by the same author, states 
 that during this period the Jews employed no less than four 
 distinct methods of capital punishment. 3 But grant that the 
 statement is strictly true. The temple was destroyed in 
 August 823 a.u.c. Forty years before was 783 a.u.c. Very 
 many of the best chronological authorities adopt this as the 
 year of Christ's death (so Wieseler, Friedlieb, Gresswell, 
 Ellicott, Thomson, Andrews). This leaves a very narrow 
 margin ; for, in the absence of all records, who shall say 
 whether it was earlier or later in that year than the Passover 
 that the jus gladii was taken from the Jews ? Besides, many 
 eminent chronologists — for example, Browne, Sepp, Patritius 
 — adopt the year 782 a.u.c. as the true date of Christ's death. 
 If this be the correct date — and who shall say that it is not, 
 when the whole subject is in so much doubt? — there is a whole 
 year against the theory in question. In short, the passage from 
 the Talmud is utterly worthless as evidence on this point. 
 Selden, who is perhaps the highest single authority on the 
 subject, concludes that we can only infer from the Talmud 
 that during this period the procurator may sometimes have 
 
 1 Selden, De Synedriis et Prefecturis Juridicis Veterum Ebraeorum (London, 
 1726), lib. ii. c. 15. 11. 
 
 2 Lightfoot, Hor. Heb., in Matt. xxvi. 3 and John xviii. 31. 
 
 8 Selden, nbi supra. — Quod niagis est diccndura de quadriginta illis excidium 
 antevertcrunt annis, quibus etiam quatuor poenae capitales in usu. Ndn pcnitus 
 Bublata sunt seu non prorsus desierc. And again : A die quo excisum est 
 Templum, quamvis cessarit Synedrium, tamen non cessarunt quatuor mortes. 
 
1882.] THE TRIAL OF CHRIST. 669 
 
 interfered with the Jewish autonomy. Friedlieb goes still 
 farther, and decisively pronounces the statement of the 
 Talmud incorrect, because Judea became a Roman province 
 sixty years before the destruction of Jerusalem, and the 
 Jewish autonomy was lost then, if ever. 
 
 The analogy of the Roman law is pleaded. M. Dupin 
 quotes at some length from Roman law-writers to prove that 
 the power of life and death " was a principal attribute of 
 sovereignty, which the Romans always took great care to 
 reserve to themselves", even if they neglected other things." * 
 Tacitus speaks to the same effect : " Apud Romanos jus valet 
 gladii ; cetera transmittuntur." 2 Certainly M. Dupin makes 
 out a strong case, but it is by no means without a flaw. We 
 learn from Strabo that Marseilles did not lose its autonomy, 
 and from the same authority we know that the Syrians lost 
 the jus gladii only under the reign of Claudius, and then 
 as a punishment for having put Roman citizens to death. 
 Roman practice in this regard was not uniform ; yet there is 
 no doubt that the usual custom was as M. Dupin states. Hence 
 the analogy furnishes a strong presumption — but, after all, 
 only a presumption — that the power of life and death was 
 lost to the Jews when first conquered. 
 
 The locus classicus of the theory we are considering is 
 John xviii. 31 : " Then said Pilate unto them, Take ye him 
 and judge him according to your law. 3 The Jews therefore 
 said unto him, It is not lawful for us (J)\iiv ov/c e^ecmv) to 
 put any man to death." This is generally quoted with a 
 triumphant air which implies that there is nothing further to 
 be said. But are these words so conclusive as they are often 
 
 1 Jesus devant Pilate, pp. 55-62. M. Dupin's principal authorities are 
 Loiseau-Godefroy and Cujas. 
 
 2 Ann. xv. 31. 
 
 3 It seems hardly necessary to remark that these words ill accord with the 
 theory that the Jews had not the jus gladii. Pilate takes for granted their power 
 to punish Jesus. Still less in accordance with the theory are his words a little 
 further on : " Take ye him and crucify him, for I find no fault in him " (John 
 xix. 6). It has, indeed, been said that Pilate spoke these words mockingly; but 
 the Jewish mob was hardly in a humor for Pilate to venture a sneer at their 
 demands. 
 
670 THE TRIAL OF CHRIST. [Oct. 
 
 considered? Although the Jews had passed sentence of 
 death upon Jesus, they dared not execute the sentence. 
 " They feared the people." But a day or two before Jesus 
 had entered Jerusalem amid the acclamations of thousands. 
 His teachings in the temple during the passover week had made 
 a profound impression. His adherents were both numerous 
 and powerful, and the Sanhedrim dared not risk a collision 
 with them. Moreover, Jewish law forbade the execution of 
 a criminal during the feast. 1 To be sure, the Sanhedrim 
 had already shown how little the rulers of the nation were 
 bound by their own traditions and laws; but there were 
 lengths to which they dared not go. To condemn Jesus upon 
 a false charge of blasphemy, and so prejudice many against 
 him, was one thing ; to execute him during the most solemn 
 feast of the nation, and draw down on their own heads the 
 charge of sacrilege, was quite another. But, on the other 
 hand, the Sanhedrim had strong reasons for wishing Jesus 
 to be put to death without delay. If this pretended Messiah 
 could be executed before the eyes of his followers, it would 
 strike terror into them, and be the death-blow of this new 
 heresy. So they fondly thought. Accordingly, they take 
 him before Pilate, and prefer a charge of sedition. But 
 Pilate finds in him no fault at all, and says, " Take ye him, 
 and judge him according to your law." It was plain enough 
 to the astute Roman that if Jesus was guilty of any offence 
 at all it was against Jewish law, and so an offence which as 
 a Roman procurator he had neither the right nor the dispo- 
 sition to judge. But the Jewish rulers, seeing their last 
 chance slip from them, cry out, " It is not lawful for us to 
 put any man to death" — for a political offence; and they 
 press again the charge of sedition. 2 That this is the natural 
 meaning of these words is proved by the whole context. 
 
 1 Says the Talmud : Non judicant die festo. Lightfoot, ubi supra. 
 
 2 There is no ground for the usual assertion that the Jews prepared a double 
 charge against Jesus when they brought him before Pilate. Not one of the 
 Evangelists mentions any charge but that of sedition. That was the only charge 
 over which Pilate had jurisdiction, and it was the one offence over which the 
 Jews, from the nature of the case, could have no jurisdiction. Had the Jews 
 
1882.] THE TRIAL OF CHRIST. 671 
 
 To sum up : We find in favor of this theory only a strong 
 presumption, supported by evidence more or less unsatisfac- 
 tory and inconclusive. Still, the presumption is so strong, 
 and the evidence as a whole so weighty, that, unless some 
 positive evidence against it is forthcoming, the theory must 
 stand. Let us now examine the opposite theory, that the 
 Jews at this time possessed the jus gladii in capital offences 
 against their own laws. 
 
 Certain passages are cited from Josephus which seem 
 inconsistent with any other theory. On one occasion, we 
 are told, Herod was summoned before the Sanhedrim to 
 answer for having executed a Jew without the approval of 
 that body. 1 But if the Sanhedrim had not the right to 
 execute the sentence of the law, surely they had no right to 
 call any one to account for so doing. After the death of 
 Herod, we find in Josephus no intimation that the Jews were 
 deprived of the power which they evidently possessed during 
 his reign. He does inform us, however, that the Jews desired 
 to be joined to the province of Syria, and to be governed by 
 a procurator, because they hoped for greater freedom under 
 the Roman rule than under that of Herod's tyrannical sons. 2 
 Their wish was granted. Had they been disappointed in 
 their hope, — in other words, had they been deprived of their 
 autonomy, — it is inconceivable that Josephus should not 
 have recorded the fact. Again, we are expressly told that 
 the Jews did possess the power of life and death in certain 
 cases. Gentiles who entered the inner court of the temple 
 were put to death. 3 The Essenes adopted a Draconian code, 
 and punished every offence against the law of Moses with 
 death. 4 The Sadducees were " very rigid in judging all 
 offenders, above all the rest of the Jews." 5 
 
 stated that Jesus was condemned on the charge of blasphemy, and requested 
 Pilate's approval of the sentence, then we might infer that the Jews no longer 
 possessed the jus gladii. But instead they prefer a wholly new charge — an 
 offence against Roman, not Jewish law. This is another incidental proof that 
 they possessed the power to execute their sentence, but dared not exercise it. 
 
 1 Antiq., xiv. 19, 3 and 4. 2 Ibid., xvii. 9. 4 ; cf. 13. 1. 
 
 3 Bell. Jud., vi. 2. 4. * Ibid., ii. 8, 9. 
 
 8 Antiq., xx. 9. 1. (cf. Life, § 34). 
 
672 THE TRIAL OF CHRIST. [Oct. 
 
 Various passages in the Gospels strongly confirm this 
 view. In warning his disciples of the persecutions they must 
 undergo, Christ said, " They will deliver you up to councils " 
 (a? avveSpia), i.e. for punishment (Mark xiii. 9). How 
 often, too, are we told that " the Jews sought to kill Jesus " 
 (John v. 18 ; vii. 1, 25, 26, et al.). This was not mere mob- 
 violence ; for on one occasion the Sanhedrim itself in solemn 
 conclave came to the same resolution (John xi. 47-53). 
 When the woman taken in adultery was brought before Jesus, 
 he takes for granted their power to punish her : " He that is 
 without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her." 1 
 
 There are indications in the Acts plainly in favor of the 
 theory that the Jews possessed the jus gladii during the 
 lifetime of the apostles. Early in the history of the church 
 at Jerusalem we find the Sanhedrim resolving to slay the 
 disciples of Christ, until dissuaded for a time by Gamaliel 
 (Acts v. 33 sq.) ; and the martyrdom of Stephen shows that 
 they were not long in carrying their resolution into practice. 
 To be sure, this execution was irregular, but it does not seem 
 to have been illegal, for the procurator took no notice of it. 
 The life of Paul also furnishes several cases just in point. 
 He himself says : " And many of the saints did I shut up in 
 prison, having received authority from the chief priests ; and 
 when they were put to death I gave my voice against them " 
 (Acts xxvi. 10). These words can only mean that the saints 
 were put to death by the Sanhedrim, and that Paul as a 
 member of that body voted against them. When Paul was 
 rescued from the Jews in the temple by Lysias the Roman 
 centurion, the latter justified his action in a letter to Felix 
 as follows : " This man was taken of the Jews, and should 
 have been killed of them ; then came I with an army and 
 rescued him, having understood that he was a Roman " (Acts 
 xxiii. 27). Now if the Jews had not the power of life and 
 death, their action was illegal in any case, and Lysias was 
 
 1 It weakens this argument very little to reply that this passage is of doubtful 
 genuineness. For, granting that the passage is an interpolation, it was interpo- 
 lated very early, when the historical fact in question must have been well-known, 
 and the interpolator evidently had do idea that the Jews had been deprived of 
 the power to punish this and all other offenses against the Mosaic law. 
 
1882.] THE TRIAL OF CHRIST. 673 
 
 bound to protect Paul, whether he was a Roman citizen or 
 not. The fact that Paul's Roman citizenship is assigned as 
 the reason for his rescue implies that had he not enjoyed 
 that privilege the Jews would have been left to deal with 
 him according to their own laws. Later, when Festus pro- 
 posed to give Paul up to the Sanhedrim to be tried by that 
 body, Paul appealed to Caesar (Acts xxv. 11) ; but wherefore, 
 if the Sanhedrim had neither power to condemn him to death 
 nor to execute the sentence ? 
 
 While any one of these instances, taken singly, would not 
 suffice to establish the fact that the Jews enjoyed their auton- 
 omy at this time, yet taken together they form a chain of proof 
 not easily to be broken. It is one of those points where the 
 evidence is hardly clear enough to warrant a positive decision. 
 Possibly, as Selden thinks, 1 the truth may lie between the two 
 theories. It is not unlikely that the powers of the Sanhedrim 
 and of the procurator were not strictly defined — now one, 
 * now the other, may have prevailed, according as the procurator 
 was a firm or a mild ruler. But, at all events, we are warranted 
 in asserting that the time-honored theory that the Jews had 
 utterly lost the jus gladii lacks any decisive confirmation. 
 
 In studying these closing scenes in the life of our Lord, 
 we have been often reminded of the marvellous' fulfilment of 
 the words of the prophet : " He is despised and rejected of 
 
 men He was oppressed and he was afflicted ; yet he 
 
 opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the 
 slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he 
 opened not his mouth." While studying this trial of Jesus, 
 more than ever before we have realized that we were standing 
 in the presence of one who was more than man. Antiquity 
 lavished praises upon the manly bearing of Socrates during 
 his trial and death. But as we have read and as we have 
 written, not once, nor twice, but many times, has leaped 
 unbidden to our lips that immortal saying of Jean Jacques : 
 " Oui, si la vie et la mort de Socrate sont d'un sage, la vie et 
 la mort de Jdsus sont d'un Dieu." 
 
 1 De Synedriis, etc., ubi supra. 
 Vol. XXXIX. No. 156. 85 
 
674 POSITIVISM AS A WORKING SYSTEM. [Oct. 
 
 ARTICLE 
 POSITIVISM AS A WORKING SYSTEM. 
 
 BT REV. F. H. JOHNSON, ANDOVER, MASS. 
 
 "RebVion originally spontaneous, then inspired, and afterwards re- 
 vealed, has at length found its ground in demonstration."-^ ugusteComte. 
 
 « The path of thought, as it were, has taken a sudden turn round a 
 mountain ; and our bewildered eyes are staring on an undreamed-of pros- 
 pect. The leaders of progress thus far have greeted the sight with accla- 
 mation, and have confidently declared that we are looking on the prom- 
 ised land. But to the more thoughtful, and to the less impulsive, it is 
 plain that a mist hangs over it, and that we have no right to be sure 
 whether it is the promised land or no. They see grave reasons for mak- 
 ing a closer scrutiny, and for asking if, when the mist lifts, what we see 
 will be not splendor but desolation."— W. H. Mallock. 
 
 A new religion is offered to Christendom to take the place 
 of that under which it has been educated. It is offered, and 
 urged upon our acceptance for three reasons : 
 
 First, because the Christian religion, as generally received, 
 embodies great errors. It has precious truths wrapped up in 
 superstitions. It presents to the minds of men unreal aims, 
 promises fictitious rewards, frightens them with groundless 
 terrors, appeals to low motives, makes men narrow, egotistical, 
 covetous of personal happiness, is opposed to progress. 
 
 Second, because the new religion is a final religion, founded 
 upon everlasting truth. It can he proved to be true by the 
 nature of things. It makes no demand for faith in the 
 unseen. It appeals to the highest motives only. It presents 
 to man, in the place of an imaginary, personal Deity, a Power 
 that is always hereon earth; an ideal which, through all ages, 
 is fitted to inspire his enthusiastic devotion. 
 
 Third, because Christendom has outgrown her old religion. 
 It was a religion of provisional and temporary value only. 
 Christianity, as commonly understood, whether true or false, 
 
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