YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Gift of h. woolsey THE LIFE OF CHRIST. THE LIFE OF CHRIST FEEDEEIO W. PAEEAE, D.D., P.E.S. LATE FELLOW OP TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE ; CANON OP WESTMINSTER; AND CHAPLAIN IN ORDINARY TO THE QUEEN. MANET IMMOTA FIDES. IN TWO VOLUMES. Vol. II. NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY, 713, BROADWAY. 1877. CONTENTS. CHAPTER XXXV. The Great Confession. page -Reception of Jesus on His return to Galilee. — An ill-omened Conjunc tion. — Demand of a Sign. — Reproof and Refusal. — Sadness of Jesus. — He sails away. — The Prophetic Woe. — Leaven of the Pharisees and of Herod. — Literal Misinterpretation of the Apostles. — Healing of a Blind Man at Bethsaida Julias. — On the road to Csesarea Philippi. — The momentous Questions. — "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God." — The Rook. — Foundation of the Church. — Misinterpre tations. — Warnings about His Death. — Rash Presumption of Peter. — "Get thee behind me, Satan." — The Worth of the Human Soul. — " The Son of Man coming in His Kingdom " .... 1 CHAPTER XXXVI. The Transfiguration. The Mountain. — Not Tabor, but Hermon. — The Vision. — Moses and Elias. — Bewildered Words of Peter. — The Voice from Heaven. — Fading of the Vision.— The New Elias ' . 24 CHAPTER XXXVTI. The Demoniac Boy. The Contrast. — The Disciples and the Scribes. — Arrival of Jesus. — The Demoniac Boy. — Emotion of Jesus. — Anguish of the Father. — " If thou canst." — The Deliverance. — Power of Faith to remove Moun tains. — Secluded Return of Jesus. — Sad Warnings. — Dispute which should be the Greatest. — The Little Child. — John's Question. — Offend ing Christ's Little Ones. — The Unforgiving Debtor .... 32 CHAPTER XXXVTH. A Brief Rest in Capernaum. The Temple Tax. — The Collectors come to Peter. — His rash Answer. — Jesus puts the Question in its true light. — The Stater in the Fish's Mouth. — Peculiar Characteristics of His Miracle . . . .41 CONTENTS. CHAPTER XXXIX. paoe Jesus at the Feast of Tabernacles. Observances of the Feast of Tabernacles. — Presumption of the Brethren of Jesus. — "I go not up yet unto this feast." — Eager Questions of the Multitude. — Their differing Opinions. — Jesus appears in the Temple. — His reproachful Question. — "Thou hast a devil." — Appeal to His Works. — Indignation of the Sanhedrin. — Observances of the Last Day of the Feast.— "The joy of the drawing of water."— " Rivers of Living Water.". — Divided Opinions. — " Never man spake like this Man." — Timid Interpellation of Nicodemus. — Answering Taunt of the Pharisees 47 CHAPTER XL. The Woman taken in Adultery. Question as to the Genuineness of the Narrative. — The Evidence on both sides. — Jesus at the Mount of Olives. — Returns at Dawn to the Temple. — Hilarity of the Feast. — Immorality of the Age. — The Water of Jealousy. — Base Cruelty of the Pharisees. — The Woman dragged into the Temple. — "What sayest Thou 1" — Subtlety of the Assault. — Writing on the Floor. — " Him that is without Bin among you." — Conscience-stricken. — Misery left alone with Mercy. — " Go, and sin no more." — Absolute Calmness of Jesus under all Attacks. — Eighth Day of the Feast. — The great Candelabra. — The Light of the World. — Agitating Discussions with the Jews. — A Burst of Fury. — Jesus leaves the Temple 61 CHAPTER XLI. The Man Born Blind. Jewish Notion of Nemesis. — " Which did sin ? "• — " Go wash in the Pool of Siloam." — On the Sabbath Day. — The Man examined by the San hedrin. — A Sturdy Nature. — Perplexity of the Sanhedrists. — "We know that this man is a sinner." — Blandishments and Threats. — The Man excommunicated. — Jesus and the Outcast. — True and False Shepherds . . . .80 CHAPTER XLn. Farewell to Galilee. The Interval between the Feasts of Tabernacles and Dedication. — Great Episode in St. Luke. — Character of the Episode.— Mission of the Seventy. — News of the Galila3ans massacred by Pilate. — Teachings founded on the Event. — Stern Warnings. — The Barren Fig-tree. The Pharisees' Plot to hasten His Departure. — " Go and tell this fox." Herod Antipas. — Jesus sets forth. — Farewell to the Scene of Hia Ministry. — Fate that fell on the Galilaeans. — Jesus exults in Spirit. " Come unto me all ye that labour." — Noble Joy .... 89 CONTENTS. v» CHAPTER XLIII. page Incidents of the Journey. Possible Routes. — The Village of En-gannim. — Churlishness of the Samari tans. — Passion of the Sons of Thunder. — Gentle Rubuke of Jesus. — Counting the Cost. — Peraea. — The Ten Lepers. — Thanklessness. — " Where are the nine f" 105 -CHAPTER XLIV. Teachings of the Journey. Sabbatical Disputes. — FooKsh Ruler of the Synagogue. — Healing of the Bowed Woman. — Argumentum ad hominem. — Ignorant Sabbatarianism. — Religious Espionage. — The Man with the Dropsy. — Question of Jesus. — Silence of Obstinacy. — The Man Healed. — Self-sufficiency of the Pharisees. — Struggles for Precedence. — A Vague Platitude. — Parable of the King's Marriage-feast. — The Unjust Steward. — Avarice of the Pharisees. — Their Sycophancy to Herod. — The Rich Man and Lazarus. — "Are there few that be saved?" — "What must I do to obtain Eternal Life?" — The Good Samaritan. — Return of the Seventy. — The Love of Publicans and Sinners. — The Parable of the Prodigal Son. — Solemn Warnings. — "Where, Lord?" — The Eagles and the Carcass 113 CHAPTER XLV. The Feast of Dedication. The House at Bethany. — Martha and Mary. — " The one thing needful." — The Chanukkah. — Solomon's Porch. — Reminiscence of the Feast. — Jesus suddenly surrounded. ¦ — ¦ " How long dost thou hold us in suspense?" — No Political Messiah. — "I and My Father are one." — They seek to stone Him. — Appeal of Jesus to His Life and Works. — He retires to Bethany beyond Jordan 140 CHAPTER XLVL The Last Stay in Persia. Question about Divorce. — Importance of the Question. — Hill el and Sham- mai. — Dispute as to the meaning of Ervath Dabhar. — Lax Interpre tations. — Both Schools wrong. — Simple Solution of the Question. — Permission of Divorce by Moses only temporary. — Corruption of the Age. — Teachings of Jesus about Moral Purity. — Celibacy and Marriage. — Jesus blesses Little Children. — The eager Young Ruler. — " Good Master." — "What must I do?" — An Heroic Mandate. — "The Great Refusal." — Discouragement of the Disciples. — Hundredfold Rewards. — The Labourers in the Vineyard 150 CHAPTER XLVH. The Raising of Lazarus. Message to Jesus.— Two Days' Delay.—" Let us also go that we may die with Him." — He approaches Sethany. — Martha meets Him. — " The CONTENTS. r\r.s Resurrection and the Life."— Mary's Agony. — Deep Emotion of Jesus. — Scene at the Grave. — "Lazarus, come forth." — Silence of the Synoptists.— Meeting at the House of Caiaphas.— His Wicked Policy.— The Fiat of Death.— Retirement to Ephraim . . .165 CHAPTER XLVJJL Jericho and Bethany. Pilgrim-caravans. — Jesus on His Way. — Revelation of the Crowning Horror. — The Sons of Zebedee. — The Cup and the Baptism.— Humility before Honour. — Jericho. — Bartimaeus. — Zacchseus. — His Repentance. — Parable of the Pounds. — Events which suggested it. — Arrival at Bethany. — "Simon the Leper." — Intentional Reticence of the Synop tists. — Mary's Offering. — Inward Rage of Judas. — Blessing of Mary by Jesus. — "For my burying." — Interview of the Traitor with the Priests 178 CHAPTER XLIX. Palm Sunday. Excitement of Expectation. — Three Roads to Bethany. — Bethphage. — The Ass's Colt. — A Humble Triumph.— Hosanna ! — Turn of the Road. — The Jerusalem of that Day. — Jesus weeps over the City. — Terrible Fulfilment of the Woe. — The Two Processions. — Indignation of the Pharisees. — " Who is this ?" — Jesus once more cleanses the Temple. — Hosannas of the Children. — "Have ye never read?"— The Greeks who desired an Interview. — Abgarus V. — Discourse of Jesus. — Voice from Heaven. — The Day closes in Sadness. — Bivouac on the Mount of Olives 195 CHAPTER L. Monday in Passion Week. — A Day of Parables. Jesus Hungers. — The Deceptive Fig. — Hopelessly Barren. — Criticisms on the Miracle. — Right View of it. — Deputation, of the Priests. — " Who gave Thee this authority?" — Counter-question of Jesus. — The Priests reduced to Silence. — Parable of the Two Sons. — Parable of the Rebellious Husbandmen. — The Rejected Corner-stone. — Parable of the Marriage of the King's Son. — Machinations of the Pharisees . 212 CHAPTER LI. The Day of Temptations. — The Last and Greatest Day of the Public Ministry of Jesus. The Withered Fig-tree.— Power of Faith.— Plot of the Herodians.— Its Dangerous Character. — The Tribute Money. — Divine and Ready Wisdom of the Reply of Jesus. — Attempt of the Sadducees. — A poor Question of Casuistry. — The Sevenfold Widow. — " As the Angels of God." — " The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." — Implicit Teaching of Immortality 226 CONTENTS. ix CHAPTER LII. The Great Denunciation. PiU,E " Master, Thou hast well said."—" Which is the great commandment p "— Answer of the Rabbis. — Answer of Jesus. — " Not far from the king dom of heaven." — Question of Jesus to the Scribes. — David's Son and David's Lord. — Their Failure to answer. — The Final Rupture. — "Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites ! " — The Voice which broke in Tears. — "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem!" — The Denunciation deserved. — The Denunciation fulfilled 238 CHAPTER LIU. Farewell to the Temple. A Happier Incident. — The poor Widow. — True Almsgiving. — Splendour of the Temple. — " Not one stone upon another." — Jesus on the Mount of Olives. — " When shall these things be? " — The great Eschatological Discourse. — The Two Horizons. — Difficulties of the Discourse, and mode of meeting them. — What must come before the Final End. — The Immediate Future. — Warning Signs. — Parable of the Fig-tree — of the Ten Virgins — of the Talents. — After Two Days. — Last Evening Walk to Bethany 252 CHAPTER LIV. The Beginning of the End. Meeting of Conspirators in the Palace of Caiaphas. — Their Discussions. — Judas demands an Interview. — Thirty Pieces of Silver. — Motives of Judas. — " Satan entered into Judas."— The Wednesday passed in Retirement. — Last Sleep of Jesus on Earth 267 CHAPTER LV. The Last Supper. " Green Thursday." — Preparations for the Meal. — The Upper Room. — Dispute about Precedence. — Jesus washes the Disciples' Feet. — Peter's Surprise and Submission. — " Ye are clean, but not all." — Teaching about Humility. — Troubled in Spirit. — " One of you shall betray me." " Lord, is it I ? " — Peter makes a sign to John. — Giving of the Sop. — " Rabbi, is it I P "• — " He went out, and it was night." — Revived Joy of the Feast. — Institution of the Lord's Supper 276 CHAPTER LVI. The Last Discourse. " Now is the Son of Man glorified." — " Little Children." — The New Com mandment. — " Lord, whither goest Thou ? " — Warning to Peter. — " Lord, here are two swords." — Consolations. — " How can we know the way?"— "Lord, show us the Father." — Difficulty of Judas Lebbaeus. — Last Words before Starting. — The True Vine. — Plain Teachings. — Gratitude of the Disciples. — Fresh Warnings to them. — The High-Priestly Prayer 293 x CONTENTS. CHAPTER LVTI. Gethsemane. — The Agony and the Arrest. page Walk through the Moonlight to Gethsemane. — Last Warning to Peter. — Gethsemane. — Scene of Agony. — Desire for Solitude and yet for Sympathy.— The First Struggle with Agony of Soul.— Its Intensity.— The Bloody Sweat.— Not due to Dread of Death.—" Simon, sleepest thou?"— The Second Agony.— The Disciples Sleeping.— The Third Agony and Final Victory. — "Sleep on now, and take your rest." — Torches in the Moonlight. — Steps taken by Judas. — " Comrade." — The Traitor's Kiss. — Jesus advances. — "Whom seek ye?" — "lam He." — Terror of the Band. — Historical Parallels. — Jesus arrested. — Peter's Blow. — "Suffer ye thus far." — The Young Man in the Linen Sheet. — Bound and Led away 305 CHAPTER LVTII. Jesus before the Priests and the Sanhedrin. Asserted Discrepancies. — Sixfold Trial. — "To Annas first." — Hanan, the High Priest de jure. — His Character. — His Responsibility for the Result. — Degradation of the then Sanhedrin. — Pharisees and Saddu cees. — Greater Cruelty of the Latter. — The Sadducees, the Priestly Party. — Cause of their Rage and Hatred. — "The Viper Brood." — Jesus repudiates the Examination of Hanan. — " Answerest Thou the High Priest so?" — Noble Patience. — The Second Phase of the Trial. — In the Palace of Caiaphas. — Committees of the Sanhedrin. — " Sought false witness."' — Total Failure of the Witnesses. — " Destroy this Temple." — Silence of Jesus. — Despair of Caiaphas. — His violent Adjuration. — Reply of Jesus. — "Blasphemy." — "Ishmaveth" . . 326 CHAPTER LIX. * The Interval between the Trials. The First Derision. — The Outer Court.— John procures Admission for Peter.— The First Denial.— The Second Denial.— The Galileean Accent. — The Third Denial. — The Look of Jesus. — The Repentance of Peter. — Brutal Insults of the Menials. — The Dawn. iii. The Meeting of the Sanhedrin. — Their Divisions. — Third Phase of the Trial. — A Contrast of Two Scenes before the Sanhedrin. — Jesus breaks His Silence. — The Condemnation.— The Second Derision. — The Fate of Jesus ............ , 344 CHAPTER LX. Jesus before Pilate. " Suffered under Pontius Pilate." — What is known of Pilate. First Out break of the Jews against him on his arrival. — The Aqueduct and CONTENTS. xi PAGE the Corban. — The gilt Votive Shields. — The Massacre of Galilseans. — The MasBacre of Samaritans. — The Palace of Herod. — Jesus in the Palace. — Led before Pilate. — Pilate comes out to the Jews. — 1. Hia Roman Contemptuousness. — Determines to try the Case. — Vagueness of the Accusations. — "Art Thou the King of the Jews?" — "What is truth p " — First Acquittal. — 2. Fierceness of the Jews. — Jesus sent to Herod Antipas. — Cruel Frivolity of Herod. — Second Acquittal. — 3. Last Phase of the Trial. — Temporising of Pilate. — Dream of his Wife. — Cowardly Concession. — Jesus or Bar-Abbas ? — " Crucify Him." — The Scourging. — Third Derision. — The Crown of Thorns. — " Behold the Man!" — Last efforts of Pilate to save Him. — Last Warning to Pilate.— " The Son of God."—" Behold your King."— Pilate terrified at the Name of Caesar. — He gives way. — He washes his Hands. — "His blood be on us, and on our children!". — Fulfilment of the Imprecation 360 CHAPTER LXI. The Crucifixion. 1 1, miles, expedi crucem." — Two Malefactors.— The Cross. — Procession to Golgotha. — Simon of Cyrene. — The Daughters of Jerusalem. — The Green and the Dry Tree. — Site of Golgotha. — The Medicated Draught. — The Method of Crucifixion. — "Father, forgive them." — Agony of Crucifixion. — The Title on the Cross. — Rage of the Jews.— The Soldiers. — Parting the Garments. — Insults of the Bystanders. — The Robber. — Silence of the Sufferer. — The Penitent Robber. — " To-day shalt thou be with me in paradise."' — The Women from Galilee. — " Woman, behold thy son." — -The Noonday Darkness. — " Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani ? " — " I thirst."' — Vinegar to Drink. — " Into Thy hands." —"It is finished."— The Centurion.— The Multitude.— What the Cross of Christ has Done. — The Crurifragium. — Water and Blood . 392 CHAPTER LXII. The Resurrection. Utter apparent Weakness of Christianity at the Death of Christ. — Source of its subsequent Strength. — Joseph of Arimathsea. — Nicodemus. — The Garden and the Sepulchre. — The Women mark the Spot. — Request of the Sanhedrin that the Tomb might be guarded. — The Dawn of Easter Day. — The Women at the Sepulchre. — The Empty Tomb. — Peter and John. — 1. First Appearance to Mary of Magdala. — 2. Ap pearance to the Women. — Story Invented by the Jews. — 3. Appearance to Peter.— i. The Disciples at Emmaus. — 5. The assembled Apostles. —6. The Apostles and Thomas. — 7. At the Sea of Galilee. — Jesus and Peter.— "Feed my lambs."— " What shall this man do?"— 8. The Five Hundred on the Mountain. — 9. Appearance to James. — 10. The Ascension.—" At the right hand of God, the Father Almighty" . 425 xii CONTENTS. APPENDIX. EXCURSUS I. "°* The Date op Christ's Birth .... .... 449 EXCURSUS n. Christ and the Christians in the Talmud . ... 452 EXCURSUS m. Jesus and Hillel 453 EXCURSUS rv. Greek Learning 461 EXCURSUS V. The Talmud and the Oral Law 462 EXCURSUS VI. Traditional Description of the Appearance op Our Lord . . 464 EXCURSUS vn. Jewish Angelology and Demonology 465 excursus vm. The Unnamed Feast of John v. 1, and the Length of the Ministry 467 EXCURSUS IX. Hypocrisy of the Pharisees 471 EXCURSUS X Was the Last Supper an Actual Passover? 474 EXCURSUS XI. Old Testament Quotations 483 EXCURSUS XII. Notes on the Talmud 485 EXCURSUS XTTT. The Sanhedrin ........ 491 EXCURSUS XTV. Pharisees and Sadducees .... . 494 EXCURSUS XV. Traditional Sayings of Christ ... 40.9 THE LIFE OF CHEIST. CHAPTEE XXXY. THE GREAT CONFESSION. " These have known that Thou hast sent me." — John xvii. 25. Very different was the reception which awaited Jesus on the farther shore. The poor heathens of Decapolis had welcomed Him with reverent enthusiasm : the haughty Pharisees of Jerusalem met Him with sneering hate. It may be that, after this period of absence, His human soul yearned for the only resting-place which He could call a home. Entering into His little vessel, He sailed across the lake to Magdala.1 It is probable that He purposely avoided sailing to Bethsaida or Capernaum, which are a little north of Magdala, and 1 St. Mark says (viii. 10), "the parts of Dalmanutha." Nothing is known about Dalmanutha, though uncertain identifications of it have been attempted; nor is anything known of Magadan, which is found in Matt. xv. 39, according to », B, D, but does not seem a probable reading. If Magadan is a confused form of Megiddo, that must be an error, for Megiddo is in the middle of the plain of Esdraelon. Tet even in Mark the Codex Bezae reads " Magadan." Eusebius and Jerome (Onomast. s. v.) make Magadan a region about Gerasa, and therefore east of the lake ; but that is impossible. The " Melegada" of D looks like a case of transposition, and indeed this transposition is probably the source of the confusion, and may even account for the form Dalmanutha. b 2 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. which had become the head- quarters of the hostile Pharisees. But it seems that these personages had kept a look-out for His arrival. As though they had been watching from the tower of Magdala for the sail of His returning vessel, barely had He set foot on shore than they came forth to meet Him. Nor were they alone : this time they were accompanied — ill-omened conjunction ! — with their rivals and enemies the Sad ducees, that sceptical sect, half-religious, half-political, to which at this time belonged the two High Priests, as well as the members of the reigning family.1 Every section of the ruling classes — the Pharisees, formidable from their religious weight among the people ; the Sadducees, few in number, but powerful from wealth and position ; the Herodians, representing the influence of the Eomans, and of their nominees the tetrarchs ; the scribes and lawyers, bringing to bear the authority of their orthodoxy and their learning — were all united against Him in one firm phalanx of conspiracy and oppo sition, and were determined above all things to hinder His preaching, and to alienate from Him, as far as was practicable, the affections of the people among whom most of His mighty works were done.2 They had already found by experience that the one most effectual weapon to discredit His mission and un dermine His influence was the demand of a sign — above all, a sign from heaven. If He were indeed the. Messiah, why should He not give them bread from heaven as 1 Acts iv. 1, 5 ; Jos. Anil. xv. 8, § 1. 5 Sepp, whose learning is strangely deformed by constant extrava gances, compares the sects of the Jews to modern schools of thought, as follows : — Pharisees = pietists ; Essenes = mystics ; Sadducees = rational ists ; Herodians = political clubs, &c. ; Zealots = radicals ; Samaritans = schismatics ! A SIGN FROM HEAVEN. 3 Moses, they said, had done? where were Samuel's thunder and Elijah's flame ? why should not the sun be darkened, and the moon turned into blood, and the stars of heaven be shaken ? why should not some fiery pillar glide before them to victory, or the burst of some stormy Bath Kol ratify His words ? They knew that no such sign would be granted them, and they knew that He had vouchsafed to them the strongest reasons for His thrice-repeated refusal to gratify their presumptuous and unspiritual demand.1 Had they known or understood the fact of His temptation in the wilderness, they would have known that His earliest answers to the tempter were uttered in this very spirit of utter self-abnegation. Had He granted their request, what purpose would have been furthered ? It is not the influence of external forces, but it is the germinal prin ciple of life within, which makes the good seed to grow ; nor can the hard heart be converted, or the stubborn unbelief removed, by portents and prodigies, but by inward humility, and the grace of God stealing down ward like the dew of heaven, in silence and unseen. What would have ensued had the sign been vouchsafed ? By its actual eye-witnesses it would have been attributed to demoniac agency ; by those to whom it was reported it would have been explained away ; by those of the next generation it would have been denied as an inven tion, or evaporated into a myth. But in spite of all this, the Pharisees and Sadducees felt that for the present this refusal to gratify their demand gave them a handle against Jesus, and was an effectual engine for weakening the admiration of the people. Yet not for one moment did He hesitate in 1 John ii. 18; vi. 30; Matt. xii. 38. 4 THE LTFE OF CHRIST. rejecting this their temptation. He would not work any epideictic miracle at their bidding, any more than at the bidding of the tempter. He at once told them, as He had told them before, that " no sign should be given them but the sign of the prophet Jonah." Pointing to the western sky, now crimson with the deepening hues of sunset, He said, " When it is evening, ye say, ' Fair weather! for the sky is red;' and in the morning, ' Storm to-day, for the sky is red and frowning.' Hypo crites ! ye knlow how to discern the face of the sky : can ye not learn the signs of the times ? " 1 As He spoke He heaved a deep inward sigh.3 For some time He had been absent from home. He had been sought out with trustful faith in the regions of Tyre and Sidon. He had been welcomed with ready gratitude in heathen Decapolis ; here, at home, He was met with the flaunt of triumphant opposition, under the guise of hypocritic zeal. He steps ashore on the lovely plain, where He had done so many noble and tender deeds, and spoken for all time such transcendent .and immortal words. He came back, haply to work once more in the little district where His steps had once been followed by rejoicing thousands, hanging in deep silence on every word He spoke. As He approaches Magdala, the little village destined for all time to lend its name to a word expressive of His most divine com passion — as He wishes to enter once more the little cities and villages which offered to His homelessness the only shadow of a home — here, barely has He stepped upon the pebbly strand, barely passed through the fringe of flowering shrubs, which embroider the water's ' Matt. xvi. 1 — & ; Mark viii. 10—13. 5 Mark viii. 12, apao-revd^as t$ wei/tari aiiroO. RETIREMENT FROM GALILEE. 5 edge, barely listened to the twittering of the innumerable birds which welcome Him back with their familiar sounds — when He finds all the self-satisfied hypocrisies of a decadent religion drawn up in array to stop His path ! He did not press His mercies on those who rejected them. As in after days His nation were suffered to prefer their robber and their murderer to the Lord of Life, so now the Galileeans were suffered to keep their Pharisees and lose their Christ. He left them as He had left the Gadarenes — rejected, not suffered to rest even in His home ; with heavy heart, solemnly and sadly He left them — left them then and there — left them, to revisit, indeed, once more their neighbourhood, but never again to return publicly — never again to work miracles, to teach or preach.1 It must have been late in that autumn evening when He stepped once more into the little ship, and bade His disciples steer their course towards Bethsaida Julius, at the northern end of the lake. On their way they must have sailed by the bright sands of the western Bethsaida, on which Peter and the sons of Zebedee had played in their infancy, and must have seen the white marble synagogue of Capernaum flinging its shadow across the waters, which blushed with the reflected colours of the sunset. Was it at such a moment, when He was leaving Galilee with the full knowledge that His work there was at an end, and that He was sailing away from it under the ban of partial excommunication and certain death — was it at that supreme moment of sorrow that He uttered the rhythmic woe in which He upbraided the 1 There is something emphatic both in the KaraM-irky auToi/s of Matt. xvi. 4, and in the aeis airoiis of Mark viii. 13. 6 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. unrepentant cities wherein most of His mighty works were done ? — " Woe unto thee, Chorazin ! woe unto thee, Beth saida ! for if the mighty works which have been done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. " But I say unto you, That it shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the day of judgment than for you. "And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to hell : for if the mighty works which have been done in thee had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day. " But I say unto you, That it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment than for thee ! " Whether these touching words were uttered on this occasion as a stern and sad farewell to His public ministry in the land He loved, we cannot tell ; x but certainly His soul was still filled with sorrow for the unbelief and hardness of heart, the darkened intellects and. corrupted consciences of those who were thus leaving for Him no power to set foot in His native land. It has been said 1 This woe — evidently complete and isolated in character — is recorded in Matt. xi. 20 — 24 ; Luke x. 12 — 15. St. Matthew seems to group it with the utterances at the feast of Simon the Pharisee; St. Luke with the Mission of the Seventy. It is, perhaps, hazardous to conjecture that words so solemnly beautiful and full of warning were uttered more than once ; and since the order of St. Matthew is in many places professedly unchrono- logical, we can find no more appropriate occasion for the words than this. They have evidently the character of a farewell, and the recent visit of Jesus to the coasts of Tyre and Sidon would give them special signifi cance here. The mention of the otherwise unknown Chorazin is an addi tional proof, if any were needed, of the fragmentary character of the Gospels. It is an inland town, three miles from Tell Hum, of which the deserted ruins, discovered by Dr. Robinson, are still called Khersah. LEAVEN OF HYPOCRISY. 7 by a great forensic orator that " no form of self-deceit is more hateful and detestable . . . than that which veils spite and falsehood under the guise of frankness, and behind the profession of religion." Bepugnance to this hideous vice must have been prominent in the stricken heart of Jesus, when, as the ship sailed along the pleasant shore upon its northward way, He said to His disciples, " Take heed, and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees." ] He added nothing more ; and this remark the strange simplicity of the disciples foolishly misinterpreted. They were constantly taking His figurative expressions lite rally, and His literal expressions metaphorically. When He called Himself the "bread from heaven," they thought the saying hard ; when He said, " I have meat to eat that ye know not of," they could only remark, " Hath any man brought Him aught to eat ? " when He said, " Our friend Lazarus sleepeth," they answered, " Lord, if he sleep he shall do well." And so now, although leaven was one of the very commonest types of sin, and especially of insidious and subterranean sin, the only interpretation which, after a discussion among them selves, they could attach to His remark was, that He was warning them not to buy leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees, or, perhaps, indirectly reproaching them because, in the sorrow and hurry of their unexpected re-embarkation, they had only brought with them one single loaf! Jesus was grieved at this utter non-com prehension, this almost stupid literalism. Did they suppose that He, at whose words the loaves and fishes had been so miraculously multiplied — that they, who 1 Or " of Herod " (Mark viii. 15). The Herodians appear to have been mainly Sadducees. 8 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. after feeding the five thousand had gathered twelve hand-baskets, and after feeding the four thousand had gathered seven large baskets-full of the fragments that remained — did they suppose, after that, that there was danger lest He or they should suffer from starvation ? There was something almost of indignation in the rapid questions in which, without correcting, He indicated their error. " Why reason ye because ye have no bread ? Perceive ye not yet, neither understand ? Have ye your heart yet hardened ? Having eyes, see ye not ? and having ears, hear ye not? and do ye not remember?" And then once more, after He had reminded them of those miracles, "How is it that ye do not understand?" They had not ventured to ask Him for any explanation ; there was something about Him — something so awe- inspiring and exalted in His personality — that their love for Him, intense though it was, was tempered by an overwhelming reverence : but now it began to dawn upon them that something else was meant, and that He was bidding them beware, not of the leaven of bread, but of the doctrine of the Pharisees and Sadducees. At Bethsaida Julias, probably on the following morning, a blind man was brought to Him for healing. The cure was wrought in a manner very similar to that of the deaf and dumb man in Decapolis. It has none of the ready freedom, the radiant spontaneity of the earlier and happier miracles. In one respect it differs from every other recorded miracle, for it was, as it were, ten tative. Jesus took the man by the hand, led him out of the village, spat upon his eyes, and then, laying His hands upon them, asked if he saw. The man looked at the figures in the distance, and, but. imperfectly cured as yet, said, " I see men as trees walking." Not until A TENTATIVE MIRACLE. 9 Jesus had laid His hands a second time upon his eyes did he see clearly. And then Jesus bade him go to his house, which was not at Bethsaida ; for, with an em phatic repetition of the word, he is forbidden either to enter into the town, or to tell it to any one in the town. We cannot explain the causes of the method which Christ here adopted. The impossibility of understanding what guided His actions arises from the brevity of the narra tive, in which the Evangelist — as is so often the case with writers conversant with their subject — passes over many particulars, which, because they were so familiar to himself, will, he supposes, be self-explaining to those who read his words. All that we can dimly see is Christ's dis like and avoidance of these heathenish Herodian towns, with their borrowed Hellenic architecture, their careless customs, and even their very names commemorating, as was the case with Bethsaida Julias, some of the most con temptible of the human race.1 We see from the Gospels themselves that the richness and power displayed in the miracles was correlative to the faith of the recipients : in places where faith was scanty it was but too natural that miracles should be gradual and few.2 Leaving Bethsaida Julias, Jesus made his way to wards Csesarea Philippi. Here, again, it seems to be distinctly intimated that He did not enter into the town itself, but only visited the " coasts " of it, or wandered about the neighbouring villages.3 Why He bent His footsteps in that direction we are not told. It was a 1 Herod Philip had named his renovated capital in honour of Julia, the abandoned daughter of the Emperor Augustus. 2 No one who has rightly considered the Gospel miracles will regard this as " a damaging concession." At any rate, if so, it is a fresh proof of the entire truthfulness of the Gospels. (Matt. xiii. 58; Mark vi. 5, 6 ; ix. 23, &c.) s Matt. xvi. 13, fiep-n, "parts," or "regions;" Mark viii. 27, Ktiaas. 10 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. town that had seen many vicissitudes. It is perhaps Baal-Gad, near the town which, as " Laish," had been the possession of the careless Sidonians, and as " Dan,' had been the chief refuge of a warlike tribe of Israel, the northern limit of the Israelitish kingdom, and the seat of the idolatry of the golden calf. Colonised by Greeks, its name had been changed into Paneas, in honour of the cave under its towering hill, which had been artificially fashioned into a grotto of Pan, and adorned with niches, which once contained statues of his sylvan nymphs. As the capital of Herod Philip, it had been re-named in honour of himself and his patron Tiberius.1 Jesus might gaze with interest on the noble ranges of Libanus and Anti-Libanus ; He might watch the splendid and snowy mass of Hermon glittering under the dawn, or flushed with its evening glow ; He might wander round Lake Phiala, and see the copious fountain, where, according to tradition, the Jordan, after his subterranean course, bursts rejoicing into the light: but He could only have gazed with sorrow on the city itself, with its dark memories of Israelitish apostacy, its poor mimicry of Boman imperialism, and the broken statues of its unhallowed and Hellenic cave. But it was on His way to the northern region that there occurred an incident which may well be regarded as the culminating point of His earthly ministry.2 He was alone. The crowd that surged so tumultuously about Him in more frequented districts, here only followed Him at a distance. Only His disciples were near Him as He stood apart in solitary prayer. And when the prayer was over, He beckoned them about 1 On Csesarea Philippi see Jos. Antt. xv. 10, § 3 ; B. J. i. 21, § 3 ; and for a description of its present state, Thomson, Land and Booh, II. ch. xvi 3 Matt. xvi. 13—28 ; Mark viii. 27— ix. 1 ; Luke ix. 18—27. ' THE MOMENTOUS QUESTION. 11 Him as they continued their journey, and asked them those two momentous questions on the answers to which depended the whole outcome of His work on earth. First He asked them — "Whom do men say that I the Son of Man am?" The answer was a sad one. The Apostles dared not and would not speak aught but the words of soberness and truth, and they made the disheartening admission that the Messiah had not been recognised by the world which He came to save. They could only repeat the idle guesses of the people. Some, echoing the verdict of the guilty conscience of Antipas, said that He was John the Baptist ; some, who may have heard the sterner denunciations of His impassioned grief, caught in that mighty utterance the thunder- tones of a new Elijah; others, who had listened to His accents of tenderness and words of universal love, saw in Him the plaintive soul of Jeremiah, and thought that He had come, perhaps, to restore them the lost Urim and the vanished Ark : others, and those the most numerous, regarded Him only as a prophet. None — in spite of an occasional Messianic cry wrung from the admiration of the multi tude, amazed by some unwonted display of power — none dreamt of who He was. The light had shone in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not. " But whom say ye that I am ?" Had that great question been answered otherwise — could it have been answered otherwise — the world's whole destinies might have been changed. Had it been answered otherwise, then, humanly speaking, so far the mission of the Saviour would have wholly failed, and Christianity and Christendom have never been. For the work of Christ on earth lay mainly with His disciples. 12 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. He sowed the seed, they reaped the harvest ; He con verted them, and they the world. He had never openly spoken of His Messiahship. John indeed had borne witness to Him, and to those who could receive it He had indirectly intimated, both in word and deed, that He was the Son of God. But it was His will that the light of revelation should dawn gradually on the minds of His children ; that it should spring more from the truths He spake, and the life He lived, than from the wonders which He wrought ; that it should be conveyed not in sudden thunder- crashes of supernatural majesty or visions of unutterable glory, but through the quiet medium of a sinless and self-sacrificing course. It was in the Son of Man that they were to recognise the Son of God. But the answer came, as from everlasting it had been written in the book of destiny that it should come ; and Peter, the ever warm-hearted, the coryphaeus of the Apostolic choir,1 had the immortal honour of giving it utterance for them all — "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God !" Such an answer from the chief of the Apostles atoned by its fulness of insight and certitude of conviction for the defective appreciation of the multitudes.2 It showed that at last the great mystery was revealed which had been hidden from the ages and the generations. The 1 6 iravraxoo depp-hs, 6 rov x°P°o T^v airoaT6\(ap Kopv(pa7os (Chrys. Som. liv.). ! He says, not " we say," but " Thou art " (Alford, ad. loc). St. Peter was " primus inter pares " — a leader, but among equals. Had he been more than this — had Christ's words been intended to bestow on him the least shadow of supremacy — how could James and John have asked to sit on the right hand and on the left of Christ in His kingdom ? and how could the Apostles on at least two subsequent occasions have disputed who among them should be the greatest ? "ON THIS ROOK" 13 Apostles at least had not only recognised in Jesus of Nazareth the promised Messiah of their nation, but it had been revealed to them by the special grace of God that that Messiah was not only what the Jews expected, a Prince, and a Buler, and a Son of David, but was more than this, even the Son of the living God. With awful solemnity did the Saviour ratify that great confession. " Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon, son of Jonas ¦} for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.2 And I say unto thee, that thou art Peter (Petros), and on this rock (petra) I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.3 And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." Never did even the lips of Jesus utter more memor- 1 So, too, Jesus addressed him on other solemn occasions (John xxi. 15—17). 2 Not the common Jewish abinu, "our Father," but "my Father" (d war-tip f-ov). 3 Similar plays on words, founded on very deep principles, are common among deep thinkers in all tongues. Our Lord was probably speaking in Aramaic, in which language the phrase " gates of hell " (fmb *&$, shaare sheol) presents a pleasing assonance. If so, He probably said, " Thou art Kephas, and on this Kepha I will," &c. Many commentators, from the earliest ages downwards, have understood " this rock " to be either the confession of Peter, or Christ himself (see abundant authorities for these opinions in the elaborate note of Bishop Wordsworth) ; it is difficult, however, in either of these cases to see any force in the "Thou art Peter." ' On the other hand, to speak of a man as " the rock " is unlike the ordinary language of Scripture. " Who is a rook save our God ? " (2 Sam. xxii. 32 ; Ps. xviii. 31 ; Ixii. 2 ; Isa. xxviii. 16 ; and see especially 1 Cor. iii. 11 ; x. 4). The key was a common Jewish metaphor for authority (Isa. xxii. 22; Luke xi. 52). (Gfrorer, i. 155, 283; Schottg., Hor. Eebr. ii. 894.) I shall speak further on the passage in a subsequen note, but do not profess to have fully solved its difficulties. 14 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. able words. It was His own testimony of Himself. It was the promise that they who can acknowledge it are blessed. It was the revealed fact that they only can acknowledge it who are led thereto by the Spirit of God. It told mankind for ever that not by earthly criticisms, but only by heavenly grace, can the full knowledge of that truth be obtained. It was the laying of the corner stone of the Church of Christ, and the earliest occasion on which was uttered that memorable word, thereafter to be so intimately blended with the history of the world.1 It was the promise that that Church founded on the rock of inspired confession should remain unconquered by all the powers of hell. It was the conferring upon that Church, in the person of its typical representative, the power to open and shut, to bind and loose, and the promise that the power faithfully exercised on earth should be finally ratified in heaven. " Tute haec omnia dicuntur," says the great Bengel, " nam quid ad Bomam ?" " all these statements are made with safety; for what have they to do with Bome?"2 Let him who will wade through all the controversy neces sitated by the memorable perversions of this memorable text, which runs as an inscription round the interior of the great dome of St. Peter's. But little force is needed to overthrow the strange inverted pyramids of argument which have been built upon it. Were it not a matter of history, it would have been deemed incredible that on so imaginary a foundation should have been rested the fan- 1 It is a remarkable fact that the word So^n (Luke ix. 31). 4 Tb opafxa (Matt. xvii. 9). The word, which occurs eleven times in the Acts, but not elsewhere in the N. T., is applied to dreams (Acts xvi. 10 ; xviii. 9) and ecstacies (Acts xi. 5), but also to any impression on the spirit which is as clear as an impression on the senses (Acts vii. 31). Hence Phavormus says, Spd/xard €ifJTai. 5 This touch in all probability comes to us from St. Peter himself (Mark ix. 6). THE TRANSFIGURATION. 29 spectacle infinitely more transcendent than Hermon — not knowing that the Law and the Prophets were now ful filled — not fully knowing that his Lord was unspeakably greater than the Prophet of Sinai and the Avenger of Carmel — exclaimed, " Babbi, it is best for us to be here ; ] and let us make three tabernacles, one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias." Jesus might have smiled at the naive proposal of the eager Apostle, that they six should dwell for ever in little succoth of wattled boughs on the slopes of Hermon. But it was not for Peter to construct the universe for his personal satisfaction. He had to learn the meaning of Calvary no less than that of Hermon. Not in cloud of glory or chariot of fire was Jesus to pass away from them, but with arms out stretched in agony upon the accursed tree ; not between Moses and Elias, but between two thieves, who " were crucified with Him, on either side one." No answer was vouchsafed to his wild and dreamy words ; but, even as he spake, a cloud — not a cloud of thick darkness as at Sinai, but a cloud of light, a Shechinah of radiance — overshadowed them, and a voice from out of it uttered, " This is my beloved Son ; hear Him." They fell prostrate, and hid their faces on the grass.2 And as — awaking from the overwhelming shock of that awful voice, of that enfolding Light — they raised their eyes and gazed suddenly all around them,3 they 1 KaXbv in the New Testament seems sometimes to have a superlative sense. Cf . Matt, xviii. 8 ; xxvi. 24, &c, and Gen. xxxviii. 26, where lie means " better," as " bona," in Plaut. Rud. iv. 4, 70. (Schleusner, s. v.) 2 Matt. xvii. 6. 3 Mark ix. 8, (=£aViya irepifiK^d^poi (cf. Matt. xvii. 8), one of the many inimitably graphic touches of truthfulness and simplicity — touches never yet found in any " myth " since the world began — with which in all three Evangelists this narrative abounds. We have proofs that on two of the tliree spectators this scene made an indelible impression. St. John most 30 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. found that all was over. The bright cloud had vanished. The lightning-like gleams of shining countenances and dazzling robes had passed away ;l they were alone with Jesus, and only the stars rained their quiet lustre on the mountain slopes. At first they were afraid to rise or stir, but Jesus, their Master— as they had seen Him before He knelt in prayer, came to them, touched them — said, " Arise, and be not afraid." And so the clay dawned on Hermon, and they de scended the hill ; and as they descended, He bade them tell no man until He had risen from the dead. The vision was for them ; it was to be pondered over by them in the depths of their own hearts in self-denying reti cence ; to announce it to their fellow-disciples might only awake their jealousy and their own self-satisfaction; until the resurrection it would add nothing to the faith of clearly alludes to it in John i. 14; 1 John i 1. St. Peter (if, as I believe. the Second Epistle is genuine) is dwelling on it in 2 Peter i. in a manner all the more striking because it is partly unconscious. Thus, he not only appeals to it in confirmation of his preaching, but he uses just before the unusual word efoSos for " death " [2 Peter i. 15 (cf . Luke ix. 31) : it is, how ever, possible that S6£av may here be the reading, as it seems to have been read by St. Chrysostom], and ox-tiPa/ia (ver. 13; cf. Matt. xvii. 4) for "taber nacle; " and immediately after speaks (ver. 19) of " a light shining in a dark place," and immediately preceding the dawn — which is another, and, so far .as I am aware, hitherto unnoticed trace of the fact that the Transfiguration (of which the writer's mind is here so full) took place by night. On the word e|oSo$ Bengel finely remarks, " Vocabulum valde grave, quo continetur passio, crux, mors, resurrectio, adscensio." Archbishop Trench aptly com pares " Post obitum, vel potius excessum, Romuli " (Cic. Rep. ii. 30), and says that St. Peter by the word t-ni-xrqs (2 Peter i. 16) seems to imply a sort of initiation into holy mysteries (Studies in the Gospels, p. 206). Many have resolved the narrative of the Transfiguration into a myth ; it is remarkable that, in this verse, St. Peter is expressly repudiating the very hind of myths (fivBoi aeaocpia^ivoi) under which this would be classed. 1 " Finis legis Christus ; Lex et Prophetia ex Verbo ; quae autem ex Verbo ^oeperunt.in Verbo desinunt" (St. Ambrose). (Wordsworth.inMatt. xvii.8.) ELIAS THE FORERUNNER. 31 others, and might only confuse their conceptions of what was to be His work on earth. They kept Christ's command, but they could not attach any meaning to this allusion. They could only ask each other, or muse in silence, what this resurrection from the dead could mean. And another serious question weighed upon their spirits. They had seen Elias. They now knew more fully than ever that their Lord was indeed the Christ. Yet " how say the Scribes " — and had not the Scribes the prophecy of Malachi in their favour?1 — "that Elias must first come and restore all things ? " And then our Lord gently led them to see that Elias indeed had come, and had not been recognised, and had received at the 'hand of his nation the same fate which was soon to happen to Him whom he announced. Then understood they that He spake to them of John the Baptist.2 ' Mai. iv. 5. The LXX., without any authority from the Hebrew, I'ead here 'H\lav rbv ®eo-$lrni>. 2 Luke i 17, "in the spirit and power of Elias;" cf. Matt. xi. 10. The Jewish expectation of Elias is well known. A tiling of unknown ownership may be kept by the finder " till the coming of Elias." He was to restore to the Jews the pot of manna, the rod of Aaron, &c, and his coming generally was to be a xp^vos airoKaTaa-rdcreus (ef. Acts iii. 21). See Lightfoot, Hor. Hebr. in Matt, xvii 10, 11. CHAPTER XXXVII THE DEMONIAC BOY. TVes Be ef\Kero tous $x*ovs- — THEOPHTL. The imagination of all readers of the Gospels has been struck by the contrast — a contrast seized and immor talised for ever in the great picture of Raphael — between the peace, the glory, the heavenly communion on the mountain heights, and the confusion, the rage, the un belief, the agony which marked the first scene that met the eyes of Jesus and His Apostles on their descent to the low levels of human life.1 For in their absence an event had occurred which filled the other disciples with agitation and alarm. They saw a crowd assembled and Scribes among them, who with disputes and victorious innuendoes were pressing hard upon the diminished band of Christ's chosen friends.2 Suddenly at this crisis the multitude caught sight of Jesus. Something about His appearance, some un usual majesty, some lingering radiance, filled them with amazement, and they ran up to Him with saluta- 1 Matt. xvii. 14—21 ; Mark ix. 14—29; Luke ix. 37—45. 2 There were, of course, many Jews, and therefore naturally there would be Scribes, in the kingdom of Philip. THE DEMONIAC BOY. 33 tions.1 " What is your dispute with them ?" He sternly asked of the Scribes. But the Scribes were too much abashed, the disciples were too self-conscious of their faithlessness and failure, to venture on any reply. Then out of the crowd struggled a man, who, kneeling before Jesus, cried out, in a loud voice,2 that he was the father of an only son whose demoniac possession was shown by epilepsy, in its most raging symptoms, accompanied by dumbness, atrophy, and a suicidal mania. He had brought the miserable sufferer to the disciples to cast out the evil spirit, but their failure had occasioned the taunts of the Scribes. The whole scene grieved Jesus to the heart. " O faithless and perverse generation," He exclaimed, " how long shall I be with you ? how long shall I suffer you ? " This cry of His indignation seemed meant for all — for the merely curious multitude, for the malicious Scribes, for the half-believing and faltering disciples. " Bring him hither to me." The poor boy was brought, and no sooner had his eye fallen on Jesus, than he was seized with another paroxysm of his malady. He fell on the ground in violent convulsions, and rolled there with foaming lips. It was the most deadly and intense form of epileptic lunacy on which our Lord had ever been called to take compassion.3 He paused before He acted. He would impress the 1 Mark ix. 14. We here follow mainly the full and vivid narrative of St. Mark. 3 Matt. xvii. 14 ; Luke ix. 38. 3 Matt. xvii. 15, aetoivid^zrai koI KaKus -wdax*1- This describes, at any rate, the natural side of his malady ; but there is, in truth, to such maladies no purely natural side. They belong to some mystery of iniquity which we can never understand. They are due, not to the ordtrts, but to the airSo-raois of human nature. d 34 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. scene in all its horror on the thronging multitude, that they might understand that the failure was not of Him. He would at the same time invoke, educe, confirm the wavering faith of the agonised suppliant. " How long has this happened to him ? " " From chil'dhood : and often hath it flung him both into fire and into water to destroy him ; but if at all thou canst, take pity on us and help us." "If thou canst ?"r answered Jesus — giving him back his own word — "all things are possible to him that believeth." And then the poor hapless father broke out into that cry, uttered by so many millions since, and so deeply applicable to an age which, like our own, has been described as " destitute of faith, yet terrified at scepti cism " — " Lord, I believe ; help thou mine unbelief." Meanwhile, during this short colloquy, the crowd had been gathering more and more, and Jesus, turning to the sufferer, said, " Dumb and deaf spirit, I charge thee, come out of him, and enter no more into him." A yet wilder cry, a yet more fearful convulsion followed His words, and then the boy lay on the ground, no longer wallowing and foaming, but still as death. Some said, " He is dead." But Jesus took him by the hand, and, amid the amazed exclamations of the multitude, restored him to his father, calm and cured. Jesus had previously given to His disciples the power of casting out devils, and this power was even exercised in His name by some who were not among His 1 This seems to be the force of Mark ix. 23, thev avrf, Ti> ei SiWrai, Trdvra Swara t£ iriorevoiiTi, which is the best reading (m, B, C, L, and some versions). For this use of rb see Matt. xix. 18; Luke ix. 46, Sua. "As for the ' if thou canst ' — all things are, &c." It is taken thus by the .ffithiopic version, and " proclivi lectioni praestat ardua." POWER OF FAITH. 35 professed disciples.1 Nor had they ever failed before. It was therefore natural that they should take the first private opportunity to ask Him the cause of their dis comfiture. He told them frankly that it was because of their unbelief. It may be that the sense of His absence weakened them ; it may be that they felt less able to cope with difficulties while Peter and the sons of Zebedee were also away from them ; it may be, too, that the sad prophecy of His rejection and death had worked with sinister effect on the minds of the weakest of them. But, at any rate, He took this opportunity to teach them two great lessons : the one, that there are forms of spiritual, physical, and moral evil so intense and so inveterate, that they can only be exorcised by prayer, united to that self-control and self-denial of which fasting is the most effectual and striking symbol;2 the other, that to a perfect faith all things are possible. Faith, like a grain of mustard-seed, could even say to Hermon itself,3 " Be thou removed, and cast into the waves of the Great Sea, and it should obey." Jesus had now wandered to the utmost northern limit of the Holy Land, and He began to turn His steps homewards. We see from St. Mark that His return was designedly secret and secluded, and possibly not along the high roads, but rather through the hills and valleys of Upper Galilee to the westward of the 1 Mark ix. 38. 2 It must, however, be noticed that the k«! p-no-rda (Mark ix. 29) is a more than dubious reading. It is not found in » or B, and the corresponding verse in Matt. xvii. 21 is omitted by m, B, as well as by various versions. Tischendorf omits both. See, however, Matt. vi. 16 — 18 ; ix. 15. 3 " Removing mountains " was among the Jews a common hyperbole for the conquest of stupendous difficulties. A great teacher was called by the Rabbis Dnn -ip (goher hdrim), or " uprooter of mountains." See many instances in Lightf oot, Mor. Hebr. in Matt. xxi. 21. 36 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. Jordan.1 His object was no longer to teach the multi tudes' who had been seduced into rejecting Him, and among whom He could hardly appear in safety, but to continue that other and even more essential part of His work, which consisted in the training of His Apostles. And now the constant subject of His teaching2 was His approaching betrayal, murder, and resurrection. Rut He spoke to dull hearts ; in their deep-seated prejudice they ignored his clear warnings, in their faithless timidity they would not ask for further enlightenment. We cannot see more strikingly how vast was the change which the resurrection wrought in them than by ob serving with what simple truthfulness they record the extent and inveteracy of their own shortcomings, during those precious days while the Lord was yet among them. The one thing which they did seem to realise was that some strange and memorable issue of Christ's life, accompanied by some great development of the Messianic kingdom, was at hand ; and this unhappily produced the only effect in them which it should not have produced. Instead of stimulating their self-denial, it awoke their ambition ; instead of confirming their love and humility, it stirred them up to jealousy and pride. On the road — remembering, perhaps, the preference which had been shown at Hermon to Peter and the sons of Zebedee — they disputed among themselves, "Which should be the greatest ? " 1 For the variety of readings on Matt. xvii. 22, apaarpe6pos as though it had been ®e6 nsin), i.e. "outside the Holy Land!'' (Frankl, Jews in the East, ii. 34, E. Tr.) 2 The feast lasted seven days, but it is uncertain whether by " the last day, that great day of the feast," the seventh day is intended, which was the proper conclusion of the feast, or the eighth, on which the booths were taken down, but on which there were special offerings and a holy con vocation (Numb. xxix. 36 — 38). It is said that the seventh, not being distinguished from the other days, cannot be called " the great day;" but on the other hand, the last day of a feast is always likely to be conspicuous for the zest of its ceremonies, and there seems to be at least some indication that such was actually the case (Buxtorf, Syn. Jud. xxi. ; see " Feast of Tabernacles " in Smith's Diet, of the Bible). One Rabbi (R. Juda Hakk6- desh), in the tract Succah, which is our chief authority on this subject, says that the water was poured out on the eighth as well as on the previous days (Succah, iv. 9), but the others deny this (Surenhusius, Mischna, ii. 276). The eighth day of the Passover, and of Tabernacles, is in Deut. xvi. 8 ; Lev. xxiii. 34, called atsereth (E. V. " solemn assembly," marg. " day of restraint "). THE HOSANNAH RABBAH. 57 There, with great solemnity, he drew three logs of water, which were then carried in triumphant procession through the water-gate into the Temple. As he entered the Temple courts the sacred trumpets breathed out a joyous blast, which continued till he reached the top of the altar slope, and there poured the water into a silver basin on the western side, while wine was poured into another silver basin on the eastern side. Then the great Hallel was sung,1 and when they came to the verse " Oh give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good : for His mercy endureth for ever," each of the gaily-clad worshippers as he stood beside the altars, shook his lulab in triumph. In the evening they abandoned them selves to such rejoicing, that the Rabbis say that the man who has not seen this "joy of the drawing water " does not know what joy means.2 In evident allusion to this glad custom — perhaps in sympathy with that sense of something missing which succeeded the disuse of it on the eighth day of the feast ¦ — Jesus pointed the yearnings of the festal crowd in the Temple, as He had done those of the Samaritan woman by the lonely well, to a new truth, and to one which ' Ps. cxiii— cxviii. Jahn, Archaeol. Bibl. § 355. Even Plutarch (Sympos. iv. 5) alludes to the Kparripoipopia. 2 Succah, v. 2. The feast was called Shimcath beth hashoabah. The day was called the Hosannah Rabbah, or " Great Hosannah," because on the seventh day the Hallel was seven times sung. The origin of the ceremony is quite obscure, but it is at least possible that the extra joy of it — the processions, illuminations, dances — commemorated the joy of the Pharisees in having got the better of Alexander Jannaeus, who, instead of pouring the water on the altar, disdainfully poured it on the ground. The Pharisees in their fury hurled at his head the citron-fruits which they were carrying in their hands (Lev. xxiii. 40), and on his calling his mercenaries to his aid, a massacre of nearly six thousand ensued (Derenbourg, Hist. Pal. 98- Jos. Antt. xiii. 13, § 5, Kirpiois abrbp ePaAAof). This unauthorised use of the fruits as convenient missiles seems not to have been rare (Succah, iv. 9). 58 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. more than fulfilled alike the spiritual (Isa. xii. 3) and the historical meaning (1 Cor. x. 4) of the scenes which they had witnessed. He " stood and cried, If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink. He that believeth on me, as the Scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water."1 And the best of them felt in their inmost soul — and this is the strongest of all the evidences of Christianity for those who believe heart and soul in a God of love who cares for His children in the family of man — that they had deep need of a comfort and salva tion, of the outpouring of a Holy Spirit, which He who spake to them could alone bestow. But the very fact that some were beginning openly to speak of Him as the Prophet and the Christ, only exasperated the others. They had a small difficulty of their own creating, founded on pure ignorance of fact, but which yet to their own narrow dogmatic fancy was irresistible — " Shall Christ come out of Galilee ? must He not come from Beth lehem ? of David's seed ? " 2 It was during this division of opinion that the officers whom the Pharisees had dispatched to seize Jesus, returned to them without having even attempted to carry out their design. As they hovered among the Temple courts, as they stood half sheltered behind the Temple pillars, not unobserved, it may be, by Him 1 Cf. Isa. xliii. 20; lviii. 11 ; lv. 1 ; xii. 3; and John iv. 14; vi. 35; Rev. xxii. 17. These are the nearest passages to " as the Scripture hath said," which must therefore be interpreted as a general allusion. St. Chrysostom -asks, ku\ ttov elivtv r\ ypaipi) on irOTa/iol, k. t. A.; ovSapov. No metaphor, however, could be more intense than that offered by the longing for water in a dry and thirsty land. To see the eagerness with which men and beasts alike rush to the fountain-side after journeys in Palestine is a striking sight. The Arabs begin to sing and shout, constantly repeating the words " Snow in the sun ! snow in the sun ! " 2 Micah v. 2 ; Isa. xi. 1 ; Jer. xxiii 5, &c. PHARISAIC CONTEMPT. 59 for whom they were lying in wait, they too could not fail to hear some of the divine words which flowed out of His mouth. And, hearing them, they could not fulfil their mission. A sacred spell was upon them, which they were unable to resist ; a force infinitely more powerful than their own, unnerved their strength and paralysed their will. To listen to Him was not only to be disarmed in every attempt against Him, it was even to be half- converted from bitter enemies to awe-struck disciples. " Never man spake like this man," was all that they could say. That bold disobedience to positive orders must have made them afraid of the possible consequences to themselves, but obedience would have required a courage even greater, to say nothing of that rankling wound wherewith an awakened conscience ever pierces the breast of crime. The Pharisees could only meet them with angry taunts. " What, ye too intend to accept this Prophet of the ignorant, this favourite of the accursed and miserable mob!"1 Then Nicodemus ventured on a timid word, " Ought you not to try, before you condemn Him ? " They had no reply to the justice of that principle : they could only fall back again on taunts — " Are you then a Galilsean?" and then the old ignorant dogma tism, " Search, and look : for out of Galilee ariseth no prophet." Where then, as we have asked already, was Gath- hepher, whence Jonah came ? where Thisbe, whence Elijah came ? where Elkosh, whence Nahum came ? where the northern town whence Hosea came? The more recent Jews, with better knowledge of Scripture, 1 The ecclesiastical contempt of the Pharisees surpassed, in its habitual spirit of scorn, the worst insolence of Paganism against " the many." 60 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. declare that the Messiah is to come from Galilee;1 and they settle at Tiberias, because they believe that He will rise from the waters of the Lake ; and at Safed, " the city set on a hill," because they believe that He will there first fix His throne.2 But there is no igno rance so deep as the ignorance that will not know ; no blindness so incurable as the blindness which will not see. And the dogmatism of a narrow and stolid prejudice which believes itself to be theological learning is, of all others, the most ignorant and the most blind. Such was the spirit in which, ignoring the mild justice of Nicodemus, and the marvellous impression made by Jesus even on their own hostile apparitors, the majority of the Sanhedrin broke up, and went each to his own home. 1 See Isa. ix. 1, 2, and this is asserted in the JZohar. See supra, Vol. L, p. 65. 2 So I was assured on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. CHAPTEB XL. THE WOMAN TAKEN IN ADULTERY. " Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all."— Shakespeare. In the difficulties which beset the celebrated incident which follows, it is impossible for us to arrive at any certainty as to its true position in the narrative.1 As there must, however, be some a priori probability that its place was assigned with due reference to the order of events, and as there appear to be some obvious though indirect references to it in the discourses which imme diately follow,2 1 shall proceed to speak of it here, feeling no shadow of a doubt that the incident really happened, even if the form in which it is preserved to us is by no means indisputably genuine.3 1 John viii. 1 — 11. In some MSS. it is placed at the end of St. John's Gospel; in some, after Luke xxi., mainly, no doubt, because it fits on well to the verses 37, 38 in that chapter. Hitzig (TJeber Joh. Marc. 205) con jectured, very plausibly, that the fact which it records really belongs to Mark xii., falling in naturally between the conspiracy of the Pharisees and Herodians, and that of the Sadducees to tempt Christ — i.e., between the 17th and 18th verses. In that case its order of sequence would be on the Tuesday in Passion week. On the other hand, if it has no connection with the Feast of Tabernacles, and no tinge of Johannean authorship, why should so many MSS. (including even such important ones as D, F, G) place it here P 2 Ex. gr., John viii. 15, 17, 24, 46. 3 The whole mass of critical evidence may be seen fully treated in 62 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. At the close of the day recorded in the last chapter, Jesus withdrew to the Mount of Olives. Whether He went to the garden of Gethsemane, and to the house of Liicke's Commentary (third edition), ii. 243 — 256. We may briefly sum- mai-ise the grounds of its dubious genuineness by observing that (1) it is not found in some of the best and oldest MSS. (e.g., «, A, B, C, L) ; (2) nor in most of the Fathers (e.g., Origen, Cyril, Chrysostom, Theophylact, Ter tullian, Cyprian) ; (3) nor in many ancient versions (e.g., Sahidic, Coptic, and Gothic) ; (4) in other MSS. it is marked with obeli and asterisks, or a space is left for it, or it is inserted elsewhere ; (5) it contains an extra ordinary number of various readings ("variant singula fere verba in codicibus plerisque " — Teschendorf ) ; (6) it contains several expressions not elsewhere found in St. John; and (7) it differs widely in some respects — particularly in the constant use of the connecting 5e — from the style of St. John through out the rest of the Gospel. Several of these arguments are weakened — (i) by the fact that the diversities of readings may be reduced to three main recensions ; (ii.) that the rejection of the passage may have been due to a false dogmatical bias ; (iii.) that the silence of some of the Fathers may be accidental, and of others prudential. The arguments in its favour are — 1. It is found in some old and important uncials (D, F, G, H, K, U) and in more than 300 cursive MSS., in some of the Itala, and in the Vulgate. 2. The tendencies which led to its deliberate rejection would have ren dered all but impossible its invention or interpolation. 3. It is quoted by Augustine, Ambrose, and Jerome, and treated as genuine in the Apostolic constitutions. St. Jerome's testimony (Adv. Pelag. ii. 6) is particularly important, because he says that in his time it was found " in multis et Graecis et Latinis codicibus " — and it must be remembered that nearly all of these must have been considerably older than any which we now possess. The main facts to be observed are, that though the dogmatic bias against the passage might be sufficient to account for its rejection, it gives us no help in explaining its want of resemblance to the style of St. John. A very simple hypothesis will account for all difficulties. If we suppose that the story of the woman accused before our Lord of many sins — to which Eusebius alludes (H. E. iii. 39) as existing in the Gospel of the Hebrews — is identical with this, we may suppose, without any improbability, either (i) that St. John (as Alford hesitatingly suggests) may here have adopted a portion of current synoptic tradition, or (ii.) that the story may have been derived originally from Papias, the pupil of St. John, and having found its way into the Gospel of the Hebrews, may have been adopted gradually into some MSS. of St. John's Gospel (see Euseb. ubi supr.). Many recent writers adopt the suggestion of Holtzmann, that it belongs to the "Ur-marcus," or ground document of the Synoptists. Whoever embodied into the Gospels this traditionally-remembered story deserved well of the world. LOVE OF THE COUNTRY. 63 its unknown but friendly owner, or whether — not having where to lay His head — He simply slept, Eastern fashion, on the green turf under those ancient olive-trees, we cannot tell ; but it is interesting to trace in Him once more that dislike of "crowded cities, that love for the pure, sweet, fresh air, and for the quiet of the lonely hill, which we see in all parts of His career on earth. There was, indeed, in Him nothing of that supercilious sentimentality and morbid egotism which makes men shrink from all contact with their brother-men ; nor can they who would be His true servants belong to those merely fantastic philanthropists "Who sigh for wretchedness, yet shun the wretched, Nursing in some delicious solitude Their dainty loves and slothful sympathies." Coleridge, Religious Musings. On the contrary, day after day, while His day-time of work continued, we find Him sacrificing all that was dearest and most elevating to His soul, and in spite of heat, and pressure, and conflict, and weariness, calmly pursuing His labours of love amid " the madding crowd's ignoble strife." But in the night-time, when men cannot work, no call of duty required His presence within the walls of Jerusalem ; and those who are familiar with the oppressive foulness of ancient cities can best imagine the relief which His spirit must have felt when he could es cape from the close streets and thronged bazaars, to cross the ravine, and climb the green slope beyond it, and be alone with His Heavenly Father under the starry night. But when the day dawned His duties lay once more within the city walls, and in that part of the city where, almost alone, we hear of His presence — in the courts of His Father's house. And with the very dawn His 64 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. enemies contrived a fresh plot against Him, the circum stances of which made their malice even more actually painful than it was intentionally perilous. It is probable that the hilarity and abandonment of the Feast of Tabernacles, which had grown to be a'kind of vintage festival, would often degenerate into acts of licence and immorality, and these would find more numerous opportunities in the general disturbance of ordinary life caused by the dwelling of the whole people in their little leafy booths. One such act had been detected during the previous night, and the guilty woman had been handed over to the Scribes1 and Pharisees. Even had the morals of the nation at that time been as clean as in the days when Moses ordained the fearful ordeal of the "water of jealousy "2 — even had these rulers and teachers of the nation been elevated as far above their contemporaries in the real, as in the professed, sanctity of their lives — the discovery, and the threatened punishment, of this miserable adulteress could hardly have failed to move every pure and noble mind to a compassion which would have mingled largely with the horror which her sin inspired. They might, indeed, even on those suppositions, have inflicted the established penalty with a sternness as inflexible as that of the Pilgrim Fathers in the early days of Salem or Provi dence; but the sternness of a severe and pure-hearted judge is not a sternness which precludes all pity; it is a sternness which would not willingly inflict one 1 It is observable that in no other passage of St. John's Gospel (though frequently in the Synoptists) are the Scribes mentioned among the enemies of Christ ; but here a few MSS. read oi dpxiepth, " the chief priests." 2 See Numb. v. 14—29. THE SIN OF ADULTERY. 65 unnecessary pang — it is a sternness not incompatible with a righteous tenderness, but wholly incompatible with a mixture of meaner and slighter motives, wholly incompatible with a spirit of malignant levity and hideous sport. But the spirit which actuated these Scribes and Pharisees was not by any means the spirit of a sincere and outraged purity. In the decadence of national life, in the daily familiarity with heathen degradations, in the gradual substitution of a Levitical scrupulosity for a heartfelt religion, the morals of the nation had grown utterly corrupt. The ordeal of the " water of jealousy " had long been abolished, and the death by stoning as a punishment for adultery had long been suffered to fall into desuetude. Not even the Scribes and Pharisees — for all their external religiosity — had any genuine horror of an impurity with which their own lives were often stained.1 They saw in the accident which had put this guilty woman into their power nothing but a chance of annoying, entrapping, possibly even endangering this Prophet of Galilee, whom they already regarded as their deadliest enemy. It was a curious custom among the Jews to consult distinguished Babbis in cases of doubt and difficulty;2 but there was no doubt or difficulty here. It was long since the Mosaic law of death to the adulteress had been demanded or enforced ; and even if this had not been the case, the Roman law would, in all probability, have 1 As is distinctly proved by the admissions of the Talmud, and by the express testimony of Josephus. In the tract Sotah it is clear that the Mosaic ordeal of the " water of jealousy " had fallen into practical desuetude from the commonness of the crime. We are there told that R. Johanan Ben Zakkai abolished the use of it (see Surenhusius, Mischna, ii. 290, 293). 2 Sepp, Leben Jesu, iv. 2, 17. / 66 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. prevented such a sentence from being put in execution. On the other hand, the civil and religious penalties of divorce were open to the injured husband ; nor did the case of this woman differ from that of any other who had similarly transgressed. Nor, again, even if they had honestly and sincerely desired the opinion of Jesus, could there have been the slightest excuse for haling the woman herself into His presence, and thus subject ing her to a moral torture which would be rendered all the more insupportable from the close seclusion of women in the East. And, therefore, to subject her to the superfluous horror of this odious publicity — to drag her, fresh from the agony of detection, into the sacred precincts of the Temple x — to subject this unveiled, dishevelled, terror- stricken woman to the cold and sensual curiosity of a malignant mob— to make her, with total disregard to her own sufferings, the mere passive instrument of their hatred against Jesus ; and to do all this — not under the pressure of moral indignation, but in order to gratify a calculating malice — showed on their parts a cold, hard cynicism, a graceless, pitiless, barbWous brutality of heart and conscience, which could /' not but prove, in every particular, revolting and hateful to One who alone was infinitely tender, because He alone was infinitely pure. And so they dragged her to Him, and set her in the midst — flagrant guilt subjected to the gaze of stainless Innocence, degraded misery set before the bar of perfect 1 It is indeed said in the Talmud (Sotah, 1, 5) that adulteresses were to be judged at the gate of Nikanor, between the Court of the Gentiles and that of the women (Surenhusius, Mischna, iii. 189) ; but this does not apply to the mere loose asking of an opinion, such as this was. THE SUBTLE QUESTION. 67 Mercy. And then, just as though their hearts were not full of outrage, they glibly begin, with ironical deference, to set before Him their case. " Master, this woman was seized in the very act of adultery. Now, Moses in the Law commanded us to stone1 such; but what sayest Thou about her?" They thought that now they had caught Him in a dilemma. They knew the divine trembling pity which had loved where others hated, and praised where others scorned, and encouraged where others crushed ; and they knew how that pity had won for Him the admira tion of many, the passionate devotion of not a few. They knew that a publican was among His chosen, that sinners had sat with Him at the banquet, and harlots unreproved had bathed His feet, and listened to His words. Would He then acquit this woman, and so make Himself liable to an accusation of heresy, by placing Himself in open disaccord with the sacred and fiery Law ? or, on the other hand, would He belie His own compassion, and be ruthless, and condemn ? And, if He did, would He not at once shock the multitude, who were touched by His tenderness, and offend the civil magistrates by making Himself liable to a charge of sedition ? How could He possibly get out of the diffi culty ? Either alternative — heresy or treason, accusation before the Sanhedrin or delation to the Procurator, 1 The Tar roiairas is contemptuous ; but where was the partner of her crime P The Law commanded that he too should be put to death (Lev. xx. 10). As to stoning being the proper punishment of adultery, a needless difficulty seems to have been raised (see Deut. xxii. 22 — 24). There is no ground whatever for concluding with Lightfoot (Hor. Hebr. ad loc.) that she was merely betrothed. (See Ewald, Gesch. Christus, 480 ; Alterthumsh, 254—268; Hitzig, Joh. Marc. 209.) The Rabbis say that " death," where' no form of it is specified, is meant to be strangulation ; but this is not the case (compare Exod. xxxi. 14 with Numb. xv. 32—35). 68 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. opposition to the orthodox or alienation from the many — would serve equally well their unscrupulous intentions. And one of these, they thought, must follow. What a happy chance this weak, guilty woman had given them ! Not yet. A sense of all their baseness, their hard ness, their malice, their cynical parade of every feeling which pity would temper and delicacy repress, rushed over the mind of Jesus. He blushed for His nation, for His race ; He blushed, not for the degradation of the miserable accused, but for the deeper guilt of her un blushing accusers.1 Glowing with uncontrollable disgust that modes of opposition so irredeemable in their mean ness should be put in play against Him, and that He should be made the involuntary centre of such a shameful scene — indignant (for it cannot be irreverent to imagine in Him an intensified degree of emotions which even the humblest of His true followers would have shared) that the sacredness of His personal reserve should thus be shamelessly violated, and that those things which belong to the sphere of a noble reticence should be thus cyni cally obtruded on His notice — He bent His face forwards from His seat, and as though He did not, or would not, hear them, stooped and wrote with His finger on the ground. For any others but such as these it would have been enough. Even if they failed to see in the action a symbol of forgiveness — a symbol that the memory of things thus written in the dust might be obliterated and forgotten2— still any but these could hardly have failed 1 In the Rabbinical treatise Berachoth, R. Papa and others are reported to have said that it is better for a man to throw himself into a furnace than to make any one blush in public, which they deduced from Gen. xxxviii. 25. (Schwab, Berachoth, p. 404.) 2 Comp. Jer. xvii. 13. THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE. 69 to interpret the gesture into a distinct indication that in such a matter Jesus would not mix Himself.1 But they saw nothing and understood nothing, and stood there unabashed, still pressing their brutal question, still hold ing, pointing to, jeering at the woman, with no com punction in their cunning glances, and no relenting in their steeled hearts. The scene could not last any longer ; and, therefore, raising Himself from His stooping attitude, He, who could read their hearts, calmly passed upon them that sad judgment involved in the memorable words — " Let him that is without sin2 among you, first cast the stone at her."3 It was not any abrogation of the Mosaic law ; it was, on the contrary, an admission of its justice, and doubt less it must have sunk heavily as a death-warrant upon the woman's heart. But it acted in a manner wholly unexpected. The terrible law stood written ; it was not the time, it was not His will, to rescind it. But on the other hand, they themselves, by not acting on the law, by referring the whole question to Him as though it needed a new solution, had practically confessed that the law was at present valid in theory alone, that it had fallen into desuetude, and that even with His authority they had no intention of carrying it into action. Since, therefore, the whole proceeding was on their part illegal and irregular, He transfers it by these words from the forum of law to that of conscience. The j udge may some times be obliged to condemn the criminal brought before 1 It seems to havo been well understood. See Wetstein ad he. 2 i.e. free from the taint of this class of sins. Cf. Luke vii. 37. 3 Trparos rbp \l6op (E, G, H, K, &c). Cf. Deut. xvii. 7. (Surenhusius, Mischna, iv. 235.) 70 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. him for sins of which he has himself been guilty, but the position of the self-constituted accuser who eagerly de mands a needless condemnation is very different. Herein to condemn her would have been in God's sight most fatally to have condemned themselves ; to have been the first to cast the stone at her would have been to crush themselves. He had but glanced at them for a moment, but that glance had read their inmost souls. He had but calmly spoken a few simple words, but those words, like the still small voice to Elijah at Horeb, had been more terrible than wind or earthquake. They had fallen like a spark of fire upon slumbering souls, and lay burning there till " the blushing, shame-faced spirit " mutinied within them. The Scribes and Pharisees stood silent and fearful ; they loosed their hold upon the woman ; their insolent glances, so full of guile and malice, fell guiltily to the ground. They who had unjustly inflicted, how justly felt the overwhelming anguish of an intolerable shame, while over their guilty consciences there rolled, in crash on crash of thunder, such thoughts as these : — " Therefore thou art inexcusable, 0 man, whosoever thou art that judgest : for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself: for thou that judgest doest the same things. But we are sure that the judgment of God is according to truth against them which commit such things. And thinkest thou this, 0 man, that judgest them which do such things and doest the same, that thou shalt escape the judgment of God ? or despisest thou the riches of His goodness, and forbearance, and long-suffering ; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance ? but after thy hardness and impenitent heart treasurest up to thyself wrath against MISERY AND MERCY. 71 the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judg ment of God, who will render to every man according to his deeds." They were " such " as the woman they had condemned, and they dared not stay. And so, with burning cheeks and cowed hearts, from the eldest to the youngest, one by one gradually, silently they slunk away. He would not add to their shame and confusion of face by watching them : He had no wish farther to reveal His knowledge of the impure secrets of their hearts ; He would not tempt them to brazen it out before Him, and to lie against the testimony of their own memories ; He had stooped down once more, and was writing on the ground.1 And when He once more raised His head, all the accusers had melted away : only the woman still cowered before Him on the Temple-floor. She, too, might have gone : none hindered her, and it might have seemed but natural that she should fly anywhere to escape her danger, and to hide her guilt and shame. But remorse, and, it may be, an awful trembling gratitude, in which hope struggled with despair, fixed her there before her Judge. His look, the most terrible of all to meet, because it was the only look that fell on her from a soul robed in the unapproachable majesty of a stainless inno cence, was at the same time the most gentle, and the most forgiving. Her stay was a sign of her penitence ; her penitence, let us trust, a certain pledge of her future forgiveness. "Two things," as St. Augustine finely says, " were here left alone together — Misery and Mercy." 1 l The MS. U (the Cod. Nanianus in St. Mark's at Venice) has here the curious reading iypatyep els tV yijv epbs e/co(TTou aiirap ras a/iaprlas "He wrote on the ground the sins of each one of them ; " which shows how early began the impossible and irrelevant surmises as to what He wrote. This is the only passage where Christ is said to have written anything. 72 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. "Woman," He asked, "where are those thine accusers? did no one convict thee ? " " No man, Lord." It was the only answer which her lips could find power to frame ; and then she received the gracious yet heart- searching permission to depart — " Neither do I convict thee. Go ; henceforth sin no more,"1 Were the critical evidence against the genuineness of this passage far more overwhelming than it is, it would yet bear upon its surface the strongest possible proof of its own authentic truthfulness. It is hardly too much to say that the mixture which it displays of tragedy and of tenderness — the contrast which it in volves between low, cruel cunning, and exalted nobility of intellect and emotion — transcends all power of human imagination to have invented it ; while the picture of a divine insight reading the inmost secrets of the heart, and a yet diviner love, which sees those inmost secrets with larger eyes than ours, furnish us with a conception of Christ's power and person at once too lofty and too original to have been founded on anything but fact. No one could have invented, for few could even appre ciate, the sovereign purity and ineffable charm — the serene authority of condemnation, and of pardon — by which the story is so deeply characterised. The repeated instances in which, without a moment's hesitation, He foiled the crafty designs of His enemies, and in foiling them taught for ever some eternal principle of thought and action, are among the most unique and decisive 1 " Convict '' is perhaps better than " condemn " (which means " convict and sentence") here. Perhaps v yvpij, the less direct address, is better than yipai. After uriKtri I read airb rov pvv with D, omitting Kal. But every variation of reading is uncertain in this paragraph. A NEEDLESS STUMBLING-BLOCK. 73 proofs of His more than human wisdom; and yet not one of those gleams of sacred light which were struck from Him by collision with the malice or hate of man was brighter or more beautiful than this. The very fact that the narrative found so little favour in the early centuries of Church history1 — the fact that whole Churches regarded the narrative as dangerous in its tendency2 — the fact that eminent Fathers of the Church either ignore it, or speak of it in a semi-apologetic tone — in these facts we see the most decisive proof that its real moral and meaning are too transcendent to admit of its having been originally invented, or interpolated without adequate authority into the sacred text. Yet it is strange that any should have failed to see that in the ray of mercy which thus streamed from heaven upon the wretched sinner, the sin assumed an aspect tenfold more heinous, tenfold more repulsive to the conscience ot mankind — to every conscience which accepts it as a law of life that it should strive to be holy as God is holy, and pure as He is pure. However painful this scene must have been to the holy and loving heart of the Saviour, it was at least alleviated by the sense of that compassionate deliverance — deliverance, we may trust, for Eternity, no less than Time — which it had wrought for one guilty soul, But the scenes that followed were a climax of perpetual 1 St. Augustine (De Conjug. Adult, ii. 6) says that some people of weak faith removed the paragraph from their MSS., "quasi permissionem peceandi tribuerit Qui dixit Deinceps noli peccare." — St. Ambrose too says that " non mediocrem scrupulum movere potuit imperitis." (Apol. David, ii. 1.) 2 The Patriarch Nikon (in the tenth century) distinctly says that the passage had been expunged from the Armenian Version because it was thought pernicious for the majority (fi\afrepav i-ots iroXKots). Bishop Wordsworth thinks that the extreme severity of the Eastern Church against adultery facilitated the rejection of the passage by them. 74 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. misunderstandings, fluctuating impressions, and bitter taunts, which caused the great and joyous festival to end with a sudden burst of rage, and an attempt of the Jewish leaders to make an end of Him — not by public accusation, but by furious violence. For, on the same day — the eighth day of the feast if the last narrative has got displaced, the day after the feast if it belongs to the true sequence of events — Jesus continued those interrupted discourses which were intended almost for the last time to set clearly before the Jewish nation His divine claims. He was seated at that moment in the Treasury — either some special building1 in the Temple so called, or that part of the court of the women which contained the thirteen chests with trumpet- shaped openings — called shopheroth — into which the people, and especially the Pharisees, used to cast their gifts. In this court, and therefore close beside Him, were two gigantic candelabra, fifty cubits high and sumptuously gilded,2 on the summit of which, nightly, during the Feast of Tabernacles, lamps were lit which shed their soft light over all the city. Round these lamps the people, in their joyful enthu siasm, and even the stateliest Priests and Pharisees, joined in festal dances, while, to the sound of flutes and other music, the Levites, drawn up in array on the fifteen steps which led up to the court, chanted the beautiful Psalms which early received the title of " Songs of Degrees."3 In allusion to these great lamps, on which some 1 Jos. Antt. xix. 6, § 1. Compare Luke xxi. 1 ; Mark xii. 41. " Pictures of these colossal lamps are given in Surenhusius's Mischna, ii. 260. The wicks of the four lamps which stood on each candelabrum were made of the cast-off clothes of the priests. " Ps. cxx. — cxxxiv. QUESTIONS OF THE JEWS. 75 circumstance of the moment may have concentrated the attention of the hearers, Christ exclaimed to them, " I am the Light of the world." It was His constant plan to shape the illustrations of His discourses by those external incidents which would rouse the deepest atten tion, and fix the words most indelibly on the memories of His hearers. The Pharisees who heard His words charged Him with idle self-glorification ; but He showed them that He had His Father's testimony, and that even were it not so, the Light can only be seen, only be known, by the evidence of its own existence ; without it, neither itself nor anything else is visible.1 They asked Him, "Where is Thy Father?" He told them that, not knowing Him, they could not know His Father ; and then He once more sadly warned them that His departure was nigh, and that then they would be unable to come to Him. Their only reply was a taunting inquiry whether, by committing suicide, He meant to plunge Himself in the darkest regions of the grave ?2 Nay, He made them understand, it was they, not He, who were from below — they, not He, who were destined, if they persisted in unbelief of His eternal existence, to that dark end. " Who art thou ? " they once more asked, in angry and faithless perplexity. " Altogether that which I am telling you,"3 He calmly 1 " Testimonium sibi perhibet lux : . . . sibi ipsa testis est, ut cogno- scatur lux." (Aug.) 2 See Jos. B. Jud. iii. 8, § 5, tovtojp /iep a'lSyis Sexerai Tas ipvxas (Tkot tier epos. 3 John viii. 25, tV apxh" bWi Kal AaAw i/xip. A vast number of render ings have been proposed for this text. Some may be rejected at once — as Liicke's, " To begin with, why do I even speak to you P " and Meyer's, " Do ye ask what I say to you at the first ? " That of De Wette, Stier, Alf ord &c.,is "Essentially that which I speak" — i.e., My being is My revelation — I am the Word. The objection to the rendering in our English version is that it makes AaAi, " J am speaking," equivalent to eAe£a, " I said; " but, on 76 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. answered. They wanted Him to announce Himself as the Messiah, and so become their temporal deliverer; but He will only tell them the far deeper, more eternal truths, that He is the Light, and the Life, and the Living Water, and that He came from the Father — as they, too, should know when they had lifted Him up upon the cross. They were looking solely for the Messiah of the Jews : He would have them know Him as the Redeemer of the world, the Saviour of their souls. As they heard Him speak, many, even of these fierce enemies, were won over to a belief in Him : but it was a wavering belief, a half belief, a false belief, a belief mingled with a thousand worldly and erroneous fancies, not a belief which had in it any saving power, or on which He could rely. And He put it to an imme diate test, which revealed its hollowness, and changed it into mad hatred. He told them that faithfulness and obedience were the marks of true discipleship, and the requisites of true freedom. The word freedom acted as a touchstone to show the spuriousness of their incipient faith. They knew of no freedom but that political free- the other hand, we never elsewhere find Christ using such an expression as "I am that which I speak." The same objection applies to the interpre tation of Augustine and others, "I am, what I am saying to you, The Beginning " (Rev. xxi. 6 ; xxii. 13 ; 1 John ii. 13). Lange seems to me to be right in rendering it "To start with (or, 'in the first place '), that which I represent Myself as being." Mr. Monro suggests to me the view that the question of the Jews, Si ris el, evidently refers to the mysterious ly ei/ti in 44, 47, and a yet fuller answer ia 57, 58 ; yet not so full or clear as in ix. 37. On this view viii. 25 might perhaps mean, " I will tell you first of all what I say.'' ANGER OF THE JEWS. 77 dom which they falsely asserted; they resented the promise of future spiritual freedom in lieu of the achieve ment of present national freedom. So Jesus showed them that they were still the slaves of sin, and in name only, not in reality, the children of Abraham, or the children of God. They were absorbed with pride when they thought of the purity of their ancestral origin, and the privilege of their exclusive monotheism;1 but He told them that in very truth they were, by spiritual affinity, the affinity of cruelty and falsehood,2 children of him who was a liar and a murderer from the beginning — children of the devil.3 That home-rebuke stung them to fury. They repaid it by calling Jesus a Samaritan, and a de moniac.4 Our Lord gently put the taunt aside, and once more held out to them the gracious promise that if they will but keep His sayings, they not only shall not die in their sins, but shall not see death. Their dull, blind hearts could not even imagine a spiritual meaning in His words. They could only charge Him with demo niac arrogance and insolence in making Himself greater than Abraham and the prophets, of whom they could 1 .Alike the Bible and the Talmud abound in proofs of the intense national arrogance with which the Jews regarded their religion and their descent. 2 John viii. 44. Untruthfulness seems to have been in all ages a failing of the Jewish national character. "Listen to all, but believe no one — not even me'' said the Hebrew poet Sapir to Dr. Frank! (Jews in the East, E. Tr., ii. 11). 3 I am aware that some make Jesus call the Jews not " children," but " brethren of the devil," translating rov waTpbs rov $ia@6Aov (ver. 44), of " the father of the devil," and rendering the end of verse 44 " he is a liar, and his father too ; " but I do not understand this demonology. 4 John viii. 48, " Thou art a Samaritan " (what intense national hatred breathes in the words !), "and hast a demon." Similarly the Arabs attribute all madness to evil spirits (Saifiov^s = Medjnoun ente). (Renan Vie de Jesus, 272.) 78 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. only think as dead.1 Jesus told them that in prophetic vision, perhaps too by spiritual intuition, in that other world, Abraham, who was not dead, but living, saw and rejoiced to see His day. Such an assertion appeared to them either senseless or blasphemous. " Abraham has been dead for seventeen centuries ; Thou art not even fifty2 years old ; how are we to understand such words as these ? " Then very gently, but with great solemnity, and with that formula of asseveration which He only used when He announced His most solemn truths, the Saviour revealed to them His eternity, His Divine pre- existence before He had entered the tabernacle of mortal flesh : "Verily, verily I say unto you, Before Abraham came into existence, I am."3 Then, with a burst of impetuous fury — one of those 1 Luke xvi. 22 ; Matt. xxii. 32. 2 In some valueless MSS. this is quite needlessly corrected into "forty." It is strange that modern writers like Gfrorer should have revived the mistaken inference of Irenseus from this verse that Jesus lived fifty years on earth. The belief that He died at the age of thirty- three may be re garded as nearly certain, and it cannot even be safely conjectured from this passage either that the sorrows of His lot had marred His visage, or that the deep seriousness of His expression made TTim appear older than He was. It is obvious that the Jews are speaking generally, and in round numbers : " Thou hast not yet reached even the full years of manhood, and hast Thou seen Abraham ? " 3 John viii. 58, vp\p 'A$pahu yepiaBai, eyw el/ii. There could be no more distinct assertion of His divine nature. I have pointed out elsewhere that those who deny this must either prove that He never spoke those words, or must believe that He — the most lowly and sinless and meek-hearted of men— was guilty of a colossal and almost phrenetic intoxication of vanity and arrogance. For the Jews, more intensely than any other nation which the world has ever known, recognised the infinite transcendence of God, and therefore for a Jew, being merely man, to claim Divinity, would not only be inconsistent with ordinary sense and virtue, but inconsistent with anything but sheer blasphemous insanity. See the Author's Hulsean Lectures, The Witness of History to Christ, p. 85. DEPARTURE OF JESUS. 79 paroxysms of sudden, uncontrollable, frantic rage to which this people has in all ages been liable upon any collision with its religious convictions — they took up stones to stone Him.1 But the very blindness of their rage made it more easy to elude them. His hour was not yet come. With perfect calmness He departed unhurt out of the Temple. 1 The unfinished state of the Temple buildings would supply them with huge stones close at hand. CHAPTER XLI. THE MAN BORN BLIND. " He from thick films shall purge the visual ray, And on the sightless eyeball pour the day." — Pope. Either on His way from the Temple, after this at tempted assault, or on the next ensuing Sabbath,1 Jesus, as He passed by, saw a man blind from his birth, who, perhaps, announced his miserable condition as he sat begging by the roadside, and at the Temple gate.2 All the Jews were trained to regard special suffering as the necessary and immediate consequence of special sin. Perhaps the disciples supposed that the words of our Lord to the paralytic whom He had healed at the Pool of Bethesda, as well as to the paralytic at Capernaum, might seem to sanction such an impression. They asked, therefore, how this man came to be born blind. Could it be in consequence of the sins of his parents ? If not, was there any way of supposing that it could have been for his own ? The supposition in 1 It is impossible to decide between these alternatives. If it was on the same Sabbath, the extreme calmness of our Lord, immediately after circumstances of such intense excitement, would be very noticeable. In either case the narrative implies that the ebullition of homicidal fury against Him was transient. 2 John v. 14. A MISTAKEN QUESTION. 81 the former case seemed hard ; in the latter, impossible.1 They were therefore perplexed. Into the unprofitable regions of such barren specula tion our Lord refused to follow them, and He declined, as always, the tendency to infer and to sit in judgment upon the sins of others. Neither the man's sins, He told them, nor those of his parents, had caused that lifelong affliction ; but now, by means of it,2 the works of God should be made manifest. He, the Light of the world, must for a short time longer dispel its darkness. Then He spat on the ground, made clay with the spittle, and smearing it on the blind man's eyes, bade him " go wash in the Pool of Siloam."3 The blind man went, washed, and was healed. 1 Exod. xx. 5. We can hardly imagine that those simple-minded Gali- lseans were familiar with the doctrine of metempsychosis (Jos. Antt. xviii. 1, § 3 ; B. J. ii. 8, § 14) ; or the Rabbinic dogma of ante-natal sin ; or the Platonic and Alexandrian fancy of pre-existence ; or the modern conception of proleptic punishment for sins anticipated by foreknowledge. 2 The Greek idiom does not here imply, as its literal English equivalent appears to do, that the man had been born blind solely in order that God's glory might be manifested in his healing. The ?"« expresses a conse quence, not a purpose — it has, technically speaking, a metabatic, not a telic force. This was pointed out long ago by Chrysostom and Theophylact, and Glassius in his valuable Philolog. Sacr., pp. 529, 530, gives many similar instances — e.g., Rom. iii. 4 ; v. 20 ; and comp. John xi. 4 ; xii. 40. It would, however, carry me too far if I attempted to enter into the subject further here. 3 " Which," adds St. John — or possibly a very ancient gloss — " means Sent." It is found in all MSS., but not in the Persian and Syriac versions. The remark is rather allusive than etymological, and connects the name of the fountain with the name of the Messiah ; but the possible grammatical accuracy of the reference seems now to be admitted. (See Neander, Life of Christ, p. 199 ; Ebrard, Gosp. Hist., p. 317 ; Hitzig, Isaiah, 97.) Justin Martyr (Dial. c. Tryph. 63, p. 81) refers to the Messiah as m-Jo-toAos, perhaps with a view to Isa. viii. 6. The fact that " the waters of Siloah that flow softly " were supposed, like those of other intermittent springs near Jerusalem, to have a healing power, would help the man's faith. Even Mohammedans say that " Zemzem and Siloah are the two fountains of Paradise." 9 82 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. The saliva of one who had not recently broken his fast was believed among the ancients to have a healing efficacy in cases of weak eyes, and clay was occasionally used to repress tumours on the eyelids.1 But that these instruments in no way detracted from the splendour of the miracle is obvious ; and we have no means of deciding in this, any more than in the parallel instances, why our Lord, who sometimes healed by a word, preferred at other times to adopt slow and more elaborate methods of giving effect to His supernatural power. In this matter He never revealed the principles of action which doubtless arose from His inner knowledge of the circumstances, and from His insight into the hearts of those on whom His cures were wrought. Possibly He had acted with the express view of teaching more than one eternal lesson by the incidents which followed. At any rate, in this instance, His mode of action led to serious results. For the man had been well known in Jerusalem as one who had been a blind beggar all his life, and his appearance with the use of his eyesight caused a tumult of excitement. Scarcely could those who had known him best believe even his own testimony, that he was indeed the blind beggar with whom they had been so familiar. They were lost in amazement, and made him repeat again and again the story of his cure. But that story infused into their astonishment a fresh element of Pharisaic indignation; for this cure also had been wrought on a Sabbath day. The Rabbis had 1 See Suet. Vesp. 7 ; Tac. Hist. iv. 8; Plin. H. N. xxviii. 7; and other classical passages quoted by Wetstein and subsequent commentators. Such indications as that of St. John are, under these circumstances, an invaluable mark of truth; for what mythopceic imagination, intent only on glori fying its object, would invent particulars which might be regarded as depreciatory ? THE SABBATH OF RABBINISM. 83 forbidden any man to smear even one of his eyes with spittle on the Sabbath, except in cases of mortal danger. Jesus had not only smeared both the man's eyes, but had actually mingled the saliva with clay ! This, as an act of mercy, was in the deepest and most inward accord ance with the very causes for which the Sabbath had been ordained, and the very lessons of which it was meant to be a perpetual witness. But the spirit of narrow literalism and slavish minuteness and quantita tive obedience — the spirit that hoped to be saved by the algebraical sum of good and bad actions — had long degraded the Sabbath from the true idea of its insti* tution into a pernicious superstition. The Sabbath of Rabbinism, with all its petty servility, was in no respect the Sabbath of God's loving and holy law. It had degenerated into that which St. Paul calls it, a ttto^kov aToixeiov, or " beggarly element."1 And these Jews were so imbued with this utter little ness, that a unique miracle of mercy awoke in them less of astonishment and gratitude than the horror kindled by a neglect of their Sabbatical superstition. Accord ingly, in all the zeal of letter- worshipping religionism, they led off the man to the Pharisees in council. Then followed thj3 scene which St. John has recorded in a manner so inimitably graphic in his ninth chapter. First came the repeated inquiry, "how the thing had been done?" followed by the repeated assertion of some of them that Jesus could not be from God, because He had not observed the Sabbath ; and the reply of others that to press the Sabbath-breaking was to admit the miracle, and to admit the miracle was to establish the fact that He who performed it could not be the criminal 1 Gal. iv. 9. 84 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. whom the others described. Then, being completely at a standstill, they asked the blind man his opinion of his deliverer; and he — not being involved in their vicious circle of reasoning — replied with fearless promptitude, "He is a Prophet."1 By this time they saw the kind of nature with which they had to deal, and anxious for any loophole by which they could deny or set aside the miracle, they sent for the man's parents. "Was this their son? If they asserted that he had been born blind, how was it that he now saw ? " Perhaps they hoped to browbeat or to bribe these parents into a denial of their relationship, or an admission of imposture ; but the parents also clung to the plain truth, while, with a certain Judaic servility and cunning, they refused to draw any inferences which would lay them open to unpleasant consequences. " This is certainly our son, and he was certainly born blind ; as to the rest, we know nothing. Ask him. He is quite capable of answering for himself." Then — one almost pities their sheer perplexity — they turned to the blind man again. He, as well as his parents, knew that the Jewish authorities had agreed to pronounce the cherem, or ban of exclusion from the synagogue, on any one who should venture, to acknow ledge Jesus as the Messiah ; and the Pharisees pro bably hoped that he would be content to follow then- advice, to give glory to God,2 i.e., deny or ignore the 1 And the Jews themselves went so far as to say that " if a prophet of undoubted credentials should command all persons to light fires on the Sabbath day, arm themselves for war, kill the inhabitants, &c, it would behove all to rise up without delay and execute all that he should direct without scruple or hesitation." (Maimonides, Porta Mosis, p. 29 [Pocock] ; Allen's Mod. Judaism, p. 26.) 2 "As if they would bind him to the strictest truthfulness" (Lange, iii. THE BLIND MAN EXAMINED. 85 miracle, and to accept their dictum that Jesus was a sinner. But the. man was made of sturdier stuff than his parents. He was not to be overawed by their authority, or knocked down by their assertions. He breathed quite freely in the halo-atmosphere of their superior sanctity. "We know," the Pharisees had said, "that this man is a sinner." "Whether He is a sinner," the man replied, "/do not know ; one thing I do know, that, being blind, now I see." Then they began again their weary and futile cross-examination. " What did He do to thee ? how did He open thine eyes ? " But the man had had enough of this. " I told you once, and ye did not attend. Why do ye wish to hear again? Is it possible that ye too wish to be His disciples ? " Bold irony this — to ask these stately, ruffled, scrupulous Sanhedrists, whether he was really to regard them as anxious and sincere inquirers about the claims of the Nazarene Prophet ! Clearly here was a man whose presumptuous honesty would neither be bullied into suppression nor corrupted into a lie. He was quite im practicable. So, since authority, threats, blandishments had all failed, they broke into abuse. " Thou art His disciple : we are the disciples of Moses ; of this man we know nothing." " Strange," he replied, " that you should know nothing of a man who yet has wrought a miracle such as not even Moses ever wrought ; and we know that neither He nor any one else could have done 335). "The words are an adjuration to tell the truth (comp. Josh, vii 19)," says Dean Alf ord ; but he seems to confuse it with a phrase like Al-hamdu lilldh, " to God be the praise " (of your cure), which is a different thing, and would require rr\v H\ap. A friend refers me to 2 Cor. xi. 31 for a similar adjuration ; cf. Rom. ix. 1, 5. 86 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. it, unless He were from God."1 What ! shades of Hillel and of Shammai ! was a mere blind beggar, a natural ignorant heretic, altogether born in sins, to be teaching them ! Unable to control any longer their transport of indignation, they flung him out of the hall, and out of the synagogue. But Jesus did not neglect His first confessor. He, too, in all probability had, either at this or some pre vious time, been placed under the ban of lesser excom munication, or exclusion from the synagogue ; a for we scarcely ever again read of His re-entering any oi those synagogues which, during the earlier years of His ministry, had been His favourite places of teaching and resort. He sought out and found the man, and asked him, " Dost thou believe on the Son of God ? " " Why,3 who is He, Lord," answered the man, "that I should believe on Him ? " " Thou hast both seen Him, and it is He who talketh with thee."4 1 There is no healing of the blind in the Old Testament, or in the Acts. ' It is true that this mildest form of excommunication (neziphah) was only temporary, for thirty days ; and that it applied to only one synagogue. But if it were once pronounced, the time could easily be extended, so as to make it a niddoui (^13) for ninety days, and the decree be adopted by other synagogues (Gfrorer, Jahrh. d. Heils, i. 183). Exclusion from the syna gogue did not, however, involve exclusion from the Temple, where a separate door was provided for the excommunicate. The last stage of excommuni cation was the cherem or shammatta, which was as bad as the Roman inter- dictio ignis et aquae. The Jews declare that Joshua Ben Perachiah had been the teacher of Jesus, and excommunicated Him to the blast of 400 rams'-horns. (Wagenseil, Sota, p. 1057.) But this Joshua Ben Perachiah lived in the reign of Alexander Jannseus, who died B.C. 79 ! 3 xal ti'j eVn (John ix. 36). The Kal as often indicates a question full of surprise and emotion. See Jelf 's Greek Syntax, § 759. Cf . Mark x. 26 («o( tis SiWtch audrivai; "Who then can be saved?"); Luke x. 29; 2 Cor. ii. 2.) * Professor Westcott points out the striking fact that this spontaneous TRUE AND FALSE SHEPHERDS. 87 " Lord, I believe," he answered ; and he did Him reverence. It must have been shortly after this time that our Lord pointed the contrast between the different effects of His teaching — they who saw not, made to see ; and those who saw, made blind. The Pharisees, ever restlessly and discontentedly hovering about Him, and in their morbid egotism always on the look-out for some reflection on themselves, asked " if they too were blind." The answer of Jesus was, that in natural blindness there would have been no guilt, but to those who only stumbled in the blindness of wilful error a claim to the possession of sight was a self-condemnation. And when the leaders, the teachers, the guides were blind, how could the people see ? The thought naturally led Him to the nature of true and false teachers, which He expanded and illustrated in the beautiful apologue — half parable, half allegory — of the True and the False Shepherds. He told them that He was the Good Shepherd,1 who laid down His life for the sheep ; while the hireling shepherds, flying from danger, betrayed their flocks. He, too, was that door of the sheepfold, by which all His true predecessors alone had entered, while all the false — from the first thief who had climbed into God's fold — had broken in some other way. And then He told them that of His own revelation to the outcast from the synagogue finds its only parallel in the similar revelation (John iv. 26) to the outcast from the nation " (Charac teristics of the Gosp. Miracles, p. 61). 1 Speaking of this allegory, Mr. Sanday points out the circumstance , that the only other allegory in the Gospels is in John xv. " The Synoptists have no allegories as distinct from parables; the fourth Evangelist no parables as a special form of allegory " (Fourth Gospel, p. 167). As the phrase is o iroipJ^p 6 /coAis, not ayaBbs, perhaps it had better be rendered " true shepherd," rather than "good." But m\bs is untranslatable. 88 THE LLFE OF CHRIST. free will He would lay down His life for the sheep, both of this and of His other flocks, 1 and that of His own power He would take it again. But all these divine mysteries were more than they could understand ; and while some declared that they were the nonsense of one who had a devil and was mad, others could only plead that they were not like the words of one who had a devil, and that a devil could not have opened the eyes of the blind. Thus, with but little fruit for them, save the bitter fruit of anger and hatred, ended the visit of Jesus to the Feast of Tabernacles. And since His very life was now in danger, He withdrew once more from Jerusalem to Galilee, for one brief visit before He bade to His old home His last farewell. ' In John x. 16, there is an unfortunate obliteration of the distinction between the aii\)i, " fold," and rroiji-pn, " flock," of the original. CHAPTER XLII. FAREWELL TO GALILEE. " I see that all things come to an end : but thy commandment is exceed ing broad." — Ps. cxix. 96. Immediately after the events just recorded, St. John narrates another incident which took place two months subsequently, at the winter Feast of Dedication.1 In accordance with the main purpose of his Gospel, which was to narrate that work of the Christ in Judsea, and especially in Jerusalem, which the Synoptists had omitted, he says nothing of an intermediate and final visit to Galilee, or of those last journeys to Jerusalem respecting parts of which the other Evangelists supply us with so many details. And yet that Jesus must have returned to Galilee is clear, not only from the other Evangelists, but also from the nature of the case and from certain incidental facts in the narrative of St. John himself.2 1 John x. 22 — 42. The Feast of Tabernacles was at the end of Sep tember or early in October. The Dedication was on December 20. 2 See John x. 25 (which evidently refers to His last discourse to them two months before) and 40 ("again "). Besides, the expression of John x. 22, " And it was the Dedication at Jerusalem," would have little meaning if a new visit were not implied ; and those words are perhaps added for the very reason that the Dedication might be kept anywhere else. 90 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. It is well known that the whole of one great section in St. Luke— from ix. 51 to xviii. 15— forms an episode in the Gospel narrative of which many incidents are narrated by this Evangelist alone, and in which the few identifications of time and place all point to one slow and solemn progress from Galilee to Jerusalem (ix. 51 ; xiii. 22; xvii. 11 ; x. 38). Now after the Feast of Dedi cation our Lord retired into Peraea, until He was sum moned thence by the death of Lazarus (John x. 40 — 42 ; xi. 1 — 46) ; after the resurrection of Lazarus, He fled to Ephraim (xi. 54) ; and He did not leave His retirement at Ephraim until He went to Bethany, six days before His final Passover (xii. 1). This great journey, therefore, from Galilee to Jeru salem, so rich in occasions which called forth some of His most memorable utterances, must have been either a journey to the Feast of Tabernacles or to the Feast of Dedication. That it could not have been the former may be regarded as settled, not only on other grounds, but decisively because that was a rapid and a secret journey, this an eminently public and leisurely one. Almost every inquirer seems to differ to a greater or less degree as to the exact sequence and chronology of the events which follow. Without entering into minute and tedious disquisitions where absolute certainty is impossible, I will narrate this period of our Lord's life in the order which, after repeated study of the Gospels, appears to me to be the most probable, and in the separate details of which I have found myself again and again confirmed by the conclusions of other inde pendent inquirers. And here I will only premise my conviction — 1 That the episode of St. Luke up to xviii. 30, INCIDENTS OF THE JOURNEY. 91 mainly refers to a single journey, although unity of sub ject, or other causes, may have led the sacred writer to weave into his narrative some events or utterances which belong to an earlier or later epoch.1 2. That the order of the facts narrated even by St. Luke alone is not,2 and does not in any way claim to be,3 strictly chronological ; so that the place of any event in the narrative by no means necessarily indicates its true position in the order of time. 3. That this journey is identical with that which is partially recorded in Matt, xviii. 1 — xx. 16; Mark x. 1—31. 4. That (as seems obvious from internal evidence*) the events narrated in Matt. xx. 17 — 28; Mark x. 32 — 45; Luke xviii. 31 — 34, belong not to this journey, but to the last which Jesus ever took — the journey from Ephraim to Bethany and Jerusalem. Assuming these conclusions to be justified — and I 1 E.g., ix. 57—62 (cf. Matt. viii. 19—22); xi. 1—13 (cf. Matt. vi. 9—15 ; vii. 7—12); xi. 14—26 (cf. Matt.ix. 32—35); xi. 29— xii. 59 (compared with parts of the Sermon on the Mount, &c). Of course the dull and recklessly adopted hypothesis of a constant repetition of incidents may here come in to support the preconceived notions of some harmonists ; but it is an hypo thesis mainly founded on a false and unscriptural view of inspiration, and one which must not be adopted without the strongest justification. The occasional repetition of discourses is a much more natural supposition, and one inherently probable from the circumstances of the case. 2 E.g., x. 38—42; xiii. 31—35; xvii. 11—19. 3 The notes of time and place throughout are of the vaguest possible character, evidently because the form of the narrative is here determined by other considerations (see x. 1, 25, 38 ; xi. 1, 14 ; xii. 1, 22 ; xiii. 6, 22 ; xiv. 1; xvii. 12, &c.). There seems to be no ground whatever for sup posing that St. Luke meant to claim absolute chronological accuracy by the expression, irap-nKoXov6-riK6ri dxpi^Ss, in i. 3; and indeed it seems clear from a study of his Gospel that, though he followed the historical sequence as far as he was able to do so, he often groups events and discourses by spiritual and subjective considerations. 4 See, among other passages, Mark x. 17 ; Matt. xix. 16. 92 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. believe that they will commend themselves as at least probable to any who really study the data of the pro blem — we naturally look to see if there are any incidents . which can only be referred to this last residence of Jesus in Galilee after the Feast of Tabernacles. The sojourn must have been a very brief one, and seems to have had no other object than that of preparing for the Mission of the Seventy, and inaugurating the final proclamation of Christ's kingdom throughout all that part of the Holy Land which had as yet been least familiar with His word and works. His instructions to the Seventy involved His last farewell to Galilee, and the delivery of those instructions synchronised, in all probability, with His actual departure. But there are two other incidents recorded in the 13th chapter, which probably belong to the same brief sojourn — namely, the news of a Galilsean massacre, and the warning which He received of Herod's designs against His life. The home of Jesus during these few last days would naturally be at Capernaum, His own city ; and while He was there organising a solemn departure to which there would be no return, there were some who came and announced to Him a recent instance of those numerous disturbances which marked the Procuratorship of Pontius Pilate. Of the particular event to which they alluded nothing further is known ; and that a few turbulent zealots should have been cut down at Jerusalem by the Boman garrison was too common-place an event in these troublous times to excite more than a transient notice. There were probably hundreds of such outbreaks of which Josephus has preserved no record. The inflammable fanaticism of the Jews at this epoch — the restless hopes which were constantly kindling them THE SLAIN GALILEANS. 93 to fury against the Roman Governor,1 and which made them the ready dupes of every false Messiah — had necessitated the construction of the Tower of Antonia, which flung its threatening shadow over the Temple itself. This Tower communicated with the Temple by a flight of steps, so that the Roman legionaries could rush down at once, and suppress any of the dis turbances which then, as now, endangered the security of Jerusalem at the recurrence of every religious feast.2 And of all the Jews, the Galilseans, being the most passionately turbulent and excitable, were the most likely to suffer in such collisions. Indeed, the main fact which seems in this instance to have struck the narrators, was not so much the actual massacre as the horrible incident that the blood of these murdered rioters had been actually mingled with the red streams that flowed from the victims they had been offering in sacrifice.3 And those who brought the news to Christ did so, less with any desire to complain of the sanguinary boldness of the Roman Governor, than with a curiosity 1 Acts xxi. 34. Three thousand Jews had been massacred by Arche- laus in one single Paschal disturbance thirty years before this time ; and on one occasion Pilate had actually disguised his soldiers as peasants, and sent them to use their daggers freely among the mob. (See Jos. Antt. xvii. 9, §3; 10, §2; xviii. 3, §1; B. J. ii. 9, §4.) 2 The Turkish Government have, with considerable astuteness, fixed the annual pilgrimage of Mohammedans to the Tomb of the Prophet Moses (!) at the very time when the return of Easter inundates Jerusalem with Christian pilgrims. I met hundreds of these servants of the Prophet in the environs of the Sacred City during the Easter of 1870, and they would be a powerful assistance to the Turks in case of any Christian outbreak in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. 3 The same fact recurs more than once in the details of the siege of Jerusalem. It is clear, however, that some links are missing to our com prehension of this story; for one would have expected that Galikeans butchered in the Temple by a Roman Governor would have been looked upon as martyrs rather than as criminals. 94 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. about the supposed crimes which must have brought upon these slaughtered worshippers so hideous and tragical a fate. The Book of Job stood in Hebrew literature as an eternal witness against these sweeping deductions of a confident uncharity ; but the spirit of Eliphaz, and Zophar, and Bildad still survived,1 and our Lord on every occasion -seized the opportunity of checking and reproving it. " Do ye imagine," He said, " that these Galilseans were sinners above all the Galilseans, because they suffered such things ? I tell you, Nay : but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish." And then He reminded them of another recent instance of sudden death, in which " the Tower in Siloam" had fallen, and crushed eighteen people who happened to be under it ;a and He told them that so far from these poor sufferers having been specially criminal, they should all, if they did not repent, be involved in a similar destruction. No doubt, the main lesson which Christ desired to teach, was that every circumstance of life, and every violence of man, was not the result either of idle accident or direct retribution, but formed part of one great scheme of Pro vidence in wThich man is permitted to recognise the one prevailing law — viz., that the so-called accidents of life happen alike to all, but that all should in due time receive according to their works.3 But His words had also a more literal fulfilment ; and, doubtless, there may have been some among His hearers who lived to call them to mind when the Jewish race was being miserably decimated by 1 Job iv. 7 ; viii. 20 ; xxii. 5. * Ewald supposes that these men had been engaged in constructing the aqueduct which the Jews regarded as impious, because Pilate had sequestrated the corban money for this secular purpose (Jos. B. J. ii. 9, §4). * See Amos iii. 6 ; ix. 1. WARNING ABOUT HEROD. 95 the sword of Titus, and the last defenders of Jerusalem, after deluging its streets with blood, fell crushed among the flaming ruins of the Temple, which not even their lives could save. The words were very stern : but Christ did not speak to them in the language of warning only; He held out to them a gracious hope. Once, and again, and yet again ; the fig-tree might be found a barren cumberer of the ground,1 but there was One to intercede for it still ; and even yet — though now the axe was uplifted, nay, though it was at its backmost poise — even yet, if at the last the tree, so carefully tended, should bring forth fruit, that axe should be stayed, and its threatened stroke should not rush through the parted air. Short as His stay at His old home was meant to be, His enemies would gladly have shortened, it still further. They were afraid of, they were weary of, the Lord of Life. Yet they did not dare openly to confess their sentiments. The Pharisees came to Him in sham solicitude for His safety, and said, " Get thee out, and depart hence ; for Herod is wanting to kill thee."2 Had Jesus yielded to fear — had He hastened His departure in consequence of a danger, which even if it had any existence, except in their own imaginations, had at any rate no immediate urgency — doubtless, they would have enjoyed a secret triumph at His expense. But His answer was supremely calm : " Go," He said, " and tell this fox,3 Behold, I am casting out devils, and working 1 Luke xiii. 7, Ivan-i Kal tV yijp Karapyei ; "Why does it even render the ground barren P " There seems to be a natural reference to the three years of our Lord's own ministry. 2 The assertion was probably quite untrue. It is inconsistent with Luke xxiii. 8. 3 Luke xiii. 32, rij aKdmtKi ravrv, as though Herod were with them in 96 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. cures to-day and to-morrow, and on the third my work is done."1 And then He adds, with the perfect confidence of security mingled with the bitter irony of sorrow, " But I must go 2 on my course to-day, and to-morrow, and the day following ; for it cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem." And, perhaps, at this sorrow ful crisis His oppressed feelings may have found vent in some pathetic cry over the fallen sinful city, so red with the blood of her murdered messengers, like that which He also uttered when He wept over it on the summit of Olivet.3 The little plot of these Pharisees had entirely failed. Whether Herod had really entertained any vague inten tion of seeing Jesus and putting Him to death as he person, as he was like them in cunning. " Non quod haec verba de Herode non dixerit, sed quod in persona Herodis, quam illi sibi induebant . . . eos notaverit atque refellerit" (Maldon). 1 Vulg. " consummor ; " or, perhaps, " I shall reach my goal : " such seems to be at least an admissible rendering of the difficult word reAeioO/iai (cf. Phil. iii. 12 ; Acts xx. 24). I have given it the sense which it has in John xix. 28. The word was afterwards used of a martyr's death, as in the inscription o 'dyios QH^as x6yxy ¦ ¦ re\eiovrai (Routh, JRel. Sacr. i. 376, op. Wordsworth, ad loc.) ; and even of natural death (Euseb. Vit. Const. 47). Cf. "Sie Tiberius finivit" (Tac. Ann. vi. 50). (Schleusner.) * TTopeiieadai used in a different sense from their previous vopeiov. The irA^c seems to mean, " Tet, though my remaining time is short, I shall not further shorten it, for," &c. Of course the " to-day," &c, means a time indefinite, yet brief. 3 Marvellously has that woe been fulfilled. Every Jewish pilgrim who enters Jerusalem to this day has a rent made in his dress, and says, " Zion is turned into a desert, it lies in ruins ! " (Dr. Frankl, Jews in the East, E. Tr. ii. 2.) Sapir, the Jewish poet of Wilna, addressed Dr. Frankl thus — "Here all is dust. After the destruction of the city, the whole earth blossoms from its ruins ; but here there is no verdure, no blossom, only a bitter fruit — sorrow. Look for no joy here, either from men or from mountains " (id. p. 9). A wealthy and pious Jew came to settle at Jeru salem : after two years' stay he left it with the words, " Let him that wishes to have neither aulom haze ('the pleasures of this life') nor aulom hdho ('those of the life to come') live at Jerusalem" (id. p. 120). — The trans lation is Dr. Frankl's, not mine. "THIS FOX." 97 had put to death His kinsman John, or whether the whole rumour was a pure invention, Jesus regarded it with consummate indifference. Whatever Herod might be designing, His own intention was to finish His brief stay in Galilee in His own due time, and not before. A day or two yet remained to Him in which He would con tinue to perform His works of mercy on all who sought Him ; after that brief interval the time would have come when He should be received up,1 and He would turn His back for the last time on the home of His youth, and " set His face steadfastly to go to Jerusalem." Till then — so they must tell their crafty patron, whom they themselves resembled — He was under an inviolable pro tection, into which neither their malice nor his cruelty could intrude. And He deservedly bestowed on Herod Antipas the sole word of pure, unmitigated contempt which is ever recorded to have passed His lips. Words of burning anger He sometimes spoke — words of scathing indig nation — words of searching irony — words of playful humour ; but some are startled to find Him using words of sheer contempt. Yet why not ? there can be no noble soul which is wholly destitute of scorn. The " scorn of scorn" must exist side by side with the " love of love." Like anger, like the power of moral indignation, scorn 1 Luke ix. 51, ep t$ avfnr\npov