xxiv. 19): but the people also were, even during his life, so well

satisfied with this aspect of his character that many believed on him in consequence (John ii. 23; comp. vi. 2), contrasted him with the Baptist who gave no sign (John x. 41), and even believed that he would not be surpassed in this respect by the future Messiah (John vii. 31). The above demands of a sign do not appear to prove that Jesus had performed no miracles, especially as several of them occur immediately after important miracles, e.g. after the cure of a demoniac, Matt. xii. 38; and after the feeding of the five thousand, John vi. 30. This position indeed creates a difficulty, for how the Jews could deny to these two acts the character of proper signs it is not easy to understand; the power of expelling demons, in particular, being rated very highly (Luke x. 17). The sign demanded on these two occasions must therefore be more precisely defined according to Luke xi. 16 (comp. Matt xvi. 1; Mark viii. 11), as a sign from heaven, σημεῖον ἐξ οὐρανοῦ, and we must understand it to be the specifically messianic sign of the Son of Man in heaven, σημεῖον τοῦ υἱοῦ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ἐν τῷ οὐρανῷ (Matt. xxiv. 30). If however it be preferred to sever the connexion between these demands of a sign and the foregoing miracles, it is possible that Jesus may have wrought numerous miracles, and yet that some hostile Pharisees, who had not happened to be eyewitnesses of any of them, may still have desired to see one for themselves.

That Jesus censures the seeking for miracles (John iv. 48) and refuses to comply with any one of the demands for a sign, does not in itself prove that he might not have voluntarily worked miracles in other cases, when they appeared to him to be more seasonable. When in relation to the demand of the Pharisees, Mark viii. 12, he declares that there shall be no sign given to this generation τῇ γενεᾷ ταύτῇ, or Matt xii. 39 f., xvi. 4; Luke xi. 29 f., that there shall no sign be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet, it would appear that by this generation, γενεὰ, which in Matthew and Luke he characterizes as evil and adulterous, he could only mean the Pharisaic part of his cotemporaries who were hostile to him, and that he intended to declare, that to these should be granted either no sign at all, or merely the sign of Jonas, that is, as he interprets it in Matthew, the miracle of his resurrection, or as modern expositors think, the impressive manifestation of his person and teaching. But if we take the words οὐ δοθήσεται αὐτῇ in the sense that his enemies were to obtain no sign from him, we encounter two difficulties: on the one hand, things must have chanced singularly if among the many miracles wrought by Jesus in the greatest publicity, not one fell under the observation of Pharisees (moreover Matt. xii. 24 f. parall. contradicts this, for there Pharisees are plainly supposed to be present at the cure of the blind and dumb demoniac): on the other hand, if signs personally witnessed are here intended, the enemies of Jesus certainly did not see his resurrection, or his person after he was risen. Hence the above declaration cannot well mean merely that his enemies should be excluded from an actual sight of his miracles. There is yet another expedient, namely, to suppose that the expression οὐ δοθήσεται αὐτῇ refers to a sign which should conduce to the good of the subject of which it is predicated: but all the miracles of Jesus happened equally with his original mission and his resurrection at once for the benefit of that subject and the contrary, namely, in their object for its benefit, in their result not so. Nothing therefore remains but to understand the γενεὰ of the cotemporaries of Jesus generally, and the δίδοσθαι to refer to observation generally, mediate or immediate: so that thus Jesus would appear to have here repudiated the working of miracles in general.

This is not very consistent with the numerous narratives of miracles in the gospels, but it accords fully with the fact that in the preaching and epistles of the apostles, a couple of general notices excepted (Acts ii. 22, x. 38 f.), the miracles of Jesus appear to be unknown, and everything is built on his resurrection: on which the remark may be ventured that it could neither have been so unexpected nor could it have formed so definite an epoch, if Jesus had previously raised more than one dead person, and had wrought the most transcendent miracles of all kinds. This then is the question: Ought we, on account of the evangelical narratives of miracles, to explain away that expression of Jesus, or doubt its authenticity; or ought we not, rather, on the strength of that declaration, and the silence of the apostolic writings, to become distrustful of the numerous histories of miracles in the gospels?

This can only be decided by a close examination of these narratives, among which, for a reason that will be obvious hereafter, we give the precedence to the expulsions of demons.

§ 92.

THE DEMONIACS, CONSIDERED GENERALLY.

While in the fourth gospel, the expressions δαιμόνιον ἔχειν to have a demon, and δαιμονιζόμενος, being a demoniac, appear nowhere except in the accusations of the Jews against Jesus, and as parallels to μαίνεσθαι, to be mad (viii. 48 f., x. 20 f.; comp. Mark iii. 22, 30; Matt. xi. 18), the synoptists may be said to represent demoniacs as the most frequent objects of the curative powers of Jesus. When they describe the commencement of his ministry in Galilee, they give the demoniacs δαιμονιζομένους [1167] a prominent place among the sufferers whom Jesus healed (Matt iv. 24; Mark i. 34), and in all their summary notices of the ministry of Jesus in certain districts, demoniacs play a chief part (Matt. viii. 16 f.; Mark i. 39, iii. 11 f.; Luke vi. 18). The power to cast out devils is before anything else imparted by Jesus to his disciples (Matt. x. 1, 8; Mark iii. 15, vi. 7; Luke ix. 1), who to their great joy succeed in using it according to their wishes (Luke x. 17, 20; Mark vi. 13).

Besides these summary notices, however, several cures of demoniacs are narrated to us in detail, so that we can form a tolerably accurate idea of their peculiar condition. In the one whose cure in the synagogue at Capernaum is given by the Evangelists as the first of this kind (Mark i. 23 ff.; Luke iv. 33 ff.), we find, on the one hand, a disturbance of the self-consciousness, causing the possessed individuals to speak in the person of the demon, which appears also in other demoniacs, as for example, the Gadarenes (Matt. viii. 29 f. parall.); on the other hand, spasms and convulsions with savage cries. This spasmodic state has, in the demoniac who is also called a lunatic (Matt. xvii. 14 ff. parall.), reached the stage of manifest epilepsy; for sudden falls, often in dangerous places, cries, gnashing of the teeth, and foaming, are known symptoms of that malady. [1168] The other aspect of the demoniacal state, namely, the disturbance of the self-consciousness, amounts in the demoniac of Gadara, by whose lips a demon, or rather a plurality of these evil spirits, speaks as a subject, to misanthropic madness, with attacks of maniacal fury against himself and others. [1169] Moreover, not only the insane and epileptic, but the dumb (Matt. ix. 32; Luke xi. 14; Matt. xii. 22, the dumb demoniac is also blind) and those suffering from a gouty contraction of the body (Luke xiii. 11 ff.), are by the evangelists designated more or less precisely as demoniacs.

The idea of these sufferers presupposed in the gospels and shared by their authors, is that a wicked, unclean spirit (δαιμόνιον, πνεῦμα ἀκάθαρτον), or several have taken possession of them (hence their condition is described by the expressions δαιμόνιον ἔχειν, δαιμονίζεσθαι, to have a demon, to be a demoniac), speak through their organs (thus Matt. viii. 31, οἱ δαίμονες παρεκάλουν αὐτὸν λέγοντες), and put their limbs in motion at pleasure (thus Mark ix. 20, τὸ πνεῦμα ἐσπάραξεν αὐτὸν), until, forcibly expelled by a cure, they depart from the patient (ἐκβάλλειν, ἐξέρχεσθαι). According to the representation of the Evangelists, Jesus also held this view of the matter. It is true that when, as a means of liberating the possessed, he addresses the demons within them (as in Mark ix. 25; Matt. viii. 32; Luke iv. 35), we might with Paulus [1170] regard this as a mode of entering into the fixed idea of these more or less insane persons, it being the part of a physical physician, if he would produce any effect, to accommodate himself to this idea, however strongly he may in reality be convinced of its groundlessness. But this is not all; Jesus, even in his private conversations with his disciples, not only says nothing calculated to undermine the notion of demoniacal possession, but rather speaks repeatedly on a supposition of its truth; as e.g. in Matt. x. 8, where he gives the commission, Cast out devils; in Luke x. 18 ff.; and especially in Matt. xvii. 21, parall., where he says, This kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting. Again, in a purely theoretical discourse, perhaps also in the more intimate circle of his disciples, Jesus gives a description quite accordant with the idea of his cotemporaries of the departure of the unclean spirit, his wandering in the wilderness, and his return with a reinforcement (Matt. xii. 43 ff.). With these facts before us, the attempt made by generally unprejudiced inquirers, such as Winer, [1171] to show that Jesus did not share the popular opinion on demoniacal possession, but merely accommodated his language to their understanding, appears to us a mere adjustment of his ideas by our own. A closer examination of the last-mentioned passage will suffice to remove every thought of a mere accommodation on the part of Jesus. It is true that commentators have sought to evade all that is conclusive in this passage, by interpreting it figuratively, or even as a parable, [1172] in every explanation of which (if we set aside such as that given by Olshausen [1173] after Calmet), the essential idea is, that superficial conversion to the cause of Jesus is followed by a relapse into aggravated sin. [1174] But, I would fain know, what justifies us in abandoning the literal interpretation of this discourse? In the propositions themselves there is no indication of a figurative meaning, nor is it rendered probable by the general style of teaching used by Jesus, for he nowhere else presents moral relations in the garb of demoniacal conditions; on the contrary, whenever he speaks, as here, of the departure of evil spirits, e.g. in Matt. xvii. 21, he evidently intends to be understood literally. But does the context favour a figurative interpretation? Luke (xi. 24 ff.) places the discourse in question after the defence of Jesus against the Pharisaic accusation, that he cast out devils by Beelzebub: a position which is undoubtedly erroneous, as we have seen, but which is a proof that he at least understood Jesus to speak literally—of real demons. Matthew also places the discourse near to the above accusation and defence, but he inserts between them the demand of a sign, together with its refusal, and he makes Jesus conclude with the application, Even so shall it be also unto this wicked generation. This addition, it is true, gives the discourse a figurative application to the moral and religious condition of his cotemporaries, but only thus: Jesus intended the foregoing description of the expelled and returning demon literally, though he made a secondary use of this event as an image of the moral condition of his cotemporaries. At any rate Luke, who has not the same addition, gives the discourse of Jesus, to use the expression of Paulus, as a warning against demoniacal relapses. That the majority of theologians in the present day, without decided support on the part of Matthew, and in decided contradiction to Luke, advocate the merely figurative interpretation of this passage, appears to be founded in an aversion to ascribe to Jesus so strongly developed a demonology, as lies in his words literally understood. But this is not to be avoided, even leaving the above passage out of consideration. In Matt. xii. 25 f. 29, Jesus speaks of a kingdom and household of the devil, in a manner which obviously outsteps the domain of the merely figurative: but above all, the passage already quoted, Luke x. 18–20, is of such a nature as to compel even Paulus, who is generally so fond of lending to the hallowed personages of primitive Christian history the views of the present age, to admit that the kingdom of Satan was not merely a symbol of evil to Jesus, and that he believed in actual demoniacal possession. For he says very justly, that as Jesus here speaks, not to the patient or to the people, but to those who themselves, according to his instructions, cured demoniacs, his words are not to be explained as a mere accommodation, when he confirms their belief that the spirits are subject unto them, and describes their capability of curing the malady in question, as a power over the power of the enemy. [1175] In answer also to the repugnance of those with whose enlightenment a belief in demoniacal possession is inconsistent, to admit that Jesus held that belief, the same theologian justly observes that the most distinguished mind may retain a false idea, prevalent among his cotemporaries, if it happen to lie out of his peculiar sphere of thought. [1176]

Some light is thrown on the evangelical conception of the demoniacs, by the opinions on this subject which we find in writers more or less cotemporary. The general idea that evil spirits had influence on men, producing melancholy, insanity, and epilepsy, was early prevalent among the Greeks [1177] as well as the Hebrews; [1178] but the more distinct idea that evil spirits entered into the human body and took possession of its members was not developed until a considerably later period, and was a consequence of the dissemination of the Oriental, particularly the Persian pneumatology among both Hebrews and Greeks. [1179] Hence we find in Josephus the expressions δαιμόνια τοῖς ζῶσιν εἰσδυόμενα, [1180] ἐνκαθεζόμενα [1181] (demons entering into the living, settling themselves there), and the same ideas in Lucian [1182] and Philostratus. [1183]

Of the nature and origin of these spirits nothing is expressly stated in the gospels, except that they belong to the household of Satan (Matt. xii. 26 ff. parall.), whence the acts of one of them are directly ascribed to Satan (Luke xiii. 16). But from Josephus, [1184] Justin Martyr, [1185] and Philostratus, [1186] with whom rabbinical writings agree, [1187] we learn that these demons were the disembodied souls of wicked men; and modern theologians have not scrupled to attribute this opinion on their origin to the New Testament also. [1188] Justin and the rabbins more nearly particularize, as spirits that torment the living, the souls of the giants, the offspring of those angels who allied themselves to the daughters of men; the rabbins further add the souls of those who perished in the deluge, and of those who participated in building the tower of Babel; [1189] and with this agree the Clementine Homilies, for, according to them also, these souls of the giants, having become demons, seek to attach themselves, as the stronger, to human souls, and to inhabit human bodies. [1190] As, however, in the continuation of the passage first cited, Justin endeavours to convince the heathens of immortality from their own ideas, the opinion which he there expresses, of demons being the souls of the departed in general, can scarcely be regarded as his, especially as his pupil Tatian expressly declares himself against it; [1191] while Josephus affords no criterion as to the latent idea of the New Testament, since his Greek education renders it very uncertain whether he presents the doctrine of demoniacal possession in its original Jewish, or in a Grecian form. If it must be admitted that the Hebrews owed their doctrine of demons to Persia, we know that the Deves of the Zend mythology were originally and essentially wicked beings, existing prior to the human race; of these two characteristics, Hebraism as such might be induced to expunge the former, which pertained to Dualism, but could have no reason for rejecting the latter. Accordingly, in the Hebrew view, the demons were the fallen angels of Gen. vi., the souls of their offspring the giants, and of the great criminals before and immediately after the deluge, whom the popular imagination gradually magnified into superhuman beings. But in the ideas of the Hebrews, there lay no motive for descending beyond the circle of these souls, who might be conceived to form the court of Satan. Such a motive was only engendered by the union of the Græco-roman culture with the Hebraic: the former had no Satan, and consequently no retinue of spirits devoted to his service, but it had an abundance of Manes, Lemures, and the like,—all names for disembodied souls that disquieted the living. Now, the combination of these Græco-roman ideas with the above-mentioned Jewish ones, seems to have been the source of the demonology of Josephus, of Justin, and also of the later rabbins; but it does not follow that the same mixed view belongs to the New Testament. Rather, as this Græcised form of the doctrine in question is nowhere positively put forth by the evangelical writers, while on the contrary the demons are in some passages represented as the household of Satan: there is nothing to contravene the inference to be drawn from the unmixedly Jewish character of thought which reigns in the synoptical gospels on all other subjects (apart from Christian modifications); namely, that we must attribute to them the pure and original Jewish conception of the doctrine of demons.

It is well known that the older theology, moved by a regard for the authority of Jesus and the Evangelists, espoused the belief in the reality of demoniacal possession. The new theology, on the contrary, especially since the time of Semler, [1192] in consideration of the similarity between the condition of the demoniacs in the New Testament and many naturally diseased subjects of our own day, has begun to refer the malady of the former also to natural causes, and to ascribe the evangelical supposition of supernatural causes to the prejudices of that age. In modern days, on the occurrence of epilepsy, insanity, and even a disturbance of the self-consciousness resembling the condition of the possessed described in the New Testament, it is no longer the custom to account for them by the supposition of demoniacal influence: and the reason of this seems to be, partly that the advancement in the knowledge of nature and of mind has placed at command a wider range of facts and analogies, which may serve to explain the above conditions naturally: partly that the contradiction, involved in the idea of demoniacal possession, is beginning to be at least dimly perceived. For—apart from the difficulties which the notion of the existence of a devil and demons entails—whatever theory may be held as to the relation between the self-consciousness and the bodily organs, it remains absolutely inconceivable how the union between the two could be so far dissolved, that a foreign self-consciousness could gain an entrance, thrust out that which belonged to the organism, and usurp its place. Hence for every one who at once regards actual phenomena with enlightened eyes, and the New Testament narratives with orthodox ones, there results the contradiction, that what now proceeds from natural causes, must in the time of Jesus have been caused supernaturally.

In order to remove this inconceivable difference between the conditions of one age and another, avoiding at the same time any imputation on the New Testament, Olshausen, whom we may fairly take as the representative of the mystical theology and philosophy of the present day, denies both that all states of the kind in question have now a natural cause, and that they had in the time of Jesus invariably a supernatural cause. With respect to our own time he asks, if the apostles were to enter our mad-houses, how would they name many of the inmates? [1193] We answer, they would to a certainty name many of them demoniacs, by reason of their participation in the ideas of their people and their age, not by reason of their apostolic illumination; and the official who acted as their conductor would very properly endeavour to set them right: whatever names therefore they might give to the inmates of our asylums, our conclusions as to the naturalness of the disorders of those inmates would not be at all affected. With respect to the time of Jesus, this theologian maintains that the same forms of disease were, even by the Jews, in one case held demoniacal, in another not so, according to the difference in their origin: for example, one who had become insane through an organic disorder of the brain, or dumb through an injury of the tongue, was not looked on as a demoniac, but only those, the cause of whose condition was more or less psychical. Of such a distinction in the time of Jesus, Olshausen is manifestly bound to give us instances. Whence could the Jews of that age have acquired their knowledge of the latent natural causes of these conditions—whence the criterion by which to distinguish an insanity or imbecility originating in a malformation of the brain, from one purely psychical? Was not their observation limited to outward phenomena, and those of the coarsest character? The nature of their distinctions seems to be this: the state of an epileptic with his sudden falls and convulsions, or of a maniac in his delirium, especially if, from the reaction of the popular idea respecting himself he speaks in the person of another, seems to point to an external influence which governs him; and consequently, so soon as the belief in demoniacal possession existed among the people, all such states were referred to this cause, as we find them to be in the New Testament: whereas in dumbness and gouty contraction or lameness, the influence of an external power is less decidedly indicated, so that these afflictions were at one time ascribed to a possessing demon, at another not so. Of the former case we find an example in the dumb persons already mentioned, Matt. ix. 32, xii. 22, and in the woman, who was bowed down, Luke xiii. 11; of the latter, in the man who was deaf and had an impediment in his speech, Mark vii. 32 ff., and in the many paralytics mentioned in the gospels. The decision for the one opinion or the other was however certainly not founded on an investigation into the origin of the disease, but solely on its external symptoms. If then the Jews, and with them the Evangelists, referred the two chief classes of these conditions to demoniacal influence, there remains for him who believes himself bound by their opinion, without choosing to shut out the lights of modern science, the glaring inconsistency of considering the same diseases as in one age natural, in another supernatural.

But the most formidable difficulty for Olshausen, in his attempted mediation between the Judaical demonology of the New Testament and the intelligence of our own day, arises from the influence of the latter on his own mind—an influence which renders him adverse to the idea of personal demons. This theologian, initiated in the philosophy of the present age, endeavours to resolve the host of demons, which in the New Testament are regarded as distinct individuals, into a system of emanations, forming the continuity of a single substance, which indeed sends forth from itself separate powers, not, however, to subsist as independent individuals, but to return as accidents into the unity of the substance. This cast of thought we have already observed in the opinions of Olshausen concerning angels, and it appears still more decidedly in his demonology. Personal demons are too repugnant, and as Olshausen himself expresses it, [1194] the comprehension of two subjects in one individual is too inconceivable to find a ready acceptation. Hence it is everywhere with vague generality that a kingdom of evil and darkness is spoken of; and though a personal prince is given to it, its demons are understood to be mere effluxes and operations, by which the evil principle manifests itself. But the most vulnerable point of Olshausen’s opinion concerning demons is this: it is too much for him to believe that Jesus asked the name of the demon in the Gadarene; since he himself doubts the personality of those emanations of the kingdom of darkness, it cannot, he thinks, have been thus decidedly supposed by Christ;—hence he understands the question, What is thy name? (Mark v. 9) to be addressed, not to the demon, but to the man, [1195] plainly in opposition to the whole context, for the answer, Legion, appears to be in no degree the result of a misunderstanding, but the right answer—the one expected by Jesus.

If, however, the demons are, according to Olshausen’s opinion, impersonal powers, that which guides them and determines their various functions is the law which governs the kingdom of darkness in relation to the kingdom of light. On this theory, the worse a man is morally, the closer must be the connexion between him and the kingdom of evil, and the closest conceivable connexion—the entrance of the power of darkness into the personality of the man, i.e. possession—must always occur in the most wicked. But historically this is not so: the demoniacs in the gospels appear to be sinners only in the sense that all sick persons need forgiveness of sins; and the greatest sinners (Judas for example) are spared the infliction of possession. The common opinion, with its personal demons, escapes this contradiction. It is true that this opinion also, as we find for instance, in the Clementine Homilies, firmly maintains it to be by sin only that man subjects himself to the ingress of the demon; [1196] but here there is yet scope for the individual will of the demon, who often, from motives not to be calculated, passes by the worst, and holds in chase the less wicked. [1197] On the contrary, if the demons are considered, as by Olshausen, to be the actions of the power of evil in its relation to the power of goodness; this relation being regulated by laws, everything arbitrary and accidental is excluded. Hence it evidently costs that theologian some pains to disprove the consequence, that according to his theory the possessed must always be the most wicked. Proceeding from the apparent contest of two powers in the demoniacs, he adopts the position that the state of demoniacal possession does not appear in those who entirely give themselves up to evil, and thus maintain an internal unity of disposition, but only in those in whom there exists a struggle against sin. [1198] In that case, however, the above state, being reduced to a purely moral phenomenon, must appear far more frequently; every violent inward struggle must manifest itself under this form, and especially those who ultimately give themselves up to evil must, before arriving at this point, pass through a period of conflict, that is of possession. Olshausen therefore adds a physical condition, namely, that the preponderance of evil in the man must have weakened his corporeal organization, particularly the nervous system, before he can become susceptible of the demoniacal state. But since such disorders of the nervous system may occur without any moral fault, who does not see that the state which it is intended to ascribe to demoniacal power as its proper source, is thus referred chiefly to natural causes, and that therefore the argument defeats its own object? Hence Olshausen quickly turns away from this side of the question, and lingers on the comparison of the δαιμονιζόμενος (demoniac) with the πονηρὸς (wicked); whereas he ought rather to compare the former with the epileptic and insane, for it is only by this means that any light can be thrown on the nature of possession. This shifting of the question from the ground of physiology and psychology to that of morality and religion, renders the discussion concerning the demoniacs one of the most useless which Olshausen’s work contains. [1199]

Let us then relinquish the ungrateful attempt to modernize the New Testament conception of the demoniacs, or to judaize our modern ideas;—let us rather, in relation to this subject, understand the statements of the New Testament as simply as they are given, without allowing our investigations to be restricted by the ideas therein presented, which belonged to the age and nation of its writers. [1200]

The method adopted for the cure of the demoniacal state was, especially among the Jews, in conformity with what we have ascertained to have been the idea of its nature. The cause of the malady was not supposed to be, as in natural diseases, an impersonal object or condition, such as an impure fluid, a morbid excitement or debility, but a self-conscious being; hence it was treated, not mechanically or chemically, but logically, i.e. by words. The demon was enjoined to depart; and to give effect to this injunction, it was coupled with the names of beings who were believed to have power over demons. Hence the main instrument against demoniacal possession was conjuration, [1201] either in the name of God, or of angels, or of some other potent being, e.g. the Messiah (Acts xix. 13), with certain forms which were said to be derived from Solomon. [1202] In addition to this, certain roots, [1203] stones, [1204] fumigations and amulets [1205] were used, in obedience to traditions likewise believed to have been handed down from Solomon. Now as the cause of the malady was not seldom really a psychical one, or at least one lying in the nervous system, which may be acted on to an incalculable extent by moral instrumentality, this psychological treatment was not altogether illusory! for by exciting in the patient the belief that the demon by which he was possessed, could not retain his hold before a form of conjuration, it might often effect the removal of the disorder. Jesus himself admits that the Jewish exorcists sometimes succeeded in working such cures (Matt. xii. 27). But we read of Jesus that without conjuration by any other power, and without the appliance of any further means, he expelled the demons by his word. The most remarkable cures of this kind, of which the gospels inform us, we are now about to examine.

§ 93.

CASES OF THE EXPULSION OF DEMONS BY JESUS, CONSIDERED SINGLY.

Among the circumstantial narratives which are given us in the three first gospels of cures wrought by Jesus on demoniacs, three are especially remarkable: the cure of a demoniac in the synagogue at Capernaum, that of the Gadarenes possessed by a multitude of demons, and lastly, that of the lunatic whom the disciples were unable to cure.

In John the conversion of water into wine is the first miracle performed by Jesus after his return from the scene of his baptism into Galilee; but in Mark (i. 23 ff.) and Luke (iv. 33 ff.) the cure of a demoniac in the synagogue of Capernaum has this position. Jesus had produced a deep impression by his teaching, when suddenly, a demoniac who was present, cried out in the character of the demon that possessed him, that he would have nothing to do with him, that he knew him to be the Messiah who was come to destroy them—the demons; whereupon Jesus commanded the demon to hold his peace and come out of the man, which happened amid cries and convulsions on the part of the demoniac, and to the great astonishment of the people at the power thus exhibited by Jesus.

Here we might, with rationalistic commentators, represent the case to ourselves thus: the demoniac, during a lucid interval, entered the synagogue, was impressed by the powerful discourse of Jesus, and overhearing one of the audience speak of him as the Messiah, was seized with the idea that the unclean spirit by which he was possessed, could not maintain itself in the presence of the holy Messiah; whence he fell into a paroxysm, and expressed his awe of Jesus in the character of the demon. When Jesus perceived this, what was more natural than that he should make use of the man’s persuasion of his power, and command the demon to come out of him, thus laying hold of the maniac by his fixed idea; which according to the laws of mental hygiene, might very probably have a favourable effect. It is under this view that Paulus regards the occasion as that on which the thought of using his messianic fame as a means of curing such sufferers, first occurred to Jesus. [1206]

But many difficulties oppose themselves to this natural conception of the case. The demoniac is supposed to learn that Jesus was the Messiah from the people in the synagogue. On this point the text is not merely silent, but decidedly contradicts such an opinion. The demon, speaking through the man, evidently proclaims his knowledge of the Messiahship of Jesus, in the words, οἶδά δε τίς εἶ κ.τ.λ., not as information casually imparted by man, but as an intuition of his demoniacal nature. Further, when Jesus cries, Hold thy peace! he refers to what the demon had just uttered concerning his messiahship; for it is related of Jesus that he suffered not the demons to speak because they knew him (Mark i. 34; Luke iv. 41), or because they made him known (Mark iii. 12). If then Jesus believed that by enjoining silence on the demon he could hinder the promulgation of his messiahship, he must have been of opinion, not that the demoniac had heard something of it from the people in the synagogue, but contrariwise that the latter might learn it from the demoniac; and this accords with the fact, that at the time of the first appearance of Jesus, in which the Evangelists place the occurrence, no one had yet thought of him as the Messiah.

If it be asked, how the demoniac could discover that Jesus was the Messiah, apart from any external communication, Olshausen presses into his service the preternaturally heightened activity of the nervous system, which, in demoniacs as in somnambules, sharpens the presentient power, and produces a kind of clear-sightedness, by means of which such a man might very well discern the importance of Jesus as regarded the whole realm of spirits. The evangelical narrative, it is true, does not ascribe that knowledge to a power of the patient, but of the demon dwelling within him, and this is the only view consistent with the Jewish ideas of that period. The Messiah was to appear, in order to overthrow the demoniacal kingdom (ἀπολέσαι ἡμᾶς, comp. 1 John iii. 8; Luke x. 18 f.) [1207] and to cast the devil and his angels into the lake of fire (Matt. xxv. 41; Rev. xx. 10) [1208]: it followed of course that the demons would recognize him who was to pass such a sentence on them. [1209] This however might be deducted as an admixture of the opinion of the narrator, without damage to the rest of the narrative; but it must first be granted admissible to ascribe so extensive a presentient power to demoniacal subjects. Now, as it is in the highest degree improbable that a nervous patient, however intensely excited, should recognize Jesus as the Messiah, at a time when he was not believed to be such by any one else, perhaps not even by himself; and as on the other hand this recognition of the Messiah by the demon so entirely agrees with the popular ideas;—we must conjecture that on this point the evangelical tradition is not in perfect accordance with historical truth, but has been attuned to those ideas. [1210] There was the more inducement to this, the more such a recognition of Jesus on the part of the demons would redound to his glory. As when adults disowned him, praise was prepared for him out of the mouth of babes (Matt. xxi. 16)—as he was convinced that if men were silent, the very stones would cry out (Luke xix. 40): so it must appear fitting, that when his people whom he came to save would not acknowledge him, he should have the involuntary homage of demons, whose testimony, since they had only ruin to expect from him, must be impartial, and from their higher spiritual nature was to be relied on.

In the above history of the cure of a demoniac, we have a case of the simplest kind; the cure of the possessed Gadarenes on the contrary (Matt. viii. 28 ff.; Mark v. 1 ff.; Luke viii. 26 ff.) is a very complex one, for in this instance we have, together with several divergencies of the Evangelists, instead of one demon, many, and instead of a simple departure of these demons, their entrance into a herd of swine.

After a stormy passage across the sea of Galilee to its eastern shore, Jesus meets, according to Mark and Luke, a demoniac who lived among the tombs, [1211] and was subject to outbreaks of terrific fury against himself [1212] and others; according to Matthew, there were two. It is astonishing how long harmonists have resorted to miserable expedients, such as that Mark and Luke mention only one because he was particularly distinguished by wildness, or Matthew two, because he included the attendant who guarded the maniac, [1213] rather than admit an essential difference between the two narratives. Since this step has been gained, the preference has been given to the statement of the two intermediate Evangelists, from the consideration that maniacs of this class are generally unsociable; and the addition of a second demoniac by Matthew has been explained by supposing that the plurality of the demons spoken of in the narratives became in his apprehension a plurality of demoniacs. [1214] But the impossibility that two maniacs should in reality associate themselves, or perhaps be associated merely in the original legend, is not so decided as to furnish in itself a ground for preferring the narrative in Mark and Luke to that in Matthew. At least if it be asked, which of the two representations could the most easily have been formed from the other by tradition, the probability on both sides will be found equal. For if according to the above supposition, the plurality of demons might give rise to the idea of a plurality of demoniacs, it may also be said, conversely: the more accurate representation of Matthew, in which a plurality of demoniacs as well as of demons was mentioned, did not give prominence to the specifically extraordinary feature in the case, namely, that one man was possessed by many demons; and as, in order to exhibit this, the narrative when reproduced must be so expressed as to make it clear that many demons inhabited one man, this might easily occasion by degrees the opposition of the demoniac in the singular to the plural number of the demons. For the rest, the introduction of Matthew’s narrative is concise and general, that of the two others circumstantially descriptive; another difference from which the greater originality of the latter has been deduced. [1215] But it is quite as probable that the details which Luke and Mark have in common, namely, that the possessed would wear no clothing, broke all fetters, and wounded himself with stones, are an arbitrary enlargement on the simple characteristic, exceeding fierce, which Matthew gives, with the consequence that no one could pass by that way,—as that the latter is a vague abridgment of the former.

This scene between Jesus and the demoniac or demoniacs opens, like the other, with a cry of terror from the latter, who, speaking in the person of the possessing demon, exclaims that he wishes to have nothing to do with Jesus, the Messiah, from whom he has to expect only torment. Two hypotheses have been framed, to explain how the demoniac came at once to recognize Jesus as the Messiah: according to one, Jesus was even then reputed to be the Messiah on the Peræan shore; [1216] according to the other, some of those who had come across the sea with Jesus had said to the man (whom on account of his fierceness no one could come near!) that the Messiah had just landed at such a spot: [1217] but both are alike groundless, for it is plain that in this narrative, as in the former, the above feature is a product of the Jewish-Christian opinion respecting the relation of the demons to the Messiah. [1218] Here, however, another difference meets us. According to Matthew, the possessed, when they see Jesus, cry: What have we to do with thee? Art thou come to torment us?—according to Luke, the demoniac falls at the feet of Jesus and says beseechingly, Torment me not; and lastly, according to Mark, he runs from a distance to meet Jesus, falls at his feet and adjures him by God not to torment him. Thus we have again a climax: in Matthew, the demoniac, stricken with terror, deprecates the unwelcome approach of Jesus; in Luke, he accosts Jesus, when arrived, as a suppliant; in Mark, he eagerly runs to meet Jesus, while yet at a distance. Those commentators who here take Mark’s narrative as the standard one, are obliged themselves to admit, that the hastening of a demoniac towards Jesus whom he all the while dreaded, is somewhat of a contradiction; and they endeavour to relieve themselves of the difficulty, by the supposition that the man set off to meet Jesus in a lucid moment, when he wished to be freed from the demon, but being heated by running, [1219] or excited by the words of Jesus, [1220] he fell into the paroxysm in which, assuming the character of the demon, he entreated that the expulsion might be suspended. But in the closely consecutive phrases of Mark, Seeing—he ran—and worshipped—and cried—and said, ἰδὼν—ἔδραμε—καὶ προσεκύνησε—καὶ κράξας—εἶπε· there is no trace of a change in the state of the demoniac, and the improbability of his representation subsists, for one really possessed, if he had recognized the Messiah at a distance, would have anxiously avoided, rather than have approached him; and even setting this aside, it is impossible that one who believed himself to be possessed by a demon inimical to God, should adjure Jesus by God, as Mark makes the demoniac do. [1221] If then his narrative cannot be the original one, that of Luke, which is only so far the simpler that it does not represent the demoniac as running towards Jesus and adjuring him, is too closely allied to it to be regarded as the nearest to the fact. That of Matthew is without doubt the purest, for the terror-stricken question, Art thou come to destroy us before the time? is better suited to a demon, who, as the enemy of the Messiah’s kingdom, could expect no forbearance from the Messiah than the entreaty for clemency in Mark and Luke; though Philostratus, in a narrative which might be regarded as an imitation of this evangelical one, has chosen the latter form. [1222]

From the course of the narratives hitherto, it would appear that the demons, in this as in the first narrative, addressed Jesus in the manner described, before anything occurred on his part; yet the two intermediate Evangelists go on to state, that Jesus had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. When did Jesus do this? The most natural answer would be: before the man spoke to him. Now in Luke the address of the demoniac is so closely connected with the word προσέπεσε, he fell down, and then again with ἀνακράξας, having cried out, that it seems necessary to place the command of Jesus before the cry and the prostration, and hence to consider it as their cause. Yet Luke himself rather gives the mere sight of Jesus as the cause of those demonstrations on the part of the demoniac, so that his representation leaves us in perplexity as to where the command of Jesus should find its place. The case is still worse in Mark, for here a similar dependence of the successive phrases thrusts back the command of Jesus even before the word ἔδραμε, he ran, so that we should have to imagine rather strangely that Jesus cried to the demon, ἔξελθε, Come out, from a distance. Thus the two intermediate Evangelists are in an error with regard either to the consecutive particulars that precede the command or to the command itself, and our only question is, where may the error be most probably presumed to lie? Here Schleiermacher himself admits, that if in the original narrative an antecedent command of Jesus had been spoken of, it would have been given in its proper place, before the prayer of the demons, and as a quotation of the precise words of Jesus; whereas the supplementary manner in which it is actually inserted, with its abbreviated and indirect form (in Luke; Mark changes it after his usual style, into a direct address), is a strong foundation for the opinion that it is an explanatory addition furnished by the narrator from his own conjecture. [1223] And it is an extremely awkward addition, for it obliges the reader to recast his conception of the entire scene. At first the pith of the incident seems to be, that the demoniac had instantaneously recognized and supplicated Jesus; but the narrator drops this original idea, and reflecting that the prayer of the demon must have been preceded by a severe command from Jesus, he corrects his previous omission, and remarks that Jesus had given his command in the first instance.

To their mention of this command, Mark and Luke annex the question put by Jesus to the demon: What is thy name? In reply, a multitude of demons make known their presence, and give as their name, Legion. Of this episode Matthew has nothing. In the above addition we have found a supplementary explanation of the former part of the narrative: what if this question and answer were an anticipatory introduction to the sequel, and likewise the spontaneous production of the legend or the narrator? Let us examine the reasons that render it probable: the wish immediately expressed by the demons to enter the herd of swine, does not in Matthew presuppose a multitude of demons in each of the two possessed, since we cannot know whether the Hebrews were not able to believe that even two demons only could possess a whole herd of swine: but a later writer might well think it requisite to make the number of the evil spirits equal the number of the swine. Now, what a herd is in relation to animals, an army or a division of an army is in relation to men and superior beings, and as it was required to express a large division, nothing could more readily suggest itself than the Roman legion, which term in Matt. xxvi. 53, is applied to angels, as here to demons. But without further considering this more precise estimate of the Evangelists, we must pronounce it inconceivable that several demons had set up their habitation in one individual. For even if we had attained so far as to conceive how one demon by a subjection of the human consciousness could possess himself of a human organization, imagination would still fail us to conceive that many personal demons could at once possess one man. For as possession means nothing else, than that the demon constitutes himself the subject of the consciousness, and as consciousness can in reality have but one focus, one central point: it is under every condition absolutely inconceivable that several demons should at the same time take possession of one man. Manifold possession could only exist in the sense of an alternation of possession by various demons, and not as here in that of a whole army of them dwelling at once in one man, and at once departing from him.

All the narratives agree in this, that the demons (in order, as Mark says, not to be sent out of the country, or according to Luke, into the deep) entreated of Jesus permission to enter into the herd of swine feeding near; that this was granted them by Jesus; and that forthwith, owing to their influence, the whole herd of swine (Mark, we must not ask on what authority, fixes their number at about two thousand) were precipitated into the sea and drowned. If we adopt here the point of view taken in the gospel narratives, which throughout suppose the existence of real demons, it is yet to be asked: how can demons, admitting even that they can take possession of men,—how, we say, can they, being at all events intelligent spirits, have and obtain the wish to enter into brutal forms? Every religion and philosophy which rejects the transmigration of souls, must, for the same reason, also deny the possibility of this passage of the demons into swine; and Olshausen is quite right in classing the swine of Gadara in the New Testament with Balaam’s ass in the Old, as a similar scandal and stumbling block. [1224] This theologian, however, rather evades than overcomes the difficulty, by the observation that we are here to suppose, not an entrance of the individual demons into the individual swine, but merely an influence of all the evil spirits on the swine collectively. For the expression, εἰσελθεῖν εἰς τοὺς χοίρους, to enter into the swine, as it stands opposed to the expression, ἐξελθεῖν ἐκ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου, to go out of the man, cannot possibly mean otherwise than that the demons were to assume the same relation to the swine which they had borne to the possessed man; besides, a mere influence could not preserve them from banishment out of the country or into the deep, but only an actual habitation of the bodies of the animals: so that the scandal and stumbling block remain. Thus the prayer in question cannot possibly have been offered by real demons, though it might by Jewish maniacs, sharing the ideas of their people. According to these ideas it is a torment to evil spirits to be destitute of a corporeal envelopment, because without a body they cannot gratify their sensual desires; [1225] if therefore they were driven out of men they must wish to enter into the bodies of brutes, and what was better suited to an impure spirit πνεῦμα ἀκάθαρτον, than an impure animal ζῶον ἀκάθαρτον, like a swine? [1226] So far, therefore, it is possible that the Evangelists might correctly represent the fact, only, in accordance with their national ideas, ascribing to the demons what should rather have been referred to the madness of the patient. But when it is further said that the demons actually entered the swine, do not the Evangelists affirm an evident impossibility? Paulus thinks that the Evangelists here as everywhere else identify the possessed men with the possessing demons, and hence attribute to the latter the entrance into the swine, while in fact it was only the former, who, in obedience to their fixed idea, rushed upon the herd. [1227] It is true that Matthew’s expression ἀπῆλθον εἰς τοὺς χοίρους, taken alone, might be understood of a mere rushing towards the swine; not only however, as Paulus himself must admit, does the word εἰσελθόντες in the two other Evangelists distinctly imply a real entrance into the swine; but also Matthew has like them before the word ἀπῆλθον, they entered, the expression ἐξελθόντες οἱ δαίμονες, the demons coming out (sc. ἐκ τῶν ἀνθρώπων out of the men): thus plainly enough distinguishing the demons who entered the swine from the men. [1228] Thus our Evangelists do not in this instance merely relate what actually happened, in the colours which it took from the false lights of their age; they have here a particular, which cannot possibly have happened in the manner they allege.

A new difficulty arises from the effect which the demons are said to have produced in the swine. Scarcely had they entered them, when they compelled the whole herd to precipitate themselves into the sea. It is reasonably asked, what then did the demons gain by entering into the animals, if they immediately destroyed the bodies of which they had taken possession, and thus robbed themselves of the temporary abode for which they had so earnestly entreated? [1229] The conjecture, that the design of the demons in destroying the swine, was to incense the minds of their owners against Jesus, which is said to have been the actual result, [1230] is too far-fetched; the other conjecture that the demoniacs, rushing with cries on the herd, together with the flight of their keepers, terrified the swine and chased them into the water, [1231]—even if it were not opposed as we have seen to the text,—would not suffice to explain the drowning of a herd of swine amounting to 2,000, according to Mark; or only a numerous herd, according to the general statement of Matthew. The expedient of supposing that in truth it was only a part of the herd that was drowned, [1232] has not the slightest foundation in the evangelical narrative. The difficulties connected with this point are multiplied by the natural reflection that the drowning of the herd would involve no slight injury to the owners, and that of this injury Jesus was the mediate author. The orthodox, bent on justifying Jesus, suppose that the permission to the demons to enter into the swine was necessary to render the cure of the demoniac possible, and, they argue, brutes are assuredly to be killed that man may live; [1233] but they do not perceive that they thus, in a manner most inconsistent with their point of view, circumscribe the power of Jesus over the demoniacal kingdom. Again, it is supposed, that the swine probably belonged to Jews, and that Jesus intended to punish them for their covetous transgression of the law, [1234] that he acted with divine authority, which often sacrifices individual good to higher objects, and by lightning, hail and inundations causes destruction to the property of many men, [1235] in which case, to accuse God of injustice would be absurd. [1236] But to adopt this expedient is to confound, in a way the most inadmissible on the orthodox system, Christ’s state of humiliation with his state of exaltation: it is to depart, in a spirit of mysticism, from the wise doctrine of Paul, that he was made under the law, γενόμενος ὑπὸ νόμον (Gal. iv. 4), and that he made himself of no reputation ἑαυτόν ἐκένωσε (Phil. ii. 7): it is to make Jesus a being altogether foreign to us, since in relation to the moral estimate of his actions, it lifts him above the standard of humanity. Nothing remains, therefore, but to take the naturalistic supposition of the rushing of the demoniacs among the swine, and to represent the consequent destruction of the latter as something unexpected by Jesus, for which therefore he is not responsible: [1237] in the plainest contradiction to the evangelical account, which makes Jesus, even if not directly cause the issue, foresee it in the most decided manner. [1238] Thus there appears to attach to Jesus the charge of an injury done to the property of another, and the opponents of Christianity have long ago made this use of the narrative. [1239] It must be admitted that Pythagoras in a similar case acted far more justly, for when he liberated some fish from the net, he indemnified the fishermen who had taken them. [1240]

Thus the narrative before us is a tissue of difficulties, of which those relating to the swine are not the slightest. It is no wonder therefore that commentators began to doubt the thorough historical truth of this anecdote earlier than that of most others in the public life of Jesus, and particularly to sever the connexion between the destruction of the swine and the expulsion of the demons by Jesus. Thus Krug thought that tradition had reversed the order of these two facts. The swine according to him were precipitated into the sea before the landing of Jesus, by the storm which raged during his voyage, and when Jesus subsequently wished to cure the demoniac, either he himself or one of his followers persuaded the man that his demons were already gone into those swine and had hurled them into the sea; which was then believed and reported to be the fact. [1241] K. Ch. L. Schmidt makes the swine-herds go to meet Jesus on his landing; during which interim many of the untended swine fall into the sea; and as about this time Jesus had commanded the demon to depart from the man, the bystanders imagine that the two events [1242] stood in the relation of cause and effect. The prominent part which is played in these endeavours at explanation, by the accidental coincidence of many circumstances, betrays that maladroit mixture of the mythical system of interpretation with the natural which characterizes the earliest attempts, from the mythical point of view. Instead of inventing a natural foundation, for which we have nowhere any warrant, and which in no degree explains the actual narrative in the gospels, adorned as it is with the miraculous; we must rather ask, whether in the probable period of the formation of the evangelical narratives, there are not ideas to be found from which the story of the swine in the history before us might be explained?

We have already adduced one opinion of that age bearing on this point, namely, that demons are unwilling to remain without bodies, and that they have a predilection for impure places, whence the bodies of swine must be best suited to them: this does not however explain why they should have precipitated the swine into the water. But we are not destitute of information that will throw light on this also. Josephus tells us of a Jewish conjuror who cast out demons by forms and means derived from Solomon, that in order to convince the bystanders of the reality of his expulsions, he set a vessel of water in the neighbourhood of the possessed person, so that the departing demon must throw it down and thus give ocular proof to the spectators that he was out of the man. [1243] In like manner it is narrated of Apollonius of Tyana, that he commanded a demon which possessed a young man, to depart with a visible sign, whereupon the demon entreated that he might overturn a statue that stood near at hand; which to the great astonishment of the spectators actually ensued in the very moment that the demon went out of the youth. [1244] If then the agitation of some near object, without visible contact, was held the surest proof of the reality of an expulsion of demons: this proof could not be wanting to Jesus; nay, while in the case of Eleazar, the object being only a little (μικρὸν) removed from the exorciser and the patient, the possibility of deception was not altogether excluded, Matthew notices in relation to Jesus, more emphatically than the two other Evangelists, the fact that the herd of swine was feeding a good way off (μακρὰν), thus removing the last remnant of such a possibility. That the object to which Jesus applied this proof, was from the first said to be a herd of swine, immediately proceeded from the Jewish idea of the relation between unclean spirits and animals, but it furnished a welcome opportunity for satisfying another tendency of the legend. Not only did it behove Jesus to cure ordinary demoniacs, such as the one in the history first considered; he must have succeeded in the most difficult cures of this kind. It is the evident object of the present narrative, from the very commencement, with its startling description of the fearful condition of the Gadarene, to represent the cure as one of extreme difficulty. But to make it more complicated, the possession must be, not simple, but manifold, as in the case of Mary Magdalene, out of whom were cast seven demons (Luke viii. 2), or in the demoniacal relapse in which the expelled demon returns with seven worse than himself (Matt. xii. 45); whence the number of the demons was here made, especially by Mark, to exceed by far the probable number of a herd. As in relation to an inanimate object, as a vessel of water or a statue, the influence of the expelled demons could not be more clearly manifested by any means, than by its falling over contrary to the law of gravity; so in animals it could not be more surely attested in any way, than by their drowning themselves contrary to their instinctive desire of life. Only by this derivation of our narrative from the confluence of various ideas and interests of the age, can we explain the above noticed contradiction, that the demons first petition for the bodies of the swine as a habitation, and immediately after of their own accord destroy this habitation. The petition grew, as we have said, out of the idea that demons shunned incorporeality, the destruction, out of the ordinary test of the reality of an exorcism;—what wonder if the combination of ideas so heterogeneous produced two contradictory features in the narrative?

The third and last circumstantially narrated expulsion of a demon has the peculiar feature, that in the first instance the disciples in vain attempt the cure, which Jesus then effects with ease. The three synoptists (Matt. xvii. 14 ff.; Mark ix. 14 ff.; Luke ix. 37 ff.) unanimously state that Jesus having descended with his three most confidential disciples from the Mount of the Transfiguration, found his other disciples in perplexity, because they were unable to cure a possessed boy, whom his father had brought to them.

In this narrative also there is a gradation from the greatest simplicity in Matthew, to the greatest particularity of description in Mark; and here again this gradation has led to the conclusion that the narrative of Matthew is the farthest from the fact, and must be made subordinate to that of the two other Evangelists. [1245] In the introduction of the incident in Matthew, Jesus, having descended from the mountain, joins the multitude (ὄχλος), whereupon the father of the boy approaches, and on his knees entreats Jesus to cure his child; in Luke, the multitude (ὄχλος) meet Jesus; lastly, in Mark, Jesus sees around the disciples a great multitude, among whom were scribes disputing with them; the people, when they see him, run towards him and salute him, he inquires what is the subject of dispute, and on this the father of the boy begins to speak. Here we have a climax in relation to the conduct of the people; in Matthew, Jesus appears to join them by accident; in Luke, they come to meet him; and in Mark, they run towards him to salute him. The last Evangelist has the singular remark: And straightway all the people, when they saw him, were greatly amazed. What could there possibly be so greatly to amaze the people in the arrival of Jesus with some disciples? This remains, in spite of all the other means of explanation that have been devised, so thorough a mystery, that I cannot find so absurd as Fritzsche esteems it, the idea of Euthymius, that Jesus having just descended from the Mount of Transfiguration, some of the heavenly radiance which had there shone around him was still visible, as on Moses when he came down from Sinai (Exod. xxxiv. 29 f.). That among this throng of people there were scribes who arraigned the disciples on the ground of their failure, and involved them in a dispute, is in and by itself quite natural; but connected as it is with the exaggerations concerning the behaviour of the multitude, this feature also becomes suspicious, especially as the other two Evangelists have it not; so that if it can be shown how the narrator might be led to insert it by a mental combination of his own, we shall have sufficient warrant for renouncing it. Shortly before (viii. 11), on the occasion of the demand of a sign from Jesus by the Pharisees, Mark says, ἥρξαντο συζητεῖν αὐτῷ, they began to question with him, apparently on the subject of his ability to work miracles; and so here when the disciples show themselves unable to perform a miracle, he represents the scribes (the majority of whom belonged to the Pharisaic sect), as συζητοῦντας τοῖς μαθηταῖς, questioning with the disciples. In the succeeding description of the boy’s state there is the same gradation as to particularity, except that Matthew is the one who alone has the expression σεληνιάζεται (is lunatic), which it is unfair to make a reproach to him, [1246] since the reference of periodical disorders to the moon was not uncommon in the time of Jesus. [1247] Mark alone calls the spirit that possessed the dumb boy (v. 17), and deaf (v. 25). The emission of inarticulate sounds by epileptics during their fits, might be regarded as the dumbness of the demon, and their incapability of noticing any words addressed to them, as his deafness.

When the father has informed Jesus of the subject of dispute and of the inability of the disciples to relieve the boy, Jesus breaks forth into the exclamation, O faithless and perverse generation, etc. On a comparison of the close of the narrative in Matthew, where Jesus, when his disciples ask him why they could not cast out the demon, answers; Because of your unbelief, and proceeds to extol the power of faith, even though no larger than a grain of mustard seed, as sufficient to remove mountains (v. 19 ff.): it cannot be doubted that in this expression of dissatisfaction Jesus apostrophizes his disciples, in whose inability to cast out the demon, he finds a proof of their still deficient faith. [1248] This concluding explanation of the want of power in the disciples, by their unbelief, Luke omits: and Mark not only imitates him in this, but also interweaves (v. 21–24), a by-scene between Jesus and the father, in which he first gives an amplified description of the symptoms of the child’s malady, drawn partly from Matthew, partly from his own resources, and then represents the father, on being required to believe, as confessing with tears the weakness of his faith, and his desire that it may be strengthened. Taking this together with the mention of the disputative scribes, we cannot err in supposing the speech of Jesus, O faithless generation, etc., in Mark and also in Luke to refer to the people, as distinguished from the disciples; in Mark, more particularly to the father, whose unbelief is intimated to be an impediment to the cure, as in another case (Matt. ix. 2), the faith of relatives appears to further the desired object. As however both the Evangelists give this aspect to the circumstances, because they do not here give the explanation of the inefficiency of the disciples by their unbelief, together with the declaration concerning the power of faith to remove mountains: we must inquire whether the connexion in which they place these discourses is more suitable than this in which they are inserted by Matthew. In Luke the declaration: If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, etc. (neither he nor Mark has, Because of your unbelief), occurs xvii. 5, 6, with only the slight variation, that instead of the mountain a tree is named; but it is here destitute of any connexion either with the foregoing or the following context, and has the appearance of a short stray fragment, with an introduction, no doubt fictitious (of the same kind as Luke xi. 1, xiii. 23), in the form of an entreaty from the disciples: Lord, increase our faith. Mark gives the sentence on the faith which removes mountains as the moral of the history of the cursed fig tree, where Matthew also has it a second time. But to this history the declaration is totally unsuitable, as we shall presently see; and if we are unwilling to content ourselves with ignorance of the occasion on which it was uttered, we must accept its connexion in Matthew as the original one, for it is perfectly appropriate to a failure of the disciples in an attempted cure. Mark has sought to make the scene more effective by other additions, beside this episode with the father; he tells us that the people ran together that they might observe what was passing, that after the expulsion of the demon the boy was as one dead, insomuch that many said, he is dead; but that Jesus, taking him by the hand, as he does elsewhere with the dead (Matt. ix. 25), lifts him up and restores him to life.

After the completion of the cure, Luke dismisses the narrative with a brief notice of the astonishment of the people; but the two first synoptists pursue the subject by making the disciples, when alone with Jesus, ask him why they were not able to cast out the demon? In Matthew the immediate reply of Jesus accounts for their incapability by their unbelief; but in Mark, his answer is, This kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting, which Matthew also adds after the discourse on unbelief and the power of faith. This seems to be an unfortunate connexion of Matthew’s; for if fasting and praying were necessary for the cure, the disciples, in case they had not previously fasted, could not have cast out the demon even if they had possessed the firmest faith. [1249] Whether these two reasons given by Jesus for the inability of the disciples can be made consistent by the observation, that fasting and prayer are means of strengthening faith; [1250] or whether we are to suppose with Schleiermacher an association of two originally unrelated passages, we will not here attempt to decide. That such a spiritual and corporeal discipline on the part of the exorcist should have effect on the possessed, has been held surprising: it has been thought with Porphyry, [1251] that it would rather be to the purpose that the patient should observe this discipline, and hence it has been supposed that the προσευχὴ καὶ νηστεία, prayer and fasting, were prescribed to the demoniac as a means of making the cure radical. [1252] But this is evidently in contradiction to the text. For if fasting and praying on the part of the patient were necessary for the success of the cure, it must have been gradual and not sudden, as all cures are which are attributed to Jesus in the gospels, and as this is plainly enough implied to be by the words, καὶ ἐθεραπεύθη ὁ παῖς ἀπὸ τῆς ὥρας ἐκείνης, and the child was cured from that very hour, in Matthew, and the word ἰάσατο, he cured, placed between ἐπετίμησε κ.τ.λ. Jesus rebuked the unclean spirit, and ἀπέδωκε κ.τ.λ. delivered him again to his father, in Luke. It is true Paulus turns the above expression of Matthew to his advantage, for he understands it to mean that from that time forward the boy, by the application of the prescribed discipline, gradually recovered. But we need only observe the same form of expression where it elsewhere occurs as the final sentence in narratives of cures, to be convinced of the impossibility of such an interpretation. When, for example, the story of the woman who had an issue of blood closes with the remark (Matt. ix. 22) καὶ ἐσώθη ἡ γυνὴ ἀπὸ ὥρας ἐκείνης, this will hardly be translated, et exinde mulier paulatim servabatur: it can only mean: servata est (et servatam se præbuit) ab illo temporis momento. Another point to which Paulus appeals as a proof that Jesus here commenced a cure which was to be consummated by degrees, is the expression of Luke, ἀπέδωκεν αὐτὸν τῷ πατρὶ αὐτοῦ, he delivered him again to his father, which, he argues, would have been rather superfluous, if it were not intended to imply a recommendation to special care. But the more immediate signification of ἀποδίδωμι is not to deliver or give up, but to give back; and therefore in the above expression the only sense is: puerum, quem sanandum acceperat, sanatum reddidit, that is, the boy who had fallen into the hands of a strange power—of the demon—was restored to the parents as their own. Lastly, how arbitrary is it in Paulus to take the expression ἐκπορεύεται, goeth out (Matt. v. 21), in the closer signification of a total departure, and to distinguish this from the preliminary departure which followed on the bare word of Jesus (v. 18)! Thus in this case, as in every other, the gospels present to us, not a cure which was protracted through days and weeks, but a cure which was instantaneously completed by one miracle: hence the fasting and prayer cannot be regarded as a prescription for the patient.

With this whole history must be compared an analogous narrative in 2 Kings iv. 29 ff. Here the prophet Elisha attempts to bring a dead child to life, by sending his staff by the hands of his servant Gehazi, who is to lay it on the face of the child; but this measure does not succeed, and Elisha is obliged in his own person to come and call the boy to life. The same relation that exists in this Old Testament story between the prophet and his servant, is seen in the New Testament narrative between the Messiah and his disciples: the latter can do nothing without their master, but what was too difficult for them, he effects with certainty. Now this feature is a clue to the tendency of both narratives, namely, to exalt their master by exhibiting the distance between him and his most intimate disciples; or, if we compare the evangelical narrative before us with that of the demoniacs of Gadara, we may say: the latter case was made to appear one of extreme difficulty in itself; the former, by the relation in which the power of Jesus, which is adequate to the occasion, is placed to the power of the disciples, which, however great in other instances, was here insufficient.

Of the other more briefly narrated expulsions of demons, the cure of a dumb demoniac and of one who was blind also, has been already sufficiently examined in connexion with the accusation of a league with Beelzebub: as also the cure of the woman who was bowed down, in our general considerations on the demoniacs. The cure of the possessed daughter of the Canaanitish woman (Matt. xv. 22 ff.; Mark vii. 25 ff.) has no further peculiarity than that it was wrought by the word of Jesus at a distance: a point of which we shall speak later.

According to the evangelical narratives, the attempt of Jesus to expel the demon succeeded in every one of these cases. Paulus remarks that cures of this kind, although they contributed more than anything else to impress the multitude with veneration for Jesus, were yet the easiest in themselves, and even De Wette sanctions a psychological explanation of the cures of demoniacs, though of no others. [1253] With these opinions we cannot but agree; for if we regard the real character of the demoniacal state as a species of madness accompanied by a convulsive tendency of the nervous system, we know that psychical and nervous disorders are most easily wrought upon by psychical influence;—an influence to which the surpassing dignity of Jesus as a prophet, and eventually even as the Messiah himself, presented all the requisite conditions. There is, however, a marked gradation among these states, according as the psychical derangement has more or less fixed itself corporeally, and the disturbance of the nervous system has become more or less habitual, and shared by the rest of the organization. We may therefore lay down the following rule: the more strictly the malady was confined to mental derangement, on which the word of Jesus might have an immediate moral influence, or in a comparatively slight disturbance of the nervous system, on which he would be able to act powerfully through the medium of the mind, the more possible was it for Jesus by his word λόγῳ (Matt. viii. 16), and instantly παραχρῆμα (Luke xiii. 13), to put an end to such states: on the other hand, the more the malady had already confirmed itself, as a bodily disease, the more difficult is it to believe that Jesus was able to relieve it in a purely psychological manner and at the first moment. From this rule results a second: namely, that to any extensive psychological influence on the part of Jesus the full recognition of his dignity as a prophet was requisite; whence it follows that at times and in districts where he had long had that reputation, he could effect more in this way than where he had it not.

If we apply these two measures to the cures in the gospels, we shall find that the first, viz., that of the demoniac in the synagogue at Capernaum, is not, so soon as we cease to consider the Evangelist’s narrative of it circumstantially correct, altogether destitute of probability. It is true that the words attributed to the demon seem to imply an intuitive knowledge of Jesus; but this may be probably accounted for by the supposition that the widely-spread fame of Jesus in that country, and his powerful discourse in the synagogue, had impressed the demoniac with the belief, if not that Jesus was the Messiah, as the Evangelists say, at least that he must be a prophet: a belief that would give effect to his words. As regards the state of this demoniac we are only told of his fixed idea (that he was possessed), and of his attacks of convulsions; his malady may therefore have been of the less rooted kind, and accessible to psychological influence. The cure of the Gadarenes is attended with more difficulty in both points of view. Firstly, Jesus was comparatively little known on the eastern shore; and secondly, the state of these demoniacs is described as so violent and deep-seated a mania, that a word from Jesus could hardly suffice to put an end to it. Here therefore the natural explanation of Paulus will not suffice, and if we are to regard the narrative as having any foundation in fact, we must suppose that the description of the demoniac’s state, as well as other particulars, has been exaggerated by the legend. The same judgment must be passed in relation to the cure of the boy who was lunatic, since an epilepsy which had existed from infancy (Mark v. 21) and the attacks of which were so violent and regular, must be too deeply rooted in the system for the possibility of so rapid and purely psychological a cure to be credible. That even dumbness and a contraction of many years’ duration, which we cannot with Paulus explain as a mere insane imagination that speech or an erect carriage was not permitted, [1254]—that these afflictions should disappear at a word, no one who is not committed to dogmatical opinions can persuade himself. Lastly, least of all is it to be conceived, that even without the imposing influence of his presence, the miracle-worker could effect a cure at a distance, as Jesus is said to have done on the daughter of the Canaanitish woman.

Thus in the nature of things there is nothing to prevent the admission, that Jesus cured many persons who suffered from supposed demoniacal insanity or nervous disorder, in a psychical manner, by the ascendancy of his manner and words (if indeed Venturini [1255] and Kaiser [1256] are not right in their conjecture, that patients of this class often believed themselves to be cured, when in fact the crisis only of their disorder had been broken by the influence of Jesus; and that the Evangelists state them to have been cured because they learned nothing further of them, and thus knew nothing of their probable relapse). But while granting the possibility of many cures, it is evident that in this field the legend has not been idle, but has confounded the easier cases, which alone could be cured psychologically, with the most difficult and complicated, to which such a treatment was totally inapplicable. [1257] Is the refusal of a sign on the part of Jesus reconcilable with such a manifestation of power as we have above defined,—or must even such cures as can be explained psychologically, but which in his age must have seemed miracles, be denied in order to make that refusal comprehensible? We will not here put this alternative otherwise than as a question.

If in conclusion we cast a glance on the gospel of John, we find that it does not even mention demoniacs and their cure by Jesus. This omission has not seldom been turned to the advantage of the Apostle John, the alleged author, as indicating a superior degree of enlightenment. [1258] If however this apostle did not believe in the reality of possession by devils, he must have had, as the author of the fourth gospel, according to the ordinary view of his relation to the synoptical writers, the strongest motives for rectifying their statements, and preventing the dissemination of what he held to be a false opinion, by setting the cures in question in a true light. But how could the Apostle John arrive at the rejection of the opinion that the above diseases had their foundation in demoniacal possession? According to Josephus it was at that period a popular Jewish opinion, from which a Jew of Palestine who, like John, did not visit a foreign land until late in life, would hardly be in a condition to liberate himself; it was, according to the nature of things and the synoptical accounts, the opinion of Jesus himself, John’s adored master, from whom the favourite disciple certainly would not be inclined to swerve even a hair’s breadth. But if John shared with his cotemporaries and with Jesus himself the notion of real demoniacal possession, and if the cure of demoniacs formed the principal part, nay, perhaps the true foundation of the alleged miraculous powers of Jesus: how comes it that the Apostle nevertheless makes no mention of them in his gospel? That he passed over them because the other Evangelists had collected enough of such histories, is a supposition that ought by this time to be relinquished, since he repeats more than one history of a miracle which they had already given; and if it be said that he repeated these because they needed correction,—we have seen, in our examination of the cures of demoniacs, that in many a reduction of them to their simple historical elements would be very much in place. There yet remains the supposition that, the histories of demoniacs being incredible or offensive to the cultivated Greeks of Asia Minor, among whom John is said to have written, he left them out of his gospel for the sake of accommodating himself to their ideas. But we must ask, could or should an apostle, out of mere accommodation to the refined ears of his auditors, withhold so essential a feature of the agency of Jesus? Certainly this silence, supposing the authenticity of the three first gospels, rather indicates an author who had not been an eye-witness of the ministry of Jesus; or, according to our view, at least one who had not at his command the original tradition of Palestine, but only a tradition modified by Hellenistic influence, in which the expulsions of demons, being less accordant with the higher culture of the Greeks, were either totally suppressed or kept so far in the background that they might have escaped the notice of the author of the gospel.

§ 94.

CURES OF LEPERS.

Among the sufferers whom Jesus healed, the leprous play a prominent part, as might have been anticipated from the tendency of the climate of Palestine to produce cutaneous disease. When, according to the synoptical writers, Jesus directs the attention of the Baptist’s messengers to the actual proofs which he had given of his Messiahship (Matt. ix. 5), he adduces among these, the cleansing of lepers; when, on the first mission of the disciples, he empowers them to perform all kinds of miracles, the cleansing of lepers is numbered among the first (Matt. x. 8), and two cases of such cures are narrated to us in detail.

One of these cases is common to all the synoptical writers, but is placed by them in two different connexions: namely, by Matthew, immediately after the delivery of the Sermon on the Mount (viii. 1 ff.); by the other Evangelists, at some period, not precisely marked, at the beginning of the ministry of Jesus in Galilee (Mark i. 40 ff.; Luke v. 12 ff.). According to the narratives, a leper comes towards Jesus, and falling on his knees, entreats that he may be cleansed; this Jesus effects by a touch, and then directs the leper to present himself to the priest in obedience to the law, that he may be pronounced clean (Lev. xiv. 2 ff.). The state of the man is in Matthew and Mark described simply by the word λεπρὸς, a leper; but in Luke more strongly, by the words, πλήρης λέπρας, full of leprosy. Paulus, indeed, regards the being thus replete with leprosy as a symptom that the patient was curable (the eruption and peeling of the leprosy on the entire skin being indicative of the healing crisis); and accordingly, that commentator represents the incident to himself in the following manner. The leper applied to Jesus in his character of Messiah for an opinion on his state, and, the result being favourable, for a declaration that he was clean (εἰ θέλεις, δύνασαί με καθαρίσαι), which might either spare him an application to the priest, or at all events give him a consolatory hope in making that application. Jesus expressing himself ready to make the desired examination (θέλω), stretched out his hand, in order to feel the patient, without allowing too near an approach while he was possibly still capable of communicating contagion; and after a careful examination, he expressed, as its result, the conviction that the patient was no longer in a contagious state (καθαρίσθητι), whereupon quickly and easily (εὐθέως) the leprosy actually disappeared. [1259]

Here, in the first place, the supposition that the leper was precisely at the crisis of healing is foreign to the text, which in the two first Evangelists speaks merely of leprosy, while the πλήρης λέπρας of the third can mean nothing else than the Old Testament expression ‏מְצֹרָע כַּשָּׁלֶג‎ (Exod. iv. 6, Num. xii. 10; 2 Kings v. 27), which, according to the connexion in every instance, signifies the worst stage of leprosy. That the word καθαρίζειν in the Hebraic and Hellenistic use of the Greek language, might also mean merely to pronounce clean is not to be denied, only it must retain the signification throughout the passage. But that after having narrated that Jesus had said, Be thou clean, καθαρίσθητι, Matthew should have added καὶ εὐθέως ἐκαθαρίσθη κ.τ.λ. in the sense that thus the sick man was actually pronounced clean by Jesus, is, from the absurd tautology such an interpretation would introduce, so inconceivable, that we must here, and consequently throughout the narrative, understand the word καθαρίζεσθαι of actual cleansing. It is sufficient to remind the reader of the expressions λεπροὶ καθαρίζονται, the lepers are cleansed (Matt. xi. 5), and λεπροὺς καθαρίζετε, cleanse the lepers (Matt. x. 8), where neither can the latter word signify merely to pronounce clean, nor can it have another meaning than in the narrative before us. But the point in which the natural interpretation the most plainly betrays its weakness, is the disjunction of θέλω, I will, from καθαρίσθητι, be thou clean. Who can persuade himself that these words, united as they are in all the three narratives, were separated by a considerable pause—that θέλω was spoken during or more properly before the manipulation, καθαρίσθητι after, when all the Evangelists represent the two words as having been uttered by Jesus without separation whilst he touched the leper? Surely, if the alleged sense had been the original one, at least one of the Evangelists, instead of the words ἥψατο αὐτοῦ ὁ Ἰησοῦς λέγων· θέλω, καθαρίσθητι, Jesus touched him, saying, I will, be thou clean, would have substituted the more accurate expression, ὁ Ἰ. ἀπεκρίνατο· θέλω, καὶ ἁψάμενος αὐτοῦ εἶπε· καθαρίσθητι, Jesus answered, I will; and having touched him, said: be thou clean. But if καθαρίσθητι was spoken in one breath with θέλω, so that Jesus announces the cleansing simply as a result of his will without any intermediate examination, the former word cannot possibly signify a mere declaration of cleanness, to which a previous examination would be requisite, and it must signify an actual making clean. It follows, therefore, that the word ἅπτεσθαι in this connexion is not to be understood of an exploratory manipulation, but, as in all other narratives of the same class, of a curative touch.

In support of his natural explanation of this incident, Paulus appeals to the rule, that invariably the ordinary and regular is to be presupposed in a narrative where the contrary is not expressly indicated. [1260] But this rule shares the ambiguity which is characteristic of the entire system of natural interpretation, since it leaves undecided what is ordinary and regular in our estimation, and what was so in the ideas of the author whose writings are to be explained. Certainly, if I have a Gibbon before me, I must in his narratives presuppose only natural causes and occurrences when he does not expressly convey the contrary, because to a writer of his cultivation, the supernatural is at the utmost only conceivable as a rare exception. But the case is altered when I take up an Herodotus, in whose mode of thought the intervention of higher powers is by no means unusual and out of rule; and when I am considering a collection of anecdotes which are the product of Jewish soil, and the object of which is to represent an individual as a prophet of the highest rank—as a man in the most intimate connexion with the Deity, to meet with the supernatural is so completely a thing of course, that the rule of the rationalists must here be reversed, and we must say: where, in such narratives, importance is attached to results which, regarded as natural, would have no importance whatever,—there, supernatural causes must be expressly excluded, if we are not to presuppose it the opinion of the narrator that such causes were in action. Moreover, in the history before us, the extraordinary character of the incident is sufficiently indicated by the statement, that the leprosy left the patient immediately on the word of Jesus. Paulus, it is true, contrives, as we have already observed, to interpret this statement as implying a gradual, natural healing, on the ground that εὐθέως, the word by which the Evangelists determine the time of the cure, signifies, according to the different connexions in which it may occur, in one case immediately, in another merely soon, and unobstructedly. Granting this, are we to understand the words εὐθέως ἐξέβαλεν αὐτὸν, which follow in close connexion in Mark (v. 43), as signifying that soon and without hindrance Jesus sent the cleansed leper away? Or is the word to be taken in a different sense in two consecutive verses?

We conclude, then, that in the intention of the evangelical writers the instantaneous disappearance of the leprosy in consequence of the word and touch of Jesus, is the fact on which their narratives turn. Now to represent the possibility of this to one’s self is quite another task than to imagine the instantaneous release of a man under the grasp of a fixed idea, or a permanently invigorating impression on a nervous patient. Leprosy, from the thorough derangement of the animal fluids of which it is the symptom, is the most obstinate and malignant of cutaneous diseases; and that a skin corroded by this malady should by a word and touch instantly become pure and healthy, is, from its involving the immediate effectuation of what would require a long course of treatment, so inconceivable, [1261] that every one who is free from certain prejudices (as the critic ought always to be) must involuntarily be reminded by it of the realm of fable. And in the fabulous region of Oriental and more particularly of Jewish legend, the sudden appearance and disappearance of leprosy presents itself the first thing. When Jehovah endowed Moses, as a preparation for his mission into Egypt, with the power of working all kinds of signs, amongst other tokens of this gift he commanded him to put his hand into his bosom, and when he drew it out again, it was covered with leprosy; again he was commanded to put it into his bosom, and on drawing it out a second time it was once more clean (Exod. iv. 6, 7). Subsequently, on account of an attempt at rebellion against Moses, his sister Miriam was suddenly stricken with leprosy, but on the intercession of Moses was soon healed (Num. xii. 10 ff.). Above all, among the miracles of the prophet Elisha the cure of a leper plays an important part, and to this event Jesus himself refers (Luke iv. 27.). The Syrian general, Naaman, who suffered from leprosy, applied to the Israelitish prophet for his aid; the latter sent to him the direction to wash seven times in the river Jordan, and on Naaman’s observance of this prescription the leprosy actually disappeared but was subsequently transferred by the prophet to his deceitful servant Gehazi (2 Kings v.). I know not what we ought to need beyond these Old Testament narratives to account for the origin of the evangelical anecdotes. What the first Goël was empowered to do in the fulfilment of Jehovah’s commission, the second Goël must also be able to perform and the greatest of prophets must not fall short of the achievements of any one prophet. If then, the cure of leprosy was without doubt included in the Jewish idea of the Messiah; the Christians, who believed the Messiah to have really appeared in the person of Jesus, had a yet more decided inducement to glorify his history by such traits, taken from the Mosaic and prophetic legend; with the single difference that, in accordance with the mild spirit of the New Covenant (Luke ix. 55 f.) they dropped the punitive side of the old miracles.

Somewhat more plausible is the appeal of the rationalists to the absence of an express statement, that a miraculous cure of the leprosy is intended in the narrative of the ten lepers, given by Luke alone (xvii. 12 ff.). Here neither do the lepers expressly desire to be cured, their words being only, Have mercy on us; nor does Jesus utter a command directly referring to such a result, for he merely enjoins them to show themselves to the priests: and the rationalists avail themselves of this indirectness in his reply, as a help to their supposition, that Jesus, after ascertaining the state of the patients, encouraged them to subject themselves to the examination of the priests, which resulted in their being pronounced clean, and the Samaritan returned to thank Jesus for His encouraging advice. [1262] But mere advice does not call forth so ardent a demonstration of gratitude as is here described by the words ἔπεσεν ἐπὶ πρόσωπον, he fell down on his face; still less could Jesus desire that because his advice had had a favourable issue, all the ten should have returned, and returned to glorify God—for what? that he had enabled Jesus to give them such good advice? No: a more real service is here presupposed; and this the narrative itself implies, both in attributing the return of the Samaritan to his discovery that he was healed (ἰδὼν ὅτι ἰάθη), and in making Jesus indicate the reason why thanks were to be expected from all, by the words: οὐχὶ οἱ δέκα ἐκαθαρίσθησαν; Were there not ten cleansed? Both these expressions can only by an extremely forced interpretation be made to imply, that because the lepers saw the correctness of the judgment of Jesus in pronouncing them clean, one of them actually returned to thank him, and the others ought to have returned. But that which is most decisive against the natural explanation is this sentence: And as they went they were cleansed, ἐν τῷ ὑπάγειν αὐτοὺς ἐκαθαρίσθησαν. If the narrator intended, according to the above interpretation, merely to say: the lepers having gone to the priest, and showed themselves to him, were pronounced clean: he must at least have said: πορευθέντες ἐκαθαρίσθησαν, having made the journey they were cleansed, whereas the deliberate choice of the expression ἐν τῷ ὑπάγειν (while in the act of going), incontestibly shows that a healing effected during the journey is intended. Thus here also we have a miraculous cure of leprosy, which is burdened with the same difficulties as the former anecdote; the origin of which is, however, as easily explained.

But in this narrative there is a peculiarity which distinguishes it from the former. Here there is no simple cure, nay, the cure does not properly form the main object of the narrative: this lies rather in the different conduct of the cured, and the question of Jesus, were there not ten cleansed, etc. (v. 17), forms the point of the whole, which thus closes altogether morally, and seems to have been narrated for the sake of the instruction conveyed. [1263] That the one who appears as a model of thankfulness happens to be a Samaritan, cannot pass without remark, in the narrative of the Evangelist who alone has the parable of the Good Samaritan. As there two Jews, a priest and a Levite, show themselves pitiless, while a Samaritan, on the contrary, proves exemplarily compassionate: so here, nine unthankful Jews stand contrasted with one thankful Samaritan. May it not be then (in so far as the sudden cure of these lepers cannot be historical) that we have here, as well as there, a parable pronounced by Jesus, in which he intended to represent gratitude, as in the other case compassion, in the example of a Samaritan? It would then be with the present narrative as some have maintained it to be with the history of the temptation. But in relation to this we have both shown, and given the reason, that Jesus never made himself immediately figure in a parable, and this he must have done if he had given a narrative of ten lepers once healed by him. If then we are not inclined to relinquish the idea that something originally parabolic is the germ of our present narrative, we must represent the case to ourselves thus: from the legends of cures performed by Jesus on lepers, on the one hand; and on the other, from parables in which Jesus (as in that of the compassionate Samaritan) presented individuals of this hated race as models of various virtues, the Christian legend wove this narrative, which is therefore partly an account of a miracle and partly a parable.

§ 95.

CURES OF THE BLIND.

One of the first places among the sufferers cured by Jesus is filled (also agreeably to the nature of the climate [1264]) by the blind, of whose cure again we read not only in the general descriptions which are given by the Evangelists (Matt. xv. 30 f.; Luke vii. 21), and by Jesus himself (Matt. xi. 5), of his messianic works, but also in some detailed narratives of particular cases. We have indeed more of these cures than of the kind last noticed, doubtless because blindness, as a malady affecting the most delicate and complicated of organs, admitted a greater diversity of treatment. One of these cures of the blind is common to all the synoptical writers; the others (with the exception of the blind and dumb demoniac in Matthew, whom we need not here reconsider) are respectively peculiar to the first, second, and fourth Evangelists.

The narrative common to all the three synoptical writers is that of a cure of blindness wrought by Jesus at Jericho, on his last journey to Jerusalem (Matt. xx. 29 parall.): but there are important differences both as to the object of the cure, Matthew having two blind men, the two other Evangelists only one; and also as to its locality, Luke making it take place on the entrance of Jesus into Jericho, Matthew and Mark on his departure out of Jericho. Moreover the touching of the eyes, by which, according to the first evangelist, Jesus effected the cure, is not mentioned by the two other narrators. Of these differences the latter may be explained by the observation, that though Mark and Luke are silent as to the touching, they do not therefore deny it: the first, relative to the number cured, presents a heavier difficulty. To remove this it has been said by those who give the prior authority to Matthew, that one of the two blind men was possibly more remarkable than the other, on which account he alone was retained in the first tradition; but Matthew, as an eye-witness, afterwards supplied the second blind man. On this supposition Luke and Mark do not contradict Matthew, for they nowhere deny that another besides their single blind man was healed; neither does Matthew contradict them, for where there are two, there is also one. [1265] But when the simple narrator speaks of one individual in whom something extraordinary has happened, and even, like Mark, mentions his name, it is plain that he tacitly contradicts the statement that it happened in two individuals—to contradict it expressly there was no occasion. Let us turn then to the other side and, taking the singular number of Mark and Luke as the original one, conjecture that the informant of Matthew (the latter being scarcely on this hypothesis an eye-witness) probably mistook the blind man’s guide for a second blind man. [1266] Hereby a decided contradiction is admitted, while to account for it an extremely improbable cause is superfluously invented. The third difference relates to the place; Matthew and Mark have ἐκπορευομένων ἀπὸ, as they departed from, Luke, ἐν τῷ ἐγγίζειν εἰς Ἱεριχὼ, as they came nigh to Jericho. If there be any whom the words themselves fail to convince that this difference is irreconcilable, let them read the forced attempts to render these passages consistent with each other, which have been made by commentators from Grotius down to Paulus.

Hence it was a better expedient which the older harmonists [1267] adopted, and which has been approved by some modern critics. [1268] In consideration of the last-named difference, they here distinguished two events, and held that Jesus cured a blind man first on his entrance into Jericho (according to Luke), and then again on his departure from that place (according to Matthew and Luke). Of the other divergency, relative to the number, these harmonists believed that they had disencumbered themselves by the supposition that Matthew connected in one event the two blind men, the one cured on entering and the other on leaving Jericho, and gave the latter position to the cure of both. But if so much weight is allowed to the statement of Matthew relative to the locality of the cure, as to make it, in conjunction with that of Mark, a reason for supposing two cures, one at each extremity of the town, I know not why equal credit should not be given to his numerical statement, and Storr appears to me to proceed more consistently when, allowing equal weight to both differences, he supposes that Jesus on his entrance into Jericho, cured one blind man (Luke) and subsequently on his departure two (Matthew). [1269] The claim of Matthew is thus fully vindicated, but on the other hand that of Mark is denied. For if the latter be associated with Matthew, as is here the case, for the sake of his locality, it is necessary to do violence to his numerical statement, which taken alone would rather require him to be associated with Luke; so that to avoid impeaching either of his statements, which on this system of interpretation is not admissible, his narrative must be equally detached from that of both the other Evangelists. Thus we should have three distinct cures of the blind at Jericho: 1st, the cure of one blind man on the entrance of Jesus, 2nd, that of another on his departure, and 3rd, the cure of two blind men, also during the departure; in all, of four blind men. Now to separate the second and third cases is indeed difficult. For it will not be maintained that Jesus can have gone out by two different gates at the same time, and it is nearly as difficult to imagine that having merely set out with the intention of leaving Jericho, he returned again into the town, and not until afterwards took his final departure. But, viewing the case more generally, it is scarcely an admissible supposition, that three incidents so entirely similar thus fell together in a group. The accumulation of cures of the blind is enough to surprise us; but the behaviour of the companions of Jesus is incomprehensible; for after having seen in the first instance, on entering Jericho, that they had acted in opposition to the designs of Jesus by rebuking the blind man for his importunity, since Jesus called the man to him, they nevertheless repeated this conduct on the second and even on the third occasion. Storr, it is true, is not disconcerted by this repetition in at least two incidents of this kind, for he maintains that no one knows whether those who had enjoined silence on going out of Jericho were not altogether different persons from those who had done the like on entering the town: indeed, supposing them to be the same, such a repetition of conduct which Jesus had implicitly disapproved, however unbecoming, was not therefore impossible, since even the disciples who had been present at the first miraculous feeding, yet asked, before the second, whence bread could be had for such a multitude?—but this is merely to argue the reality of one impossibility from that of another, as we shall presently see when we enter on the consideration of the two miraculous feedings. Further, not only the conduct of the followers of Jesus, but also almost every feature of the incident must have been repeated in the most extraordinary manner. In the one case as in the other, the blind men cry, Have mercy upon us, (or me,) thou son of David; then (after silence has been enjoined on them by the spectators) Jesus commands that they should be brought to him: he next asks what they will that he should do to them; they answer, that we may receive our sight; he complies with their wish, and they gratefully follow him. That all this was so exactly repeated thrice, or even twice, is an improbability amounting to an impossibility; and we must suppose, according to the hypothesis adopted by Sieffert in such cases, a legendary assimilation of different facts, or a traditionary variation of a single occurrence. If, in order to arrive at a decision, it be asked: what could more easily happen, when once the intervention of the legend is presupposed, than that one and the same history should be told first of one, then of several, first of the entrance, then of the departure? it will not be necessary to discuss the other possibility, since this is so incomparably more probable that there cannot be even a momentary hesitation in embracing it as real. But in thus reducing the number of the facts, we must not with Sieffert stop short at two, for in that case not only do the difficulties with respect to the repetition of the same incident remain, but we fall into a want of logical sequency in admitting one divergency (in the number) as unessential, for the sake of removing another (in the locality). If it be further asked, supposing only one incident to be here narrated, which of the several narratives is the original one? the statements as to the locality will not aid us in coming to a decision; for Jesus might just as well meet a blind man on entering as on leaving Jericho. The difference in the number is more likely to furnish us with a basis for a decision, and it will be in favour of Mark and Luke, who have each only one blind man; not, it is true, for the reason alleged by Schleiermacher, [1270] namely, that Mark, by his mention of the blind man’s name, evinces a more accurate acquaintance with the circumstances; for Mark, from his propensity to individualize out of his own imagination, ought least of all to be trusted with respect to names which are given by him alone. Our decision is founded on another circumstance.

It seems probable that Matthew was led to add a second blind man by his recollection of a previous cure of two blind men narrated by him alone (ix. 27 ff.). Here, likewise, when Jesus is in the act of departure,—from the place, namely, where he had raised the ruler’s daughter,—two blind men follow him (those at Jericho are sitting by the way side), and in a similar manner cry for mercy of the Son of David, who here also, as in the other instance, according to Matthew, immediately cures them by touching their eyes. With these similarities there are certainly no slight divergencies; nothing is here said of an injunction to the blind men to be silent, on the part of the companions of Jesus; and, while at Jericho Jesus immediately calls the blind men to him, in the earlier case, they come in the first instance to him when he is again in the house; further, while there he asks them, what they will have him to do to them? here he asks, if they believe him able to cure them? Lastly, the prohibition to tell what had happened, is peculiar to the earlier incident. The two narratives standing in this relation to each other, an assimilation of them might have taken place thus: Matthew transferred the two blind men and the touch of Jesus from the first anecdote to the second; the form of the appeal from the blind men, from the second to the first.

The two histories, as they are given, present but few data for a natural explanation. Nevertheless the rationalistic commentators have endeavoured to frame such an explanation. When Jesus in the earlier occurrence asked the blind men whether they had confidence in his power, he wished, say they, to ascertain whether their trust in him would remain firm during the operation, and whether they would punctually observe his further prescriptions; [1271] having then entered the house, in order to be free from interruption, he examined, for the first time, their disease, and when he found it curable (according to Venturini [1272] it was caused by the fine dust of that country), he assured the sufferers that the result should be according to the measure of their faith. Hereupon Paulus merely says briefly, that Jesus removed the obstruction to their vision; but he also must have imagined to himself something similar to what is described in detail by Venturini, who makes Jesus anoint the eyes of the blind men with a strong water prepared beforehand, and thus cleanse them from the irritating dust, so that in a short time their sight returned. But this natural explanation has not the slightest root in the text; for neither can the faith (πίστις) required from the patient imply anything else than, as in all similar cases, trust in the miraculous power of Jesus, nor can the word ἥψατο, he touched, signify a surgical operation, but merely that touch which appears in so many of the evangelical curative miracles, whether as a sign or a conductor of the healing power of Jesus; of further prescriptions for the completion of the cure there is absolutely nothing. It is not otherwise with the cure of the blind at Jericho, where, moreover, the two middle Evangelists do not even mention the touching of the eyes.

If then, according to the meaning of the narrators, the blind instantaneously receive their sight as a consequence of the simple word or touch of Jesus, there are the same difficulties to be encountered here as in the former case of the lepers. For a disease of the eyes, however slight, as it is only engendered gradually by the reiterated action of the disturbing cause, is still less likely to disappear on a word or a touch; it requires very complicated treatment, partly surgical, partly medical, and this must be pre-eminently the case with blindness, supposing it to be of a curable kind. How should we represent to ourselves the sudden restoration of vision to a blind eye by a word or a touch? as purely miraculous and magical? That would be to give up thinking on the subject. As magnetic? There is no precedent of magnetism having influence over a disease of this nature. Or, lastly, as psychical? But blindness is something so independent of the mental life, so entirely corporeal, that the idea of its removal at all, still less of its sudden removal by means of a mental operation, is not to be entertained. We must therefore acknowledge that an historical conception of these narratives is more than merely difficult to us; and we proceed to inquire whether we cannot show it to be probable that legends of this kind should arise unhistorically.

We have already quoted the passage in which, according to the first and third gospels, Jesus in reply to the messengers of the Baptist who had to ask him whether he were the ἐρχόμενος (he that should come), appeals to his works. Now he here mentions in the very first place the cure of the blind, a significant proof that this particular miracle was expected from the Messiah, his words being taken from Isa. xxxv. 5, a prophecy interpreted messianically; and in a rabbinical passage above cited, among the wonders which Jehovah is to perform in the messianic times, this is enumerated, that he oculos cæcorum aperiet, id quod per Elisam fecit. [1273] Now Elisha did not cure a positive blindness, but merely on one occasion opened the eyes of his servant to a perception of the supersensual world, and on another, removed a blindness which had been inflicted on his enemies in consequence of his prayer (2 Kings vi. 17–20). That these deeds of Elisha were conceived, doubtless with reference to the passage of Isaiah, as a real opening of the eyes of the blind, is proved by the above rabbinical passage, and hence cures of the blind were expected from the Messiah. [1274] Now if the Christian community, proceeding as it did from the bosom of Judaism, held Jesus to be the messianic personage, it must manifest the tendency to ascribe to him every messianic predicate, and therefore the one in question.

The narrative of the cure of a blind man at Bethsaida, and that of the cure of a man that was deaf and had an impediment in his speech, which are both peculiar to Mark (viii. 22 ff., vii. 32 ff.), and which we shall therefore consider together, are the especial favourites of all rationalistic commentators. If, they exclaim, in the other evangelical narratives of cures, the accessory circumstances by which the facts might be explained were but preserved as they are here, we could prove historically that Jesus did not heal by his mere word, and profound investigators might discover the natural means by which his cures were effected! [1275] And in fact chiefly on the ground of these narratives, in connexion with particular features in other parts of the second gospel, Mark has of late been represented, even by theologians who do not greatly favour this method of interpretation, as the patron of the naturalistic system. [1276]

In the two cures before us, it is at once a good augury for the rationalistic commentators that Jesus takes both the patients apart from the multitude, for no other purpose, as they believe, than that of examining their condition medically, and ascertaining whether it were susceptible of relief. Such an examination is, according to these commentators, intimated by the Evangelist himself, when he describes Jesus as putting his fingers into the ears of the deaf man, by which means he discovered that the deafness was curable, arising probably from the hardening of secretions in the ear, and hereupon, also with the finger, he removed the hindrance to hearing. Not only are the words, he put his fingers into his ears, ἔβαλε τοὺς δακτύλους εἰς τὰ ὦτα, interpreted as denoting a surgical operation, but the words, he touched his tongue, ἥψατο τῆς γλώσσης, are supposed to imply that Jesus cut the ligament of the tongue in the degree necessary to restore the pliancy which the organ had lost. In like manner, in the case of the blind man, the words, when he had put his hands upon him, ἐπιθεὶς τὰς χεῖρας αὐτῷ, are explained as probably meaning that Jesus by pressing the eyes of the patient removed the crystalline lens which had become opaque. A further help to this mode of interpretation is found in the circumstance that both to the tongue of the man who had an impediment in his speech, and to the eyes of the blind man, Jesus applied spittle. Saliva has in itself, particularly in the opinion of ancient physicians, [1277] a salutary effect on the eyes; as, however, it in no case acts so rapidly as instantaneously to cure blindness and a defect in the organs of speech, it is conjectured, with respect to both instances, that Jesus used the saliva to moisten some medicament, probably a caustic powder; that the blind man only heard the spitting and saw nothing of the mixture of the medicaments, and that the deaf man, in accordance with the spirit of the age, gave little heed to the natural means, or that the legend did not preserve them. In the narrative of the deaf man the cure is simply stated, but that of the blind man is yet further distinguished, by its representing the restoration of his sight circumstantially, as gradual. After Jesus had touched the eyes of the patient as above mentioned, he asked him if he saw aught; not at all, observes Paulus, in the manner of a miracle-worker, who is sure of the result, but precisely in the manner of a physician, who after performing an operation endeavours to ascertain if the patient is benefited. The blind man answers that he sees, but first indistinctly, so that men seem to him like trees. Here apparently the rationalistic commentator may triumphantly ask the orthodox one: if divine power for the working of cures stood at the command of Jesus, why did he not at once cure the blind man perfectly? If the disease presented an obstacle which he was not able to overcome, is it not clear from thence that his power was a finite, ordinarily human power? Jesus once more puts his hands on the eyes of the blind man, in order to aid the effect of the first operation, and only then is the cure completed. [1278]

The complacency of the rationalistic commentators in these narratives of Mark, is liable to be disturbed by the frigid observation, that, here also, the circumstances which are requisite to render the natural explanation possible are not given by the Evangelists themselves, but are interpolated by the said commentators. For in both cures Mark furnishes the saliva only; the efficacious powder is infused by Paulus and Venturini: it is they alone who make the introduction of the fingers into the ears first a medical examination and then an operation; and it is they alone who, contrary to the signification of language, explain the words ἐπιτιθέναι τὰς χεῖρας ἐπὶ τοὺς ὀφθαλμοὺς, to lay the hands upon the eyes, as implying a surgical operation on those organs. Again, the circumstance that Jesus takes the blind man aside, is shown by the context (vii. 36, viii. 26) to have reference to the design of Jesus to keep the miraculous result a secret, not to the desire to be undisturbed in the application of natural means: so that all the supports of the rationalistic explanation sink beneath it, and the orthodox one may confront it anew. This regards the touch and the spittle either as a condescension towards the sufferers, who were thereby made more thoroughly sensible to whose power they owed their cure; or as a conducting medium for the spiritual power of Christ, a medium with which he might nevertheless have dispensed. [1279] That the cure was gradual, is on this system accounted for by the supposition, that Jesus intended by means of the partial cure to animate the faith of the blind man, and only when he was thus rendered worthy was he completely cured; [1280] or it is conjectured that, owing to the malady being deep-seated, a sudden cure would perhaps have been dangerous. [1281]

But by these attempts to interpret the evangelical narratives, especially in the last particular, the supernaturalistic theologians, who bring them forward, betake themselves to the same ground as the rationalists, for they are equally open to the charge of introducing into the narratives what is not in the remotest degree intimated by the text. For where, in the procedure of Jesus towards the blind man, is there a trace that his design in the first instance was to prove and to strengthen the faith of the patient? In that case, instead of the expression, He asked him if he saw aught, which relates only to his external condition, we must rather have read, as in Matt. ix. 28, Believe ye that I am able to do this? But what shall we say to the conjecture that a sudden cure might have been injurious! The curative act of a worker of miracles is (according to Olshausen’s own opinion) not to be regarded as the merely negative one of the removal of a disease, but also as the positive one of an impartation of new and fresh strength to the organ affected, whence the idea of danger from an instantaneous cure when wrought by miraculous agency, is not to be entertained. Thus no motive is to be discovered which could induce Jesus to put a restraint on the immediate action of his miraculous power, and it must therefore have been restricted, independently of his volition, by the force of the deep-seated malady. This, however, is entirely opposed to the idea of the gospels, which represent the miraculous power of Jesus as superior to death itself; it cannot therefore have been the meaning of our Evangelists. If we take into consideration the peculiar characteristics of Mark as an author, it will appear that his only aim is to give dramatic effect to the scene. Every sudden result is difficult to bring before the imagination: he who wishes to give to another a vivid idea of a rapid movement, first goes through it slowly, and a quick result is perfectly conceivable only when the narrator has shown the process in detail. Consequently a writer whose object it is to assist as far as may be the imagination of his reader, will wherever it is possible exhibit the propensity to render the immediate mediate, and when recording a sudden result, still to bring forward the successive steps that led to it. [1282] So here Mark, or his informant, supposed that he was contributing greatly to the dramatic effect, when he inserted between the blindness of the man and the entire restoration of his sight, the partial cure, or the seeing men as trees, and every reader will say, from his own feeling, that this object is fully achieved. But herein, as others also have remarked, [1283] Mark is so far from manifesting an inclination to the natural conception of such miracles, that he, on the contrary, not seldom labours to aggrandize the miracle, as we have partly seen in the case of the Gadarene, and shall yet have frequent reason to remark. In a similar manner may also be explained why Mark in these narratives which are peculiar to him (and elsewhere also, as in vi. 13, where he observes that the disciples anointed the sick with oil), mentions the application of external means and manifestations in miraculous cures. That these means, the saliva particularly, were not in the popular opinion of that age naturally efficacious causes of the cure, we may be convinced by the narrative concerning Vespasian quoted above, as also by passages of Jewish and Roman authors, according to which saliva was believed to have a magical potency, especially against diseases of the eye. [1284] Hence Olshausen perfectly reproduces the conception of that age when he explains the touch, saliva, and the like, to be conductors of the superior power resident in the worker of miracles. We cannot indeed make this opinion ours, unless with Olshausen we proceed upon the supposition of a parallelism between the miraculous power of Jesus and the agency of animal magnetism: a supposition which, for the explanation of the miracles of Jesus, especially of the one before us, is inadequate and therefore superfluous. Hence we put this means merely to the account of the Evangelist. To him also we may then doubtless refer the taking aside of the blind man, the exaggerated description of the astonishment of the people, (ὑπερπερισσῶς ἐξπλήσσοντο ἅπαντες, vii. 37,) and the strict prohibition to tell any man of the cure. This secrecy gave the affair a mysterious aspect, which, as we may gather from other passages, was pleasing to Mark. We have another trait belonging to the mysterious in the narratives of the cure of the deaf man, where Mark says, And looking up to heaven he sighed (vii. 34). What cause was there for sighing at that particular moment? Was it the misery of the human race, [1285] which must have been long known to Jesus from many melancholy examples? Or shall we evade the difficulty by explaining the expression as implying nothing further than silent prayer or audible speech? [1286] Whoever knows Mark will rather recognise the exaggerating narrator in the circumstance that he ascribes to Jesus a deep emotion, on an occasion which could not indeed have excited it, but which, being accompanied by it, had a more mysterious appearance. But above all, there appears to me to be an air of mystery in this, that Mark gives the authoritative word with which Jesus opened the ears of the deaf man in its original Syriac form, ἐφφαθὰ, as on the resuscitation of the daughter of Jairus, this Evangelist alone has the words ταλιθὰ κοῦμι (v. 41). It is indeed said that these expressions are anything rather than magical forms; [1287] but that Mark chooses to give these authoritative words in a language foreign to his readers, to whom he is obliged at the same time to explain them, nevertheless proves that he must have attributed to this original form a special significance, which, as it appears from the context, can only have been a magical one. This inclination to the mysterious we may now retrospectively find indicated in the application of those outward means which have no relation to the result; for the mysterious consists precisely in the presentation of infinite power through a finite medium, in the combination of the strongest effect with apparently inefficacious means.

If we have been unable to receive as historical the simple narrative given by all the synoptical writers of the cure of the blind man at Jericho, we are still less prepared to award this character to the mysterious description, given by Mark alone, of the cure of a blind man at Bethsaida, and we must regard it as a product of the legend, with more or less addition from the evangelical narrator. The same judgment must be pronounced on his narrative of the cure of the deaf man who had an impediment in his speech κωφὸς μογιλάλος; for, together with the negative reasons already adduced against its historical credibility, there are not wanting positive causes for its mythical origin, since the prophecy relating to the messianic times, τότε ὦτα κωφῶν ἀκούσονται—τρανὴ δὲ ἔσται γλῶσσα μογιλάλων, the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped, the tongue of the dumb shall sing (Isa. xxxv. 5, 6), was in existence, and according to Matt. xi. 5, was interpreted literally.

If the narratives of Mark which we have just considered, seem at the first glance to be favourable to the natural explanation, the narrative of John, chap. ix., must, one would think, be unfavourable and destructive to it; for here the question is not concerning a blind man, whose malady having originated accidentally, might be easier to remove, but concerning a man born blind. Nevertheless, as the expositors of this class are sharp-sighted, and do not soon lose courage, they are able even here to discover much in their favour. In the first place, they find that the condition of the patient is but vaguely described, however definite the expression, blind from his birth, τυφλὸν ἐκ γενετῆς may seem to sound. The statement of time which this expression includes, Paulus, it is true, refrains from overthrowing (though his forbearance is unwilling and in fact incomplete): hence he has the more urgent necessity for attempting to shake the statement as to quality. Τυφλὸς is not to signify total blindness, and as Jesus tells the man to go to the pool of Siloam, not to get himself led thither, he must have still had some glimmering of eye-sight, by means of which he could himself find the way thither. Still more help do the rationalistic commentators find for themselves in the mode of cure adopted by Jesus. He says beforehand (v. 4) he must work the works of him that sent him while it is day, ἕως ἡμέρα ἐστὶν, for in the night no man can work; a sufficient proof that he had not the idea of curing the blind man by a mere word, which he might just as well have uttered in the night—that, on the contrary, he intended to undertake a medical or surgical operation, for which certainly daylight was required. Further, the clay, πηλὸς, which Jesus made with his spittle, and with which he anointed the eyes of the blind man, is still more favourable to the natural explanation than the expression πτύσας having spit, in a former case, and hence it is a fertile source of questions and conjectures. Whence did John know that Jesus took nothing more than spittle and dust to make his eye-salve? Was he himself present, or did he understand it merely from the narrative of the cured blind man? The latter could not: with his then weak glimmering of sight, correctly see what Jesus took: perhaps Jesus while he mixed a salve out of other ingredients accidentally spat upon the ground, and the patient fell into the error of supposing that the spittle made part of the salve. Still more: while or before Jesus put something on the eyes, did he not also remove something by extraction or friction, or otherwise effect a change in the state of these organs? This would be an essential fact which might easily be mistaken by the blind man and the spectators for a merely accessory circumstance. Lastly, the washing in the pool of Siloam which was prescribed to the patient was perhaps continued many days—was a protracted cure by means of the bath—and the words ἦλθε βλέπων he came seeing, do not necessarily imply that he came thus after his first bath, but that at a convenient time after the completion of his cure, he came again seeing. [1288]

But, to begin at the beginning, the meaning here given to ἡμέρα and νὺξ is too shallow even for Venturini, [1289] and especially clashes with the context (v. 5), which throughout demands an interpretation of the words with reference to the speedy departure of Jesus. [1290] As to the conjecture that the clay was made of medicinal ingredients of some kind or other, it is the more groundless, since it cannot be said here, as in the former case, that only so much is stated as the patient could learn by his hearing or by a slight glimmering of light, for, on this occasion, Jesus undertook the cure, not in private, but in the presence of his disciples. Concerning the further supposition of previous surgical operations, by which the anointing and washing, alone mentioned in the text, are reduced to mere accessories, nothing more is to be said, than that by this example we may see how completely the spirit of natural explanation despises all restraints, not scrupling to pervert the clearest words of the text in support of its arbitrary combinations. Further, when, from the circumstance that Jesus ordered the blind man to go to the pool of Siloam, it is inferred that he must have had a share of light, we may remark, in opposition to this, that Jesus merely told the patient whither he should go (ὑπάγεν); how he was to go, whether alone or with a guide, he left to his own discretion. Lastly, when the closely connected words he went his way, therefore, and washed and came seeing, ἀπῆλθεν οὖν καὶ ἐνίψατο καὶ ἦλθε βλέπων (v. 7; comp. v. 11) are stretched out into a process of cure lasting several weeks, it is just as if the words veni, vidi, vici, were translated thus: After my arrival I reconnoitred for several days, fought battles at suitable intervals, and finally remained conqueror.

Thus here also the natural explanation will not serve us, and we have still before us the narrative of a man born blind, miraculously cured by Jesus. That the doubts already expressed as to the reality of the cures of the blind, apply with increased force to the case of a man born blind, is self-evident. And they are aided in this instance by certain special critical reasons. Not one of three first Evangelists mentions this cure. Now, if in the formation of the apostolic tradition, and in the selection which it made from among the miracles of Jesus, any kind of reason was exercised, it must have taken the shape of the two following rules: first, to choose the greater miracles before those apparently less important; and secondly, those with which edifying discourses were connected, before those which were not thus distinguished. In the first respect, it is plain that the cure of a man blind from his birth, as the incomparably more difficult miracle, was by all means to be chosen rather than that of a man in whom blindness had supervened, and it is not to be conceived why, if Jesus really gave sight to a man born blind, nothing of this should have entered into the evangelical tradition, and from thence into the synoptical gospels. It is true that with this consideration of the magnitude of the miracles, a regard to the edifying nature of the discourses connected with them might not seldom come into collision, so that a less striking, but from the conversations which it caused, a more instructive miracle, might be preferred to one more striking, but presenting less of the latter kind of interest. But the cure of the blind man in John is accompanied by very remarkable conversations, first, of Jesus with the disciples, then, of the cured man with the magistrates, and lastly of Jesus with the cured man, such as there is no trace of in the synoptical cures of the blind; conversations in which, if not the entire course of the dialogue, at least some aphoristic pearls (as v. 4, 5, 39), were admirably suited to the purpose of three first Evangelists. These writers, therefore, could not have failed to introduce the cure of the man born blind into their histories, instead of their less remarkable and less edifying cures of the blind, if the former had made a part of the evangelical tradition whence they drew. It might possibly have remained unknown to the general Christian tradition, if it had taken place at a time and under circumstances which did not favour its promulgation—if it had been effected in a remote corner of the country, without further witnesses. But Jesus performed this miracle in Jerusalem, in the circle of his disciples; it made a great sensation in the city, and was highly offensive to the magistracy, hence the affair must have been known if it had really occurred; and as we do not find it in the common evangelical tradition, the suspicion arises that it perhaps never did occur.

But it will be said, the writer who attests it is the Apostle John. This, however, is too improbable, not only on account of the incredible nature of the contents of the narrative, which could thus hardly have proceeded from an eyewitness, but also from another reason. The narrator interprets the name of the pool, Siloam, by the Greek ἀπεσταλμένος (v. 7); a false explanation, for one who is sent is called ‏שָׁלוּחַ‎, whereas ‏שִּׁלחַ‎ according to the most probable interpretation signifies a waterfall. [1291] The Evangelist, however, chose the above interpretation, because he sought for some significant relation between the name of the pool, and the sending thither of the blind man, and thus seems to have imagined that the pool had by a special providence received the name of Sent, because at a future time the Messiah, as a manifestation of his glory, was to send thither a blind man. [1292] Now, we grant that an apostle might give a grammatically incorrect explanation, in so far as he is not held to be inspired, and that even a native of Palestine might mistake the etymology of Hebrew words, as the Old Testament itself shows; nevertheless, such a play upon words looks more like the laboured attempt of a writer remote from the event, than of an eye-witness. The eye-witness would have had enough of important matters in the miracle which he had beheld, and the conversation to which he had listened; only a remote narrator could fall into the triviality of trying to extort a significant meaning from the smallest accessory circumstance. Tholuck and Lücke are highly revolted by this allegory, which, as the latter expresses himself, approaches to absolute folly, hence they are unwilling to admit that it proceeded from John, and regard it as a gloss. As, however, all critical authorities, except one of minor importance, present this particular, such a position is sheer arbitrariness, and the only choice left us is either with Olshausen, to edify ourselves by this interpretation as an apostolic one, [1293] or, with the author of the Probabilia, to number it among the indications that the fourth gospel had not an apostolic origin. [1294]

The reasons which might prevent the author of the fourth gospel, or the tradition whence he drew, from resting contented with the cures of the blind narrated by the synoptical writers, and thus induce the one or the other to frame the history before us, are already pointed out by the foregoing remarks. The observation has been already made by others, that the fourth Evangelist has fewer miracles than the synoptical writers, but that this deficiency in number is compensated by a superiority in magnitude. [1295] Thus while the other Evangelists have simple paralytics cured by Jesus, the fourth gospel has one who had been lame thirty-eight years; while, in the former, Jesus resuscitates persons who had just expired, in the latter, he calls back to life one who had lain in the grave four days, in whom therefore it might be presumed that decomposition had begun; and so here, instead of a cure of simple blindness, we have that of a man born blind,—a heightening of the miracle altogether suited to the apologetic and dogmatic tendency of this gospel. In what way the author, or the particular tradition which he followed, might be led to depict the various details of the narrative, is easily seen. The act of spitting, πτύειν, was common in magical cures of the eyes; clay, πηλὸς, was a ready substitute for an eye-salve, and elsewhere occurs in magical proceedings; [1296] the command to wash in the pool of Siloam may have been an imitation of Elisha’s order, that the leper Naaman should bathe seven times in the river Jordan. The conversations connected with the cure partly proceed from the tendency of the Gospel of John already remarked by Storr, namely, to attest and to render as authentic as possible both the cure of the man, and the fact of his having been born blind, whence the repeated examination of the cured man, and even of his parents; partly they turn upon the symbolical meaning of the expressions, blind and seeing, day and night,—a meaning which it is true is not foreign to the synoptical writers, but which specifically belongs to the circle of images in favour with John.

§ 96.

CURES OF PARALYTICS. DID JESUS REGARD DISEASES AS PUNISHMENTS?

An important feature in the history of the cure of the man born blind has been passed over, because it can only be properly estimated in connexion with a corresponding one in the synoptical narratives of the cure of a paralytic (Matt. ix. 1 ff.; Mark ii. 1 ff.; Luke v. 17 ff.), which we have in the next place to consider. Here Jesus first declares to the sick man: ἀφέωνταί σοί αἱ ἁμαρτίαι σου, thy sins are forgiven thee, and then as a proof that he had authority to forgive sins, he cures him. It is impossible not to perceive in this a reference to the Jewish opinion, that any evil befalling an individual, and especially disease, was a punishment of his sins; an opinion which, presented in its main elements in the Old Testament (Lev. xxvi. 14 ff.; Deut. xxviii. 15 ff.; 2 Chron. xxi. 15, 18 f.) was expressed in the most definite manner by the later Jews. [1297] Had we possessed that synoptical narrative only, we must have believed that Jesus shared the opinion of his cotemporary fellow-countrymen on this subject, since he proves his authority to forgive sins (as the cause of disease) by an example of his power to cure disease (the consequence of sin). But, it is said, there are other passages where Jesus directly contradicts this Jewish opinion; whence it follows, that what he then says to the paralytic was a mere accommodation to the ideas of the sick man, intended to promote his cure. [1298]

The principal passage commonly adduced in support of this position, is the introduction to the history of the man born blind, which was last considered (John ix. 1–3). Here the disciples, seeing on the road the man whom they knew to have been blind from his birth, put to Jesus the question, whether his blindness was the consequence of his own sins, or of those of his parents? The case was a peculiarly difficult one on the Jewish theory of retribution. With respect to diseases which attach themselves to a man in his course through life, an observer who has once taken a certain bias, may easily discover or assume some peculiar delinquencies on the part of this man as their cause. With respect to inborn diseases, on the contrary, though the old Hebraic opinion (Exod. xx. 5; Deut. v. 9; 2 Sam. iii. 29), it is true, presented the explanation that by these the sins of the fathers were visited on their posterity: yet as, for human regulations, the Mosaic law itself ordained that each should suffer for his own sins alone (Deut. xxiv. 16; 2 Kings xiv. 6); and as also, in relation to the penal justice of the Divine Being, the prophets predicted a similar dispensation (Jer. xxxi. 30; Ezek. xviii. 19 f.); rabbinical acumen resorted to the expedient of supposing, that men so afflicted might probably have sinned in their mother’s womb, [1299] and this was doubtless the notion which the disciples had in view in their question, v. 2. Jesus says, in answer, that neither for his own sin nor for that of his parents, did this man come into the world blind; but in order that by the cure which he, as the Messiah, would effect in him, he might be an instrument in manifesting the miraculous power of God. This is generally understood as if Jesus repudiated the whole opinion, that disease and other evils were essentially punishments of sin. But the words of Jesus are expressly limited to the case before him; he simply says, that this particular misfortune had its foundation, not in the guilt of the individual, but in higher providential designs. The supposition that his expressions had a more general sense, and included a repudiation of the entire Jewish opinion, could only be warranted by other more decided declarations from him to that effect. As, on the contrary, according to the above observations, a narrative is found in the synoptical gospels which, simply interpreted, implies the concurrence of Jesus in the prevalent opinion, the question arises: which is easier, to regard the expression of Jesus in the synoptical narratives as an accommodation, or that in John as having relation solely to the case immediately before him?—a question which will be decided in favour of the latter alternative by every one who, on the one hand, knows the difficulties attending the hypothesis of accommodation as applied to the expressions of Jesus in the gospels, and on the other, is clear-sighted enough to perceive, that in the passage in question in the fourth gospel, there is not the slightest intimation that the declaration of Jesus had a more general meaning.

It is true that according to correct principles of interpretation, one Evangelist ought not to be explained immediately by another, and in the present case it is very possible that while the synoptical writers ascribe to Jesus the common opinion of his age, the more highly cultivated author of the fourth gospel may make him reject it: but that he also confined the rejection of the current opinion on the part of Jesus to that single case, is proved by the manner in which he represents Jesus as speaking on another occasion. When, namely, Jesus says to the man who had been lame thirty-eight years (John v.) and had just been cured, μηκέτι ἁμάρτανε, ἵνα μὴ χεῖρόν τί σοι γένηται (v. 14), Sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee; this is equivalent to his saying to the paralytic whom he was about to cure, ἀφέωνταί σοι αἱ ἁμαρτίαι σου, thy sins are forgiven thee: in the one case disease is removed, in the other threatened, as a punishment of sin. But here again the expositors, to whom it is not agreeable that Jesus should hold an opinion which they reject, find a means of evading the direct sense of the words. Jesus, say they, perceived that the particular disease of this man was a natural consequence of certain excesses, and warned him from a repetition of these as calculated to bring on a more dangerous relapse. [1300] But an insight into the natural connexion between certain excesses and certain diseases as their consequence, is far more removed from the mode of thinking of the age in which Jesus lived, than the notion of a positive connexion between sin in general and disease as its punishment; hence, if we are nevertheless to ascribe the former sense to the words of Jesus, it must be very distinctly conveyed in the text. But the fact is that in the whole narrative there is no intimation of any particular excess on the part of the man; the words μηκέτι ἁμάρτανε relate only to sin in general, and to supply a conversation of Jesus with the sick man, in which he is supposed to have acquainted the former with the connexion between his sufferings and a particular sin, [1301] is the most arbitrary fiction. What exposition! for the sake of evading a result which is dogmatically unwelcome, to extend the one passage (John ix.) to a generality of meaning not really belonging to it, to elude the other (Matt. ix.) by the hypothesis of accommodation, and forcibly to affix to a third (John v.) a modern idea; whereas if the first passage be only permitted to say no more than it actually says, the direct meaning of the other two may remain unviolated!

But another passage, and that a synoptical one, is adduced in vindication of the superiority of Jesus to the popular opinion in question. This passage is Luke xiii. 1 ff., where Jesus is told of the Galileans whom Pilate had caused to be slain while they were in the act of sacrificing, and of others who were killed by the falling of a tower. From what follows, we must suppose the informants to have intimated their opinion that these calamities were to be regarded as a divine visitation for the peculiar wickedness of the parties so signally destroyed. Jesus replied that they must not suppose those men to have been especially sinful; they themselves were in no degree better, and unless they repented would meet with a similar destruction. Truly it is not clear how in these expressions of Jesus a repudiation of the popular notion can be found. If Jesus wished to give his voice in opposition to this, he must either have said: you are equally great sinners, though you may not perish bodily in the same manner; or: do you believe that those men perished on account of their sins? No! the contrary may be seen in you, who, notwithstanding your wickedness, are not thus smitten with death. On the contrary, the expressions of Jesus as given by Luke can only have the following sense: that those men have already met with such calamities is no evidence of their peculiar wickedness, any more than the fact that you have been hitherto spared the like, is an evidence of your greater worth, on the contrary, earlier or later, similar judgments falling on you will attest your equal guilt:—whereby the supposed law of the connexion between the sin and misfortune of every individual is confirmed, not overthrown. This vulgar Hebrew opinion concerning sickness and evil, is indeed in contradiction with that esoteric view, partly Essene, partly Ebionite, which we have found in the introduction to the Sermon on the Mount, the parable of the rich man, and elsewhere, and according to which the righteous in this generation are the suffering, the poor and the sick; but both opinions are clearly to be seen in the discourses of Jesus by an unprejudiced exegesis, and the contradiction, which we find between them authorizes us neither to put a forced construction on the one class of expressions, nor to deny them to have really come from Jesus, since we cannot calculate how he may have solved for himself the opposition between two ideas of the world, presented to him by different sides of the Jewish culture of that age.

As regards the above-mentioned cure, the synoptical writers make Jesus in his reply to the messengers of the Baptist, appeal to the fact that the lame walked (Matt. xi. 5), and at another time the people wonder when, among other miracles, they see the maimed to be whole and the lame to walk (Matt. xv. 31). In the place of the lame, χωλοὶ, paralytics, παραλυτικοὶ are elsewhere brought forward (Matt. iv. 24), and especially in the detailed histories of cures relating to this kind of sufferers (as Matt. ix. 1 ff. parall., viii. 5, parall.), παραλυτικοὶ, and not χωλοὶ, are named. The sick man at the pool of Bethesda (John v. 5) belongs probably to the χωλοῖς spoken of in v. 3; there also ξηροὶ, withered, are mentioned, and in Matt. xii. 9 ff. parall. we find the cure of a man who had a withered hand. As however the three last named cures will return to us under different heads, all that remains here for our examination is the cure of the paralytic Matt. ix. 1 ff. parall.

As the definitions which the ancient physicians give of paralysis, though they all show it to have been a species of lameness, yet leave it undecided whether the lameness was total or partial; [1302] and as, besides, no strict adherence to medical technicalities is to be expected from the Evangelists, we must gather what they understand by paralytics from their own descriptions of such patients. In the present passage, we read of the paralytic that he was borne on a bed κλίνη, and that to enable him to arise and carry his bed was an unprecedented wonder παράδοξον, whence we must conclude that he was lame, at least in the feet. While here there is no mention of pains, or of an acute character of disease, in another narrative (Matt. viii. 6) these are evidently presupposed when the centurion says that his servant is sick of the palsy, grievously tormented, βέβληται—παραλυτικὸς, δεινως βασανιζόμενος; so that under paralytics in the gospels we have at one time to understand a lameness without pain, at another a painful, gouty disease of the limbs. [1303]

In the description of the scene in which the paralytic (Matt. ix. 1 ff. parall.) is brought to Jesus, there is a remarkable gradation in the three accounts. Matthew says simply, that as Jesus, after an excursion to the opposite shore, returned to Capernaum, there was brought to him a paralytic, stretched on a bed. Luke describes particularly how Jesus, surrounded by a great multitude, chiefly Pharisees and scribes, taught and healed in a certain house, and how the bearers, because on account of the press they could not reach Jesus, let the sick man down to him through the roof. If we call to mind the structure of oriental houses, which had a flat roof, to which an opening led from the upper story; [1304] and if we add to this the rabbinical manner of speaking, in which to the via per portum (‏דרך פתחים‎) was opposed the via per tectum (‏דרך נגיך‎) as a no less ordinary way for reaching the ὑπερῳον upper story or chamber, [1305] we cannot under the expression καθιέναι διὰ τῶν κεράμων, to let down through the tiling, understand anything else than that the bearers—who, either by means of stairs leading thither directly from the street, or from the roof of a neighbouring house, gained access to the roof of the house in which Jesus was,—let down the sick man with his bed, apparently by cords, through the opening already existing in the roof. Mark, who, while with Matthew he places the scene at Capernaum, agrees with Luke in the description of the great crowd and the consequent ascent to the roof, goes yet further than Luke, not only in determining the number of the bearers to be four, but also in making them, regardless of the opening already existing, uncover the roof and let down the sick man through an aperture newly broken.

If we ask here also in which direction, upwards or downwards, the climax may most probably have been formed, the narrative of Mark, which stands at the summit, has so many difficulties that it can scarcely be regarded as nearest the truth. For not only have opponents asked, how could the roof be broken open without injury to those beneath? [1306] but Olshausen himself admits that the disturbance of the roof, covered with tiles, partakes of the extravagant. [1307] To avoid this, many expositors suppose that Jesus taught either in the inner court, [1308] or in the open air in front of the house, [1309] and that the bearers only broke down a part of the parapet in order to let down the sick man more conveniently. But both the phrase, διὰ τῶν κεράμων, in Luke, and the expressions of Mark, render this conception of the thing impossible, since here neither can στέγῃ mean parapet, nor ἀποστεγάζω the breaking of the parapet, while ἐξορύττω can only mean the breaking of a hole. Thus the disturbance of the roof subsists, but this is further rendered improbable on the ground that it was altogether superfluous, inasmuch as there was a door in every roof. Hence help has been sought in the supposition that the bearers indeed used the door previously there, but because this was too narrow for the bed of the patient, they widened it by the removal of the surrounding tiles. [1310] Still, however, there remains the danger to those below, and the words imply an opening actually made, not merely widened.

But dangerous and superfluous as such a proceeding would be in reality, it is easy to explain how Mark, wishing further to elaborate the narrative of Luke, might be led to add such a feature. Luke had said that the sick man was let down, so that he descended in the midst before Jesus, ἔμπροσθεν τοῦ Ἰησοῦ. How could the people precisely hit upon this place, unless Jesus accidentally stood under the door of the roof, except by breaking open the roof above the spot where they knew him to be (ἀπεστέγασαν τὴν στέγην ὅπου ἦν)? [1311] This trait Mark the more gladly seized because it was adapted to place in the strongest light the zeal which confidence in Jesus infused into the people, and which was to be daunted by no labour. This last interest seems to be the key also to Luke’s departure from Matthew. In Matthew, who makes the bearers bring the paralytic to Jesus in the ordinary way, doubtless regarding the laborious conveyance of the sick man on his bed as itself a proof of their faith, it is yet less evident wherein Jesus sees their faith. If the original form of the history was that in which it appears in the first gospel, the temptation might easily arise to make the bearers devise a more conspicuous means of evincing their faith, which, since the scene was already described as happening in a great crowd, might appear to be most suitably found in the uncommon way in which they contrived to bring their sick man to Jesus.

But even the account of Matthew we cannot regard as a true narrative of a fact. It has indeed been attempted to represent the result as a natural one, by explaining the state of the man to be a nervous weakness, the worst symptom of which was the idea of the sick man that his disease must continue as a punishment of his sin; [1312] reference has been made to analogous cases of a rapid psychical cure of lameness; [1313] and a subsequent use of long-continued curative means has been supposed. [1314] But the first and last expedients are purely arbitrary; and if in the alleged analogies there may be some truth, yet it is always incomparably more probable that histories of cures of the lame and paralytic in accordance with messianic expectation, should be formed by the legend, than that they should really have happened. In the passage of Isaiah already quoted (xxxv. 6), it was promised in relation to the messianic time: then shall the lame man leap as a hart, τότε ἁλεῖται ὡς ἕλαφος ὁ χωλὸς, and in the same connexion, v. 3, the prophet addresses to the feeble knees γόνατα παραλελυμένα the exhortation, Be strong, ἰσχύσατε, which, with the accompanying particulars, must have been understood literally, of a miracle to be expected from the Messiah, since Jesus, as we have already mentioned, among other proofs that he was the ἐρχόμενος adduced this: χωλοὶ περιπατοῦσι, the lame walk.

§ 97.

INVOLUNTARY CURES.

Occasionally in their general statements concerning the curative power of Jesus, the synoptical writers remark, that all kinds of sick people only sought to touch Jesus, or to lay hold on the hem of his garment, in order to be healed, and that immediately on this slight contact, a cure actually followed (Matt. xiv. 36; Mark iii. 10, vi. 56; Luke vi. 19). In these cases Jesus operated, not, as we have hitherto always seen, with a precise aim towards any particular sufferer, but on entire masses, without taking special notice of each individual; his power of healing appears not here, as elsewhere, to reside in his will, but in his body and its coverings; he does not by his own voluntary act dispense its virtues, but is subject to have them drawn from him without his consent.

Of this species of cure again a detailed example is preserved to us, in the history of the woman who had an issue of blood, which all the synoptical writers give, and interweave in a peculiar manner with the history of the resuscitation of the daughter of Jairus, making Jesus cure the woman on his way to the ruler’s house (Matt. ix. 20 ff.; Mark v. 25 ff.; Luke viii. 43 ff.). On comparing the account of the incident in the several Evangelists, we might in this instance be tempted to regard that of Luke as the original, because it seems to offer an explanation of the uniform connexion of the two histories. As, namely, the duration of the woman’s sufferings is fixed by all the narrators at twelve years, so Luke, whom Mark follows, gives twelve years also as the age of the daughter of Jairus; a numerical similarity which might be a sufficient inducement to associate the two histories in the evangelical tradition. But this reason is far too isolated by itself to warrant a decision, which can only proceed from a thorough comparison of the three narratives in their various details. Matthew describes the woman simply as γυνὴ αἱμοῤῥοοῦσα δώδεκα ἔτη, which signifies that she had for twelve years been subject to an important loss of blood, probably in the form of excessive menstruation. Luke, the reputed physician, shows himself here in no degree favourable to his professional brethren, for he adds that the woman had spent all her living on physicians without obtaining any help from them. Mark, yet more unfavourable, says that she had suffered many things of many physicians, and was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse. Those who surround Jesus when the woman approaches him are, according to Matthew, his disciples, according to Mark and Luke, a thronging multitude. After all the narrators have described how the woman, as timid as she was believing, came behind Jesus and touched the hem of his garment, Mark and Luke state that she was immediately healed, but that Jesus, being conscious of the egress of curative power, asked who touched me? The disciples, astonished, ask in return, how he can distinguish a single touch amidst so general a thronging and pressure of the crowd. According to Luke, he persists in his assertion; according to Mark, he looks inquiringly around him in order to discover the party who had touched him: then, according to both these Evangelists, the woman approaches trembling, falls at His feet and confesses all, whereupon Jesus gives her the tranquillizing assurance that her faith has made her whole. Matthew has not this complex train of circumstances; he merely states that after the touch Jesus looked round, discovered the woman, and announced to her that her faith had wrought her cure.

This difference is an important one, and we need not greatly wonder that it induced Storr to suppose two separate cures of women afflicted in the same manner. [1315] To this expedient he was yet more decidedly determined by the still wider divergencies in the narrative of the resuscitation of the daughter of Jairus, a narrative which is interlaced with the one before us; it is, however, this very interlacement which renders it totally impossible to imagine that Jesus, twice, on both occasions when he was on his way to restore to life the daughter of a Jewish ruler (ἄρχων), cured a woman who had had an issue of blood twelve years. While, on this consideration, criticism has long ago decided for the singleness of the fact on which the narratives are founded, it has at the same time given the preference to those of Mark and Luke as the most vivid and circumstantial. [1316] But, in the first place, if it be admitted that Mark’s addition ἀλλὰ μᾶλλον εἰς τὸ χεῖρον ἐλθοῦσα, but rather grew worse, is merely a finishing touch from his own imagination to the expression οὐκ ἴσχυσεν ὑπ’ οὐδενὸς θεραπευθῆναι neither could be healed of any, which he found in Luke; there seems to be the same reason for regarding this particular of Luke’s as an inference of his own by which he has amplified the simple statement αἱμοῤῥοοῦσα δώδεκα ἔτη, which Matthew gives without any addition. If the woman had been ill twelve years, she must, it was thought, during that period have frequently had recourse to physicians: and as, when contrasted with the inefficiency of the physicians, the miraculous power of Jesus, which instantaneously wrought a cure, appeared in all the more brilliant a light; so in the legend, or in the imagination of the narrators, there grew up these additions. What if the same observation applied to the other differences? That the woman according to Matthew also, only touched Jesus from behind, implied the effort and the hope to remain concealed; that Jesus immediately looked round after her, implied that he was conscious of her touch. This hope on the part of the woman became the more accountable, and this consciousness on the part of Jesus the more marvellous, the greater the crowd that surrounded Jesus and pressed upon him; hence the companionship of the disciples in Matthew is by the other two Evangelists changed into a thronging of the multitude (βλέπεις τὸν ὄχλον συνθλίβοντά σε). Again, Matthew mentions that Jesus looked round after the woman touched him; on this circumstance the supposition might be founded that he had perceived her touch in a peculiar manner; hence the scene was further worked up, and we are shown how Jesus, though pressed on all sides, had yet a special consciousness of that particular touch by the healing power which it had drawn from him; while the simple feature ἐπιστραφεὶς καὶ ἰδὼν αὐτὴν, he turned him about, and when he saw her, in Matthew, is transformed into an inquiry and a searching glance around upon the crowd to discover the woman, who then is represented as coming forward, trembling, to make her confession. Lastly, on a comparison of Matt xiv. 36, the point of this narrative, even as given in the first gospel, appears to lie in the fact that simply to touch the clothes of Jesus had in itself a healing efficacy. Accordingly, in the propagation of this history, there was a continual effort to make the result follow immediately on the touch, and to represent Jesus as remaining, even after the cure, for some time uncertain with respect to the individual who had touched him, a circumstance which is in contradiction with that superior knowledge elsewhere attributed to Jesus. Thus, under every aspect, the narrative in the first gospel presents itself as the earlier and more simple, that of the second and third as a later and more embellished formation of the legend.

As regards the common substance of the narratives, it has in recent times been a difficulty to all theologians, whether orthodox or rationalistic, that the curative power of Jesus should have been exhibited apart from his volition. Paulus and Olshausen agree in the opinion, [1317] that the agency of Jesus is thus reduced too completely into the domain of physical nature; that Jesus would then be like a magnetiser who in operating on a nervous patient is conscious of a diminution of strength, or like a charged electrical battery, which a mere touch will discharge. Such an idea of Christ, thinks Olshausen, is repugnant to the Christian consciousness, which determines the fulness of power resident in Jesus to have been entirely under the governance of his will; and this will to have been guided by a knowledge of the moral condition of the persons to be healed. It is therefore supposed that Jesus fully recognized the woman even without seeing her, and considering that she might be spiritually won over to him by this bodily succour, he consciously communicated to her an influx of his curative power; but in order to put an end to her false shame and constrain her to a confession, he behaved as if he knew not who had touched him. But the Christian consciousness, in cases of this kind, means nothing else than the advanced religious culture of our age, which cannot appropriate the antiquated ideas of the Bible. Now this consciousness must be neutral where we are concerned, not with the dogmatical appropriation, but purely with the exegetical discovery of the biblical ideas. The interference of this alleged Christian consciousness is the secret of the majority of exegetical errors, and in the present instance it has led the above named commentators astray from the evident sense of the text. For the question of Jesus in both the more detailed narratives τίς ὁ ἁψάμενός μου; who touched me? repeated as it is in Luke, and strengthened as it is in Mark by a searching glance around, has the appearance of being meant thoroughly in earnest; and indeed it is the object of these two Evangelists to place the miraculous nature of the curative power of Jesus in a particularly clear light by showing that the mere touching of his clothes accompanied by faith, no previous knowledge on his part of the person who touched, nor so much as a word from him, being requisite, was sufficient to obtain a cure. Nay, even originally, in the more concise account of Matthew, the expressions προσελθοῦσα ὄπισθεν ἥφατο having come behind him, she touched, and ἐπιστραθεὶς καὶ ἰδὼν αὐτὴν he turned him about, and when he saw her, clearly imply that Jesus knew the woman only after she had touched him. If then, it is not to be proved that Jesus had a knowledge of the woman previous to her cure and a special will to heal her; nothing remains for those who will not admit an involuntary exhibition of curative power in Jesus, but to suppose in him a constant general will to cure, with which it was only necessary that faith on the part of the diseased person should concur, in order to produce an actual cure. But that, notwithstanding the absence of a special direction of the will to the cure of this woman on the part of Jesus, she was restored to health, simply by her faith, without even touching his clothes, is assuredly not the idea of the Evangelists. On the contrary, it is their intention to substitute for an individual act of the will on the part of Jesus, the touch on the part of the sick person; this it is which, instead of the former, brings into action the latent power of Jesus: so that the materialistic character of the representation is not in this way to be avoided.

A step further was necessary to the rationalistic interpretation, which not only with modern supranaturalism regards as incredible the unconscious efflux of curative power from Jesus, but also denies in general any efflux of such power, and yet wishes to preserve unattainted the historical veracity of the Evangelists. According to this system, Jesus was led to ask who touched him, solely because he felt himself held back in his progress; the assertion that consciousness of a departure of power, δύναμις ἐξελθοῦσα, was the cause of his question, is a mere inference of the two narrators, of whom the one, Mark, actually gives it as his own observation; and it is only Luke who incorporates it with the question of Jesus. The cure of the woman was effected by means of her exalted confidence, in consequence of which when she touched the hem of Jesus she was seized with a violent shuddering in her whole nervous system, which probably caused a sudden contraction of the relaxed vessels; at the first moment she could only believe, not certainly know that she was cured, and only by degrees, probably after the use of means recommended to her by Jesus, did the malady entirely cease. [1318] But who can represent to himself the timid touch of a sick woman whose design was to remain concealed, and whose faith rendered her certain of obtaining a cure by the slightest touch, as a grasp which arrested the progress of Jesus, pressed upon as he was, according to Mark and Luke, by the crowd? Further, what a vast conception of the power of confidence is demanded by the opinion, that it healed a disease of twelve years’ duration without the concurrence of any real force on the part of Jesus! Lastly, if the Evangelists are supposed to have put into the mouth of Jesus an inference of their own (that healing efficacy had gone out of him)—if they are supposed to have described a gradual cure as an instantaneous one; then, with the renunciation of these particulars all warrant for the historical reality of the entire narrative falls to the ground, and at the same time all necessity for troubling ourselves with the natural interpretation.

In fact, if we only examine the narrative before us somewhat more closely, and compare it with kindred anecdotes, we cannot remain in doubt as to its proper character. As here and in some other passages it is narrated of Jesus, that the sick were cured by the bare touch of his clothes: so in the Acts we are told that the handkerchiefs σουδάρια and aprons σιμικίνθια of Paul cured all kinds of sick persons to whom they were applied (xix. 11 f.), and that the very shadow of Peter was believed to have the same efficacy (v. 15); while the apocryphal gospels represent a mass of cures to have been wrought by means of the swaddling bands of the infant Jesus, and the water in which he was washed. [1319] In reading these last histories, every one knows that he is in the realm of fiction and legend; but wherein are the cures wrought by the pocket-handkerchiefs of Paul to be distinguished from those wrought by the swaddling bands of Jesus, unless it be that the latter proceeded from a child, the former from a man? It is certain that if the story relative to Paul were not found in a canonical book, every one would deem it fabulous, and yet the credibility of the narratives should not be concluded from the assumed origin of the book which contains them, but on the contrary, our judgment of the book must be founded on the nature of its particular narratives. But again, between these cures by the pocket-handkerchiefs and those by the touch of the hem of the garment, there is no essential distinction. In both cases we have the contact of objects which are in a merely external connexion with the worker of the miracle; with the single difference, that this connexion is with regard to the pocket-handkerchiefs an interrupted one, with regard to the clothes a continuous one; in both cases again, results which, even according to the orthodox view, are only derived from the spiritual nature of the men in question, and are to be regarded as acts of their will in virtue of its union with the divine, are reduced to physical effects and effluxes. The subject thus descends from the religious and theological sphere to the natural and physical, because a man with a power of healing resident in his body, and floating as an atmosphere around him, would belong to the objects of natural science, and not of religion. But natural science is not able to accredit such a healing power by sure analogies or clear definitions; hence these cures, being driven from the objective to the subjective region, must receive their explanation from psychology. Now psychology, taking into account the power of imagination and of faith, will certainly allow the possibility that without a real curative power in the reputed miracle-worker, solely by the strong confidence of the diseased person that he possesses this power, bodily maladies which have a close connexion with the nervous system may be cured: but when we seek for historical vouchers for this possibility, criticism, which must here be called to aid, will soon show that a far greater number of such cures has been invented by the faith of others, than has been performed by the parties alleged to be concerned. Thus it is in itself by no means impossible, that through strong faith in the healing power residing even in the clothes and handkerchiefs of Jesus and the apostles, many sick persons on touching these articles were conscious of real benefit; but it is at least equally probable, that only after the death of these men, when their fame in the church was ever on the increase, anecdotes of this kind were believingly narrated, and it depends on the nature of the accounts, for which of the two alternatives we are to decide. In the general statement in the Gospels and the Acts, which speak of whole masses having been cured in the above way, this accumulation at any rate is traditional. As to the detailed history which we have been examining, in its representation that the woman had suffered twelve years from a very obstinate disease, and one the least susceptible of merely psychical influence, and that the cure was performed by power consciously emitted from Jesus, instead of by the imagination of the patient: so large a portion betrays itself to be mythical that we can no longer discern any historical elements, and must regard the whole as legendary.

It is not difficult to see what might give rise to this branch of the evangelical miraculous legend, in distinction from others. The faith of the popular mind, dependent on the senses, and incapable of apprehending the divine through the medium of thought alone, strives perpetually to draw it down into material existence. Hence, according to a later opinion, the saint must continue to work miracles when his bones are distributed as relics, and the body of Christ must be present in the transubstantiated host; hence also, according to an idea developed much earlier, the curative power of the men celebrated in the New Testament must be attached to their body and its coverings. The less the church retained of the words of Jesus, the more tenaciously she clung to the efficacy of his mantle, and the further she was removed from the free spiritual energy of the apostle Paul, the more consolatory was the idea of carrying home his curative energy in a pocket-handkerchief.

§ 98.

CURES AT A DISTANCE.

The cures performed at a distance are, properly speaking, the opposite of these involuntary cures. The latter are effected by mere corporeal contact without a special act of the will; the former solely by the act of the will without corporeal contact, or even local proximity. But there immediately arises this objection: if the curative power of Jesus was so material that it dispensed itself involuntarily at a mere touch, it cannot have been so spiritual that the simple will could convey it over considerable distances; or conversely, if it was so spiritual as to act apart from bodily presence, it cannot have been so material as to dispense itself independently of the will. Since we have pronounced the purely physical mode of influence in Jesus to be improbable, free space is left to us for the purely spiritual, and our decision on the latter will therefore depend entirely on the examination of the narratives and the facts themselves.

As proofs that the curative power of Jesus acted thus at a distance, Matthew and Luke narrate to us the cure of the sick servant of a centurion at Capernaum, John that of the son of a nobleman βασιλικὸς, at the same place (Matt. viii. 5 ff.; Luke vii. 1 ff.; John iv. 46 ff.); and again Matthew (xv. 22 ff.), and Mark (vii. 25 ff.), that of the daughter of the Canaanitish woman. Of these examples, as in the summary narration of the last there is nothing peculiar, we have here to consider the two first only. The common opinion is, that Matthew and Luke do indeed narrate the same fact, but John one distinct from this, since his narrative differs from that of the two others in the following particulars: firstly, the place from which Jesus cures, is in the synoptical gospels the place where the sick man resides, Capernaum,—in John a different one, namely, Cana; secondly, the time at which the synoptists lay the incident, namely, when Jesus is in the act of returning home after his Sermon on the Mount, is different from that assigned to it in the fourth gospel, which is immediately after the return of Jesus from the first passover and his ministry in Samaria; thirdly, the sick person is according to the former the slave, according to the latter the son of the suppliant; but the most important divergencies are those which relate, fourthly, to the suppliant himself, for in the first and third gospels he is a military person (an ἑκατόνταρχος), in the fourth a person in office at court (βασιλικὸς), according to the former (Matt. v. 10 ff.), a Gentile, according to the latter without doubt a Jew; above all, the synoptists make Jesus eulogize him as a pattern of the most fervent, humble faith, because, in the conviction that Jesus could cure at a distance, he prevented him from going to his house; whereas in John, on the contrary, he is blamed for his weak faith which required signs and wonders, because he thought the presence of Jesus in his house necessary for the purpose of the cure. [1320]

These divergencies are certainly important enough to be a reason, with those who regard them from a certain point of view, for maintaining the distinction of the fact lying at the foundation of the synoptical narratives from that reported by John: only this accuracy of discrimination must be carried throughout, and the diversities between the two synoptical narratives themselves must not be overlooked. First, even in the designation of the person of the patient they are not perfectly in unison; Luke calls him δοῦλος ἔντιμος, a servant who was dear to the centurion; in Matthew, the latter calls him ὁ παῖς μοῦ, which may equally mean either a son or a servant, and as the centurion when speaking (v. 9) of his servant, uses the word δοῦλος, while the cured individual is again (v. 13) spoken of as ὁ παῖς αὐτοῦ, it seems most probable that the former sense was intended. With respect to his disease, the man is described by Matthew as παραλυτικὸς δεινῶς βασανιζόμενος a paralytic grievously tormented; Luke is not only silent as to this species of disease, but he is thought by many to presuppose a different one, since after the indefinite expression κακῶς ἔχων, being ill, he adds, ἤμελλε τελευτᾶν, was ready to die, and paralysis is not generally a rapidly fatal malady. [1321] But the most important difference is one which runs through the entire narrative, namely, that all which according to Matthew the centurion does in his own person, is in Luke done by messengers, for here in the first instance he makes the entreaty, not personally, as in Matthew, but through the medium of the Jewish elders, and when he afterwards wishes to prevent Jesus from entering his house, he does not come forward himself, but commissions some friends to act in his stead. To reconcile this difference, it is usual to refer to the rule: quod quis per alium facit, etc. [1322] If then it be said, and indeed no other conception of the matter is possible to expositors who make such an appeal,—Matthew well knew that between the centurion and Jesus everything was transacted by means of deputies, but for the sake of brevity, he employed the figure of speech above alluded to, and represented him as himself accosting Jesus: Storr is perfectly right in his opposing remark, that scarcely any historian would so perseveringly carry that metonymy through an entire narrative, especially in a case where, on the one hand, the figure of speech is by no means so obvious as when, for example, that is ascribed to a general which is done by his soldiers; and where, on the other hand, precisely this point, whether the person acted for himself or through others, is of some consequence to a full estimate of his character. [1323] With laudable consistency, therefore, Storr, as he believed it necessary to refer the narrative of the fourth gospel to a separate fact from that of the first and third, on account of the important differences; so, on account of the divergencies which he found between the two last, pronounces these also to be narratives of two separate events. If any one wonder that at three different times so entirely similar a cure should have happened at the same place (for according to John also, the patient lay and was cured at Capernaum), Storr on his side wonders how it can be regarded as in the least improbable that in Capernaum at two different periods two centurions should have had each a sick servant, and that again at another time a nobleman should have had a sick son at the same place; that the second centurion (Luke) should have heard the history of the first, have applied in a similar manner to Jesus, and sought to surpass his example of humility, as the first centurion (Matthew), to whom the earlier history of the nobleman (John) was known, wished to surpass the weak faith of the latter; and lastly, that Jesus cured all the three patients in the same manner at a distance. But the incident of a distinguished official person applying to Jesus to cure a dependent or relative, and of Jesus at a distance operating on the latter in such a manner, that about the time in which Jesus pronounced the curative word, the patient at home recovered, is so singular in its kind that a threefold repetition of it may be regarded as impossible, and even the supposition that it occurred twice only, has difficulties; hence it is our task to ascertain whether the three narratives may not be traced to a single root.

Now the narrative of the fourth Evangelist which is most generally held to be distinct, has not only an affinity with the synoptical narratives in the outline already given; but in many remarkable details either one or the other of the synoptists agrees more closely with John than with his fellow synoptist. Thus, while in designating the patient as παῖς, Matthew may be held to accord with the υἱὸς of John, at least as probably as with the δοῦλος of Luke; Matthew and John decidedly agree in this, that according to both the functionary at Capernaum applies in his own person to Jesus, and not as in Luke by deputies. On the other hand, the account of John agrees with that of Luke in its description of the state of the patient; in neither is there any mention of the paralysis of which Matthew speaks, but the patient is described as near death, in Luke by the words ἤμελλε τελευτᾷν, in John by ἤμελλεν ἀποθνήσκειν, in addition to which it is incidentally implied in the latter, v. 52, that the disease was accompanied by a fever, πυρετὸς. In the account of the manner in which Jesus effected the cure of the patient, and in which his cure was made known, John stands again on the side of Matthew in opposition to Luke. While namely, the latter has not an express assurance on the part of Jesus that the servant was healed, the two former make him say to the officer, in very similar terms, the one, ὕπαγε, καὶ ὡς ἐπίστευσας γενηθήτω σοι, Go thy way, and as thou hast believed so shall it be done unto thee, the other, πορεύου, ὁ υἱὸς σου ζῇ, Go thy way, thy son liveth; and the conclusion of Matthew also, καὶ ἰάθη ὁ παῖς αὐτοῦ ἐν τῇ ὥρᾳ ἐκείνῃ, has at least in its form more resemblance to the statement of John, that by subsequent inquiry the father ascertained it to be ἐν ἐκείνῃ τῇ ὥρᾳ, at the same hour in which Jesus had spoken the word that his son had begun to amend, than to the statement of Luke, that the messengers when they returned found the sick man restored to health. In another point of this conclusion, however, the agreement with John is transferred from Matthew again to Luke. In both Luke and John, namely, a kind of embassy is spoken of, which towards the close of the narrative comes out of the house of the officer; in the former it consists of the centurion’s friends, whose errand it is to dissuade Jesus from giving himself unnecessary trouble; in the latter, of servants who rejoicingly meet their master and bring him the news of his son’s recovery. Unquestionably where three narratives are so thoroughly entwined with each other as these, we ought not merely to pronounce two of them identical and allow one to stand for a distinct fact, but must rather either distinguish all, or blend all into one. The latter course was adopted by Semler, after older examples, [1324] and Tholuck has at least declared it possible. But with such expositors the next object is so to explain the divergencies of the three narratives, that no one of the Evangelists may seem to have said anything false. With respect to the rank of the applicant, they make the βασιλικὸς in John a military officer, for whom the ἑκατόνταρχος of the two others would only be a more specific designation; as regards the main point, however, namely, the conduct of the applicant, it is thought that the different narrators may have represented the event in different periods of its progress; that is, John may have given the earlier circumstance, that Jesus complained of the originally weak faith of the suppliant, the synoptists only the later, that he praised its rapid growth. We have already shown how it has been supposed possible, in a yet easier manner, to adjust the chief difference between the two synoptical accounts relative to the mediate or immediate entreaty. But this effort to explain the contradictions between the three narratives in a favourable manner is altogether vain. There still subsist these difficulties: the synoptists thought of the applicant as a centurion, the fourth Evangelist as a courtier; the former as strong, the latter as weak in faith; John and Matthew imagined that he applied in his own person to Jesus; Luke, that out of modesty he sent deputies. [1325]

Which then represents the fact in the right way, which in the wrong? If we take first the two synoptists by themselves, expositors with one voice declare that Luke gives the more correct account. First of all, it is thought improbable that the patient should have been, as Matthew says, a paralytic, since in the case of a disease so seldom fatal the modest centurion would scarcely have met Jesus to implore his aid immediately on his entrance into the city: [1326] as if a very painful disease such as is described by Matthew did not render desirable the quickest help, and as if there were any want of modesty in asking Jesus before he reached home to utter a healing word. Rather, the contrary relation between Matthew and Luke seems probable from the observation, that the miracle, and consequently also the disease of the person cured miraculously, is never diminished in tradition but always exaggerated; hence the tormented paralytic would more probably be heightened into one ready to die, μέλλων τελευτᾲν, than the latter reduced to a mere sufferer. But especially the double message in Luke is, according to Schleiermacher, a feature very unlikely to have been invented. How if, on the contrary, it very plainly manifested itself to be an invention? While in Matthew the centurion, on the offer of Jesus to accompany him, seeks to prevent him by the objection: Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof, in Luke he adds by the mouth of his messenger, wherefore neither thought I myself worthy to come unto thee, by which we plainly discover the conclusion on which the second embassy was founded. If the man declared himself unworthy that Jesus should come to him, he cannot, it was thought, have held himself worthy to come to Jesus; an exaggeration of his humility by which the narrative of Luke again betrays its secondary character. The first embassy seems to have originated in the desire to introduce a previous recommendation of the centurion as a motive for the promptitude with which Jesus offered to enter the house of a Gentile. The Jewish elders, after having informed Jesus of the case of disease, add that he was worthy for whom he should do this, for he loveth our nation and has built us a synagogue: a recommendation the tenor of which is not unlike what Luke (Acts x. 22) makes the messengers of Cornelius say to Peter to induce him to return with them, namely, that the centurion was a just man, and one that feareth God, and in good report among all the nation of the Jews. That the double embassy cannot have been original, appears the most clearly from the fact, that by it the narrative of Luke loses all coherence. In Matthew all hangs well together: the centurion first describes to Jesus the state of the sufferer, and either leaves it to Jesus to decide what he shall next do, or before he prefers his request Jesus anticipates him by the offer to go to his house, which the centurion declines in the manner stated. Compare with this his strange conduct in Luke: he first sends to Jesus by the Jewish elders the request that he will come and heal his servant, but when Jesus is actually coming, repents that he has occasioned him to do so, and asks only for a miraculous word from Jesus. The supposition that the first request proceeded solely from the elders and not from the centurion [1327] runs counter to the express words of the Evangelist, who by the expressions: ἀπέστειλε—πρεσβυτέρους—ἐρωτῶν αὐτὸν, he sent—the elders—beseeching him, represents the prayer as coming from the centurion himself; and that the latter by the word ἐλθὼν meant only that Jesus should come into the neighbourhood of his house, but when he saw that Jesus intended actually to enter his house, declined this as too great a favour,—is too absurd a demeanour to attribute to a man who otherwise appears sensible, and of whom for this reason so capricious a change of mind as is implied in the text of Luke, was still less to be expected. The whole difficulty would have been avoided, if Luke had put into the mouth of the first messengers, as Matthew in that of the centurion, only the entreaty, direct or indirect, for a cure in general; and then after Jesus had offered to go to the house where the patient lay, had attributed to the same messengers the modest rejection of this offer. But on the one hand, he thought it requisite to furnish a motive for the resolution of Jesus to go into the Gentile’s house; and on the other, tradition presented him with a deprecation of this personal trouble on the part of Jesus: he was unable to attribute the prayer and the deprecation to the same persons, and he was therefore obliged to contrive a second embassy. Hereby, however, the contradiction was only apparently avoided, since both embassies are sent by the centurion. Perhaps also the centurion who was unwilling that Jesus should take the trouble to enter his house, reminded Luke of the messenger who warned Jairus not to trouble the master to enter his house, likewise after an entreaty that he would come into the house; and as the messenger says to Jairus, according to him and Mark, μὴ σκύλλε τὸν διδάσκαλον, trouble not the master (Luke viii. 49), so here he puts into the mouth of the second envoys, the words, κύριε μὴ σκύλλον, Lord, trouble not thyself, although such an order has a reason only in the case of Jairus, in whose house the state of things had been changed since the first summons by the death of his daughter, and none at all in that of the centurion whose servant still remained in the same state.

Modern expositors are deterred from the identification of all the three narratives, by the fear that it may present John in the light of a narrator who has not apprehended the scene with sufficient accuracy, and has even mistaken its main drift. [1328] Were they nevertheless to venture on a union, they would as far as possible vindicate to the fourth gospel the most original account of the facts; a position of which we shall forthwith test the security, by an examination of the intrinsic character of the narratives. That the suppliant is according to the fourth Evangelist a βασιλικὸς, while according to the two others he is an ἑκατόνταρχος, is an indifferent particular from which we can draw no conclusion on either side; and it may appear to be the same with the divergency as to the relation of the diseased person to the one who entreats his cure. If, however, it be asked with reference to the last point, from which of the three designations the other two could most easily have arisen? it can scarcely be supposed that the υἱὸς of John became in a descending line, first the doubtful term παῖς, and then δοῦλος; and even the reverse ascending order is here less probable than the intermediate alternative, that out of the ambiguous παῖς (= ‏כַעַר‎) there branched off in one direction the sense of servant, as in Luke; in the other, of son, as in John. We have already remarked, that the description of the patient’s state in John, as well as in Luke, is an enhancement on that in Matthew, and consequently of later origin. As regards the difference in the locality, from the point of view now generally taken in the comparative criticism of the gospels, the decision would doubtless be, that in the tradition from which the synoptical writers drew, the place from which Jesus performed the miracles was confounded with that in which the sick person lay, the less noted Cana being absorbed in the celebrated Capernaum; whereas John, being an eye-witness, retained the more correct details. But the relation between the Evangelists appears to stand thus only when John is assumed to have been an eye-witness; if the critic seeks, as he is bound to do, to base his decision solely on the intrinsic character of the narratives, he will arrive at a totally different result. Here is a narrative of a cure performed at a distance, in which the miracle appears the greater, the wider the distance between the curer and the cured. Would oral tradition, in propagating this narrative, have the tendency to diminish that distance, and consequently the miracle, so that in the account of John, who makes Jesus perform the cure at a place from which the nobleman does not reach his son until the following day, we should have the original narrative, in that of the synoptists on the contrary, who represent Jesus as being in the same town with the sick servant, the one modified by tradition? Only the converse of this supposition can be held accordant with the nature of the legend, and here again the narrative of John manifests itself to be a traditional one. Again, the preciseness with which the hour of the patient’s recovery is ascertained in the fourth gospel has a highly fictitious appearance. The simple expression of Matthew, usually found at the conclusion of histories of cures: he was healed in the self-same hour, is dilated into an inquiry on the part of the father as to the hour in which the son began to amend, an answer from the servants that yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him, and lastly the result, that in the very hour in which Jesus had said, Thy son liveth, the recovery took place. This is a solicitous accuracy, a tediousness of calculation, that seems to bespeak the anxiety of the narrator to establish the miracle, rather than to show the real course of the event. In representing the βασιλικὸς as conversing personally with Jesus, the fourth gospel has preserved the original simplicity of the narrative better than the third; though as has been remarked, the servants who come to meet their master in the former seem to be representatives of Luke’s second embassy. But in the main point of difference, relative to the character of the applicant, it might be thought that, even according to our own standard, the preference must be given to John before the two other narrators. For if that narrative is the more legendary, which exhibits an effort at aggrandizement or embellishment, it might be said that the applicant whose faith is in John rather weak, is in Luke embellished into a model of faith. It is not, however, on embellishment in general that legend or the inventive narrator is bent, but on embellishment in subservience to their grand object, which in the gospels is the glorification of Jesus; and viewed in this light, the embellishment will in two respects be found on the side of John. First, as this Evangelist continually aims to exhibit the pre-eminence of Jesus, by presenting a contrast to it in the weakness of all who are brought into communication with him, so here this purpose might be served by representing the suppliant as weak rather than strong in faith. The reply, however, which he puts into the mouth of Jesus, Unless ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe, has proved too severe, for which reason it reduces most of our commentators to perplexity. Secondly, it might seem unsuitable that Jesus should allow himself to be diverted from his original intention of entering the house in which the patient was, and thus appear to be guided by external circumstances; it might be regarded as more consistent with his character that he should originally resolve to effect the cure at a distance instead of being persuaded to this by another. If then, as tradition said, the suppliant did nevertheless make a kind of remonstrance, this must have had an opposite drift to the one in the synoptical gospels, namely, to induce Jesus to a journey to the house where the patient lay.

In relation to the next question, the possibility and the actual course of the incident before us, the natural interpretation seems to find the most pliant material in the narrative of John. Here, it is remarked, Jesus nowhere says that he will effect the patient’s cure, he merely assures the father that his son is out of danger (ὁ υἱός σου ζῇ), and the father, when he finds that the favourable turn of his son’s malady coincides with the time at which he was conversing with Jesus, in no way draws the inference that Jesus had wrought the cure at a distance. Hence, this history is only a proof that Jesus by means of his profound acquaintance with semeiology, was able, on receiving a description of the patient’s state, correctly to predict the course of his disease; that such a description is not here given is no proof that Jesus had not obtained it; while further this proof of knowledge is called a σημεῖον (v. 54) because it was a sign of a kind of skill in Jesus which John had not before intimated, namely, the ability to predict the cure of one dangerously ill. [1329] But, apart from the misinterpretation of the word σημεῖον, and the interpolation of a conversation not intimated in the text; this view of the matter would place the character and even the understanding of Jesus in the most equivocal light. For if we should pronounce a physician imprudent, who in the case of a patient believed to be dying of fever, should even from his own observation of the symptoms, guarantee a cure, and thus risk his reputation: how much more rashly would Jesus have acted, had he, on the mere description of a man who was not a physician, given assurance that a disease was attended with no danger? We cannot ascribe such conduct to him, because it would be in direct contradiction with his general conduct, and the impression which he left on his cotemporaries. If then Jesus merely predicted the cure without effecting it, he must have been assured of it in a more certain manner than by natural reasoning,—he must have known it in a supernatural manner. This is the turn given to the narrative by one of the most recent commentators on the gospel of John. He puts the question, whether we have here a miracle of knowledge or of power; and as there is no mention of an immediate effect from the words of Jesus, while elsewhere in the fourth gospel the superior knowledge of Jesus is especially held up to our view, he is of opinion that Jesus, by means of his higher nature, merely knew that at that moment the dangerous crisis of the disease was past. [1330] But if our gospel frequently exhibits the superior knowledge of Jesus, this proves nothing to the purpose, for it just as frequently directs our attention to his superior power. Further, where the supernatural knowledge of Jesus is concerned, this is plainly stated (as i. 49, ii. 25, vi. 64), and hence if a supernatural cognizance of the already effected cure of the boy had been intended, John would have made Jesus speak on this occasion as he did before to Nathanael, and tell the father that he already saw his son on his bed in an ameliorated state. On the contrary, not only is there no intimation of the exercise of superior knowledge, but we are plainly enough given to understand that there was an exercise of miraculous power. When the sudden cure of one at the point of death is spoken of, the immediate question is, What brought about this unexpected change? and when a narrative which elsewhere makes miracles follow on the word of its hero, puts into his mouth an assurance that the patient lives, it is only the mistaken effort to diminish the marvellous, which can prevent the admission, that in this assurance the author means to give the cause of the cure.

In the case of the synoptical narratives, the supposition of a mere prediction will not suffice, since here the father (Matt. v. 8) entreats the exercise of healing power, and Jesus (v. 13), accedes to this entreaty. Hence every way would seem to be closed to the natural interpretation (for the distance of Jesus from the patient made all physical or psychical influence impossible), if a single feature in the narrative had not presented unexpected help. This feature is the comparison which the centurion institutes between himself and Jesus. As he need only speak a word in order to see this or that command performed by his soldiers and servants, so, he concludes, it would cost Jesus no more than a word to restore his servant to health. Out of this comparison it has been found possible to extract an intimation that as on the side of the centurion, so on that of Jesus, human proxies were thought of. According to this, the centurion intended to represent to Jesus, that he need only speak a word to one of his disciples, and the latter would go with him and cure his servant, which is supposed to have forthwith happened. [1331] But as this would be the first instance in which Jesus had caused a cure to be wrought by his disciples, and the only one in which he commissions them immediately to perform a particular cure, how could this peculiar circumstance be silently presupposed in the otherwise detailed narrative of Luke? Why, since this narrator is not sparing in spinning out the rest of the messenger’s speech, does he stint the few words which would have explained all—the simple addition after εἰπὲ λόγῳ, speak the word, of ἑνὶ τῶν μαθητῶν, to one of thy disciples, or something similar? But, above all, at the close of the narrative, where the result is told, this mode of interpretation falls into the greatest perplexity, not merely through the silence of the narrator, but through his positive statement. Luke, namely, concludes with the information that when the friends of the centurion returned into the house, they found the servant already recovered. Now, if Jesus had caused the cure by sending with the messengers one or more of his disciples, the patient could only begin gradually to be better after the disciples had come into the house with the messengers; he could not have been already well on their arrival. Paulus indeed supposes that the messengers lingered for some time listening to the discourse of Jesus, and that thus the disciples arrived before them; but how the former could so unnecessarily linger, and how the Evangelist could have been silent on this point as well as on the commission of the disciples, he omits to explain. Whether instead of the disciples, we hold that which corresponds on the side of Jesus to the soldiers of the centurion to be demons of disease, [1332] ministering angels, [1333] or merely the word and the curative power of Jesus; [1334] in any case there remains to us a miracle wrought at a distance.

This kind of agency on the part of Jesus is, according to the admission even of such commentators as have not generally any repugnance to the miraculous, attended with special difficulty, because from the want of the personal presence of Jesus, and its beneficial influence on the patient, we are deprived of every possibility of rendering the cure conceivable by means of an analogy observable in nature. [1335] According to Olshausen, indeed, this distant influence has its analogies; namely, in animal magnetism. [1336] I will not directly contest this, but only point out the limits within which, so far as my knowledge extends, this phenomenon confines itself in the domain of animal magnetism. According to our experience hitherto, the cases in which one person can exert an influence over another at a distance are only two: first, the magnetizer or an individual in magnetic relation to him can act thus on the somnambule, but this distant action must always be preceded by immediate contact,—a preliminary which is not supposed in the relation of Jesus to the patient in our narrative; secondly, such an influence is found to exist in persons who are themselves somnambules, or otherwise under a disordered state of the nerves: neither of which descriptions can apply to Jesus. If thus such a cure of distant persons as is ascribed to Jesus in our narratives, far outsteps the extreme limits of natural causation, as exhibited in magnetism and the kindred phenomena; then must Jesus have been, so far as the above narratives can lay claim to historical credit, a supernatural being. But before we admit him to have been so really, it is worth our while as critical inquirers, ta examine whether the narrative under consideration could not have arisen without any historical foundation; especially as by the very fact of the various forms which it has taken in the different gospels it shows itself to contain legendary ingredients. And here it is evident that the miraculous cures of Jesus by merely touching the patient, such as we have examples of in that of the leper, Matt. viii. 3, and in that of the blind men, Matt. ix. 29, might by a natural climax rise, first into the cure of persons when in his presence, by a mere word, as in the case of the demoniacs, of the lepers, Luke xvii. 14, and other sufferers; and then into the cure even of the absent by a word; of which there is a strongly marked precedent in the Old Testament. In 2 Kings v. 9 ff. we read that when the Syrian general Naaman came before the dwelling of the prophet Elisha that he might be cured of his leprosy, the prophet came not out to meet him, but sent to him by a servant the direction to wash himself seven times in the river Jordan. At this the Syrian was so indignant that he was about to return home without regarding the direction of the prophet. He had expected, he said, that the prophet would come to him, and calling on his God, strike his hand over the leprous place; that without any personal procedure of this kind, the prophet merely directed him to go to the river Jordan and wash, discouraged and irritated him, since if water were the thing required, he might have had it better at home than here in Israel. By this Old Testament history we see what was ordinarily expected from a prophet, namely, that he should be able to cure when present by bodily contact; that he could do so without contact, and at a distance, was not presupposed. Elisha effected the cure of the leprous general in the latter manner (for the washing was not the cause of cure here, any more than in John ix., but the miraculous power of the prophet, who saw fit to annex its influence to this external act), and hereby proved himself a highly distinguished prophet: ought then the Messiah in this particular to fall short of the prophet? Thus our New Testament narrative is manifested to be a necessary reflection of that Old Testament story. As, there, the sick person will not believe in the possibility of his cure unless the prophet comes out of his house; so here according to one edition of the story the applicant likewise doubts the possibility of a cure, unless Jesus will come in to his house; according to the other editions, he is convinced of the power of Jesus to heal even without this; and all agree that Jesus, like the prophet, succeeded in the performance of this especially difficult miracle.

§ 99.

CURES ON THE SABBATH.

Jesus, according to the gospels, gave great scandal to the Jews by not seldom performing his curative miracles on the sabbath. One example of this is common to the three synoptical writers, two are peculiar to Luke, and two to John.

In the narrative common to the three synoptical writers, two cases of supposed desecration of the sabbath are united; the plucking of the ears of corn by the disciples (Matt. xii. 1 parall.), and the cure of the man with the withered hand by Jesus (v. 9 ff. parall.). After the conversation which was occasioned by the plucking of the corn, and which took place in the fields, the two first Evangelists continue as if Jesus went from this scene immediately into the synagogue of the same place, to which no special designation is given, and there, on the occasion of the cure of the man with the withered hand, again held a dispute on the observance of the sabbath. It is evident that these two histories were originally united only on account of the similarity in their tendency; hence it is to the credit of Luke, that he has expressly separated them chronologically by the words ἐν ἑτέρῳ σαββάτῳ, on another Sabbath. [1337] The further inquiry, which narrative is here the more original? we may dismiss with the observation, that if the question which Matthew puts into the mouth of the Pharisees, Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath days? is held up as a specimen of invented dialogue; [1338] we may with equal justice characterize in the same way the question lent to Jesus by the two intermediate Evangelists; while their much praised [1339] description of Jesus calling to the man to stand forth in the midst, and then casting reproving glances around, may be accused of having the air of dramatic fiction.

The narratives all agree in representing the affliction under which the patient laboured, as a χεὶρ ξηρὰ, or ἐξηραμμένη. Indefinite as this expression is, it is treated too freely when it is understood, as by Paulus, to imply only that the hand was injured by heat, [1340] or even by a sprain, according to Venturini’s supposition. [1341] For when, in order to determine the signification in which this term is used in the New Testament we refer, as it is proper to do, to the Old Testament, we find (1 Kings xiii. 4) a hand which, on being stretched out, ἐξηράνθη (‏וַתִּיבַשׁ‎), described as incapable of being drawn back again, so that we must understand a lameness and rigidity of the hand; and on a comparison of Mark ix. 18, where the expression ξηραίνεσθαι to be withered or wasted away is applied to an epileptic, a drying up and shrinking of that member. [1342] Now from the narrative before us a very plausible argument may be drawn in favour of the supposition, that Jesus employed natural means in the treatment of this and other diseases. Only such cures, it is said, were prohibited on the sabbath as were attended with any kind of labour; thus, if the Pharisees, as it is here said, expected Jesus to transgress the sabbatical laws by effecting a cure, they must have known that he was not accustomed to cure by his mere word, but by medicaments and surgical operations. [1343] As, however, a cure merely by means of a conjuration otherwise lawful, was forbidden on the sabbath, a fact which Paulus himself elsewhere adduces; [1344] as moreover there was a controversy between the schools of Hillel and Schammai, whether it were permitted even to administer consolation to the sick on the sabbath; [1345] and as again, according to an observation of Paulus, the more ancient rabbins were stricter on the point of sabbatical observance than those whose writings on this subject have come down to us; [1346] so the cures of Jesus, even supposing that he used no natural means, might by captious Pharisees be brought under the category of violations of the sabbath. The principal objection to the rationalistic explanation, namely, the silence of the Evangelists as to natural means, Paulus believes to be obviated in the present case by conceiving the scene thus: at that time, and in the synagogue, there was indeed no application of such means; Jesus merely caused the hand to be shown to him, that he might see how far the remedies hitherto prescribed by him (which remedies however are still a bare assumption) had been serviceable, and he then found that it was completely cured; for the expression ἀποκατεστάθη, used by all the narrators, implies a cure completed previously, not one suddenly effected in the passing moment. It is true that the context seems to require this interpretation, since the outstretching of the hand prior to the cure would appear to be as little possible, as in 1 Kings xiii. 4, the act of drawing it back: nevertheless the Evangelists give us only the word of Jesus as the source of the cure; not natural means, which are the gratuitous addition of expositors. [1347]

Decisive evidence, alike for the necessity of viewing this as a miraculous cure, and for the possibility of explaining the origin of the anecdote, is to be obtained by a closer examination of the Old Testament narrative already mentioned, 1 Kings xiii. 1 ff.. A prophet out of Judah threatened Jeroboam, while offering incense on his idolatrous altar, with the destruction of the altar and the overthrow of his false worship; the king with outstretched hand commanded that this prophet of evil should be seized, when suddenly his hand dried up so that he could not draw it again towards him, and the altar was rent. On the entreaty of the king, however, the prophet besought Jehovah for the restoration of the hand, and its full use was again granted. [1348] Paulus also refers to this narrative in the same connexion, but only for the purpose of applying to it his natural method of explanation; he observes that Jeroboam’s anger may have produced a transient convulsive rigidity of the muscles and so forth, in the hand just stretched out with such impetuosity. But who does not see that we have here a legend designed to glorify the monotheistic order of prophets, and to hold up to infamy the Israelitish idolatry in the person of its founder Jeroboam? The man of God denounces on the idolatrous altar quick and miraculous destruction; the idolatrous king impiously stretches forth his hand against the man of God; the hand is paralyzed, the idolatrous altar falls asunder into the dust, and only on the intercession of the prophet is the king restored. Who can argue about the miraculous and the natural in what is so evidently a mythus? And who can fail to perceive in our evangelical narrative an imitation of this Old Testament legend, except that agreeably to the spirit of Christianity the withering of the hand appears, not as a retributive miracle, but as a natural disease, and only its cure is ascribed to Jesus; whence also the outstretching of the hand is not, as in the case of Jeroboam, the criminal cause of the infliction, continued as a punishment, and the drawing of it back again a sign of cure; but, on the contrary, the hand which had previously been drawn inwards, owing to disease, can after the completion of the cure be again extended. That, in other instances, about that period, the power of working cures of this kind was in the East ascribed to the favourites of the gods, may be seen from a narrative already adduced, in which, together with the cure of blindness, the restoration of a diseased hand is attributed to Vespasian. [1349]

But this curative miracle does not appear independently and as an object by itself: the history of it hinges on the fact that the cure was wrought on the Sabbath, and the point of the whole lies in the words by which Jesus vindicates his activity in healing on the Sabbath against the Pharisees. In Luke and Mark this defence consists in the question, Is it lawful to do good on the sabbath days, or to do evil, to save life or to destroy it? in Matthew, in a part of this question, together with the aphorism on saving the sheep which might fall into the pit on the sabbath. Luke, who has not this saying on the present occasion, places it (varied by the substitution of ὄνος ἢ βοῦς, an ass or an ox for πρόβατον sheep, and of φρέαρ, well or pit for βόθυνος, ditch) in connexion with the cure of an ὑδρωπικὸς a man who had the dropsy (xiv. 5); a narrative which has in general a striking similarity to the one under consideration. Jesus takes food in the house of one of the chief Pharisees, where, as in the other instance in the synagogue, he is watched (here, ἦσαν παρατηρούμενοι, there, παρετήρουν). A dropsical person is present; as, there, a man with a withered hand. In the synagogue, according to Matthew, the Pharisees ask Jesus, εἰ ἔξεστι τοῖς σάββασι θεραπεύειν; Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath days? According to Mark and Luke, Jesus asks them whether it be lawful to save life, etc.: so, here, he asks them, εἰ ἔξεστι τῷ σαββατῷ θεραπερύειν; Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath? whereupon in both histories the interrogated parties are silent (in that of the withered hand, Mark: οἱ δέ ἐσιώπων; in that of the dropsical patient, Luke: οἱ δὲ ἡσύχασαν). Lastly, in both histories we have the saying about the animal fallen into a pit, in the one as an epilogue to the cure, in the other (that of Matthew) as a prologue. A natural explanation, which has not been left untried even with this cure of the dropsy, [1350] seems more than usually a vain labour, where, as in this case, we have before us no particular narrative, resting on its own historical basis, but a mere variation on the theme of the sabbath cures, and the text on the endangered domestic animal, which might come to one (Matthew) in connexion with the cure of a withered hand, to another (Luke) with the cure of a dropsical patient, and to a third in a different connexion still; for there is yet a third Story of a miraculous cure with which a similar saying is associated. Luke, namely, narrates (xiii. 10 ff.) the cure of a woman bowed down by demoniacal influence, as having been performed by Jesus on the sabbath; when to the indignant remonstrance of the ruler of the synagogue, Jesus replies by asking, whether every one does not loose his ox or ass from the stall on the sabbath, and lead him away to watering? a question which is undeniably a variation of the one given above. So entirely identical does this history appear with the one last named, that Schleiermacher comes to this conclusion: since in the second there is no reference to the first, and since consequently the repetition is not excused by confession, the two passages Luke xiii. 10, and xiv. 5, cannot have been written one after the other by the same author. [1351]

Thus we have here, not three different incidents, but only three different frames in which legend has preserved the memorable and thoroughly popular aphorism on the domestic animal, to be rescued or tended on the sabbath. Yet, unless we would deny to Jesus so original and appropriate an argument, there must lie at the foundation a cure of some kind actually performed by him on the sabbath; not, however, a miraculous one. We have seen that Luke unites the saying with the cure of a demoniacal patient: now it might have been uttered by Jesus on the occasion of one of those cures of demoniacs of which, under certain limitations, we have admitted the natural possibility. Or, when Jesus in cases of illness among his followers applied the usual medicaments without regard to the sabbath, he may have found this appeal to the practical sense of men needful for his vindication. Or lastly, if there be some truth in the opinion of rationalistic commentators that Jesus, according to the oriental and more particularly the Essene custom, occupied himself with the cure of the body as well as of the soul, he may, when complying with a summons to the former work on the sabbath, have had occasion for such an apology. But in adopting this last supposition, we must not, with these commentators, seek in the particular supernatural cures which the gospels narrate, the natural reality; on the contrary, we must admit that this is totally lost to us, and that the supernatural has usurped its place. [1352] Further, it cannot have been cures in general with which that saying of Jesus was connected; but any service performed by him or his disciples which might be regarded as a rescuing or preservation of life, and which was accompanied by external labour, might in his position with respect to the Pharisaic party, furnish an occasion for such a defence.

Of the two cures on the sabbath narrated in the fourth gospel, one has already been considered with the cures of the blind; the other (v. 1 ff.) might have been numbered among the cures of paralytics, but as the patient is not so designated, it was admissible to reserve it for our present head. In the porches of the pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem, Jesus found a man who, as it subsequently appears, had been lame for thirty-eight years; this sufferer he enables by a word to stand up and carry home his bed, but, as it was the sabbath, he thus draws down on himself the hostility of the Jewish hierarchy. Woolston [1353] and many later writers have thought to get clear of this history in a singular manner, by the supposition that Jesus here did not cure a real sufferer but merely unmasked a hypocrite. [1354] The sole reason which can with any plausibility be urged in favour of this notion, is that the cured man points out Jesus to his enemies as the one who had commanded him to carry his bed on the sabbath (v. 15; comp. 11 ff.), a circumstance which is only to be explained on the ground that Jesus had enjoined what was unwelcome. But that notification to the Pharisees might equally be given, either with a friendly intention, as in the case of the man born blind (John ix. 11, 25), or at least with the innocent one of devolving the defence of the alleged violation of the sabbath on a stronger than himself. [1355] The Evangelist at least gives it as his opinion that the man was really afflicted, and suffered from a wearisome disease, when he describes him as having had an infirmity thirty-eight years, τριάκοντα καὶ ὀκτὼ ἔτη ἔχων ἐν τῇ ἀσθενίᾳ (v. 5): for the forced interpretation once put on this passage by Paulus, referring the thirty-eight years to the man’s age, and not to the duration of his disease, he has not even himself ventured to reproduce. [1356] On this view of the incident it is also impossible to explain what Jesus says to the cured man on a subsequent meeting (v. 14): Behold thou art made whole; sin no more lest a worse thing come unto thee. Even Paulus is compelled by these words to admit that the man had a real infirmity, though only a trifling one:—in other words he is compelled to admit the inadequacy of the idea on which his explanation of the incident is based, so that here again we retain a miracle, and that not of the smallest.

In relation to the historical credibility of the narrative, it may certainly be held remarkable that so important a sanative institution as Bethesda is described to be by John, is not mentioned either by Josephus or the rabbins, especially if the popular belief connected a miraculous cure with this pool: [1357] but this affords nothing decisive. It is true that in the description of the pool there lies a fabulous popular notion, which appears also to have been received by the writer (for even if v. 4 be spurious, something similar is contained in the words κίνησις τοῦ ὕδατος, v. 3, and ταραχθῇ, v. 7). But this proves nothing against the truth of the narrative, since even an eye-witness and a disciple of Jesus may have shared a vulgar error. To make credible, however, such a fact as that a man who had been lame eight-and-thirty years, so that he was unable to walk, and completely bed-ridden, should have been perfectly cured by a word, the supposition of psychological influence will not suffice, for the man had no knowledge whatever of Jesus, v. 13; nor will any physical analogy, such as magnetism and the like, serve the purpose: but if such a result really happened, we must exalt that by which it happened above all the limits of the human and the natural. On the other hand, it ought never to have been thought a difficulty [1358] that from among the multitude of the infirm waiting in the porches of the pool, Jesus selected one only as the object of his curative power, since the cure of him whose sufferings had been of the longest duration was not only particularly adapted, but also sufficient, to glorify the miraculous power of the Messiah. Nevertheless, it is this very trait which suggests a suspicion that the narrative has a mythical character. On a great theatre of disease, crowded with all kinds of sufferers, Jesus, the exalted and miraculously gifted physician, appears and selects the one who is afflicted with the most obstinate malady, that by his restoration he may present the most brilliant proof of his miraculous power. We have already remarked that the fourth gospel, instead of extending the curative agency of Jesus over large masses and to a great variety of diseases, as the synoptical gospels do, concentrates it on a few cases which proportionately gain in intensity: thus here, in the narrative of the cure of a man who had been lame thirty-eight years, it has far surpassed all the synoptical accounts of cures performed on persons with diseased limbs, among whom the longest sufferer is described in Luke xiii. 11, only as a woman who had had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years. Without doubt the fourth Evangelist had received some intimation (though, as we have gathered from other parts of his history, it was far from precise) of cures of this nature performed by Jesus, especially of that wrought on the paralytic, Matt. ix. 2 ff. parall., for the address to the patient, and the result of the cure are in this narrative in John almost verbally the same as in that case, especially according to Mark’s account. [1359] There is even a vestige in this history of John, of the circumstance that in the synoptical narrative the cure appears in the light of a forgiveness of sins: for as Jesus in the latter consoles the patient, before the cure, with the assurance, thy sins are forgiven thee, so in the former, he warns him, after the cure, in the words, sin no more, etc. For the rest, this highly embellished history of a miraculous cure was represented as happening on the sabbath, probably because the command to take up the bed which it contained appeared the most suitable occasion for the reproach of violating the sabbath.

§ 100.

RESUSCITATIONS OF THE DEAD.

The Evangelists tell us of three instances in which Jesus recalled the dead to life. One of these is common to the three synoptists, one belongs solely to Luke, and one to John.

The instance which is common to the three first Evangelists is the resuscitation of a girl, and is in all the three gospels united with the narrative of the woman who had an issue of blood (Matt. ix. 18 f.; 23–26; Mark v. 22 ff.; Luke viii. 41 ff.). In the more precise designation of the girl and her father, the synoptical writers vary. Matthew introduces the father generally as ἄρχων εἷς a certain ruler, without any name; the two others as a ruler of the synagogue named Jairus: the latter moreover describe the girl as being twelve years old, and Luke states that she was the only child of her father; particulars of which Matthew is ignorant. A more important difference is, that according to Matthew the ruler in the first instance speaks of his daughter to Jesus as being dead, and intreats him to restore her to life; whereas according to the two other Evangelists, he left her while yet living, though on the point of death, that he might fetch Jesus to avert her actual decease, and first when Jesus was on the way with him, people came out of his house with the information that his daughter had in the meantime expired, so that to trouble Jesus further was in vain. The circumstances of the resuscitation also are differently described, for Matthew knows not that Jesus, as the other Evangelists state, took with him only his three most confidential disciples as witnesses. Some theologians, Storr for example, have thought these divergencies so important, that they have supposed two different cases in which, among other similar circumstances, the daughter, in one case of a civil ruler (Matthew), in the other, of a ruler of the synagogue named Jairus (Mark and Luke), was raised from the dead by Jesus. [1360] But that, as Storr supposes, and as it is inevitable to suppose on his view, Jesus not only twice resuscitated a girl, but also on both these occasions, healed a woman with an issue immediately before, is a coincidence which does not at all gain in probability by the vague observation of Storr, that it is quite possible for very similar things to happen at different times. If then it must be admitted that the Evangelists narrate only one event, the weak attempt to give perfect agreement to their narratives should be forborne. For neither can the expression of Matthew ἄρτι ἐτελεύτησε mean, as Kuinöl maintains, [1361] est morti proxima, nor can that of Mark, ἐσχάτως ἔχει, or of Luke ἀπέθνησκε, imply that death had already taken place: not to mention that according to both, the fact of the death is subsequently announced to the father as something new. [1362]

Our more modern critics have wisely admitted a divergency between the accounts in doing which they have unanimously given the palm of superior accuracy to the intermediate Evangelists. Some are lenient towards Matthew, and only attribute to his mode of narration a brevity which might belong even to the representation of an eye-witness; [1363] while others regard this want of particularity as an indication that the first gospel had not an apostolic origin. [1364] Now that Mark and Luke give the name of the applicant, on which Matthew is silent, and also that they determine his rank more precisely than the latter, will just as well bear an unfavourable construction for them, as the usual favourable one; since the designation of persons by name, as we have before remarked, is not seldom an addition of the later legend. For example, the woman with the issue first receives the name of Veronica in the tradition of John Malala; [1365] the Canaanitish woman that of Justa in the Clementine Homilies: [1366] and the two thieves crucified with Jesus, the names of Gestas and Demas in the Gospel of Nicodemus. [1367] Luke’s μονογενὴς (one only daughter) only serves to make the scene more touching, and the ἐτῶν δώδεκα twelve years of age, he, and after him Mark, might have borrowed from the history of the woman with the issue. The divergency that, according to Matthew, the maiden is spoken of in the first instance as dead, according to the two others as only dying, must have been considered very superficially by those who have thought it possible to turn it in accordance with our own rule to the disadvantage of Matthew, on the ground that his representation serves to aggrandize the miracle. For in both the other gospels the death of the girl is subsequently announced, and its being supposed in Matthew to have occurred a few moments earlier is no aggrandizement of the miracle. Nay, it is the reverse; for the miraculous power of Jesus appears greater in the former, not indeed objectively, but subjectively, because it is heightened by contrast and surprise. There, where Jesus is in the first instance intreated to restore the dead to life, he does no more than what was desired of him; here, on the contrary, where supplicated only for the cure of a sick person, he actually brings that person to life again, he does more than the interested parties seek or understand. There, where the power of awaking the dead is presupposed by the father to belong to Jesus, the extraordinary nature of such a power is less marked than here, where the father at first only presupposes the power of healing the sick, and when death has supervened, is diverted from any further hope. In the description of the arrival and the conduct of Jesus in the house where the corpse lay, Matthew’s brevity is at least clearer than the diffuse accounts of the two other Evangelists. Matthew tells us that Jesus, having reached the house, put forth the minstrels already assembled for the funeral, together with the rest of the crowd, on the ground that there would be no funeral there; this is perfectly intelligible. But Mark and Luke tell us besides that he excluded his disciples also, with the exception of three, from the scene about to take place, and for this it is difficult to discover a reason. That a greater number of spectators would have been physically or psychologically an impediment to the resuscitation, can only be said on the supposition that the event was a natural one. Admitting the miracle, the reason for the exclusion can only be sought in the want of fitness in the excluded parties, whom, however, the sight of such a miracle would surely have been the very means to benefit. But we must not omit to observe that the two later synoptists, in opposition to the concluding statement of Matthew that the fame of this event went abroad in the whole land, represent Jesus as enjoining the strictest silence on the witnesses: so that on the whole it rather appears that Mark and Luke regarded the incident as a mystery, to which only the nearest relatives and the most favoured disciples were admitted. Lastly, the difference on which Schulz insists as favourable to the second and third Evangelists, namely, that while Matthew makes Jesus simply take the maiden by the hand, they have preserved to us the words which he at the same time uttered, the former even in the original language;—can either have no weight at all, or it must fall into the opposite scale. For that Jesus, if he said anything when recalling a girl to life, made use of some such words as ἡ παῖς ἐγείρον, maiden, I say unto thee, arise, the most remote narrator might imagine, and to regard the ταλιθὰ κοῦμι of Mark as an indication that this Evangelist drew from a peculiarly original source, is to forget the more simple supposition that he translated these words from the Greek of his informant for the sake of presenting the life giving word in its original foreign garb, and thus enhancing its mysteriousness, as we have before observed with reference to the ἐφφαθὰ in the cure of the deaf man. After what we have seen we shall willingly abstain from finding out whether the individual who originally furnished the narrative in Luke were one of the three confidential disciples, and whether the one who originally related it, also put it into writing: a task to which only the acumen of Schleiermacher is equal. [1368]

In relation to the facts of the case, the natural interpretation speaks with more than its usual confidence, under the persuasion that it has on its side the assurance of Jesus himself, that the maiden was not really dead, but merely in a sleep-like swoon; and not only rationalists, like Paulus, and semi-rationalists, like Schleiermacher, but also decided supranaturalists, like Olshausen, believe, on the strength of that declaration of Jesus, that this was no resuscitation of the dead. [1369] The last-named commentator attaches especial importance to the antithesis in the speech of Jesus, and because the words οὐκ ἀπέθανε, is not dead, are followed by ἀλλὰ καθεύδει, but sleepeth, is of opinion that the former expression cannot be interpreted to mean merely, she is not dead, since I have resolved to restore her to life; strange criticism,—for it is precisely this addition which shows that she was only not dead, in so far as it was in the power of Jesus to recall her to life. Reference is also made to the declaration of Jesus concerning Lazarus, John xi. 14, Λάζαρος ἀπέθανε, Lazarus is dead, which is directly the reverse of the passage in question, οὐκ ἀπέθανε τὸ κοράσιον, the damsel is not dead. But Jesus had before said of Lazarus, αὕτη ἡ ἀσθένεια οὐκ ἔστι πρὸς θάνατον, this sickness is not unto death (v. 4), and Λάζαρος ὁ φίλος ἡμῶν κεκοίμηται, our friend Lazarus sleepeth (v. 11). Thus in the case of Lazarus also, who was really dead, we have just as direct a denial of death, and affirmation of mere sleep, as in the narrative before us. Hence Fritzsche is undoubtedly right when he paraphrases the words of Jesus in our passage as follows: puellam ne pro mortua habetote, sed dormire existimatote quippe in vitam mox redituram. Moreover, Matthew subsequently (xi. 5) makes Jesus say, νεκροὶ ἐγείρονται, the dead are raised up; and as he mentions no other instance of resuscitation by Jesus, he must apparently have had this in his mind. [1370]

But apart from the false interpretation of the words of Jesus, this view of the subject has many difficulties. That in many diseases conditions may present themselves which have a deceptive resemblance to death, or that in the indifferent state of medical science among the Jews of that age especially, a swoon might easily be mistaken for death is not to be denied. But how was Jesus to know that there was such a merely apparent death in this particular case? However minutely the father detailed to him the course of the disease, nay, even if Jesus were acquainted beforehand with the particular circumstances of the girl’s illness (as the natural explanation supposes): we must still ask, how could he build so much on this information as, without having seen the girl, and in contradiction to the assurance of the eye-witnesses, decidedly to declare that she was not dead, according to the rationalistic interpretation of his words? This would have been rashness and folly to boot, unless Jesus had obtained certain knowledge of the true state of the case in a supernatural way: [1371] to admit which, however, is to abandon the naturalistic point of view. To return to the explanation of Paulus; between the expressions, ἐκράτησε τῆς χειρὸς αὐτῆς, he took her by the hand, and ἠγέρθη τὸ κοράσιον, the maid arose, expressions which are closely enough connected in Matthew, and are still more inseparably linked by the words εὐθέως and παραχρῆμα in the other two gospels, he inserts a course of medical treatment, and Venturini can even specify the different restoratives which were applied. [1372] Against such arbitrary suppositions, Olshausen justly maintains that in the opinion of the evangelical narrator the life-giving word of Jesus (and we might add, the touch of his hand, furnished with divine power) was the means of restoring the girl to life.

In the case of resuscitation narrated by Luke alone (vii. 11 ff.) the natural explanation has not such a handle as was presented by the declaration of Jesus in the narrative just considered. Nevertheless, the rationalistic commentators take courage, and rest their hopes mainly on the circumstance that Jesus speaks to the young man lying in the coffin (v. 14). Now, say they, no one would speak to a dead person, but only to such an one as is ascertained or guessed to be capable of hearing. [1373] But this rule would prove that all the dead whom Christ will raise at the last day are only apparently dead, as otherwise they could not hear his voice, which it is expressly said they will do (John v. 28; comp. 1 Thess. iv. 16); it would therefore prove too much. Certainly one who is spoken to must be supposed to hear, and in a certain sense to be living; but in the present instance this holds only in so far as the voice of him who quickens the dead can penetrate even to the ears from which life has departed. We must indeed admit the possibility that with the bad custom which prevailed among the Jews of burying their dead a few hours after their decease, a merely apparent corpse might easily be carried to the grave; [1374] but all by which it is attempted to show that this possibility was here a reality, is a tissue of fictions. In order to explain how Jesus, even without any intention to perform a miracle, came to join the funeral procession, and how the conjecture could occur to him that the individual about to be buried was not really dead, it is first imagined that the two processions, that of the funeral and that of the companions of Jesus, met precisely under the gate of the city, and as they impeded each other, halted for a while:—directly in opposition to the text, which makes the bearers first stand still when Jesus touches the bier. Affected by the peculiar circumstances of the case, which he had learned during the pause in his progress, Jesus, it is said, approached the mother, and not with any reference to a resurrection which he intended to effect, but merely as a consolatory address, said to her, Weep not. [1375] But what an empty, presuming comforter would he be, who, when a mother was about to consign her only son to the grave, should forbid her even the relief of tears, without offering to her either real help by recalling the departed one, or ideal, by suggesting grounds for consolation! Now the latter Jesus does not attempt: hence unless we would allow him to appear altogether heartless, he must be supposed to have resolved on the former, and for this he in fact makes every preparation, designedly touching the bier, and causing the bearers to stand still. Here, before the reanimating word of Jesus, the natural explanation inserts the circumstance that Jesus observed some sign of life in the youth, and on this, either immediately or after a previous application of medicaments, [1376] spoke the words, which helped completely to awake him. But setting aside the fact that those intervening measures are only interpolated into the text, and that the strong words: νεανίσκε, σοὶ λέγω, ἐγέρθητι, Young man, I say unto thee arise! resemble rather the authoritative command of a miracle worker than the attempt of a physician to restore animation; how, if Jesus were conscious that the youth was alive when he met him, and was not first recalled to life by himself, could he with a good conscience receive the praise which, according to the narrative, the multitude lavished on him as a great prophet on account of this deed? According to Paulus, he was himself uncertain how he ought to regard the result; but if he were not convinced that he ought to ascribe the result to himself, it was his duty to disclaim all praise on account of it; and if he omitted to do this, his conduct places him in an equivocal light, in which he by no means appears in the other evangelical histories, so far as they are fairly interpreted. Thus here also we must acknowledge that the Evangelist intends to narrate to us a miraculous resuscitation of the dead, and that according to him, Jesus also regarded his deed as a miracle. [1377]

In the third history of a resurrection, which is peculiar to John (chap. xi.), the resuscitated individual is neither just dead nor being carried to his grave, but has been already buried several days. Here one would have thought there was little hope of effecting a natural explanation; but the arduousness of the task has only stimulated the ingenuity and industry of the rationalists in developing their conception of this narrative. We shall also see that together with the rigorously consequent mode of interpretation of the rationalists,—which, maintaining the historical integrity of the evangelical narrative throughout, assumes the responsibility of explaining every part naturally, there has appeared another system, which distinguishes certain features of the narrative as additions after the event, and is thus an advance towards the mythical explanation.

The rationalistic expositors set out here from the same premises as in the former narrative, namely, that it is in itself possible for a man who has lain in a tomb four days to come to life again, and that this possibility is strengthened in the present instance by the known custom of the Jews; propositions which we shall not abstractedly controvert. From this they proceed to a supposition which we perhaps ought not to let pass so easily, [1378] namely, that from the messenger whom the sisters had sent with the news of their brother’s illness, Jesus had obtained accurate information of the circumstances of the disease; and the answer which he gave to the messenger, This sickness is not unto death (v. 4), is said to express, merely as an inference which he had drawn from the report of the messenger, his conviction that the disease was not fatal. Such a view of his friend’s condition would certainly accord the best with his conduct in remaining two days in Peræa after the reception of the message (v. 6); since, according to that supposition, he could not regard his presence in Bethany as a matter of urgent necessity. But how comes it that after the lapse of these two days, he not only resolves to journey thither (v. 8), but also has quite a different opinion of the state of Lazarus, nay, certain knowledge of his death, which he first obscurely (v. 10) and then plainly (v. 14) announces to his disciples? Here the thread of the natural explanation is lost, and the break is only rendered more conspicuous by the fiction of a second messenger, [1379] after the lapse of two days, bringing word to Jesus that Lazarus had expired in the interim. For the author of the gospel at least cannot have known of a second messenger, otherwise he must have mentioned him, since the omission to do so gives another aspect to the whole narrative, obliging us to infer that Jesus had obtained information of the death of Lazarus in a supernatural manner. Jesus, when he had resolved to go to Bethany, said to the disciples, Lazarus sleepeth, but I go that I may awake him out of sleep (κεκοίμηται—ἐξυπνίσω—v. 11); this the naturalists explain by the supposition that Jesus must in some way have gathered from the statements of the messengers who announced the death of Lazarus, that the latter was only in a state of lethargy. But we can as little here as in the former case impute to Jesus the foolish presumption of giving, before he had even seen the alleged corpse, the positive assurance that he yet lived. [1380] From this point of view, it is also a difficulty that Jesus says to his disciples (v. 15) I am glad for your sakes that I was not there, to the intent ye may believe (ἵνα πιστεύσητε). Paulus explains these words to imply that Jesus feared lest the death, had it happened in his presence, might have shaken their faith in him; but, as Gabler [1381] has remarked, πιστεύω cannot mean merely the negative: not to lose faith, which would rather have been expressed by a phrase such as: ἵνα μὴ ἐκλείπῃ ἡ πίστις ὑμῶν, that your faith fail not (see Luke xxii. 32); and moreover we nowhere find that the idea which the disciples formed of Jesus as the Messiah was incompatible with the death of a man, or, more correctly, of a friend, in his presence.

From the arrival of Jesus in Bethany the evangelical narrative is somewhat more favourable to the natural explanation. It is true that Martha’s address to Jesus (v. 21 f.), Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died, but I know that even now, whatsoever thou wilt ask of God, he will give it thee, ἀλλὰ καὶ νῦν οἶδα, ὅτι, ὅσα ἂν αἰτήσῃ τὸν θεὸν, δώσει σοι ὁ θεὸς, appears evidently to express the hope that Jesus may be able even to recall the dead one to life. However, on the assurance of Jesus which follows, Thy brother shall rise again, ἀναστήσεται ὁ ἀδελφός σου, she answers despondingly, Yes, at the last day. This is certainly a help to the natural explanation, for it seems retrospectively to give to the above declaration of Martha (v. 22) the general sense, that even now, although he has not preserved the life of her brother, she believes Jesus to be him to whom God grants all that he desires, that is, the favourite of the Deity, the Messiah. But the expression which Martha there uses is not πιστεύω but οἶδα, and the turn of phrase: I know that this will happen if thou only willest it to be so, is a common but indirect form of petition, and is here the more unmistakable, because the object of the entreaty is clearly indicated by the foregoing antithesis. Martha evidently means, Thou hast not indeed prevented the death of our brother, but even now it is not too late, for at thy prayer God will restore him to thee and us. Martha’s change of mind, from the hope which is but indirectly expressed in her first reply (v. 24) to its extinction in the second, cannot be held very surprising in a woman who here and elsewhere manifests a very hasty disposition, and it is in the present case sufficiently explained by the form of the foregoing assurance of Jesus (v. 23). Martha had expected that Jesus would reply to her indirect prayer by a decided promise of its fulfilment, and when he answers quite generally and with an expression which it was usual to apply to the resurrection at the last day (ἀναστήσεται), she gives a half-impatient half-desponding reply. [1382] But that general declaration of Jesus, as well as the yet more indefinite one (v. 25 f.), I am the resurrection and the life, is thought favourable to the rationalistic view: Jesus, it is said, was yet far from the expectation of an extraordinary result, hence he consoles Martha merely with the general hope that he, the Messiah, would procure for those who believed in him a future resurrection and a life of blessedness. As however Jesus had before (v. 11) spoken confidently to his disciples of awaking Lazarus, he must then have altered his opinion in the interim—a change for which no cause is apparent. Further, when (v. 40) Jesus is about to awake Lazarus, he says to Martha, Said I not unto thee that if thou wouldst believe thou shouldst see the glory of God? evidently alluding to v. 23, in which therefore he must have meant to predict the resurrection which he was going to effect. That he does not declare this distinctly, and that he again veils the scarcely uttered promise in relation to the brother (v. 25) in general promises for the believing, is the effect of design, the object of which is to try the faith of Martha, and extend her sphere of thought. [1383]

When Mary at length comes out of the house with her companions, her weeping moves Jesus himself to tears. To this circumstance the natural interpretation appeals with unusual confidence, asking whether if he were already certain of his friend’s resurrection, he would not have approached his grave with the most fervent joy, since he was conscious of being able to call him again living from the grave in the next moment? In this view the words ἐνεβριμήσατο (v. 33) and ἐμβριμώμενος (v. 38) are understood of a forcible repression of the sorrow caused by the death of his friend, which subsequently found vent in tears (ἐδάκρυσεν). But both by its etymology, according to which it signifies fremere in aliquem or in se, and by the analogy of its use in the New Testament, where it appears only in the sense of increpare aliquem (Matt. ix. 30; Mark i. 43, xiv. 5), ἐμβριμᾶσθαι is determined to imply an emotion of anger, not of sorrow; where it is united, not with the dative of another person, but with τῷ πνεύματι and ἐν ἑαυτῷ, it must be understood of a silent, suppressed displeasure. This sense would be very appropriate in v. 38, where it occurs the second time; for in the foregoing observation of the Jews, Could not this man, who opened the eyes of the blind, have caused that even this man should not have died? there lies an intimation that they were scandalized, the prior conduct of Jesus perplexing them as to his present demeanour, and vice versâ. But where the word ἐμβριμᾶσθαι is first used v. 33, the general weeping seems to have been likely to excite in Jesus a melancholy, rather than an angry emotion: yet even here a strong disapproval of the want of faith (ὀλιγοπιστία) which was manifested was not impossible. That Jesus then himself broke out into tears, only proves that his indignation against the faithless generation around him dissolved into melancholy, not that melancholy was his emotion from the beginning. Lastly, that the Jews (v. 36) in relation to the tears which Jesus shed, said among themselves, Behold, how he loved him! appears to be rather against than for those who regard the emotion of Jesus as sorrow for the death of his friend, and sympathy with the sisters; for, as the character of the narrative of John in general would rather lead us to expect an opposition between the real import of the demeanour of Jesus, and the interpretation put upon it by the spectators, so in particular the Jews in this gospel are always those who either misunderstand or pervert the words and actions of Jesus. It is true that the mild character of Jesus is urged, as inconsistent with the harshness which displeasure on his part at the very natural weeping of Mary and the rest would imply; [1384] but such a mode of thinking is by no means foreign to the Christ of John’s gospel. He who gave to the βασιλικὸς, when preferring the inoffensive request that he would come to his house and heal his son, the rebuke, Except ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe; he who, when some of his disciples murmured at the hard doctrines of the sixth chapter, assailed them with the cutting question, Doth this offend you? and Will ye also go away? (vi. 61, 67); he who repulsed his own mother, when at the wedding at Cana she complained to him of the want of wine, with the harsh reply, What have I to do with thee, Woman? (ii. 4)—who thus was always the most displeased when men, not comprehending his higher mode of thought or action, showed themselves desponding or importunate,—would here find peculiar reason for this kind of displeasure. If this be the true interpretation of the passage, and if it be not sorrow for the death of Lazarus which Jesus here exhibits, there is an end to the assistance which the natural explanation of the entire event is thought to derive from this particular feature; meanwhile, even on the other interpretation, a momentary emotion produced by sympathy with the mourners is quite reconcilable with the foreknowledge of the resurrection. [1385] And how could the words of the Jews v. 37, serve, as rationalistic commentators think, to excite in Jesus the hope that God would now perhaps perform something extraordinary for him? The Jews did not express the hope that he could awake the dead, but only the conjecture that he might perhaps have been able to preserve his friend’s life; Martha therefore had previously said more when she declared her belief that even now the Father would grant him what he asked; so that if such hopes were excited in Jesus from without, they must have been excited earlier, and especially before the weeping of Jesus, to which it is customary to appeal as the proof that they did not yet exist.

Even supranaturalists admit that the expression of Martha when Jesus commanded that the stone should be taken away from the grave, Κύριε, ἤδη ὄζει (v. 39), is no proof at all that decomposition had really commenced, nor consequently that a natural resuscitation was impossible, since it may have been a mere inference from the length of time since the burial. [1386] But more weight must be attached to the words with which Jesus, repelling the objections of Martha, persists in having the tomb opened (v. 40): Said I not unto thee that if thou wouldst believe thou shouldst see the glory of God? How could he say this unless he was decidedly conscious of his power to resuscitate Lazarus? According to Paulus, this declaration only implied generally that those who have faith will, in some way or other, experience a glorious manifestation of the divinity. But what glorious manifestation of the divinity was to be seen here, on the opening of the grave of one who had been buried four days, unless it were his restoration to life? and what could be the sense of the words of Jesus, as opposed to the observation of Martha, that her brother was already within the grasp of decay, but that he was empowered to arrest decay? But in order to learn with certainty the meaning of the words τὴν δόξαν τοῦ θεοῦ in our present passage we need only refer to v. 4, where Jesus had said that the sickness of Lazarus was not unto death, πρὸς θάνατον, but for the glory of God, ὑπὲρ τῆς δόξης τοῦ θεοῦ. Here the first member of the antithesis, not unto death, clearly shows that the δόξα τοῦ θεοῦ signifies the glorification of God by the life of Lazarus, that is, since he was now dead, by his resurrection: a hope which Jesus could not venture to excite in the most critical moment, without having a superior assurance that it would be fulfilled. [1387] After the opening of the grave, and before he says to the dead man, Come forth! he thanks the Father for having heard his prayer. This is adduced, in the rationalistic point of view, as the most satisfactory proof that he did not first recall Lazarus to life by those words, but on looking into the grave found him already alive again. Truly, such an argument was not to be expected from theologians who have some insight into the character of John’s gospel. These ought to have remembered how common it is in this gospel, as for example in the expression glorify thy son, to represent that which is yet to be effected or which is only just begun, as already performed; and in the present instance it is especially suited to mark the certainty of obtaining fulfilment, that it is spoken of as having already happened. And what invention does it further require to explain, both how Jesus could perceive in Lazarus the evidences of returning life, and how the latter could have come to life again! Between the removal of the stone, says Paulus, and the thanksgiving of Jesus, lies the critical interval when the surprising result was accomplished; then must Jesus, yet some steps removed from the grave, have discerned that Lazarus was living. By what means? and how so quickly and unhesitatingly? and why did he and no one else discern it? He may have discerned it by the movements of Lazarus, it is conjectured. But how easily might he deceive himself with respect to a dead body lying in a dark cavern; how precipitate was he, if without having examined more nearly, he so quickly and decidedly declared his conviction that Lazarus lived! Or, if the movements of the supposed corpse were strong and not to be mistaken, how could they escape the notice of the surrounding spectators? Lastly, how could Jesus in his prayer represent the incident about to take place as a sign of his divine mission, if he was conscious that he had not effected, but only discovered, the resuscitation of Lazarus? As arguments for the natural possibility of a return of life in a man who had been interred four days, the rationalistic explanation adduces our ignorance of the particular circumstances of the supposed death, the rapidity of interment among the Jews, afterwards the coolness of the cave, the strong fragrance of the spices, and lastly, the reanimating draught of warm air, which on the rolling away of the stone streamed into the cave. But all these circumstances do not produce more than the lowest degree of possibility, which coincides with the highest degree of improbability: and with this the certainty with which Jesus predicts the result must remain irreconcilable. [1388]

These decided predictions are indeed the main hindrance to the natural interpretation of this chapter; hence it has been sought to neutralize them, still from the rationalistic position, by the supposition that they did not proceed from Jesus, but may have been added ex eventu by the narrator. Paulus himself found the words ἐξυπνίσω αὐτὸν (v. 11) quite too decided, and therefore ventured the conjecture that the narrator, writing with the result in his mind, had omitted a qualifying perhaps, which Jesus had inserted. [1389] This expedient has been more extensively adopted by Gabler. Not only does he partake the opinion of Paulus as to the above expression, but already in v. 4, he is inclined to lay the words ὑπὲρ τῆς δόξης τοῦ θεοῦ for the glory of God, to the account of the Evangelist: again v. 15, he conjectures that in the words χαίρω δι’ ὑμᾶς, ἵνα πιστεύσητε, ὅτι οὐκ ἤμην ἐκεῖ, I am glad for your sakes that I was not there, to the intent ye may believe, there is a slight exaggeration resulting from John’s knowledge of the issue; lastly, even in relation to the words of Martha v. 22, ἀλλὰ καὶ νῦν οἶδα κ.τ.λ. he admits the idea of an addition from the pen of the writer. [1390] By the adoption of this expedient, the natural interpretation avows its inability by itself to cope with the difficulties in John’s narrative. For if, in order to render its application possible, it is necessary to expunge the most significant passages, it is plain that the narrative in its actual state does not admit of a natural explanation. It is true that the passages, the incompatibility of which with the rationalistic mode of explanation is confessed by their excision, are very sparingly chosen; but from the above observations it is clear, that if all the features in this narrative which are really opposed to the natural view of the entire event were ascribed to the Evangelist, it would in the end be little short of the whole that must be regarded as his invention. Thus, what we have done with the two first narratives of resuscitations, is with the last and most remarkable history of this kind, effected by the various successive attempts at explanation themselves, namely, to reduce the subject to the alternative: that we either receive the event as supernatural, according to the representation of the evangelical narrative; or, if we find it incredible as such, deny that the narrative has an historical character.

In order, in this dilemma, to arrive at a decision, with respect to all the three narratives, we must refer to the peculiar character of the kind of miracles which we have now before us. We have hitherto been ascending a ladder of miracles; first, cures of mental disorders, then, of all kinds of bodily maladies, in which, however, the organization of the sufferer was not so injured as to cause the cessation of consciousness and life; and now, the revivification of bodies, from which the life has actually departed. This progression in the marvellous is, at the same time, a gradation in inconceivability. We have indeed been able to represent to ourselves how a mental derangement, in which none of the bodily organs were attacked beyond the nervous system, which is immediately connected with mental action, might have been removed, even in a purely psychical manner, by the mere word, look, and influence of Jesus: but the more deeply the malady appeared to have penetrated into the entire corporeal system, the more inconceivable to us was a cure of this kind. Where in insane persons the brain was disturbed to the extent of raging madness, or where in nervous patients the disorder was so confirmed as to manifest itself in periodical epilepsy; there we could scarcely imagine how permanent benefit could be conferred by that mental influence; and this was yet more difficult where the disease had no immediate connection with the mind, as in leprosy, blindness, lameness, etc. And yet, up to this point, there was always something present, to which the miraculous power of Jesus could apply itself; there was still a consciousness in the objects, on which to make an impression—a nervous life to be stimulated. Not so with the dead. The corpse from which life and consciousness have flown has lost the last fulcrum for the power of the miracle worker; it perceives him no longer—receives no impression from him; for the very capability of receiving impressions must be conferred on him anew. But to confer this, that is, to give life in the proper sense, is a creative act, and to think of this as being exercised by a man, we must confess to be beyond our power.

But even within the limits of our three histories of resurrections, there is an evident climax. Woolston has remarked with justice, that it seems as if each of these narratives were intended to supply what was wanting in the preceding. [1391] The daughter of Jairus is restored to life on the same bed on which she had just expired; the youth of Nain, when already in his coffin, and on his way to interment; lastly, Lazarus, after four days’ abode in the tomb. In the first history, a word was the only intimation that the maiden had fallen under the powers of the grave; in the second, the fact is imprinted on the imagination also, by the picture of the young man being already carried out of the city towards his grave; but in the third, Lazarus, who had been some time inclosed in the grave, is depicted in the strongest manner as an inhabitant of the nether world: so that, if the reality of the death could be doubted in the first instance, this would become more difficult in the second, and in the third, as good as impossible. [1392] With this gradation, there is a corresponding increase in the difficulty of rendering the three events conceivable; if, indeed, when the fact itself is inconceivable, there can exist degrees of inconceivableness between its various modifications. If, however, the resurrection of a dead person in general were possible, it must rather be possible in the case of one just departed, and yet having some remains of vital warmth, than in that of a corpse, cold and being carried to the grave; and again, in this, rather than in the case of one who had already lain four days in the grave, and in which decay is supposed to have commenced, nay, with respect to which, this supposition, if not confirmed, is at least not denied.

But, setting aside the miraculous part of the histories in question, each succeeding one is both intrinsically more improbable, and externally less attested, than the foregoing. As regards the internal improbability, one element of this, which indeed lies in all, and therefore also in the first, is especially conspicuous in the second. As a motive by which Jesus was induced to raise the young man at Nain, the narrative mentions compassion for the mother (v. 13). Together with this we are to include, according to Olshausen, a reference to the young man himself. For, he observes, man as a conscious being can never be treated as a mere instrument, which would be the case here, if the joy of the mother were regarded as the sole object of Jesus in raising the youth. [1393] This remark of Olshausen demands our thanks, not that it removes the difficulty of this and every other resuscitation of the dead, but that it exhibits that difficulty in the clearest light. For the conclusion, that what in itself, or according to enlightened ideas, is not allowable or fitting, cannot be ascribed to Jesus by the Evangelists, is totally inadmissible. We should rather (presupposing the purity of the character of Jesus) conclude that when the evangelical narratives ascribe to him what is not allowable, they are incorrect. Now that Jesus, in his resuscitations of the dead, made it a consideration whether the persons to be restored to life might, from the spiritual condition in which they died, derive advantage from the restoration or the contrary, we find no indication; that, as Olshausen supposes, the corporeal awakening was attended with a spiritual awakening, or that such a result was expected, is nowhere said. These resuscitated individuals, not excepting even Lazarus, recede altogether from our observation after their return to life, and hence Woolston was led to ask why Jesus rescued from the grave precisely these insignificant persons, and not rather John the Baptist, or some other generally useful man. Is it said, he knew it to be the will of Providence that these men, once dead, should remain so? But then, it should seem, he must have thought the same of all who had once died, and to Woolston’s objection there remains no answer but this: as it was positively known concerning celebrated men, that the breach which their deaths occasioned was never filled up by their restoration to life, legend could not annex the resurrections which she was pleased to narrate to such names, but must choose unknown subjects, in relation to which she was not under the same control.

The above difficulty is common to all the three narratives, and is only rendered more prominent in the second by an accidental expression: but the third narrative is full of difficulties entirely peculiar to itself, since the conduct of Jesus throughout, and, to a considerable extent, that of the other parties, is not easily to be conceived. When Jesus receives the information of the death of Lazarus, and the request of the sisters implied therein, that he would come to Bethany, he remains still two days in the same place, and does not set out toward Judea till after he is certain of the death. Why so? That it was not because he thought the illness attended with no danger, has been already shown; on the contrary, he foresaw the death of Lazarus. That indifference was not the cause of the delay, is expressly remarked by the Evangelist (v. 5). What then? Lücke conjectures that Jesus was then occupied with a particularly fruitful ministry in Peræa, which he was not willing to interrupt for the sake of Lazarus, holding it his duty to postpone his less important call as a worker of miracles and a succouring friend, to his higher call as a teacher. [1394] But he might here have very well done the one, and not have left the other undone; he might either have left some disciples to carry forward his work in that country, or remaining there himself, have still cured Lazarus, whether through the medium of a disciple, or by the power of his will at a distance. Moreover, our narrator is entirely silent as to such a cause for the delay of Jesus. This view of it, therefore, can be listened to only on the supposition that no other motive for the delay is intimated by the Evangelist, and even then as nothing more than a conjecture. Now another motive is clearly indicated, as Olshausen has remarked, in the declaration of Jesus, v. 15, that he is glad he was not present at the death of Lazarus, because, for the object of strengthening the faith of the disciples, the resurrection of his friend would be more effectual than his cure. Thus Jesus had designedly allowed Lazarus to die, that by his miraculous restoration to life, he might procure so much the more faith in himself. Tholuck and Olshausen on the whole put the same construction on this declaration of Jesus; but they confine themselves too completely to the moral point of view, when they speak of Jesus as designing, in his character of teacher, to perfect the spiritual condition of the family at Bethany and of his disciples; [1395] since, according to expressions, such as ἵνα δοξασθῇ ὁ υἱὸς τ. θ. (v. 4), his design was rather the messianic one of spreading and confirming faith in himself as the Son of God, though principally, it is true, within that narrow circle. Here Lücke exclaims: by no means! never did the Saviour of the needy, the noblest friend of man, act thus arbitrarily and capriciously; [1396] and De Wette also observes, that Jesus in no other instance designedly brings about or increases his miracles. [1397] The former, as we have seen, concludes that something external, preoccupation elsewhere, detained Jesus; a supposition which is contrary to the text, and which even De Wette finds inadequate, though he points out no other expedient. If then these critics are correct in maintaining that the real Jesus cannot have acted thus; while, on the other hand, they are incorrect in denying that the author of the fourth gospel makes his Jesus act thus: nothing remains but with the author of the Probabilia, [1398] from this incongruity of the Christ in John’s gospel with the Christ alone conceivable as the real one, to conclude that the narrative of the fourth Evangelist is unhistorical.

The alleged conduct of the disciples also, v. 12 f., is such as to excite surprise. If Jesus had represented to them, or at least to the three principal among them, the death of the daughter of Jairus as a mere sleep, how could they, when he said of Lazarus, he sleeps, I will awake him, κεκοίμηται, ἐξυπνίσω αὐτὸν think that he referred to a natural sleep? One would not awake a patient out of a healthy sleep; hence it must have immediately occurred to the disciples that here sleep (κοίμησις) was spoken of in the same sense as in the case of the maiden. That, instead of this, the disciples understand the deep expressions of Jesus quite superficially, is entirely in the fourth Evangelist’s favourite manner, which we have learned to recognise by many examples. If tradition had in any way made known to him, that to speak of death as a sleep was part of the customary phraseology of Jesus, there would immediately spring up in his imagination, so fertile in this kind of antithesis, a misunderstanding corresponding to that figure of speech. [1399]

The observation of the Jews, v. 37, is scarcely conceivable, presupposing the truth of the synoptical resuscitations of the dead. The Jews appeal to the cure of the man born blind (John ix.), and draw the inference, that he who had restored sight to this individual, must surely have been able to avert the death of Lazarus. How came they to refer to this heterogeneous and inadequate example, if there lay before them, in the two resuscitations of the dead, miracles more analogous, and adapted to give hope even in this case of actual death? It is certain that the Galilean resuscitations were prior to this of Lazarus, since Jesus after this period went no more into Galilee; neither could those events remain unknown in the capital, [1400] especially as we are are expressly told that the fame of them went abroad into all that land, throughout all Judæa, and throughout all the country round about. To the real Jews therefore these cases must have been well known; and as the fourth Evangelist makes his Jews refer to something less to the point, it is probable that he knew nothing of the above events: for that the reference belongs to him, and not to the Jews themselves, is evident from the fact, that he makes them refer to the very cure which he had last narrated.

A formidable difficulty lies also in the prayer which is put into the mouth of Jesus, v. 41 f. After thanking the Father for hearing his prayer, he adds, that for himself he knew well that the Father heard him always, and that he uttered this special thanksgiving only for the sake of the people around him, in order to obtain their belief in his divine mission. Thus he first gives his address a relation to God, and afterwards reduces this relation to a feigned one, intended to exist only in the conceptions of the people. Nor is the sense of the words such as Lücke represents it, namely, that Jesus for his own part would have prayed in silence, but for the benefit of the people uttered his prayer aloud (for in the certainty of fulfilment there lies no motive for silent prayer); they imply that for himself he had no need to thank the Father for a single result, as if surprised, since he was sure beforehand of having his wish granted, so that the wish and the thanks were coincident; that is, to speak generally, his relation to the Father did not consist in single acts of prayer, fulfilment, and thanks, but in a continual and permanent interchange of these reciprocal functions, in which no single act of gratitude in and by itself could be distinguished in this manner. If it may be admitted that in relation to the necessities of the people, and out of sympathy with them, such an isolated act could have taken place on the part of Jesus; yet, if there be any truth in this explanation, Jesus must have been entirely borne away by sympathy, must have made the position of the people his own, and thus in that moment have prayed from his own impulse, and on his own behalf. [1401] But, here, scarcely has he begun to pray when the reflection arises that he does this from no need of his own; he prays therefore from no lively feeling, but out of cold accommodation, and this must be felt difficult to conceive, nay, even revolting. He who in this manner prays solely for the edification of others, ought in no case to tell them that he prays from their point of view, not from his own; since an audible prayer cannot make any impression on the hearers, unless they suppose the speaker’s whole soul to be engaged. How then could Jesus make his prayer ineffective by this addition? If he felt impelled to lay before God a confession of the true state of the case, he might have done this in silence; that he uttered the confession aloud, and that we in consequence read it, could only happen on a calculation of advantage to later Christendom, to the readers of the gospel. While the thanksgiving was, for obvious reasons, needful to awake the faith of the spectators, the more developed faith which the fourth gospel presupposes, might regard it as a difficulty; because it might possibly appear to proceed from a too subordinate, and more particularly, a too little constant relation between the Father and the Son. Consequently the prayer which was necessary for the hearers, must be annulled for readers of a later period, or its value restricted to that of a mere accommodation. But this consideration cannot have been present in the mind of Jesus: it could belong only to a Christian who lived later. This has been already felt by one critic, who has hence proposed to throw v. 42 out of the text, as an unauthenticated addition by a latter hand. [1402] But as this judgment is destitute of any external reason, if the above passage could not have been uttered by Jesus, we must conclude that the Evangelist only lent the words to Jesus in order to explain the preceding, v. 41; and to this opinion Lücke has shown himself not altogether disinclined. [1403] Assuredly we have here words, which are only lent to Jesus by the Evangelist: but if it be so with these words, what is our security that it is so only with these? In a gospel in which we have already detected many discourses to be merely lent to the alleged speakers—in a narrative which presents historical improbabilities at all points,—the difficulty contained in a single verse is not a sign that that verse does not belong to the rest, but that the whole taken together does not belong to the class of historical compositions. [1404]

As regards the gradation in the external testimony to the three narratives, it has already been justly observed by Woolston, that only the resurrection of the daughter of Jairus, in which the miraculous is the least marked, appears in three Evangelists; the two others are each related by one Evangelist only: [1405] and as it is far less easy to understand the omission in the other gospels in relation to the resurrection of Lazarus, than in relation to the raising of the youth at Nain, there is here again a complete climax.

That the last-named event is mentioned by the author of Luke’s gospel alone;—especially that Matthew and Mark have it not instead of the resuscitation of the daughter of Jairus, or together with that narrative,—is a difficulty in more than one respect. [1406] Even viewed generally as a resuscitation of a dead person, one would have thought, as there were few of such miracles according to our gospels, and as they are highly calculated to carry conviction, it could not have been too much trouble to the Evangelists to recount it as a second instance; especially as Matthew has thought it worth while, for example, to narrate three cures of blindness, which nevertheless were of far less importance, and of which, therefore, he might have spared two, inserting instead of them either one or the other of the remaining resuscitations of the dead. But admitting that the two first Evangelists had some reason, no longer to be discovered, for not giving more than one history of a resurrection, they ought, one must think, to have chosen that of the youth at Nain far rather than that of the daughter of Jairus, because the former, as we have above observed, was a more indubitable and striking resurrection. As nevertheless they give only the latter, Matthew at least can have known nothing of the others; Mark, it is true, probably had it before him in Luke, but he had, as early as iii. 7, or 20, leaped from Luke vi. 12 (17) to Matt. xii. 15; and only at iv. 35 (21 ff.) returns to Luke viii. 22 (16 ff.); [1407] thus passing over the resurrection of the youth (Luke vii. 11 ff.). But now arises the second question: how can the resurrection of the youth, if it really happened, have remained unknown to the author of the first gospel? Even apart from the supposition that this gospel had an apostolic origin, this question is fraught with no less difficulty than the former. Besides the people, there were present many of his disciples, μαθηταὶ ἱκανοὶ; the place, Nain, according to the account which Josephus gives of its position relative to Mount Tabor, cannot have been far from the ordinary Galilean theatre of the ministry of Jesus; [1408] lastly, the fame of the event, as was natural, was widely disseminated (v. 17). Schleiermacher is of opinion that the authors of the first sketches from the life of Jesus, not being within the apostolic circle, did not generally venture to apply to the much occupied apostles, but rather sought the friends of Jesus of the second order, and in doing so they naturally turned to those places where they might hope for the richest harvests,—to Capernaum and Jerusalem; events which, like the resuscitation in question, occurred in other places, could not so easily become common property. But first, this conception of the case is too subjective, making the promulgation of the most important deeds of Jesus, dependent on the researches of amateurs and collectors of anecdotes, who went about gleaning, like Papias, at a later period; secondly, (and these two objections are essentially connected,) there lies at its foundation the erroneous idea that such histories were fixed, like inert bodies once fallen to the ground, in the places to which they belonged, guarded there as lifeless treasures, and only exhibited to those who took the trouble to resort to the spot: instead of which, they were rather like the light-winged inhabitants of the air, flying far away from the place which gave them birth, roaming everywhere, and not seldom losing all association with their original locality. We see the same thing happen daily; innumerable histories, both true and false, are represented as having occurred at the most widely different places. Such a narrative, once formed, is itself the substance, the alleged locality, the accident: by no means can the locality be the substance, to which the narrative is united as the accident, as it would follow from Schleiermacher’s supposition. Since then it cannot well be conceived that an incident of this kind, if it really happened, could remain foreign to the general tradition, and hence unknown to the author of the first gospel: the fact of this author’s ignorance of the incident gives rise to a suspicion that it did not really happen.

But this ground of doubt falls with incomparably greater weight, on the narrative of the resurrection of Lazarus in the fourth gospel. If the authors or collectors of the three first gospels knew of this, they could not, for more than one reason, avoid introducing it into their writings. For, first, of all the resuscitations effected by Jesus, nay, of all his miracles, this resurrection of Lazarus, if not the most wonderful, is yet the one in which the marvellous presents itself the most obviously and strikingly, and which therefore, if its historical reality can be established, is a pre-eminently strong proof of the extraordinary endowments of Jesus as a divine messenger; [1409] whence the Evangelists, although they had related one or two other instances of the kind, could not think it superfluous to add this also. But, secondly, the resurrection of Lazarus had, according to the representation of John, a direct influence in the development of the fate of Jesus; for we learn from xi. 47 ff., that the increased resort to Jesus, and the credit which this event procured him, led to that consultation of the Sanhedrim in which the sanguinary counsel of Caiaphas was given and approved. Thus the event had a double importance—pragmatical as well as dogmatical; consequently, the synoptical writers could not have failed to narrate it, had it been within their knowledge. Nevertheless, theologians have found out all sorts of reasons why those Evangelists, even had the fact been known to them, should refrain from its narration. Some have been of opinion that at the time of the composition of the three first gospels, the history was still in every mouth, so that to make a written record of it was superfluous; [1410] others, on the contrary, have conjectured that it was thought desirable to guard against its further publication, lest danger should accrue to Lazarus and his family, the former of whom, according to John xii. 10, was persecuted by the Jewish hierarchy on account of the miracle which had been preformed in him; a caution for which there was no necessity at the later period at which John wrote his gospel. [1411] It is plain that these two reasons nullify each other, and neither of them is in itself worthy of a serious refutation; yet as similar modes of evading a difficulty are still more frequently resorted to than might be supposed, we ought not to think some animadversion on them altogether thrown away. The proposition, that the resurrection of Lazarus was not recorded by the synoptists because it was generally known in their circle, proves too much; since on this rule, precisely the most important events in the life of Jesus, his baptism, death, and resurrection, must have remained unwritten. Moreover, writings, which like our gospels, originate in a religious community, do not serve merely to make known the unknown; it is their office also to preserve what is already known. In opposition to the other explanation, it has been remarked by others, that the publication of this history among those who were not natives of Palestine, as was the case with those for whom Mark and Luke wrote, could have done no injury to Lazarus; and even the author of the first gospel, admitting that he wrote in and for Palestine, could hardly have withheld a fact in which the glory of Christ was so peculiarly manifested, merely out of consideration to Lazarus, who, supposing the more improbable case that he was yet living at the time of the composition of the first gospel, ought not, Christian as he doubtless was, to refuse to suffer for the name of Christ; and the same observation would apply to his family. The most dangerous time for Lazarus according to John xii. 10, was that immediately after his resurrection, and a narrative which appeared so long after, could scarcely have heightened or renewed this danger; besides, in the neighbourhood of Bethany and Jerusalem whence danger was threatened to Lazarus, the event must have been so well-known and remembered that nothing was to be risked by its publication. [1412]

It appears then that the resurrection of Lazarus, since it is not narrated by the synoptists, cannot have been known to them; and the question arises, how was this ignorance possible? Hase gives the mysterious answer, that the reason of this omission lies hid in the common relations under which the synoptists in general were silent concerning all the earlier incidents in Judæa; but this leaves it uncertain, at least so far as the expressions go, whether we ought to decide to the disadvantage of the fourth gospel or of its predecessors. The latest criticism of the gospel of Matthew has cleared up the ambiguity in Hase’s answer after its usual manner, determining the nature of those common relations which he vaguely adduces, thus: Every one of the synoptists, by his ignorance of a history which an apostle must have known, betrays himself to be no apostle. [1413] But this renunciation of the apostolic origin of the first gospel, does not by any means enable us to explain the ignorance of its author and his compeers of the resurrection of Lazarus. For besides the remarkable character of the event, its occurrence in the very heart of Judæa, the great attention excited by it, and its having been witnessed by the apostles,—all these considerations render it incomprehensible that it should not have entered into the general tradition, and from thence into the synoptical gospels. It is argued that these gospels are founded on Galilean legends, i.e. oral narratives and written notices by the Galilean friends and companions of Jesus; that these were not present at the resurrection of Lazarus, and therefore did not include it in their memoirs; and that the authors of the first gospels, strictly confining themselves to the Galilean sources of information, likewise passed over the event. [1414] But there was not such a wall of partition between Galilee and Judæa, that the fame of an event like the resurrection of Lazarus could help sounding over from the one to the other. Even if it did not happen during a feast time, when (John iv. 45) many Galileans might be eye-witnesses, yet the disciples, who were for the greater part Galileans, were present (v. 16), and must, so soon as they returned into Galilee after the resurrection of Jesus, have spread abroad the history throughout this province, or rather, before this, the Galileans who kept the last passover attended by Jesus, must have learned the event, the report of which was so rife in the city. Hence even Lücke finds this explanation of Gabler’s unsatisfactory; and on his own side attempts to solve the enigma by the observation, that the original evangelical tradition, which the synoptists followed, did not represent the history of the Passion mainly in a pragmatical light, and therefore gave no heed to this event as the secret motive of the murderous resolve against Jesus, and that only John, who was initiated into the secret history of the Sanhedrim, was in a condition to supply this explanatory fact. [1415] This view of the case would certainly appear to neutralize one reason why the synoptists must have noticed the event in question, namely, that drawn from its pragmatical importance; but when it is added, that as a miracle regarded in itself, apart from its more particular circumstances, it might easily be lost among the rest of those narratives from which we have in the three first gospels a partly accidental selection,—we must reply, that the synoptical selection of miracles appears to be an accidental one only when that is at once assumed which ought first to be proved: namely, that the miracles in the fourth gospel are historical: and unless the selection be casual to a degree inconsistent with the slightest intelligence in the compilers, such a miracle cannot have been overlooked. [1416]

It has doubtless been these and similar considerations, which have led the latest writers on the controversy concerning the first gospel, to complain of the one-sidedness with which the above question is always answered to the disadvantage of the synoptists, especially Matthew, as if it were forgotten that an answer dangerous to the fourth gospel lies just as near at hand. [1417] For our own part, we are not so greatly alarmed by the fulminations of Lücke, as to be deterred from the expression of our opinion on the subject. This theologian, even in his latest editions, reproaches those who, from the silence of the synoptical writers, conclude that this narrative is a fiction and the gospel of John not authentic, with an unparalleled lack of discernment, and a total want of insight into the mutual relations of our gospels (that is, into those relations viewed according to the professional conviction of theologians, which is unshaken even by the often well-directed attacks of the author of the Probabilia). We, nevertheless, distinctly declare that we regard the history of the resurrection of Lazarus, not only as in the highest degree improbable in itself, but also destitute of external evidence; and this whole chapter, in connexion with those previously examined, as an indication of the unauthenticity of the fourth gospel.

If it is thus proved that all the three evangelical histories of resuscitations are rendered more or less doubtful by negative reasons: all that is now wanting to us is positive proof, that the tradition of Jesus having raised the dead might easily be formed without historical foundation. According to rabbinical, [1418] as well as New Testament passages (e.g. John v. 28 f., vi. 40, 44; 1 Cor. xv.; 1 Thess. iv. 16), the resuscitation of the dead was expected of the Messiah at his coming. Now the παρουσία, the appearance of the Messiah Jesus on earth, was in the view of the early church broken by his death into two parts; the first comprised his preparatory appearance, which began with his human birth, and ended with the resurrection and ascension; the second was to commence with his future advent on the clouds of heaven, in order to open the αἰὼν μέλλων, the age to come. As the first appearance of Jesus had wanted the glory and majesty expected in the Messiah, the great demonstrations of messianic power, and in particular the general resurrection of the dead, were assigned to his second, and as yet future appearance on earth. Nevertheless, as an immediate pledge of what was to be anticipated, even in the first advent some fore-splendours of the second must have been visible in single instances; Jesus must, even in his first advent, by awaking some of the dead, have guaranteed his authority one day to awake all the dead; he must, when questioned as to his messiahship, have been able to adduce among other criteria the fact that the dead were raised up by him (Matt. xi. 5), and he must have imparted the same power to his disciples (Matt. xi. 8, comp. Acts ix. 40, xx. 10); but especially as a close prefiguration of the hour in which all that are in their graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth (John v. 28 f.), he must have cried with a loud voice, Come forth! to one who had lain in the grave four days (John xi. 17, 43). For the origination of detailed narratives of single resuscitations, there lay, besides, the most appropriate types in the Old Testament. The prophets Elijah and Elisha (1 Kings xvii. 17 ff.; 2 Kings iv. 18 ff.) had awaked the dead, and to these instances Jewish writings appealed as a type of the messianic time. [1419] The object of the resuscitation was with both these prophets a child, but a boy, while in the narrative common to the synoptists we have a girl; the two prophets revived him while he lay on the bed, as Jesus does the daughter of Jairus; both entered alone into the chamber of death, as Jesus excludes all save a few confidential friends; only, as it is fitting, the Messiah needs not the laborious manipulations by which the prophets attained their object. Elijah in particular raised the son of a widow, as Jesus did at Nain; he met the widow of Zarephath at the gate (but before the death of her son) as Jesus met the widow of Nain, under the gate of the city (after the death of her son); lastly, it is in both instances told in the same words how the miracle-worker restored the son to the mother. [1420] Even one already laid in his grave, like Lazarus, was restored to life by the prophet Elisha; with this difference, however, that the prophet himself had been long dead, and the contact of his bones reanimated a corpse which was accidentally thrown upon them (2 Kings xiii. 21). There is yet another point of similarity between the resuscitations of the dead in the Old Testament and that of Lazarus; it is that Jesus, while in his former resuscitation he utters the authoritative word without any preliminary, in that of Lazarus offers a prayer to God, as Elisha, and more particularly Elijah, are said to have done. While Paulus extends to these narratives in the Old Testament, the natural explanation which he has applied to those in the New, theologians of more enlarged views have long ago remarked, that the resurrections in the New Testament are nothing more than mythi, which had their origin in the tendency of the early Christian church, to make her Messiah agree with the type of the prophets, and with the messianic ideal. [1421]

§ 101.

ANECDOTES HAVING RELATION TO THE SEA.

As in general, at least according to the representations of the three first Evangelists the country around the Galilean sea was the chief theatre of the ministry of Jesus; so a considerable number of his miracles have an immediate reference to the sea. One of this class, the miraculous draught of fishes granted to Peter, has already presented itself for our consideration; besides this, there are the miraculous stilling of the storm which had arisen on the sea while Jesus slept, in the three synoptists; Matthew, Mark, and John; the summary of most of those, the walking of Jesus on the sea, likewise during a storm, in incidents which the appendix to the fourth gospel places after the resurrection; and lastly, the anecdote of the coin that was to be angled for by Peter, in Matthew.

The first-named narrative (Matt. viii. 23 ff. parall.) is intended, according to the Evangelist’s own words, to represent Jesus to us as him whom the winds and the sea obey, οἱ ἄνεμοι καὶ ἡ θάλασσα ὑπακούουσιν. Thus, to follow out the gradation in the miraculous which has been hitherto observed, it is here presupposed, not merely that Jesus could act on the human mind and living body in a psychological and magnetic manner; or with a revivifying power on the human organism when it was forsaken by vitality; nay, not merely as in the history of the draught of fishes earlier examined, that he could act immediately with determinative power, on irrational yet animated existences, but that he could act thus even on inanimate nature. The possibility of finding a point of union between the alleged supernatural agency of Jesus, and the natural order of phenomena, here absolutely ceases: here, at the latest, there is an end to miracles in the wider and now more favoured sense; and we come to those which must be taken in the narrowest sense, or to the miracle proper. The purely supranaturalistic view is therefore the first to suggest itself. Olshausen has justly felt, that such a power over external nature is not essentially connected with the destination of Jesus for the human race and for the salvation of man; whence he was led to place the natural phenomenon which is here controlled by Jesus in a relation to sin, and therefore to the office of Jesus. Storms, he says, are the spasms and convulsions of nature, and as such the consequences of sin, the fearful effects of which are seen even on the physical side of existence. [1422] But it is only that limited observation of nature which in noting the particular forgets the general, that can regard storms, tempests, and similar phenomena (which in connexion with the whole have their necessary place and beneficial influence) as evils and departure from original law: and a theory of the world in which it is seriously upheld, that before the fall there were no storms and tempests, as, on the other hand, no beasts of prey and poisonous plants, partakes—one does not know whether to say, of the fanatical, or of the childish. But to what purpose, if the above explanation will not hold, could Jesus be gifted with such a power over nature? As a means of awakening faith in him, it was inadequate and superfluous: because Jesus found individual adherents without any demonstration of a power of this kind, and general acceptance even this did not procure him. As little can it be regarded as a type of the original dominion of man over external nature, a dominion which he is destined to reattain; for the value of this dominion consists precisely in this, that it is a mediate one, achieved by the progressive reflection and the united efforts of ages, not an immediate and magical dominion, which costs no more than a word. Hence in relation to that part of nature of which we are here speaking the compass and the steam-vessel are an incomparably truer realization of man’s dominion over the ocean, than the allaying of the waves by a mere word. But the subject has another aspect, since the dominion of man over nature is not merely external and practical, but also immanent or theoretical, that is, man even when externally he is subjected to the might of the elements, yet is not internally conquered by them; but, in the conviction that the powers of physical nature can only destroy in him that which belongs to his physical existence, is elevated in the self-certainty of the spirit above the possible destruction of the body. This spiritual power, it is said, was exhibited by Jesus, for he slept tranquilly in the midst of the storm, and when awaked by his trembling disciples, inspired them with courage by his words. But for courage to be shown, real danger must be apprehended: now for Jesus, supposing him to be conscious of an immediate power over nature, danger could in no degree exist: therefore he could not here give any proof of this theoretical power.

In both respects the natural explanation would find only the conceivable and the desirable attributed to Jesus in the evangelical narrative; namely, on the one hand, an intelligent observation of the state of the weather, and on the other, exalted courage in the presence of real peril. When we read that Jesus commanded the winds ἐπιτιμᾷν τοῖς ἀνέμοις, we are to understand simply that he made some remark on the storm, or some exclamations at its violence: and his calming of the sea we are to regard only as a prognostication, founded on the observation of certain signs, that the storm would soon subside. His address to the disciples is said to have proceeded, like the celebrated saying of Cæsar, from the confidence that a man who was to leave an impress on the world’s history, could not so lightly be cut short in his career by an accident. That those who were in the ship regarded the subsidence of the storm as the effect of the words of Jesus, proves nothing, for Jesus nowhere confirms their inference. [1423] But neither does he disapprove it, although he must have observed the impression which, in consequence of that inference, the result had made on the people; [1424] he must therefore, as Venturini actually supposes, have designedly refrained from shaking their high opinion of his miraculous power, in order to attach them to him the more firmly. But, setting this altogether aside, was it likely that the natural presages of the storm should have been better understood by Jesus, who had never been occupied on the sea, than by Peter, James, and John, who had been at home on it from their youth upwards? [1425]

It remains then that, taking the incident as it is narrated by the Evangelists, we must regard it as a miracle; but to raise this from an exegetical result to a real fact, is, according to the above remarks extremely difficult: whence there arises a suspicion against the historical character of the narrative. Viewed more nearly however, and taking Matthew’s account as the basis, there is nothing to object to the narrative until the middle of v. 26. It might really have happened that Jesus in one of his frequent passages across the Galilean sea, was sleeping when a storm arose; that the disciples awaked him with alarm, while he, calm and self-possessed, said to them, Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith? What follows—the commanding of the waves, which Mark, with his well-known fondness for such authoritative words, reproduces as if he were giving the exact words of Jesus in a Greek translation (σιώπα, πεφίμωσο!)—might have been added in the propagation of the anecdote from one to another. There was an inducement to attribute to Jesus such a command over the winds and the sea, not only in the opinion entertained of his person, but also in certain features of the Old Testament history. Here, in poetical descriptions of the passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea, Jehovah is designated as he who rebuked the Red Sea, ἐπετίμησε τῇ ἐρυθρᾷ θαλάσσῇ (Psa. cvi. 9; LXX. comp. Nahum i. 4), so that it retreated. Now, as the instrument in this partition of the Red Sea was Moses, it was natural to ascribe to his great successor, the Messiah, a similar function; accordingly we actually find from rabbinical passages, that a drying up of the sea was expected to be wrought by God in the messianic times, doubtless through the agency of the Messiah, as formerly through that of Moses. [1426] That instead of drying up the sea Jesus is said only to produce a calm, may be explained, on the supposition that the storm and the composure exhibited by Jesus on the occasion were historical, as a consequence of the mythical having combined itself with this historical element; for, as according to this, Jesus and his disciples were on board a ship, a drying up of the sea would have been out of place.

Still it is altogether without any sure precedent, that a mythical addition should be engrafted on the stem of a real incident, so as to leave the latter totally unmodified. And there is one feature, even in the part hitherto assumed to be historical, which, more narrowly examined, might just as probably have been invented by the legend as have really happened. That Jesus, before the storm breaks out, is sleeping, and even when it arises, does not immediately awake, is not his voluntary deed, but chance; [1427] it is this very chance, however, which alone gives the scene its full significance, for Jesus sleeping in the storm is by the contrast which he presents, a not less emblematical image than Ulysses sleeping when, after so many storms, he was about to land on his island home. Now that Jesus really slept at the time that a storm broke out, may indeed have happened by chance in one case out of ten; but in the nine cases also, when this did not happen, and Jesus only showed himself calm and courageous during the storm, I am inclined to think that the legend would so far have understood her interest, that, as she had represented the contrast of the tranquillity of Jesus with the raging of the elements to the intellect, by means of the words of Jesus, so she would depict it for the imagination, by means of the image of Jesus sleeping in the ship (or as Mark has it, [1428] on a pillow in the hinder part of the ship). If then that which may possibly have happened in a single case, must certainly have been invented by the legend in nine cases; the expositor must in reason prepare himself for the undeniable possibility, that we have before us one of the nine cases, instead of that single case. [1429] If then it be granted that nothing further remains as an historical foundation for our narrative, than that Jesus exhorted his disciples to show the firm courage of faith in opposition to the raging waves of the sea, it is certainly possible that he may once have done this in a storm at sea; but just as he said: if ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye may say to this mountain, Be thou removed, and cast into the sea (Matt. xxi. 21), or to this tree, Be thou plucked up by the root, and be thou planted in the sea (Luke xvii. 6), and both shall be done (καὶ ὑπήκουσεν ἂν ὑμῖν, Luke): so he might, not merely on the sea, but in any situation, make use of the figure, that to him who has faith, winds and waves shall be obedient at a word (ὅτι καὶ τοῖς ἀνέμοις ἐπιτάσσει καὶ τῷ ὕδατι, καὶ ὑπακούουσιν αὐτῷ, Luke). If we now take into account what even Olshausen remarks, and Schneckenburger has shown, [1430] that the contest of the kingdom of God with the world was in the early times of Christianity commonly compared to a voyage through a stormy ocean; we see at once, how easily legend might come to frame such a narrative as the above, on the suggestions afforded by the parallel between the Messiah and Moses, the expressions of Jesus, and the conception of him as the pilot who steers the little vessel of the kingdom of God through the tumultuous waves of the world. Setting this aside, however, and viewing the matter only generally, in relation to the idea of a miracle-worker, we find a similar power over storms and tempests, ascribed, for example, to Pythagoras. [1431]

We have a more complicated anecdote connected with the sea, wanting in Luke, but contained in John vi. 16 ff., as well as in Matt. xiv. 22 ff., and Mark vi. 45 ff., where a storm overtakes the disciples when sailing by night, and Jesus appears to their rescue, walking towards them on the sea. Here, again, the storm subsides in a marvellous manner on the entrance of Jesus into the ship; but the peculiar difficulty of the narrative lies in this, that the body of Jesus appears so entirely exempt from a law which governs all other human bodies without exception, namely, the law of gravitation, that he not only does not sink under the water, but does not even dip into it; on the contrary, he walks erect on the waves as on firm land. If we are to represent this to ourselves, we must in some way or other, conceive the body of Jesus as an ethereal phantom, according to the opinion of the Docetæ; a conception which the Fathers of the Church condemned as irreligious, and which we must reject as extravagant. Olshausen indeed says, that in a superior corporeality, impregnated with the powers of a higher world, such an appearance need not create surprise: [1432] but these are words to which we can attach no definite idea. If the spiritual activity of Jesus which refined and perfected his corporeal nature, instead of being conceived as that which more and more completely emancipated his body from the psychical laws of passion and sensuality, is understood as if by its means the body was exempted from the physical law of gravity:—this is a materialism of which, as in a former case, it is difficult to decide whether it be more fantastical or childish. If Jesus did not sink in the water, he must have been a spectre, and the disciples in our narrative would not have been wrong in taking him for one. We must also recollect that on his baptism in the river Jordan, Jesus did not exhibit this property, but was submerged like an ordinary man. Now had he at that time also the power of sustaining himself on the surface of the water, and only refrained from using it? and did he thus increase or reduce his specific gravity by an act of his will? or are we to suppose, as Olshausen would perhaps say, that at the time of his baptism he had not attained so far in the process of subtilizing his body, as to be freely borne up by the water, and that he only reached this point at a later period? These are questions which Olshausen justly calls absurd: nevertheless they serve to open a glimpse into the abyss of absurdities in which we are involved by the supranaturalistic interpretation, and particularly by that which this theologian gives of the narrative before us.

To avoid these, the natural explanation has tried many expedients. The boldest is that of Paulus, who maintains that the text does not state that Jesus walked on the water; and that the miracle in this passage is nothing but a philological mistake, since περιπατεῖν ἐπὶ τῆς θαλάσσης is analogous to the expression στρατοπεδεύειν ἐπὶ τῆς θαλάσσης, Exod.