Chapter 23

When he heard in the prison of one who did great wonders and signs, he desired to learn with certainty whether this was“he who was to come.”If this question is taken as referring to the Messiahship the whole narrative loses its meaning, and it upsets the theory of the Messianic secret, since in this case at least one person had become aware, independently, of the office which belonged to Jesus, not to mention all the ineptitudes involved in making the Baptist here speak in doubt and confusion. Moreover, on this false interpretation of the question the point of Jesus' discourse is lost, for in this case it is not clear why He says to the people afterwards,“If ye can receive it, John himself is Elias.”This revelation presupposes that Jesus and the people, who had[pg 373]heard the question which had been addressed to Him, also gave it its only natural meaning, referring it to Jesus as the bearer of the office of Elias.That even the first Evangelist gives the episode a Messianic setting by introducing it with the words“When John heard in the prison of the works of the Christ”does not alter the facts of the body of the narrative. The sequel directly contradicts the introduction. And this interpretation fully explains the evasive answer of Jesus, in which exegesis has always recognised a certain reserve without ever being able to make it intelligible why Jesus did not simply send him the message,“Yes, I am he”—whereto, however, according to modern theology, He would have needed to add,“but another kind of Messiah from him whom you expect.”The fact was, the Baptist had put Him in an extremely difficult position. He could not answer that He was Elias if He held Himself to be the Messiah; on the other hand He could not, and would not, disclose to him, and still less to the messengers and the listening multitude, the secret of His Messiahship. Therefore He sends this obscure message, which only contains a confirmation of the facts which John had already heard and closes with a warning, come what may, not to be offended in Him. Of this the Baptist was to make what he could.It mattered, in fact, little how John understood the message. The time was much more advanced than he supposed; the hammer of the world's clock had risen to strike the last hour. All that he needed to know was that he had no cause to doubt.In revealing to the people the true office of the Baptist, Jesus unveiled to them almost the whole mystery of the Kingdom of God, and nearly disclosed the secret of His Messiahship. For if Elias was already present, was not the coming of the Kingdom close at hand? And if John was Elias, who was Jesus?... There could only be one answer: the Messiah. But this seemed impossible, because Messiah was expected as a supernatural personality. The eulogy on the Baptist is, historically regarded, identical in content with the prediction of the Parousia in the discourse at the sending forth of the disciples. For after the coming of Elias there must follow immediately the judgment and the other events belonging to the last time. Now we can understand why in the enumeration of the events of the last time in the discourse to the Twelve the coming of Elias is not mentioned.We see here, too, how, in the thought of Jesus, Messianic doctrine forces its way into history and simply abolishes the historic aspect of the events. The Baptist had not held himself to be Elias, the people had not thought of attributing this office to him; the description of Elias did not fit him at all, since he had[pg 374]done none of those things which Elias was to do: and yet Jesus makes him Elias, simply because He expected His own manifestation as Son of Man, and before that it was necessary that Elias must first have come. And even when John was dead Jesus still told the disciples that in him Elias had come, although the death of Elias was not contemplated in the eschatological doctrine, and was in fact unthinkable, But Jesus must somehow drag or force the eschatological events into the framework of the actual occurrences.Thus the conception of the“dogmatic element”in the narrative widens in an unsuspected fashion. And even what before seemed natural becomes on a closer examination doctrinal. The Baptist is made into Elias solely by the force of Jesus' Messianic consciousness.A short time afterwards, immediately upon the return of the disciples, He spoke and acted before their eyes in a way which presupposed the Messianic secret. The people had been dogging his steps; at a lonely spot on the shores of the lake they surrounded Him, and He“taught them about many things”(Mark vi. 30-34). The day was drawing to a close, but they held closely to Him without troubling about food. In the evening, before sending them away, He fed them.Weisse, long ago, had constantly emphasised the fact that the feeding of the multitude was one of the greatest historical problems, because this narrative, like that of the transfiguration, is very firmly riveted to its historical setting and, therefore, imperatively demands explanation. How is the historical element in it to be got at? Certainly not by seeking to explain the apparently miraculous in it on natural lines, by representing that at the bidding of Jesus people brought out the baskets of provisions which they had been concealing, and, thus importing into the tradition a natural fact which, so far from being hinted at in the narrative, is actually excluded by it.Our solution is that the whole is historical, except the closing remark that they were all filled. Jesus distributed the provisions which He and His disciples had with them among the multitude so that each received a very little, after He had first offered thanks. The significance lies in the giving of thanks and in the fact that they had received from Him consecrated food. Because He is the future Messiah, this meal becomes without their knowledge the Messianic feast. With the morsel of bread which He gives His disciples to distribute to the people He consecrates them as partakers in the coming Messianic feast, and gives them the guarantee that they, who had shared His table in the time of His obscurity, would also share it in the time of His glory. In the prayer He gave thanks not only for the food, but also for the coming Kingdom and all its blessings. It is the counterpart of[pg 375]the Lord's prayer, where He so strangely inserts the petition for daily bread between the petitions for the coming of the Kingdom and for deliverance from the πειρασμός.The feeding of the multitude was more than a love-feast, a fellowship-meal. It was from the point of view of Jesus a sacrament of salvation.We never realise sufficiently that in a period when the judgment and the glory were expected as close at hand, one thought arising out of this expectation must have acquired special prominence—how, namely, in the present time a man could obtain a guarantee of coming scatheless through the judgment, of being saved and received into the Kingdom, of being signed and sealed for deliverance amid the coming trial, as the Chosen People in Egypt had a sign revealed to them from God by means of which they might be manifest as those who were to be spared. But once we do realise this, we can understand why the thought of signing and sealing runs through the whole of the apocalyptic literature. It is found as early as the ninth chapter of Ezekiel. There, God is making preparation for judgment. The day of visitation of the city is at hand. But first the Lord calls unto“the man clothed with linen who had the writer's ink-horn by his side”and said unto him,“Go through the midst of the city, through the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof.”Only after that does He give command to those who are charged with the judgment to begin, adding,“But come not near any man upon whom is the mark”(Ezek. ix. 4 and 6).In the fifteenth of the Psalms of Solomon,288the last eschatological writing before the movement initiated by the Baptist, it is expressly said in the description of the judgment that“the saints of God bear a sign upon them which saves them.”In the Pauline theology very striking prominence is given to the thought of being sealed unto salvation. The apostle is conscious of bearing about with him in his body“the marks of Jesus”(Gal. vi. 17), the“dying”of Jesus (2 Cor. iv. 10). This sign is received in baptism, since it is a baptism“into the death of Christ”; in this act the recipient is in a certain sense really buried with Him, and thenceforth walks among men as one who belongs, even here below, to risen humanity (Rom. vi. 1 ff.). Baptism is the seal, the earnest of the spirit, the pledge of that which is to come (2 Cor i. 22; Eph. i. 13, 14, iv. 30).This conception of baptism as a“salvation”in view of that which was to come goes down through the whole of ancient theology. Its preaching might really be summed up in the words,“Keep your baptism holy and without blemish.”[pg 376]In the Shepherd of Hermas even the spirits of the men of the past must receive“the seal, which is the water”in order that they may“bear the name of God upon them.”That is why the tower is built over the water, and the stones which are brought up out of the deep are rolled through the water (Vis. iii. and Sim. ix. 16).In the Apocalypse of John the thought of the sealing stands prominently in the foreground. The locusts receive power to hurt those only who have not the seal of God on their foreheads (Rev. ix. 4, 5). The beast (Rev. xiii. 16 ff.) compels men to bear his mark; only those who will not accept it are to reign with Christ (Rev. xx. 4). The chosen hundred and forty-four thousand bear the name of God and the name of the Lamb upon their foreheads (Rev. xiv. 1).“Assurance of salvation”in a time of eschatological expectation demanded some kind of security for the future of which the earnest could be possessed in the present. And with this the predestinarian thought of election was in complete accord. If we find the thought of being sealed unto salvation previously in the Psalms of Solomon, and subsequently in the same signification in Paul, in the Apocalypse of John, and down to the Shepherd of Hermas, it may be assumed in advance that it will be found in some form or other in the so strongly eschatological teaching of Jesus and the Baptist.It may be said, indeed, to dominate completely the eschatological preaching of the Baptist, for this preaching does not confine itself to the declaration of the nearness of the Kingdom, and the demand for repentance, but leads up to an act to which it gives a special reference in relation to the forgiveness of sins and the outpouring of the spirit. It is a mistake to regard baptism with water as a“symbolic act”in the modern sense, and make the Baptist decry his own wares by saying,“I baptize only with water, but the other can baptize with the Holy Spirit.”He is not contrasting the two baptisms, but connecting them—he who is baptized by him has the certainty that he will share in the outpouring of the Spirit which shall precede the judgment, and at the judgment shall receive forgiveness of sins, as one who is signed with the mark of repentance. The object of being baptized by him is to secure baptism with the Spirit later. The forgiveness of sins associated with baptism is proleptic; it is to be realised at the judgment. The Baptist himself did not forgive sin.289If he had done so, how could[pg 377]such offence have been taken when Jesus claimed for Himself the right to forgive sins in the present (Mark ii. 10).The baptism of John was therefore an eschatological sacrament pointing forward to the pouring forth of the spirit and to the judgment, a provision for“salvation.”Hence the wrath of the Baptist when he saw Pharisees and Sadducees crowding to his baptism:“Ye generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bring forth now fruits meet for repentance”(Matt. iii. 7, 8). By the reception of baptism, that is, they are saved from the judgment.As a cleansing unto salvation it is a divine institution, a revealed means of grace. That is why the question of Jesus, whether the baptism of John was from heaven or from men, placed the Scribes at Jerusalem in so awkward a dilemma (Mark xi. 30).The authority of Jesus, however, goes farther than that of the Baptist. As the Messiah who is to come He can give even here below to those who gather about Him a right to partake in the Messianic feast, by this distribution of food to them; only, they do not know what is happening to them and He cannot solve the riddle for them. The supper at the Lake of Gennesareth was a veiled eschatological sacrament. Neither the disciples nor the multitude understood what was happening, since they did not know who He was who thus made them His guests.290This meal must[pg 378]have been transformed by tradition into a miracle, a result which may have been in part due to the references to the wonders of the Messianic feast which were doubtless contained in the prayers, not to speak of the eschatological enthusiasm which then prevailed universally. Did not the disciples believe that on the same evening, when they had been commanded to take Jesus into their ship at the mouth of the Jordan, to which point He had walked along the shore—did they not believe that they saw Him come walking towards them upon the waves of the sea? The impulse to the introduction of the miraculous into the narrative came from the unintelligible element with which the men who surrounded Jesus were at this time confronted.291The Last Supper at Jerusalem had the same sacramental significance as that at the lake. Towards the end of the meal Jesus, after giving thanks, distributes the bread and wine. This had as little to do with the satisfaction of hunger as the distribution to the Galilaean believers. The act of Jesus is an end in itself, and the significance of the celebration consists in the fact that it is He Himself who makes the distribution. In Jerusalem, however, they understood what was meant, and He explained it to them explicitly by telling them that He would drink no more of the fruit of the vine until He drank it new in the Kingdom of God. The mysterious images which He used at the time of the distribution concerning the atoning significance of His death do not touch the essence of the celebration, they are only discourses accompanying it.On this interpretation, therefore, we may think of Baptism and the Lord's Supper as from the first eschatological sacraments in the eschatological movement which later detached itself from Judaism under the name of Christianity. That explains why we find them both in Paul and in the earliest theology as sacramental acts, not as symbolic ceremonies, and find them dominating the whole Christian doctrine. Apart from the assumption of the eschatological sacraments, we can only make the history of dogma begin with a“fall”from the earlier purer theology into the sacramental magical, without being able to adduce a single syllable in support of the idea that after the death of Jesus Baptism and the Lord's Supper existed even for an hour as symbolical actions—Paul, indeed, makes this supposition wholly impossible.In any case the adoption of the baptism of John in Christian practice cannot be explained except on the assumption that it was[pg 379]the sacrament of the eschatological community, a revealed means of securing“salvation”which was not altered in the slightest by the Messiahship of Jesus. How else could we explain the fact that baptism, without any commandment of Jesus, and without Jesus' ever having baptized, was taken over, as a matter of course, into Christianity, and was given a special reference to the receiving of the Spirit?It is no use proposing to explain it as having been instituted as a symbolical repetition of the baptism of Jesus, thought of as“an anointing to the Messiahship.”There is not a single passage in ancient theology to support such a theory. And we may point also to the fact that Paul never refers to the baptism of Jesus in explaining the character of Christian baptism, never, in fact, makes any distinct reference to it. And how could baptism, if it had been a symbolical repetition of the baptism of Jesus, ever have acquired this magic-sacramental sense of“salvation”?Nothing shows more clearly than the dual character of ancient baptism, which makes it the guarantee both of the reception of the Spirit and of deliverance from the judgment, that it is nothing else than the eschatological baptism of John with a single difference. Baptism with water and baptism with the Spirit are now connected not only logically, but also in point of time, seeing that since the day of Pentecost the period of the outpouring of the Spirit is present. The two portions of the eschatological sacrament which in the Baptist's preaching were distinguished in point of time—because he did not expect the outpouring of the Spirit until some future period—are now brought together, since one eschatological condition—the baptism with the Spirit—is now present. The“Christianising”of baptism consisted in this and in nothing else; though Paul carried it a stage farther when he formed the conception of baptism as a mystic partaking in the death and resurrection of Jesus.Thus the thoroughgoing eschatological interpretation of the Life of Jesus puts into the hands of those who are reconstructing the history of dogma in the earliest times an explanation of the conception of the sacraments, of which they had been able hitherto only to note the presence as anxof which the origin was undiscoverable, and for which they possessed no equation by which it could be evaluated. If Christianity as the religion of historically revealed mysteries was able to lay hold upon Hellenism and overcome it, the reason of this was that it was already in its purely eschatological beginnings a religion of sacraments, a religion of eschatological sacraments, since Jesus had recognised a Divine institution in the baptism of John, and had Himself performed a sacramental action in the distribution of food at the Lake of Gennesareth and at the Last Supper.[pg 380]This being so, the feeding of the multitude also belongs to the dogmatic element in the history. But no one had previously recognised it as what it really was, an indirect disclosure of the Messianic secret, just as no one had understood the full significance of Jesus' description of the Baptist as Elias.But how does Peter at Caesarea Philippi know the secret of his Master? What he there declares is not a conviction which had gradually dawned on him, and slowly grown through various stages of probability and certainty.The real character of this incident has been interpreted with remarkable penetration by Wrede. The incident itself, he says, is to be understood in quite as supernatural a fashion in Mark as in Matthew. But on the other hand one does not receive the impression that the writer intends to represent the confession as a merit or a discovery of Peter.“For according to the text of Mark, Jesus shows no trace of joy or surprise at this confession. His only answer consists of the command to say nothing about His Messiahship.”Keim, whom Wrede quotes, had received a similar impression from the Marcan account, and had supposed that Jesus had actually found the confession of Peter inopportune.How is all this to be explained—the supernatural knowledge of Peter and the rather curt fashion in which Jesus receives his declaration?It might be worth while to put the story of the transfiguration side by side with the incident at Caesarea Philippi, since there the Divine Sonship of Jesus is“a second time”revealed to the“three,”Peter, James, and John, and the revelation is made supernaturally by a voice from heaven. It is rather striking that Mark does not seem to be conscious that he is reporting something which the disciples knew already. At the beginning of the actual transfiguration Peter still addresses Jesus simply as Rabbi (Mark ix. 5). And what does it mean when Jesus, during the descent from the mountain, forbids them to speak to any man concerning that which they have seen until after the resurrection of the Son of Man? That would exclude even the other disciples who knew only the secret of His Messiahship. But why should they not be told of the Divine confirmation of that which Peter had declared at Caesarea Philippi and Jesus had“admitted”?What has the transfiguration to do with the resurrection of the dead? And why are the thoughts of the disciples suddenly busied, not with what they have seen, not with the fact that the Son of Man shall rise from the dead, but simply with the possibility of the rising from the dead, the difficulty being that Elias was not yet present? Those who see in the transfiguration a projection backwards of the Pauline theology into the Gospel history do not realise what are the principal points and difficulties of the[pg 381]narrative. The problem lies in the conversation during the descent. Against the Messiahship of Jesus, against His rising from the dead, they have only one objection to suggest: Elias had not yet come.We see here, in the first place, the importance of the revelation which Jesus had made to the people in declaring to them the secret that the Baptist is Elias. From the standpoint of the eschatological expectation no one could recognise Elias in the Baptist, unless he knew of the Messiahship of Jesus. And no one could believe in the Messiahship and“resurrection”of Jesus, that is, in His Parousia, without presupposing that Elias had in some way or other already come. This was therefore the primary difficulty of the disciples, the stumbling-block which Jesus must remove for them by making the same revelation concerning the Baptist to them as to the people. It is also once more abundantly clear that expectation was directed at that time primarily to the coming of Elias.292But since the whole eschatological movement arose out of the Baptist's preaching, the natural conclusion is that by“him who was to come after”and baptize with the Holy Spirit John meant, not the Messiah, but Elias.But if the non-appearance of Elias was the primary difficulty of the disciples in connexion with the Messiahship of Jesus and all that it implied, why does it only strike the“three,”and moreover, all three of them together, now, and not at Caesarea Philippi?293How could Peter there have declared it and here be still labouring with the rest over the difficulty which stood in the way of his own declaration? To make the narrative coherent, the transfiguration, as being a revelation of the Messiahship, ought to precede the incident at Caesarea Philippi. Now let us look at the connexion in which it actually occurs. It falls in that inexplicable section Mark viii. 34-ix. 30 in which the multitude suddenly appears in the company of Jesus who is sojourning in a Gentile district, only to disappear again, equally enigmatically, afterwards, when He sets out for Galilee, instead of accompanying Him back to their own country.In this section everything points to the situation during the days at Bethsaida after the return of the disciples from their mission. Jesus is surrounded by the people, while what He desires is to be alone with His immediate followers. The disciples make use of the healing powers which He had bestowed upon them when sending them forth, and have the experience of finding that they are not in all cases adequate (Mark ix. 14-29). The[pg 382]mountain to which He takes the“three”is not a mountain in the north, or as some have suggested, an imaginary mountain of the Evangelist, but the same to which Jesus went up to pray and to be alone on the evening of the feeding of the multitude (Mark vi. 46 and ix. 2). The house to which He goes after His return from the transfiguration is therefore to be placed at Bethsaida.Another thing which points to a sojourn at Bethsaida after the feeding of the multitude is the story of the healing of the blind man at Bethsaida (Mark viii. 22-26).The circumstances, therefore, which we have to presuppose are that Jesus is surrounded and thronged by the people at Bethsaida. In order to be alone He once more puts the Jordan between Himself and the multitude, and goes with the“three”to the mountain where He had prayed after the feeding of the five thousand. This is the only way in which we can understand how the people failed to follow Him, and He was able really to carry out His plan.But how could this story be torn out of its natural context and its scene removed to Caesarea Philippi, where it is both on external and internal grounds impossible? What we need to notice is the Marcan account of the events which followed the sending forth of the disciples. We have two stories of the feeding of the multitude with a crossing of the lake after each (Mark vi. 31-56, Mark viii. 1-22), two stories of Jesus going away towards the north with the same motive, that of being alone and unrecognised. The first time, after the controversy about the washing of hands, His course is directed towards Tyre (Mark vii. 24-30), the second time, after the demand for a sign, he goes into the district of Caesarea Philippi (Mark viii. 27). The scene of the controversy about the washing of hands is some locality in the plain of Gennesareth (Mark vi. 53 ff); Dalmanutha is named as the place where the sign was demanded (Mark viii. 10 ff.).The most natural conclusion is to identify the two cases of feeding the multitude, and the two journeys northwards. In that case we should have in the section Mark vi. 31-ix. 30, two sets of narratives worked into one another, both recounting how Jesus, after the disciples came back to Him, went with them from Capernaum to the northern shore of the lake, was there surprised by the multitude, and after the meal which He gave them, crossed the Jordan by boat to Bethsaida, stayed there for a while, and then returned again by ship to the country of Gennesareth, and was there again overtaken and surrounded by the people; then after some controversial encounters with the Scribes, who at the report of His miracles had come down from Jerusalem (Mark vii. 1), left Galilee and again went northwards.294[pg 383]The seams at the joining of the narratives can be recognised in Mark vii. 31, where Jesus is suddenly transferred from the north to Decapolis, and in the saying in Mark viii. 14 ff., which makes explicit reference to the two miracles of feeding the multitude. Whether the Evangelist himself worked these two sets of narratives together, or whether he found them already united, cannot be determined, and is not of any direct historical interest. The disorder is in any case so complete that we cannot fully reconstruct each of the separate sets of narratives.The external reasons why the narratives of Mark viii. 34-ix. 30, of which the scene is on the northern shore of the lake, are placed in this way after the incident of Caesarea Philippi are not difficult to grasp. The section contains an impressive discourse to the people on following Jesus in His sufferings, crucifixion, and death (Mark viii. 34-ix. 1). For this reason the whole series of scenes is attached to the revelation of the secret of the suffering of the Son of Man; and the redactor did not stop to think how the people could suddenly appear, and as suddenly disappear again. The statement, too,“He called the people with the disciples”(Mark viii. 34), helped to mislead him into inserting the section at this point, although this very remark points to the circumstances of the time just after the return of the disciples, when Jesus was sometimes alone with the disciples, and sometimes calls the eager multitude about Him.The whole scene belongs, therefore, to the days which He spent at Bethsaida, and originally followed immediately upon the crossing of the lake, after the feeding of the multitude. It was after Jesus had been six days surrounded by the people, not six days after the revelation at Caesarea Philippi, that the“transfiguration”took place (Mark ix. 2). On this assumption, all the difficulties of the incident at Caesarea Philippi are cleared up in a moment; there is no longer anything strange in the fact that Peter declares to Jesus who He really is, while Jesus appears neither surprised nor especially rejoiced at the insight of His disciple. The transfiguration had, in fact, been the revelation of the secret of the Messiahship to the three who constituted the inner circle of the disciples.295And Jesus had not Himself revealed it to them; what had happened was, that[pg 384]in a state of rapture common to them all, in which they had seen the Master in a glorious transfiguration, they had seen Him talking with Moses and Elias and had heard a voice from heaven saying,“This is my beloved Son, hear ye Him.”We must always make a fresh effort to realise to ourselves, that Jesus and His immediate followers were, at that time, in an enthusiastic state of intense eschatological expectation. We must picture them among the people, who were filled with penitence for their sins, and with faith in the Kingdom, hourly expecting the coming of the Kingdom, and the revelation of Jesus as the Son of Man, seeing in the eager multitude itself a sign that their reckoning of the time was correct; thus the psychological conditions were present for a common ecstatic experience such as is described in the account of the transfiguration.In this ecstasy the“three”heard the voice from heaven saying who He was. Therefore, the Matthaean report, according to which Jesus praises Simon“because flesh and blood have not revealed it to him, but the Father who is in heaven,”is not really at variance with the briefer Marcan account, since it rightly indicates the source of Peter's knowledge.Nevertheless Jesus was astonished. For Peter here disregarded the command given during the descent from the mount of transfiguration. He had“betrayed”to the Twelve Jesus' consciousness of His Messiahship. One receives the impression that Jesus did not put the question to the disciples in order to reveal Himself to them as Messiah, and that by the impulsive speech of Peter, upon whose silence He had counted because of His command, and to whom He had not specially addressed the question, He was forced to take a different line of action in regard to the Twelve from what He had intended. It is probable that He had never had the intention of revealing the secret of His Messiahship to the disciples. Otherwise He would not have kept it from them at the time of their mission, when He did not expect them to return before the Parousia. Even at the transfiguration the“three”do not learn it from His lips, but in a state of ecstasy, an ecstasy which He shared with them. At Caesarea Philippi it is not He, but Peter, who reveals His Messiahship. We may say, therefore, that Jesus did not voluntarily give up His Messianic secret; it was wrung from Him by the pressure of events.However that may be, from Caesarea Philippi onwards it was known to the other disciples through Peter; what Jesus Himself revealed to them, was the secret of his sufferings.Pfleiderer and Wrede were quite right in pointing to the clear and definite predictions of the suffering, death, and resurrection as the historically inexplicable element in our reports, since the necessity of Jesus' death, by which modern theology endeavours[pg 385]to make His resolve and His predictions intelligible, is not a necessity which arises out of the historical course of events. There was not present any natural ground for such a resolve on the part of Jesus. Had He returned to Galilee, He would immediately have had the multitudes flocking after Him again.In order to make the historical possibility of the resolve to suffer and the prediction of the sufferings in some measure intelligible, modern theology has to ignore the prediction of the resurrection which is bound up with them, for this is“dogmatic.”That is, however, not permissible. We must, as Wrede insists, take the words as they are, and must not even indulge in ingenious explanations of the“three days.”Therefore, the resolve to suffer and to die are dogmatic; therefore, according to him, they are unhistorical, and only to be explained by a literary hypothesis.But the thoroughgoing eschatological school says they are dogmatic, and therefore historical; because they find their explanation in eschatological conceptions.Wrede held that the Messianic conception implied in the Marcan narrative is not the Jewish Messianic conception, just because of the thought of suffering and death which it involves. No stress must be laid on the fact that in Fourth Ezra vii. 29 the Christ dies and rises again, because His death takes place at the end of the Messianic Kingdom.296The Jewish Messiah is essentially a glorious being who shall appear in the last time. True, but the case in which the Messiah should be present, prior to the Parousia, should cause the final tribulations to come upon the earth, and should Himself undergo them, does not arise in the Jewish eschatology as described from without. It first arises with the self-consciousness of Jesus. Therefore, the Jewish conception of the Messiah has no information to give us upon this point.In order to understand Jesus' resolve to suffer, we must first recognise that the mystery of this suffering is involved in the mystery of the Kingdom of God, since the Kingdom cannot come until the πειρασμός has taken place. This certainty of suffering is quite independent of the historic circumstances, as the beatitude on the persecuted in the sermon on the mount, and the predictions in the discourse at the sending forth of the Twelve, clearly show. Jesus' prediction of His own sufferings at Caesarea Philippi is precisely as unintelligible, precisely as dogmatic, and therefore precisely as historical as the prediction to the disciples at the time of their mission. The“must be”of the sufferings is the same—the coming of the Kingdom, and of the Parousia, which are dependent upon the πειρασμός having first taken place.[pg 386]In the first period Jesus' thoughts concerning His own sufferings were included in the more general thought of the sufferings which formed part of the mystery of the Kingdom of God. The exhortations to hold steadfastly to Him in the time of trial, and not to lose faith in Him, certainly tended to suggest that He thought of Himself as the central point amid these conflicts and confusions, and reckoned on the possibility of His own death as much as on that of others. Upon this point nothing more definite can be said, since the mystery of Jesus' own sufferings does not detach itself from the mystery of the sufferings connected with the Kingdom of God until after the Messianic secret is made known at Caesarea Philippi. What is certain is that, for Him, suffering was always associated with the Messianic secret, since He placed His Parousia at the end of the pre-Messianic tribulations in which He was to have His part.The suffering, death, and resurrection of which the secret was revealed at Caesarea Philippi are not therefore in themselves new or surprising.297The novelty lies in the form in which they are conceived. The tribulation, so far as Jesus is concerned, is now connected with an historic event: He will go to Jerusalem, there to suffer death at the hands of the authorities.For the future, however, He no longer speaks of the general tribulation which He is to bring upon the earth, nor of the sufferings which await His followers, nor of the sufferings in which they must rally round Him. In the predictions of the passion there is no word of that; at Jerusalem there is no word of that. This thought disappears once for all.In the secret of His passion which Jesus reveals to the disciples at Caesarea Philippi the pre-Messianic tribulation is for others set aside, abolished, concentrated upon Himself alone, and that in the[pg 387]form that they are fulfilled in His own passion and death at Jerusalem. That was the new conviction that had dawned upon Him. He must suffer for others ... that the Kingdom might come.This change was due to the non-fulfilment of the promises made in the discourse at the sending forth of the Twelve. He had thought then to let loose the final tribulation and so compel the coming of the Kingdom. And the cataclysm had not occurred. He had expected it also after the return of the disciples. In Bethsaida, in speaking to the multitude which He had consecrated by the foretaste of the Messianic feast, as also to the disciples at the time of their mission, He had turned their thoughts to things to come and had adjured them to be prepared to suffer with Him, to give up their lives, not to be ashamed of Him in His humiliation, since otherwise the Son of Man would be ashamed of them when He came in glory (Mark viii. 34-ix. 1).298In leaving Galilee He abandoned the hope that the final tribulation would begin of itself. If it delays, that means that there is still something to be done, and yet another of the violent must lay violent hands upon the Kingdom of God. The movement of repentance had not been sufficient. When, in accordance with His commission, by sending forth the disciples with their message, he hurled the fire-brand which should kindle the fiery trials of the Last Time, the flame went out. He had not succeeded in sending the sword on earth and stirring up the conflict. And until the time of trial had come, the coming of the Kingdom and His own manifestation as Son of Man were impossible.That meant—not that the Kingdom was not near at hand—but that God had appointed otherwise in regard to the time of trial. He had heard the Lord's Prayer in which Jesus and His followers prayed for the coming of the Kingdom—and at the same time, for deliverance from the πειρασμός. The time of trial was not come; therefore God in His mercy and omnipotence had eliminated it from the series of eschatological events, and appointed to Him whose commission had been to bring it about, instead to accomplish it in His own person. As He who was to rule over the members of the Kingdom in the future age, He was appointed to serve them in the present, to give His life for them, the many (Mark x. 45 and xiv. 24), and to make in His own blood the atonement which they would have had to render in the tribulation.The Kingdom could not come until the debt which weighed upon the world was discharged. Until then, not only the now living believers, but the chosen of all generations since the beginning[pg 388]of the world wait for their manifestation in glory—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and all the countless unknown who should come from the East and from the West to sit at tables with them at the Messianic feast (Matt. viii. 11). The enigmatic πολλοί for whom Jesus dies are those predestined to the Kingdom, since His death must at last compel the Coming of the Kingdom.299This thought Jesus found in the prophecies of Isaiah, which spoke of the suffering Servant of the Lord. The mysterious description of Him who in His humiliation was despised and misunderstood, who, nevertheless bears the guilt of others and afterwards is made manifest in what He has done for them, points, He feels, to Himself.And since He found it there set down that He must suffer unrecognised, and that those for whom He suffered should doubt Him, His suffering should, nay must, remain a mystery. In that case those who doubted Him would not bring condemnation upon themselves. He no longer needs to adjure them for their own sakes to be faithful to Him and to stand by Him even amid reproach and humiliation; He can calmly predict to His disciples that they shall all be offended in Him and shall flee (Mark xiv. 26, 27); He can tell Peter, who boasts that he will die with Him, that before the dawn he shall deny Him thrice (Mark xiv. 29-31); all that is so set down in the Scripture. They must doubt Him. But now they shall not lose their blessedness, for He bears all sins and transgressions. That, too, is buried in the atonement which He offers.[pg 389]Therefore, also, there is no need for them to understand His secret. He spoke of it to them without any explanation. It is sufficient that they should know why He goes up to Jerusalem. They, on their part, are thinking only of the coming transformation of all things, as their conversation shows. The prospect which He has opened up to them is clear enough; the only thing that they do not understand is why He must first die at Jerusalem. The first time that Peter ventured to speak to Him about it, He had turned on him with cruel harshness, had almost cursed him (Mark viii. 32, 33); from that time forward they no longer dared to ask Him anything about it. The new thought of His own passion has its basis therefore in the authority with which Jesus was armed to bring about the beginning of the final tribulation. Ethically regarded, His taking the suffering upon Himself is an act of mercy and compassion towards those who would otherwise have had to bear these tribulations, and perhaps would not have stood the test. Historically regarded, the thought of His sufferings involves the same lofty treatment both of history and eschatology as was manifested in the identification of the Baptist with Elias. For now He identifies His condemnation and execution, which are to take place on natural lines, with the predicted pre-Messianic tribulations. This imperious forcing of eschatology into history is also its destruction; its assertion and abandonment at the same time.Towards Passover, therefore, Jesus sets out for Jerusalem, solely in order to die there.300“It is,”says Wrede,“beyond question the opinion of Mark that Jesus went to Jerusalem because He had decided to die; that is obvious even from the details of the story.”It is therefore a mistake to speak of Jesus as“teaching”in Jerusalem. He has no intention of doing so. As a prophet He foretells in veiled parabolic form the offence which must come (Mark xii. 1-12), exhorts men to watch for the Parousia, pictures the nature of the judgment which the Son of Man shall hold, and, for the rest, thinks only how He can so provoke the Pharisees and the rulers that they will be compelled to get rid of Him. That is why He violently cleanses the Temple, and attacks the Pharisees, in the presence of the people, with passionate invective.From the revelation at Caesarea Philippi onward, all that belongs to the history of Jesus, in the strict sense, are the events which lead up to His death; or, to put it more accurately, the events in which He Himself is the sole actor. The other things which happen, the questions which are laid before Him for decision, the episodic incidents which occur in those days, have nothing to[pg 390]do with the real“Life of Jesus,”since they contribute nothing to the decisive issue, but merely form the anecdotic fringes of the real outward and inward event, the deliberate bringing down of death upon Himself.It is in truth surprising that He succeeded in transforming into history this resolve which had its roots in dogma, and really dying alone. Is it not almost unintelligible that His disciples were not involved in His fate? Not even the disciple who smote with the sword was arrested along with Him (Mark xiv. 47); Peter, recognised in the courtyard of the High Priest's house as one who had been with Jesus the Nazarene, is allowed to go free.For a moment indeed, Jesus believes that the“three”are destined to share His fate, not from any outward necessity, but because they had professed themselves able to suffer the last extremities with Him. The sons of Zebedee, when He asked them whether, in order to sit at His right hand and His left, they are prepared to drink His cup and be baptized with His baptism, had declared that they were, and thereupon He had predicted that they should do so (Mark x. 38, 39). Peter again had that very night, in spite of the warning of Jesus, sworn that he would go even unto death with Him (Mark xiv. 30, 31). Hence He is conscious of a higher possibility that these three are to go through the trial with Him. He takes them with Him to Gethsemane and bids them remain near Him and watch with Him. And since they do not perceive the danger of the hour, He adjures them to watch and pray. They are to pray that they may not have to pass through the trial (ἵνα μὴ ἔλθητε εἰς πειρασμόν) since, though the spirit is willing, the flesh is weak. Amid His own sore distress He is anxious about them and their capacity to share His trial as they had declared their willingness to do.301Here also it is once more made clear that for Jesus the necessity of His death is grounded in dogma, not in external historical facts. Above the dogmatic eschatological necessity, however, there stands the omnipotence of God, which is bound by no limitations. As Jesus in the Lord's Prayer had taught His followers to pray for deliverance from the πειρασμός, and as in His fears for the three He bids them pray for the same thing, so now He Himself prays for deliverance, even in this last moment when He knows that the armed band which is coming to arrest Him is already on the way. Literal history does not exist for Him, only the will of God; and this is exalted even above eschatological necessity.But how did this exact agreement between the fate of Jesus and His predictions come about? Why did the authorities strike at Him only, not at His whole following, not even at the disciples?[pg 391]He was arrested and condemned on account of His Messianic claims. But how did the High Priest know that Jesus claimed to be the Messiah? And why does he put the accusation as a direct question without calling witnesses in support of it? Why was the attempt first made to bring up a saying about the Temple which could be interpreted as blasphemy in order to condemn Him on this ground (Mark xiv. 57-59)? Before that again, as is evident from Mark's account, they had brought up a whole crowd of witnesses in the hope of securing evidence sufficient to justify His condemnation; and the attempt had not succeeded.It was only after all these attempts had failed that the High Priest brought his accusation concerning the Messianic claim, and he did so without citing the three necessary witnesses. Why so? Because he had not got them. The condemnation of Jesus depended on His own admission. That was why they had endeavoured to convict Him upon other charges.302This wholly unintelligible feature of the trial confirms what is evident also from the discourses and attitude of Jesus at Jerusalem, viz. that He had not been held by the multitude to be the Messiah, that the idea of His making such claims had not for a moment occurred to them—lay in fact for them quite beyond the range of possibility. Therefore He cannot have made a Messianic entry.According to Havet, Brandt, Wellhausen, Dalman, and Wrede the ovation at the entry had no Messianic character whatever. It is wholly mistaken, as Wrede quite rightly remarks, to represent matters as if the Messianic ovation was forced upon Jesus—that He accepted it with inner repugnance and in silent passivity. For that would involve the supposition that the people had for a moment regarded Him as Messiah and then afterwards had shown themselves as completely without any suspicion of His Messiahship as though they had in the interval drunk of the waters of Lethe. The exact opposite is true: Jesus Himself made the preparations for the Messianic entry. Its Messianic features were due to His arrangements. He made a point of riding upon the ass, not because He was weary, but because He desired that the Messianic prophecy of Zech. ix. 9 should be secretly fulfilled.The entry is therefore a Messianic act on the part of Jesus, an action in which His consciousness of His office breaks through, as it did at the sending forth of the disciples, in the explanation that[pg 392]the Baptist was Elias, and in the feeding of the multitude. But others can have had no suspicion of the Messianic significance of that which was going on before their eyes. The entry into Jerusalem was therefore Messianic for Jesus, but not Messianic for the people.But what was He for the people? Here Wrede's theory that He was a teacher again refutes itself. In the triumphal entry there is more than the ovation offered to a teacher. The jubilations have reference to“Him who is to come”; it is to Him that the acclamations are offered and because of Him that the people rejoice in the nearness of the Kingdom, as in Mark, the cries of jubilation show; for here, as Dalman rightly remarks, there is actually no mention of the Messiah.Jesus therefore made His entry into Jerusalem as the Prophet, as Elias. That is confirmed by Matthew (xxi. 11), although Matthew gives a Messianic colouring to the entry itself by bringing in the acclamation in which He was designated the Son of David, just as, conversely, he reports the Baptist's question rightly, and introduces it wrongly, by making the Baptist hear of the“works of the Christ.”Was Mark conscious, one wonders, that it was not a Messianic entry that he was reporting? We do not know. It is not inherently impossible that, as Wrede asserts,“he had no real view concerning the historical life of Jesus,”did not know whether Jesus was recognised as Messiah, and took no interest in the question from an historical point of view. Fortunately for us! For that is why he simply hands on tradition and does not write a Life of Jesus.The Marcan hypothesis went astray in conceiving this Gospel as a Life of Jesus written with either complete or partial historical consciousness, and interpreting it on these lines, on the sole ground that it only brings in the name Son of Man twice prior to the incident at Caesarea Philippi. The Life of Jesus cannot be arrived at by following the arrangement of a single Gospel, but only on the basis of the tradition which is preserved more or less faithfully in the earliest pair of Synoptic Gospels.Questions of literary priority, indeed literary questions in general, have in the last resort, as Keim remarked long ago, nothing to do with the gaining of a clear idea of the course of events, since the Evangelists had not themselves a clear idea of it before their minds; it can only be arrived at hypothetically by an experimental reconstruction based on the necessary inner connexion of the incidents.But who could possibly have had in early times a clear conception of the Life of Jesus? Even its most critical moments were totally unintelligible to the disciples who had themselves shared in the experiences, and who were the only sources for the tradition.[pg 393]They were simply swept through these events by the momentum of the purpose of Jesus. That is why the tradition is incoherent. The reality had been incoherent too, since it was only the secret Messianic self-consciousness of Jesus which created alike the events and their connexion. Every Life of Jesus remains therefore a reconstruction on the basis of a more or less accurate insight into the nature of the dynamic self-consciousness of Jesus which created the history.The people, whatever Mark may have thought, did not offer Jesus a Messianic ovation at all; it was He who, in the conviction that they were wholly unable to recognise it, played with His Messianic self-consciousness before their eyes, just as He did at the time after the sending forth of the disciples, when, as now, He thought the end at hand. It was in the same way, too, that He closed the invective against the Pharisees with the words“I say unto you, ye shall see me no more until ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord”(Matt. xxiii. 39). This saying implies His Parousia.Similarly He is playing with His secret in that crucial question regarding the Messiahship in Mark xii. 35-37. There is no question of dissociating the Davidic Sonship from the Messiahship.303He asks only how can the Christ in virtue of His descent from David be, as his son, inferior to David, and yet be addressed by David in the Psalm as his Lord? The answer is; by reason of the metamorphosis and Parousia in which natural relationships are abolished and the scion of David's line who is the predestined Son of Man shall take possession of His unique glory.Far from rejecting the Davidic Sonship in this saying, Jesus, on the contrary, presupposes His possession of it. That raises the question whether He did not really during His lifetime regard Himself as a descendant of David and whether He was not regarded as such. Paul, who otherwise shows no interest in the earthly phase of the existence of the Lord, certainly implies His descent from David.The blind man at Jericho, too, cries out to the Nazarene prophet as“Son of David”(Mark x. 47). But in doing so he does not mean to address Jesus as Messiah, for afterwards, when he is brought to Him he simply calls Him“Rabbi”(Mark x. 51). And the people thought nothing further about what he had said. When the expectant people bid him keep silence they do not do so because the expression Son of David offends them, but because his clamour annoys them. Jesus, however, was struck by this cry, stood still and caused him, as he was standing timidly behind the[pg 394]eager multitude, to be brought to Him. It is possible, of course, that this address is a mere mistake in the tradition, the same tradition which unsuspectingly brought in the expression Son of Man at the wrong place.So much, however, is certain: the people were not made aware of the Messiahship of Jesus by the cry of the blind man any more than by the outcries of the demoniacs. The entry into Jerusalem was not a Messianic ovation. All that history is concerned with is that this fact should be admitted on all hands. Except Jesus and the disciples, therefore, no one knew the secret of His Messiahship even in those days at Jerusalem. But the High Priest suddenly showed himself in possession of it. How? Through the betrayal of Judas.For a hundred and fifty years the question has been historically discussed why Judas betrayed his Master. That the main question for history waswhat he betrayedwas suspected by few and they touched on it only in a timid kind of way—indeed the problems of the trial of Jesus may be said to have been non-existent for criticism.The traitorous act of Judas cannot have consisted in informing the Sanhedrin where Jesus was to be found at a suitable place for an arrest. They could have had that information more cheaply by causing Jesus to be watched by spies. But Mark expressly says that Judas when he betrayed Jesus did not yet know of a favourable opportunity for the arrest, but was seeking such an opportunity. Mark xiv. 10, 11,“And Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve, went unto the chief priests, to betray him unto them. And when they heard it, they were glad, and promised to give him money. And he sought how he might conveniently betray him.”In the betrayal, therefore, there were two points, a more general and a more special: the general fact by which he gave Jesus into their power, and the undertaking to let them know of the next opportunity when they could arrest Him quietly, without publicity. The betrayal by which he brought his Master to death, in consequence of which the rulers decided upon the arrest, knowing that their cause was safe in any case, was the betrayal of the Messianic secret. Jesus died because two of His disciples had broken His command of silence: Peter when he made known the secret of the Messiahship to the Twelve at Caesarea Philippi; Judas Iscariot by communicating it to the High Priest. But the difficulty was that Judas was the sole witness. Therefore the betrayal was useless so far as the actual trial was concerned unless Jesus admitted the charge. So they first tried to secure His condemnation on other grounds, and only when these attempts broke down did the High Priest put, in the form of a question, the charge in support of which he could have brought no witnesses.[pg 395]But Jesus immediately admitted it, and strengthened the admission by an allusion to His Parousia in the near future as Son of Man.The betrayal and the trial can only be rightly understood when it is realised that the public knew nothing whatever of the secret of the Messiahship.304It is the same in regard to the scene in the presence of Pilate. The people on that morning knew nothing of the trial of Jesus, but came to Pilate with the sole object of asking the release of a prisoner, as was the custom at the feast (Mark xv. 6-8). The idea then occurs to Pilate, who was just about to hand over, willingly enough, this troublesome fellow and prophet to the priestly faction, to play off the people against the priests and work on the multitude to petition for the release of Jesus. In this way he would have secured himself on both sides. He would have condemned Jesus to please the priests, and after condemning Him would have released Him to please the people. The priests are greatly embarrassed by the presence of the multitude. They had done everything so quickly and quietly that they might well have hoped to get Jesus crucified before any one knew what was happening or had had time to wonder at His non-appearance in the Temple.

That even the first Evangelist gives the episode a Messianic setting by introducing it with the words“When John heard in the prison of the works of the Christ”does not alter the facts of the body of the narrative. The sequel directly contradicts the introduction. And this interpretation fully explains the evasive answer of Jesus, in which exegesis has always recognised a certain reserve without ever being able to make it intelligible why Jesus did not simply send him the message,“Yes, I am he”—whereto, however, according to modern theology, He would have needed to add,“but another kind of Messiah from him whom you expect.”

The fact was, the Baptist had put Him in an extremely difficult position. He could not answer that He was Elias if He held Himself to be the Messiah; on the other hand He could not, and would not, disclose to him, and still less to the messengers and the listening multitude, the secret of His Messiahship. Therefore He sends this obscure message, which only contains a confirmation of the facts which John had already heard and closes with a warning, come what may, not to be offended in Him. Of this the Baptist was to make what he could.

It mattered, in fact, little how John understood the message. The time was much more advanced than he supposed; the hammer of the world's clock had risen to strike the last hour. All that he needed to know was that he had no cause to doubt.

In revealing to the people the true office of the Baptist, Jesus unveiled to them almost the whole mystery of the Kingdom of God, and nearly disclosed the secret of His Messiahship. For if Elias was already present, was not the coming of the Kingdom close at hand? And if John was Elias, who was Jesus?... There could only be one answer: the Messiah. But this seemed impossible, because Messiah was expected as a supernatural personality. The eulogy on the Baptist is, historically regarded, identical in content with the prediction of the Parousia in the discourse at the sending forth of the disciples. For after the coming of Elias there must follow immediately the judgment and the other events belonging to the last time. Now we can understand why in the enumeration of the events of the last time in the discourse to the Twelve the coming of Elias is not mentioned.

We see here, too, how, in the thought of Jesus, Messianic doctrine forces its way into history and simply abolishes the historic aspect of the events. The Baptist had not held himself to be Elias, the people had not thought of attributing this office to him; the description of Elias did not fit him at all, since he had[pg 374]done none of those things which Elias was to do: and yet Jesus makes him Elias, simply because He expected His own manifestation as Son of Man, and before that it was necessary that Elias must first have come. And even when John was dead Jesus still told the disciples that in him Elias had come, although the death of Elias was not contemplated in the eschatological doctrine, and was in fact unthinkable, But Jesus must somehow drag or force the eschatological events into the framework of the actual occurrences.

Thus the conception of the“dogmatic element”in the narrative widens in an unsuspected fashion. And even what before seemed natural becomes on a closer examination doctrinal. The Baptist is made into Elias solely by the force of Jesus' Messianic consciousness.

A short time afterwards, immediately upon the return of the disciples, He spoke and acted before their eyes in a way which presupposed the Messianic secret. The people had been dogging his steps; at a lonely spot on the shores of the lake they surrounded Him, and He“taught them about many things”(Mark vi. 30-34). The day was drawing to a close, but they held closely to Him without troubling about food. In the evening, before sending them away, He fed them.

Weisse, long ago, had constantly emphasised the fact that the feeding of the multitude was one of the greatest historical problems, because this narrative, like that of the transfiguration, is very firmly riveted to its historical setting and, therefore, imperatively demands explanation. How is the historical element in it to be got at? Certainly not by seeking to explain the apparently miraculous in it on natural lines, by representing that at the bidding of Jesus people brought out the baskets of provisions which they had been concealing, and, thus importing into the tradition a natural fact which, so far from being hinted at in the narrative, is actually excluded by it.

Our solution is that the whole is historical, except the closing remark that they were all filled. Jesus distributed the provisions which He and His disciples had with them among the multitude so that each received a very little, after He had first offered thanks. The significance lies in the giving of thanks and in the fact that they had received from Him consecrated food. Because He is the future Messiah, this meal becomes without their knowledge the Messianic feast. With the morsel of bread which He gives His disciples to distribute to the people He consecrates them as partakers in the coming Messianic feast, and gives them the guarantee that they, who had shared His table in the time of His obscurity, would also share it in the time of His glory. In the prayer He gave thanks not only for the food, but also for the coming Kingdom and all its blessings. It is the counterpart of[pg 375]the Lord's prayer, where He so strangely inserts the petition for daily bread between the petitions for the coming of the Kingdom and for deliverance from the πειρασμός.

The feeding of the multitude was more than a love-feast, a fellowship-meal. It was from the point of view of Jesus a sacrament of salvation.

We never realise sufficiently that in a period when the judgment and the glory were expected as close at hand, one thought arising out of this expectation must have acquired special prominence—how, namely, in the present time a man could obtain a guarantee of coming scatheless through the judgment, of being saved and received into the Kingdom, of being signed and sealed for deliverance amid the coming trial, as the Chosen People in Egypt had a sign revealed to them from God by means of which they might be manifest as those who were to be spared. But once we do realise this, we can understand why the thought of signing and sealing runs through the whole of the apocalyptic literature. It is found as early as the ninth chapter of Ezekiel. There, God is making preparation for judgment. The day of visitation of the city is at hand. But first the Lord calls unto“the man clothed with linen who had the writer's ink-horn by his side”and said unto him,“Go through the midst of the city, through the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof.”Only after that does He give command to those who are charged with the judgment to begin, adding,“But come not near any man upon whom is the mark”(Ezek. ix. 4 and 6).

In the fifteenth of the Psalms of Solomon,288the last eschatological writing before the movement initiated by the Baptist, it is expressly said in the description of the judgment that“the saints of God bear a sign upon them which saves them.”

In the Pauline theology very striking prominence is given to the thought of being sealed unto salvation. The apostle is conscious of bearing about with him in his body“the marks of Jesus”(Gal. vi. 17), the“dying”of Jesus (2 Cor. iv. 10). This sign is received in baptism, since it is a baptism“into the death of Christ”; in this act the recipient is in a certain sense really buried with Him, and thenceforth walks among men as one who belongs, even here below, to risen humanity (Rom. vi. 1 ff.). Baptism is the seal, the earnest of the spirit, the pledge of that which is to come (2 Cor i. 22; Eph. i. 13, 14, iv. 30).

This conception of baptism as a“salvation”in view of that which was to come goes down through the whole of ancient theology. Its preaching might really be summed up in the words,“Keep your baptism holy and without blemish.”

In the Shepherd of Hermas even the spirits of the men of the past must receive“the seal, which is the water”in order that they may“bear the name of God upon them.”That is why the tower is built over the water, and the stones which are brought up out of the deep are rolled through the water (Vis. iii. and Sim. ix. 16).

In the Apocalypse of John the thought of the sealing stands prominently in the foreground. The locusts receive power to hurt those only who have not the seal of God on their foreheads (Rev. ix. 4, 5). The beast (Rev. xiii. 16 ff.) compels men to bear his mark; only those who will not accept it are to reign with Christ (Rev. xx. 4). The chosen hundred and forty-four thousand bear the name of God and the name of the Lamb upon their foreheads (Rev. xiv. 1).

“Assurance of salvation”in a time of eschatological expectation demanded some kind of security for the future of which the earnest could be possessed in the present. And with this the predestinarian thought of election was in complete accord. If we find the thought of being sealed unto salvation previously in the Psalms of Solomon, and subsequently in the same signification in Paul, in the Apocalypse of John, and down to the Shepherd of Hermas, it may be assumed in advance that it will be found in some form or other in the so strongly eschatological teaching of Jesus and the Baptist.

It may be said, indeed, to dominate completely the eschatological preaching of the Baptist, for this preaching does not confine itself to the declaration of the nearness of the Kingdom, and the demand for repentance, but leads up to an act to which it gives a special reference in relation to the forgiveness of sins and the outpouring of the spirit. It is a mistake to regard baptism with water as a“symbolic act”in the modern sense, and make the Baptist decry his own wares by saying,“I baptize only with water, but the other can baptize with the Holy Spirit.”He is not contrasting the two baptisms, but connecting them—he who is baptized by him has the certainty that he will share in the outpouring of the Spirit which shall precede the judgment, and at the judgment shall receive forgiveness of sins, as one who is signed with the mark of repentance. The object of being baptized by him is to secure baptism with the Spirit later. The forgiveness of sins associated with baptism is proleptic; it is to be realised at the judgment. The Baptist himself did not forgive sin.289If he had done so, how could[pg 377]such offence have been taken when Jesus claimed for Himself the right to forgive sins in the present (Mark ii. 10).

The baptism of John was therefore an eschatological sacrament pointing forward to the pouring forth of the spirit and to the judgment, a provision for“salvation.”Hence the wrath of the Baptist when he saw Pharisees and Sadducees crowding to his baptism:“Ye generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bring forth now fruits meet for repentance”(Matt. iii. 7, 8). By the reception of baptism, that is, they are saved from the judgment.

As a cleansing unto salvation it is a divine institution, a revealed means of grace. That is why the question of Jesus, whether the baptism of John was from heaven or from men, placed the Scribes at Jerusalem in so awkward a dilemma (Mark xi. 30).

The authority of Jesus, however, goes farther than that of the Baptist. As the Messiah who is to come He can give even here below to those who gather about Him a right to partake in the Messianic feast, by this distribution of food to them; only, they do not know what is happening to them and He cannot solve the riddle for them. The supper at the Lake of Gennesareth was a veiled eschatological sacrament. Neither the disciples nor the multitude understood what was happening, since they did not know who He was who thus made them His guests.290This meal must[pg 378]have been transformed by tradition into a miracle, a result which may have been in part due to the references to the wonders of the Messianic feast which were doubtless contained in the prayers, not to speak of the eschatological enthusiasm which then prevailed universally. Did not the disciples believe that on the same evening, when they had been commanded to take Jesus into their ship at the mouth of the Jordan, to which point He had walked along the shore—did they not believe that they saw Him come walking towards them upon the waves of the sea? The impulse to the introduction of the miraculous into the narrative came from the unintelligible element with which the men who surrounded Jesus were at this time confronted.291

The Last Supper at Jerusalem had the same sacramental significance as that at the lake. Towards the end of the meal Jesus, after giving thanks, distributes the bread and wine. This had as little to do with the satisfaction of hunger as the distribution to the Galilaean believers. The act of Jesus is an end in itself, and the significance of the celebration consists in the fact that it is He Himself who makes the distribution. In Jerusalem, however, they understood what was meant, and He explained it to them explicitly by telling them that He would drink no more of the fruit of the vine until He drank it new in the Kingdom of God. The mysterious images which He used at the time of the distribution concerning the atoning significance of His death do not touch the essence of the celebration, they are only discourses accompanying it.

On this interpretation, therefore, we may think of Baptism and the Lord's Supper as from the first eschatological sacraments in the eschatological movement which later detached itself from Judaism under the name of Christianity. That explains why we find them both in Paul and in the earliest theology as sacramental acts, not as symbolic ceremonies, and find them dominating the whole Christian doctrine. Apart from the assumption of the eschatological sacraments, we can only make the history of dogma begin with a“fall”from the earlier purer theology into the sacramental magical, without being able to adduce a single syllable in support of the idea that after the death of Jesus Baptism and the Lord's Supper existed even for an hour as symbolical actions—Paul, indeed, makes this supposition wholly impossible.

In any case the adoption of the baptism of John in Christian practice cannot be explained except on the assumption that it was[pg 379]the sacrament of the eschatological community, a revealed means of securing“salvation”which was not altered in the slightest by the Messiahship of Jesus. How else could we explain the fact that baptism, without any commandment of Jesus, and without Jesus' ever having baptized, was taken over, as a matter of course, into Christianity, and was given a special reference to the receiving of the Spirit?

It is no use proposing to explain it as having been instituted as a symbolical repetition of the baptism of Jesus, thought of as“an anointing to the Messiahship.”There is not a single passage in ancient theology to support such a theory. And we may point also to the fact that Paul never refers to the baptism of Jesus in explaining the character of Christian baptism, never, in fact, makes any distinct reference to it. And how could baptism, if it had been a symbolical repetition of the baptism of Jesus, ever have acquired this magic-sacramental sense of“salvation”?

Nothing shows more clearly than the dual character of ancient baptism, which makes it the guarantee both of the reception of the Spirit and of deliverance from the judgment, that it is nothing else than the eschatological baptism of John with a single difference. Baptism with water and baptism with the Spirit are now connected not only logically, but also in point of time, seeing that since the day of Pentecost the period of the outpouring of the Spirit is present. The two portions of the eschatological sacrament which in the Baptist's preaching were distinguished in point of time—because he did not expect the outpouring of the Spirit until some future period—are now brought together, since one eschatological condition—the baptism with the Spirit—is now present. The“Christianising”of baptism consisted in this and in nothing else; though Paul carried it a stage farther when he formed the conception of baptism as a mystic partaking in the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Thus the thoroughgoing eschatological interpretation of the Life of Jesus puts into the hands of those who are reconstructing the history of dogma in the earliest times an explanation of the conception of the sacraments, of which they had been able hitherto only to note the presence as anxof which the origin was undiscoverable, and for which they possessed no equation by which it could be evaluated. If Christianity as the religion of historically revealed mysteries was able to lay hold upon Hellenism and overcome it, the reason of this was that it was already in its purely eschatological beginnings a religion of sacraments, a religion of eschatological sacraments, since Jesus had recognised a Divine institution in the baptism of John, and had Himself performed a sacramental action in the distribution of food at the Lake of Gennesareth and at the Last Supper.

This being so, the feeding of the multitude also belongs to the dogmatic element in the history. But no one had previously recognised it as what it really was, an indirect disclosure of the Messianic secret, just as no one had understood the full significance of Jesus' description of the Baptist as Elias.

But how does Peter at Caesarea Philippi know the secret of his Master? What he there declares is not a conviction which had gradually dawned on him, and slowly grown through various stages of probability and certainty.

The real character of this incident has been interpreted with remarkable penetration by Wrede. The incident itself, he says, is to be understood in quite as supernatural a fashion in Mark as in Matthew. But on the other hand one does not receive the impression that the writer intends to represent the confession as a merit or a discovery of Peter.“For according to the text of Mark, Jesus shows no trace of joy or surprise at this confession. His only answer consists of the command to say nothing about His Messiahship.”Keim, whom Wrede quotes, had received a similar impression from the Marcan account, and had supposed that Jesus had actually found the confession of Peter inopportune.

How is all this to be explained—the supernatural knowledge of Peter and the rather curt fashion in which Jesus receives his declaration?

It might be worth while to put the story of the transfiguration side by side with the incident at Caesarea Philippi, since there the Divine Sonship of Jesus is“a second time”revealed to the“three,”Peter, James, and John, and the revelation is made supernaturally by a voice from heaven. It is rather striking that Mark does not seem to be conscious that he is reporting something which the disciples knew already. At the beginning of the actual transfiguration Peter still addresses Jesus simply as Rabbi (Mark ix. 5). And what does it mean when Jesus, during the descent from the mountain, forbids them to speak to any man concerning that which they have seen until after the resurrection of the Son of Man? That would exclude even the other disciples who knew only the secret of His Messiahship. But why should they not be told of the Divine confirmation of that which Peter had declared at Caesarea Philippi and Jesus had“admitted”?

What has the transfiguration to do with the resurrection of the dead? And why are the thoughts of the disciples suddenly busied, not with what they have seen, not with the fact that the Son of Man shall rise from the dead, but simply with the possibility of the rising from the dead, the difficulty being that Elias was not yet present? Those who see in the transfiguration a projection backwards of the Pauline theology into the Gospel history do not realise what are the principal points and difficulties of the[pg 381]narrative. The problem lies in the conversation during the descent. Against the Messiahship of Jesus, against His rising from the dead, they have only one objection to suggest: Elias had not yet come.

We see here, in the first place, the importance of the revelation which Jesus had made to the people in declaring to them the secret that the Baptist is Elias. From the standpoint of the eschatological expectation no one could recognise Elias in the Baptist, unless he knew of the Messiahship of Jesus. And no one could believe in the Messiahship and“resurrection”of Jesus, that is, in His Parousia, without presupposing that Elias had in some way or other already come. This was therefore the primary difficulty of the disciples, the stumbling-block which Jesus must remove for them by making the same revelation concerning the Baptist to them as to the people. It is also once more abundantly clear that expectation was directed at that time primarily to the coming of Elias.292But since the whole eschatological movement arose out of the Baptist's preaching, the natural conclusion is that by“him who was to come after”and baptize with the Holy Spirit John meant, not the Messiah, but Elias.

But if the non-appearance of Elias was the primary difficulty of the disciples in connexion with the Messiahship of Jesus and all that it implied, why does it only strike the“three,”and moreover, all three of them together, now, and not at Caesarea Philippi?293How could Peter there have declared it and here be still labouring with the rest over the difficulty which stood in the way of his own declaration? To make the narrative coherent, the transfiguration, as being a revelation of the Messiahship, ought to precede the incident at Caesarea Philippi. Now let us look at the connexion in which it actually occurs. It falls in that inexplicable section Mark viii. 34-ix. 30 in which the multitude suddenly appears in the company of Jesus who is sojourning in a Gentile district, only to disappear again, equally enigmatically, afterwards, when He sets out for Galilee, instead of accompanying Him back to their own country.

In this section everything points to the situation during the days at Bethsaida after the return of the disciples from their mission. Jesus is surrounded by the people, while what He desires is to be alone with His immediate followers. The disciples make use of the healing powers which He had bestowed upon them when sending them forth, and have the experience of finding that they are not in all cases adequate (Mark ix. 14-29). The[pg 382]mountain to which He takes the“three”is not a mountain in the north, or as some have suggested, an imaginary mountain of the Evangelist, but the same to which Jesus went up to pray and to be alone on the evening of the feeding of the multitude (Mark vi. 46 and ix. 2). The house to which He goes after His return from the transfiguration is therefore to be placed at Bethsaida.

Another thing which points to a sojourn at Bethsaida after the feeding of the multitude is the story of the healing of the blind man at Bethsaida (Mark viii. 22-26).

The circumstances, therefore, which we have to presuppose are that Jesus is surrounded and thronged by the people at Bethsaida. In order to be alone He once more puts the Jordan between Himself and the multitude, and goes with the“three”to the mountain where He had prayed after the feeding of the five thousand. This is the only way in which we can understand how the people failed to follow Him, and He was able really to carry out His plan.

But how could this story be torn out of its natural context and its scene removed to Caesarea Philippi, where it is both on external and internal grounds impossible? What we need to notice is the Marcan account of the events which followed the sending forth of the disciples. We have two stories of the feeding of the multitude with a crossing of the lake after each (Mark vi. 31-56, Mark viii. 1-22), two stories of Jesus going away towards the north with the same motive, that of being alone and unrecognised. The first time, after the controversy about the washing of hands, His course is directed towards Tyre (Mark vii. 24-30), the second time, after the demand for a sign, he goes into the district of Caesarea Philippi (Mark viii. 27). The scene of the controversy about the washing of hands is some locality in the plain of Gennesareth (Mark vi. 53 ff); Dalmanutha is named as the place where the sign was demanded (Mark viii. 10 ff.).

The most natural conclusion is to identify the two cases of feeding the multitude, and the two journeys northwards. In that case we should have in the section Mark vi. 31-ix. 30, two sets of narratives worked into one another, both recounting how Jesus, after the disciples came back to Him, went with them from Capernaum to the northern shore of the lake, was there surprised by the multitude, and after the meal which He gave them, crossed the Jordan by boat to Bethsaida, stayed there for a while, and then returned again by ship to the country of Gennesareth, and was there again overtaken and surrounded by the people; then after some controversial encounters with the Scribes, who at the report of His miracles had come down from Jerusalem (Mark vii. 1), left Galilee and again went northwards.294

The seams at the joining of the narratives can be recognised in Mark vii. 31, where Jesus is suddenly transferred from the north to Decapolis, and in the saying in Mark viii. 14 ff., which makes explicit reference to the two miracles of feeding the multitude. Whether the Evangelist himself worked these two sets of narratives together, or whether he found them already united, cannot be determined, and is not of any direct historical interest. The disorder is in any case so complete that we cannot fully reconstruct each of the separate sets of narratives.

The external reasons why the narratives of Mark viii. 34-ix. 30, of which the scene is on the northern shore of the lake, are placed in this way after the incident of Caesarea Philippi are not difficult to grasp. The section contains an impressive discourse to the people on following Jesus in His sufferings, crucifixion, and death (Mark viii. 34-ix. 1). For this reason the whole series of scenes is attached to the revelation of the secret of the suffering of the Son of Man; and the redactor did not stop to think how the people could suddenly appear, and as suddenly disappear again. The statement, too,“He called the people with the disciples”(Mark viii. 34), helped to mislead him into inserting the section at this point, although this very remark points to the circumstances of the time just after the return of the disciples, when Jesus was sometimes alone with the disciples, and sometimes calls the eager multitude about Him.

The whole scene belongs, therefore, to the days which He spent at Bethsaida, and originally followed immediately upon the crossing of the lake, after the feeding of the multitude. It was after Jesus had been six days surrounded by the people, not six days after the revelation at Caesarea Philippi, that the“transfiguration”took place (Mark ix. 2). On this assumption, all the difficulties of the incident at Caesarea Philippi are cleared up in a moment; there is no longer anything strange in the fact that Peter declares to Jesus who He really is, while Jesus appears neither surprised nor especially rejoiced at the insight of His disciple. The transfiguration had, in fact, been the revelation of the secret of the Messiahship to the three who constituted the inner circle of the disciples.295And Jesus had not Himself revealed it to them; what had happened was, that[pg 384]in a state of rapture common to them all, in which they had seen the Master in a glorious transfiguration, they had seen Him talking with Moses and Elias and had heard a voice from heaven saying,“This is my beloved Son, hear ye Him.”

We must always make a fresh effort to realise to ourselves, that Jesus and His immediate followers were, at that time, in an enthusiastic state of intense eschatological expectation. We must picture them among the people, who were filled with penitence for their sins, and with faith in the Kingdom, hourly expecting the coming of the Kingdom, and the revelation of Jesus as the Son of Man, seeing in the eager multitude itself a sign that their reckoning of the time was correct; thus the psychological conditions were present for a common ecstatic experience such as is described in the account of the transfiguration.

In this ecstasy the“three”heard the voice from heaven saying who He was. Therefore, the Matthaean report, according to which Jesus praises Simon“because flesh and blood have not revealed it to him, but the Father who is in heaven,”is not really at variance with the briefer Marcan account, since it rightly indicates the source of Peter's knowledge.

Nevertheless Jesus was astonished. For Peter here disregarded the command given during the descent from the mount of transfiguration. He had“betrayed”to the Twelve Jesus' consciousness of His Messiahship. One receives the impression that Jesus did not put the question to the disciples in order to reveal Himself to them as Messiah, and that by the impulsive speech of Peter, upon whose silence He had counted because of His command, and to whom He had not specially addressed the question, He was forced to take a different line of action in regard to the Twelve from what He had intended. It is probable that He had never had the intention of revealing the secret of His Messiahship to the disciples. Otherwise He would not have kept it from them at the time of their mission, when He did not expect them to return before the Parousia. Even at the transfiguration the“three”do not learn it from His lips, but in a state of ecstasy, an ecstasy which He shared with them. At Caesarea Philippi it is not He, but Peter, who reveals His Messiahship. We may say, therefore, that Jesus did not voluntarily give up His Messianic secret; it was wrung from Him by the pressure of events.

However that may be, from Caesarea Philippi onwards it was known to the other disciples through Peter; what Jesus Himself revealed to them, was the secret of his sufferings.

Pfleiderer and Wrede were quite right in pointing to the clear and definite predictions of the suffering, death, and resurrection as the historically inexplicable element in our reports, since the necessity of Jesus' death, by which modern theology endeavours[pg 385]to make His resolve and His predictions intelligible, is not a necessity which arises out of the historical course of events. There was not present any natural ground for such a resolve on the part of Jesus. Had He returned to Galilee, He would immediately have had the multitudes flocking after Him again.

In order to make the historical possibility of the resolve to suffer and the prediction of the sufferings in some measure intelligible, modern theology has to ignore the prediction of the resurrection which is bound up with them, for this is“dogmatic.”That is, however, not permissible. We must, as Wrede insists, take the words as they are, and must not even indulge in ingenious explanations of the“three days.”Therefore, the resolve to suffer and to die are dogmatic; therefore, according to him, they are unhistorical, and only to be explained by a literary hypothesis.

But the thoroughgoing eschatological school says they are dogmatic, and therefore historical; because they find their explanation in eschatological conceptions.

Wrede held that the Messianic conception implied in the Marcan narrative is not the Jewish Messianic conception, just because of the thought of suffering and death which it involves. No stress must be laid on the fact that in Fourth Ezra vii. 29 the Christ dies and rises again, because His death takes place at the end of the Messianic Kingdom.296The Jewish Messiah is essentially a glorious being who shall appear in the last time. True, but the case in which the Messiah should be present, prior to the Parousia, should cause the final tribulations to come upon the earth, and should Himself undergo them, does not arise in the Jewish eschatology as described from without. It first arises with the self-consciousness of Jesus. Therefore, the Jewish conception of the Messiah has no information to give us upon this point.

In order to understand Jesus' resolve to suffer, we must first recognise that the mystery of this suffering is involved in the mystery of the Kingdom of God, since the Kingdom cannot come until the πειρασμός has taken place. This certainty of suffering is quite independent of the historic circumstances, as the beatitude on the persecuted in the sermon on the mount, and the predictions in the discourse at the sending forth of the Twelve, clearly show. Jesus' prediction of His own sufferings at Caesarea Philippi is precisely as unintelligible, precisely as dogmatic, and therefore precisely as historical as the prediction to the disciples at the time of their mission. The“must be”of the sufferings is the same—the coming of the Kingdom, and of the Parousia, which are dependent upon the πειρασμός having first taken place.

In the first period Jesus' thoughts concerning His own sufferings were included in the more general thought of the sufferings which formed part of the mystery of the Kingdom of God. The exhortations to hold steadfastly to Him in the time of trial, and not to lose faith in Him, certainly tended to suggest that He thought of Himself as the central point amid these conflicts and confusions, and reckoned on the possibility of His own death as much as on that of others. Upon this point nothing more definite can be said, since the mystery of Jesus' own sufferings does not detach itself from the mystery of the sufferings connected with the Kingdom of God until after the Messianic secret is made known at Caesarea Philippi. What is certain is that, for Him, suffering was always associated with the Messianic secret, since He placed His Parousia at the end of the pre-Messianic tribulations in which He was to have His part.

The suffering, death, and resurrection of which the secret was revealed at Caesarea Philippi are not therefore in themselves new or surprising.297The novelty lies in the form in which they are conceived. The tribulation, so far as Jesus is concerned, is now connected with an historic event: He will go to Jerusalem, there to suffer death at the hands of the authorities.

For the future, however, He no longer speaks of the general tribulation which He is to bring upon the earth, nor of the sufferings which await His followers, nor of the sufferings in which they must rally round Him. In the predictions of the passion there is no word of that; at Jerusalem there is no word of that. This thought disappears once for all.

In the secret of His passion which Jesus reveals to the disciples at Caesarea Philippi the pre-Messianic tribulation is for others set aside, abolished, concentrated upon Himself alone, and that in the[pg 387]form that they are fulfilled in His own passion and death at Jerusalem. That was the new conviction that had dawned upon Him. He must suffer for others ... that the Kingdom might come.

This change was due to the non-fulfilment of the promises made in the discourse at the sending forth of the Twelve. He had thought then to let loose the final tribulation and so compel the coming of the Kingdom. And the cataclysm had not occurred. He had expected it also after the return of the disciples. In Bethsaida, in speaking to the multitude which He had consecrated by the foretaste of the Messianic feast, as also to the disciples at the time of their mission, He had turned their thoughts to things to come and had adjured them to be prepared to suffer with Him, to give up their lives, not to be ashamed of Him in His humiliation, since otherwise the Son of Man would be ashamed of them when He came in glory (Mark viii. 34-ix. 1).298

In leaving Galilee He abandoned the hope that the final tribulation would begin of itself. If it delays, that means that there is still something to be done, and yet another of the violent must lay violent hands upon the Kingdom of God. The movement of repentance had not been sufficient. When, in accordance with His commission, by sending forth the disciples with their message, he hurled the fire-brand which should kindle the fiery trials of the Last Time, the flame went out. He had not succeeded in sending the sword on earth and stirring up the conflict. And until the time of trial had come, the coming of the Kingdom and His own manifestation as Son of Man were impossible.

That meant—not that the Kingdom was not near at hand—but that God had appointed otherwise in regard to the time of trial. He had heard the Lord's Prayer in which Jesus and His followers prayed for the coming of the Kingdom—and at the same time, for deliverance from the πειρασμός. The time of trial was not come; therefore God in His mercy and omnipotence had eliminated it from the series of eschatological events, and appointed to Him whose commission had been to bring it about, instead to accomplish it in His own person. As He who was to rule over the members of the Kingdom in the future age, He was appointed to serve them in the present, to give His life for them, the many (Mark x. 45 and xiv. 24), and to make in His own blood the atonement which they would have had to render in the tribulation.

The Kingdom could not come until the debt which weighed upon the world was discharged. Until then, not only the now living believers, but the chosen of all generations since the beginning[pg 388]of the world wait for their manifestation in glory—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and all the countless unknown who should come from the East and from the West to sit at tables with them at the Messianic feast (Matt. viii. 11). The enigmatic πολλοί for whom Jesus dies are those predestined to the Kingdom, since His death must at last compel the Coming of the Kingdom.299

This thought Jesus found in the prophecies of Isaiah, which spoke of the suffering Servant of the Lord. The mysterious description of Him who in His humiliation was despised and misunderstood, who, nevertheless bears the guilt of others and afterwards is made manifest in what He has done for them, points, He feels, to Himself.

And since He found it there set down that He must suffer unrecognised, and that those for whom He suffered should doubt Him, His suffering should, nay must, remain a mystery. In that case those who doubted Him would not bring condemnation upon themselves. He no longer needs to adjure them for their own sakes to be faithful to Him and to stand by Him even amid reproach and humiliation; He can calmly predict to His disciples that they shall all be offended in Him and shall flee (Mark xiv. 26, 27); He can tell Peter, who boasts that he will die with Him, that before the dawn he shall deny Him thrice (Mark xiv. 29-31); all that is so set down in the Scripture. They must doubt Him. But now they shall not lose their blessedness, for He bears all sins and transgressions. That, too, is buried in the atonement which He offers.

Therefore, also, there is no need for them to understand His secret. He spoke of it to them without any explanation. It is sufficient that they should know why He goes up to Jerusalem. They, on their part, are thinking only of the coming transformation of all things, as their conversation shows. The prospect which He has opened up to them is clear enough; the only thing that they do not understand is why He must first die at Jerusalem. The first time that Peter ventured to speak to Him about it, He had turned on him with cruel harshness, had almost cursed him (Mark viii. 32, 33); from that time forward they no longer dared to ask Him anything about it. The new thought of His own passion has its basis therefore in the authority with which Jesus was armed to bring about the beginning of the final tribulation. Ethically regarded, His taking the suffering upon Himself is an act of mercy and compassion towards those who would otherwise have had to bear these tribulations, and perhaps would not have stood the test. Historically regarded, the thought of His sufferings involves the same lofty treatment both of history and eschatology as was manifested in the identification of the Baptist with Elias. For now He identifies His condemnation and execution, which are to take place on natural lines, with the predicted pre-Messianic tribulations. This imperious forcing of eschatology into history is also its destruction; its assertion and abandonment at the same time.

Towards Passover, therefore, Jesus sets out for Jerusalem, solely in order to die there.300“It is,”says Wrede,“beyond question the opinion of Mark that Jesus went to Jerusalem because He had decided to die; that is obvious even from the details of the story.”It is therefore a mistake to speak of Jesus as“teaching”in Jerusalem. He has no intention of doing so. As a prophet He foretells in veiled parabolic form the offence which must come (Mark xii. 1-12), exhorts men to watch for the Parousia, pictures the nature of the judgment which the Son of Man shall hold, and, for the rest, thinks only how He can so provoke the Pharisees and the rulers that they will be compelled to get rid of Him. That is why He violently cleanses the Temple, and attacks the Pharisees, in the presence of the people, with passionate invective.

From the revelation at Caesarea Philippi onward, all that belongs to the history of Jesus, in the strict sense, are the events which lead up to His death; or, to put it more accurately, the events in which He Himself is the sole actor. The other things which happen, the questions which are laid before Him for decision, the episodic incidents which occur in those days, have nothing to[pg 390]do with the real“Life of Jesus,”since they contribute nothing to the decisive issue, but merely form the anecdotic fringes of the real outward and inward event, the deliberate bringing down of death upon Himself.

It is in truth surprising that He succeeded in transforming into history this resolve which had its roots in dogma, and really dying alone. Is it not almost unintelligible that His disciples were not involved in His fate? Not even the disciple who smote with the sword was arrested along with Him (Mark xiv. 47); Peter, recognised in the courtyard of the High Priest's house as one who had been with Jesus the Nazarene, is allowed to go free.

For a moment indeed, Jesus believes that the“three”are destined to share His fate, not from any outward necessity, but because they had professed themselves able to suffer the last extremities with Him. The sons of Zebedee, when He asked them whether, in order to sit at His right hand and His left, they are prepared to drink His cup and be baptized with His baptism, had declared that they were, and thereupon He had predicted that they should do so (Mark x. 38, 39). Peter again had that very night, in spite of the warning of Jesus, sworn that he would go even unto death with Him (Mark xiv. 30, 31). Hence He is conscious of a higher possibility that these three are to go through the trial with Him. He takes them with Him to Gethsemane and bids them remain near Him and watch with Him. And since they do not perceive the danger of the hour, He adjures them to watch and pray. They are to pray that they may not have to pass through the trial (ἵνα μὴ ἔλθητε εἰς πειρασμόν) since, though the spirit is willing, the flesh is weak. Amid His own sore distress He is anxious about them and their capacity to share His trial as they had declared their willingness to do.301

Here also it is once more made clear that for Jesus the necessity of His death is grounded in dogma, not in external historical facts. Above the dogmatic eschatological necessity, however, there stands the omnipotence of God, which is bound by no limitations. As Jesus in the Lord's Prayer had taught His followers to pray for deliverance from the πειρασμός, and as in His fears for the three He bids them pray for the same thing, so now He Himself prays for deliverance, even in this last moment when He knows that the armed band which is coming to arrest Him is already on the way. Literal history does not exist for Him, only the will of God; and this is exalted even above eschatological necessity.

But how did this exact agreement between the fate of Jesus and His predictions come about? Why did the authorities strike at Him only, not at His whole following, not even at the disciples?[pg 391]He was arrested and condemned on account of His Messianic claims. But how did the High Priest know that Jesus claimed to be the Messiah? And why does he put the accusation as a direct question without calling witnesses in support of it? Why was the attempt first made to bring up a saying about the Temple which could be interpreted as blasphemy in order to condemn Him on this ground (Mark xiv. 57-59)? Before that again, as is evident from Mark's account, they had brought up a whole crowd of witnesses in the hope of securing evidence sufficient to justify His condemnation; and the attempt had not succeeded.

It was only after all these attempts had failed that the High Priest brought his accusation concerning the Messianic claim, and he did so without citing the three necessary witnesses. Why so? Because he had not got them. The condemnation of Jesus depended on His own admission. That was why they had endeavoured to convict Him upon other charges.302

This wholly unintelligible feature of the trial confirms what is evident also from the discourses and attitude of Jesus at Jerusalem, viz. that He had not been held by the multitude to be the Messiah, that the idea of His making such claims had not for a moment occurred to them—lay in fact for them quite beyond the range of possibility. Therefore He cannot have made a Messianic entry.

According to Havet, Brandt, Wellhausen, Dalman, and Wrede the ovation at the entry had no Messianic character whatever. It is wholly mistaken, as Wrede quite rightly remarks, to represent matters as if the Messianic ovation was forced upon Jesus—that He accepted it with inner repugnance and in silent passivity. For that would involve the supposition that the people had for a moment regarded Him as Messiah and then afterwards had shown themselves as completely without any suspicion of His Messiahship as though they had in the interval drunk of the waters of Lethe. The exact opposite is true: Jesus Himself made the preparations for the Messianic entry. Its Messianic features were due to His arrangements. He made a point of riding upon the ass, not because He was weary, but because He desired that the Messianic prophecy of Zech. ix. 9 should be secretly fulfilled.

The entry is therefore a Messianic act on the part of Jesus, an action in which His consciousness of His office breaks through, as it did at the sending forth of the disciples, in the explanation that[pg 392]the Baptist was Elias, and in the feeding of the multitude. But others can have had no suspicion of the Messianic significance of that which was going on before their eyes. The entry into Jerusalem was therefore Messianic for Jesus, but not Messianic for the people.

But what was He for the people? Here Wrede's theory that He was a teacher again refutes itself. In the triumphal entry there is more than the ovation offered to a teacher. The jubilations have reference to“Him who is to come”; it is to Him that the acclamations are offered and because of Him that the people rejoice in the nearness of the Kingdom, as in Mark, the cries of jubilation show; for here, as Dalman rightly remarks, there is actually no mention of the Messiah.

Jesus therefore made His entry into Jerusalem as the Prophet, as Elias. That is confirmed by Matthew (xxi. 11), although Matthew gives a Messianic colouring to the entry itself by bringing in the acclamation in which He was designated the Son of David, just as, conversely, he reports the Baptist's question rightly, and introduces it wrongly, by making the Baptist hear of the“works of the Christ.”

Was Mark conscious, one wonders, that it was not a Messianic entry that he was reporting? We do not know. It is not inherently impossible that, as Wrede asserts,“he had no real view concerning the historical life of Jesus,”did not know whether Jesus was recognised as Messiah, and took no interest in the question from an historical point of view. Fortunately for us! For that is why he simply hands on tradition and does not write a Life of Jesus.

The Marcan hypothesis went astray in conceiving this Gospel as a Life of Jesus written with either complete or partial historical consciousness, and interpreting it on these lines, on the sole ground that it only brings in the name Son of Man twice prior to the incident at Caesarea Philippi. The Life of Jesus cannot be arrived at by following the arrangement of a single Gospel, but only on the basis of the tradition which is preserved more or less faithfully in the earliest pair of Synoptic Gospels.

Questions of literary priority, indeed literary questions in general, have in the last resort, as Keim remarked long ago, nothing to do with the gaining of a clear idea of the course of events, since the Evangelists had not themselves a clear idea of it before their minds; it can only be arrived at hypothetically by an experimental reconstruction based on the necessary inner connexion of the incidents.

But who could possibly have had in early times a clear conception of the Life of Jesus? Even its most critical moments were totally unintelligible to the disciples who had themselves shared in the experiences, and who were the only sources for the tradition.

They were simply swept through these events by the momentum of the purpose of Jesus. That is why the tradition is incoherent. The reality had been incoherent too, since it was only the secret Messianic self-consciousness of Jesus which created alike the events and their connexion. Every Life of Jesus remains therefore a reconstruction on the basis of a more or less accurate insight into the nature of the dynamic self-consciousness of Jesus which created the history.

The people, whatever Mark may have thought, did not offer Jesus a Messianic ovation at all; it was He who, in the conviction that they were wholly unable to recognise it, played with His Messianic self-consciousness before their eyes, just as He did at the time after the sending forth of the disciples, when, as now, He thought the end at hand. It was in the same way, too, that He closed the invective against the Pharisees with the words“I say unto you, ye shall see me no more until ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord”(Matt. xxiii. 39). This saying implies His Parousia.

Similarly He is playing with His secret in that crucial question regarding the Messiahship in Mark xii. 35-37. There is no question of dissociating the Davidic Sonship from the Messiahship.303He asks only how can the Christ in virtue of His descent from David be, as his son, inferior to David, and yet be addressed by David in the Psalm as his Lord? The answer is; by reason of the metamorphosis and Parousia in which natural relationships are abolished and the scion of David's line who is the predestined Son of Man shall take possession of His unique glory.

Far from rejecting the Davidic Sonship in this saying, Jesus, on the contrary, presupposes His possession of it. That raises the question whether He did not really during His lifetime regard Himself as a descendant of David and whether He was not regarded as such. Paul, who otherwise shows no interest in the earthly phase of the existence of the Lord, certainly implies His descent from David.

The blind man at Jericho, too, cries out to the Nazarene prophet as“Son of David”(Mark x. 47). But in doing so he does not mean to address Jesus as Messiah, for afterwards, when he is brought to Him he simply calls Him“Rabbi”(Mark x. 51). And the people thought nothing further about what he had said. When the expectant people bid him keep silence they do not do so because the expression Son of David offends them, but because his clamour annoys them. Jesus, however, was struck by this cry, stood still and caused him, as he was standing timidly behind the[pg 394]eager multitude, to be brought to Him. It is possible, of course, that this address is a mere mistake in the tradition, the same tradition which unsuspectingly brought in the expression Son of Man at the wrong place.

So much, however, is certain: the people were not made aware of the Messiahship of Jesus by the cry of the blind man any more than by the outcries of the demoniacs. The entry into Jerusalem was not a Messianic ovation. All that history is concerned with is that this fact should be admitted on all hands. Except Jesus and the disciples, therefore, no one knew the secret of His Messiahship even in those days at Jerusalem. But the High Priest suddenly showed himself in possession of it. How? Through the betrayal of Judas.

For a hundred and fifty years the question has been historically discussed why Judas betrayed his Master. That the main question for history waswhat he betrayedwas suspected by few and they touched on it only in a timid kind of way—indeed the problems of the trial of Jesus may be said to have been non-existent for criticism.

The traitorous act of Judas cannot have consisted in informing the Sanhedrin where Jesus was to be found at a suitable place for an arrest. They could have had that information more cheaply by causing Jesus to be watched by spies. But Mark expressly says that Judas when he betrayed Jesus did not yet know of a favourable opportunity for the arrest, but was seeking such an opportunity. Mark xiv. 10, 11,“And Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve, went unto the chief priests, to betray him unto them. And when they heard it, they were glad, and promised to give him money. And he sought how he might conveniently betray him.”

In the betrayal, therefore, there were two points, a more general and a more special: the general fact by which he gave Jesus into their power, and the undertaking to let them know of the next opportunity when they could arrest Him quietly, without publicity. The betrayal by which he brought his Master to death, in consequence of which the rulers decided upon the arrest, knowing that their cause was safe in any case, was the betrayal of the Messianic secret. Jesus died because two of His disciples had broken His command of silence: Peter when he made known the secret of the Messiahship to the Twelve at Caesarea Philippi; Judas Iscariot by communicating it to the High Priest. But the difficulty was that Judas was the sole witness. Therefore the betrayal was useless so far as the actual trial was concerned unless Jesus admitted the charge. So they first tried to secure His condemnation on other grounds, and only when these attempts broke down did the High Priest put, in the form of a question, the charge in support of which he could have brought no witnesses.

But Jesus immediately admitted it, and strengthened the admission by an allusion to His Parousia in the near future as Son of Man.

The betrayal and the trial can only be rightly understood when it is realised that the public knew nothing whatever of the secret of the Messiahship.304

It is the same in regard to the scene in the presence of Pilate. The people on that morning knew nothing of the trial of Jesus, but came to Pilate with the sole object of asking the release of a prisoner, as was the custom at the feast (Mark xv. 6-8). The idea then occurs to Pilate, who was just about to hand over, willingly enough, this troublesome fellow and prophet to the priestly faction, to play off the people against the priests and work on the multitude to petition for the release of Jesus. In this way he would have secured himself on both sides. He would have condemned Jesus to please the priests, and after condemning Him would have released Him to please the people. The priests are greatly embarrassed by the presence of the multitude. They had done everything so quickly and quietly that they might well have hoped to get Jesus crucified before any one knew what was happening or had had time to wonder at His non-appearance in the Temple.

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