| 120. Preparation For the Passover. | ||||
ON The First Day of Unleavened Bread, in the evening of which the paschal lamb was to be slain, consequently, the day before the feast properly speaking which however commenced on that evening, i.e. the 14th of Nisan, Jesus, according to the two first evangelists, in compliance with a question addressed to him by the disciples, sent-Matthew leaves it undecided which and hov many, Mark says, two disciples, whom Luke designates as Peter and John, to {P.690} Jerusalem (perhaps from Bethany), to bespeak a place in which he miwht partake of the Passover with them, and to make the further arrangements (Matt. xxvi.17ff. parall.). | ||||
The three narrators do not altogether agree as to the directions which Jesus gave to these disciples. According to all, he sends them to a man of whom they had only to desire, in the name of their master, a place in which to celebrate the Passover, in order at once to have their want supplied: but first, this locality is more particularly described by the two intermediate evangelists than by Matthew, namely, as a large upper room, which was already furnished and prepared for the reception of guests; and secondly, the manner in which they were to find the owner, is described by the former otherwise than by the latter. Matthew makes Jesus merely say to the disciples, that they were to go "to such a man;" the others, that, being come into the city, they would meet a man bearing a pitcher of water, hom they were to follow into the house which he should enter, and there make their application to the owner. In this narrative there have been found a multitude of difficulties, which G abler has assembled in a special treatise. At the very threshold of the narrative it occasions surprise, that Jesus should not have thought of any preparation for the Passover until the last day, indeed, that he should even then have needed to be reminded of it by the disciples, as the two first evangelists tell us: for, owing to the great influx of people at the time of the Passover (2,700,000, according to Josephus), the accomodations in the city were soon disposed of, and the majority of the strangers were obliged to encamp in tents before the city. It is the more remarkable, then, that, notwithstanding all this, the messengers of Jesus find the desired chamber disengaged, and not only so, but actually kept in reserve by the owner and prepared for a repast, as if he had had a presentiment that it would be bespoken by Jess. And so confidently is this reckoned on by Jesus that he directs his disciples to ask the owner of the house, not whether he can obtain from him a room in which to eat the Passover, but merely-where the guest-chamber appropriated to this purpose may be? or, if we take Matthew's account, he directs them to say to him that he will eat the Passover at his house; to which it must be added that, according to Mark and Luke, Jesus even knows what kind of chamber will be assigned him, and in what part of the house it is situated. But the way in which, according to these two evangelists, the two disciples were to find their way to the right house, is especially remarkable. The words i-uyere dc n)v -noA.ly Trpbc rbv delva in Matthew (v. 18), sound as if Jesus had named the person to whom the disciples were to go, but that the narrator either would not or could not repeat it: whereas in the two other evangelists, Jesus indicates the house into which they were to enter, by means of a person whom they would met {P.691} carrying a vessel of water. Now how could Jesus in Bethany, or wherever else he might be, foreknow this accidental circumstance, unless, indeed, it had been preconcerted that at this particular time a servant from the house should appear with a vessel of water, and thus await the messengers of Jesus? To the rationalist expositors everything in our narrative appeared to point to a preconcerted arrangement; and this being presupposed, they believed that all its difficulties would at once be solved. The disciples, dispatched so late, could only find a room disengaged if it had heen previously bespoken by Jesus; he could only direct; them to address the owner of the house so categorically, if he had already previously made an arrangement with him; this would explain the precise knowledge of Jesus as to the locality, and, lastly, (the point from which this explanation gets out,) his certainty that the disciples would meet a man carrying water from that particular house. This circumlocutory mannerof indicating the house, which might have been avoided by the simple mention of the owners name, is supposed to have been adopted by Jesus, that the place where he intended to keep the Passover might not be known before the time to the betrayer, who would otherwise perhaps have surprised him there, and thus have disturbed the repast. | ||||
But such is not at all the impression produced by the Gospel narrative. of a preconcerted arrangement, of a previous bespeaking of the apartment, it says nothing; .on the contrary, the words, they found as he had said to them, in Mark and Luke, seem intended to convey the idea that Jesus was able to predict every thing as they afterwards actually found it; a solicitous fore-eight is nowhere indicated, but rather a miraculous foreknowledge. Here, in fact, as above in the procuring of the animal for the entrance into Jerusalem, we have a twofold miracle: first, the fact that everything stands ready to supply the wants of Jesus, and tluit no one is able to withstand the power of his name: secondly, the ability of Jesus to fake cognizance of distant circumstances, and to predict the merest fortuities. It must create surprise that, forcibly as this supernaturalistic conception of the narrative before us urges itself upon the reader, Olshausen himself seeks to elude it, by arguments which would nullfy most of the histories of miracles, and which we are accustomed to hear only from rationalists. To the impartial expositor, he says, the narrative does not present the slightest warrant for a miraculous interpretation, (we almost fancy ourselves transported into the commentary of Paulus); if the narrators intended to recount a miracle, they must have expressly observed that no previous arrangement had been made (precisely the {P.692} rationalist demand-if a cure were meant to be recognized as a miracle, the application of natural means must have been expressly denied); moreover the object of such a miracle is not to be discerned, a strengthening of the faith of the disciples was not then necessary, nor was it to be effected by this unimportant miracle, after the more exalted ones which had preceded it: grounds on which the thoroughly similar narrative of the procuring of the ass for the entrance, which Olshausen upholds as a miracle, would be equally excluded from the sphere of the supernatural. | ||||
The present narrative, indeed, is so strikingly allied to the earlier one just mentioned, that in relation to their historical reality, the same judgment must be passed on both. In the one as in the other, Jesus has a want, the speedy supply of which is so cared for by God, that Jesus foreknows to the minutest particular the manner in which if is to be supplied; in the one he needs a guest chamber, as in the other an animal on which to ride; in the one as in the other, he sends out two disciples, to bespeak the thing required; in the one he gives them as a sign by which to find the right house-a man carrying water whom they are to meet, as in the other they have a sign in the circumstance of the ass being tied where two roads meet; in the one as in the other, he directs his disciples simply to mention him to the owner, in the one case as the master, diddanaA-of, in the other, as the lord, Kvpiog, in order to ensure unhesitating compliance with his demand; in both instances the result closely corresponds to is prediction. In the narrative more immediately under our consideration, as in the earlier one, there is wanting an adequate object, for the sake of which so manifold a miracle should have been ordained; while the motive which might occasion the development of the miraculous narrative in the primitive Christian legend is obvious. An Old Testament narrative, to which we have already had occasion to refer in connection with the earlier miracle, is still more strikingly recalled by the one before us. After disclosing to Saul that he was destined to be King of Israel, Samuel, as a sign of the truth of this more remote announcement, foretells whom Saul will meet on his return homewards: namely, first two men with the information that his father's asses are found; then three others, who will be carrying animals for sacrifice, bread and wine, and will offer him some of the bread etc. (1 Sam. x. 1 f): from which we see by what kind of predictions the Hebrew legend made its prophets attest their inspiration. | ||||
As regards the relation of the Gospels to each other, the narrative of Matthew is commonly placed far below that of the two other Synoptics, and regarded as the later and more traditional. The circumstance of the man carrying water, especially, is held to have belonged to the original fact, but to have been lost in tradition before the narrative reached Matthew, who inserted in its place the {P.693} enigmatical "go to such a man." | ||||
But we have seen, on the contrary, that the Seiva. presents no difficulty; while the circumstance of the water-bearer is in the highest degree enigmatical. Still less is the omission of Matthew to designate the two commissioned disciples as Peter and John, an indication that the narrative of the third gospel is the more original one. For when Schleiermacher says that this trait might easily be lost in the course of transmission through several hands, but that it could scarcely have been added by a later hand, the latter half of his proposition, at least, is without foundation. There is little probability that Jesus should have assigned so purely economical an office to the two most eminent disciples; whereas it is easy to conceive that in the first instance it was simply narrated, as by Matthew, that Jesus sent the disciples or some disciples, that hereupon the number was fixed at two, perhaps from the narrative of the procuring of the ass, and that at length, as the appointment had relation to a task which was ultimately of high importance, the preparing of the last meal of Jesus, these places were filled by the two chief apostles, so that in this instance even Mark appears to have kept nearer to the original fact, since he has not adopted into his narrative the names of the two disciples, which are presented by Luke. | ||||