| 125. Agony of Jesus in the Garden. | ||||
ACCORDING to the Synoptic Narratives, Jesus, immediately after the conclusion of the meal and the singing of the Hallel, it being his habit during this feast time to spend the night out of Jerusalem (Matth. xxi. 17; Luke xxii. 39), went to the Mount of Olives, into a garden called Gethsemano (Matth. xxvi. 30, 36, parall.). John, who gives the additional particular that the garden lay over the brook Kedron, does not represent him as departing there until after a long series of valedictory discourses (xiv.- xvii), of which we shall hereafter have to speak again. While John makes the arrest of Jesus follow immediately on the arrival of Jesus in the garden, the Synoptics insert between the two that scene which is usually designated the agony of Jesus. | ||||
Their accounts of this scene are not in unison. According to Matthew and Mark, Jesus takes with him his three most confidential disciples, Peter and the sons of Zebedee, leaving the rest behind, is seized with tearfulness and trembling, tells the three disciples that he is sorrowful even to death, and admonishing them to remain wakeful in the mean time, removes to a distance from them also, that he may offer a prayer for himself, in which, with his face bent to the earth, he entreats that the cup of suffering may pass from him, but still resigns all to the will of his Father. When he returns to the disciples, he finds them sleeping, again admonishes them to watchfulness, then removes from them a second time, and repeats the former prayer, after which he once more finds his disciples asleep. For the third time he retires to repeat the prayer, and returning, for the third time finds the disciples sleeping, but now awakes them, in order to meet the coming betrayer. of the Dumber three, which thus doubly figure in the narrative of the two tost evangelists, Luke says nothing; according to him, Jesus retires from all the disciples, after admonishing them to watch, for the Distance of about a stone's cast, and prays kneeling, once only, but | ||||
{P.720} nearly in the same words as in the other Gospels, then returns to the disciples and awakes them, because Judas is approaching with the multitude. But, on the other hand, Luke in his single, scene of prayer, has two circumstances which are foreign to the other narrators, namely, that while Jesus was yet praying, and immediately before the most violent mental struggle, an angel appeared to strengthen him, and that during the agony dyuvia which ensued, the sweat of Jesus was as it were groat drops of Hood falling to the ground. | ||||
From the earliest time this scene in Gethscmane has been a stumbling-block, because Jesus therein appears to betray a weakness and fear of death which might, be considered unworthy of him. Celsus and Julian, doubtless having in their minds the great examples of a dying Socrates and other heathen sages, expressed contempt for the fear of death exhibited by Jesus; Vanini boldly extolled his own demeanour in the face of execution as superior to that of Jesus; and in the E'vangelium Nicodemi, Satan concludes from this scene that Christ is a mere man.The supposition resorted to in this apocryphal book, that the trouble of Jesus was only assumed in order to encourage the devil to enter into a contest with him, is but a confession of inability to reconcile a real truth of that kind with the ideal of Jesus. Hence appeal has been made to t'ae distinction between the two natures in Christ; the sorrowfulness and the prayer for the removal of the cup having been ascribed to the human nature, the resignation to te will of the Father, to the divine. As however, in the first place, this appeared to introduce an inad-m'ssible division in the nature of Jesus; and in the second place, even a fi'ar experienced by his human nature in the prospect of appro ching bodily sufferings appeared umvorthv of him: his consternation was represented as being of a spiritual and sympathetic character as arising from the wickedness of Judas, the danger which threatened his disciples, and the fate which was impending over his nation. The effort to free the sorrow of Jesus from all reference to {P.721} physical suffering, or to his own person, attained its highest pitch in the ecclesiastical tenet, that Jesus by substitution was burdened with the guilt of all mankind, and vicariously endured the wrath of God against that guilt. Some have even supposed that the devil himself wrestled with Jesus. But such a cause for the trouble of Jesus is not found in the text; on the contrary, here as elsewhere (Matt. xx. 22 f. parall), the cup (potherion) for the removal of which Jesus prays, must be understood of his own bodily sufferings and death. Moreover, the above ecclesiastical opinion is founded on an unscriptural conception of the vicarious office of Jesus. It is true that even in the conception of the Synoptics, the suffering of Jesus is a vicarious one for the sins of many; but the substitution consists, according to them, not in Jesus having immediately borne these sins and the punishment due to mankind on account of them, but in a personal suffering being laid upon him on account of those sins, and in order to remove their-punishment. Tims, as on the cross it was not directly the sins of the world, and the anger of God in relation to them, which afflicted him, but the wounds which he received, and his whole lamentable situation, wherein he was indeed placed for the sins of mankind: so, according to te idea of the evangelists, in Gethscmane also, it was not immediately the feeling of the misery of humanity which occasioned his dismay, but the presentiment of his own suffering, which, however, was encountered in the stead of mankind. | ||||
From the untenable ecclesiastical view of the agony of Jesus, a descent has in more modern times been made to coarse materialism, by reducing what it Was thought hopeless to justify ethically, as a mental condition, to a purely physical one, and supposing that Jesus was attacked by some malady in Gethsemane; an opinion which Paulus, with a severity which he should only have more industriously applied to his own explanations, pronounces to be altogether unseemly and opposed to the text, though he does not regard as improbable Hcumann's hypothesis, that in addition to his inward sorrow, Jesus had contracted a cold in the clayey ground traversed by the Kedron. On the other hand, the scene has been depicted in the colours of modern sentimentalism, and the feelings of friendship, the pain of separation, the thoughts of parting, have been assigned as the causes which so lacerated the mind of Jesus;; or a confused blending of all the different kinds of sorrow, selfish and sympathetic, sensual and spiritual, as been presupposed. Paulus explains "if it be possible, let this cup {P.722} pass from me" as the expression of a purely moral anxiety on the part of Jesus, as to whether it were the will of God that he should give himself up to the attack immediately at hand, or whether it were not more accordant with the Divine pleasure, that he should yet escape from this danger: thus converting into a mere inquiry of God, what is obviously the most urgent prayer. | ||||
While Olshausen falls back on the ecclesiastical theory, and authoritatively declares that the supposition of external corporeal suffering having called forth the anguish of Jesus, ought to be banished as one which would annihilate the essential characteristics of his mission; others have more correctly acknowledged that in that anguish the passionate wish to be delivered from the terrible sufferings in prospect, the horror of sensitive nature in the face of annihilation, are certainly apparent. With justice also it is remarked, in opposition to the reproach which has been cast on Jesus, that the speedy conquest over rebellious nature removes every appearance of sinfulness; that, moreover, the shrinking of physical nature at the prospect of annihilation belongs to the essential conditions of life: indeed, that the purer the human nature in an individual, the more susceptible is it in relation to suffering and annihilation; that the conquest over suffering intensely appreciated is greater than a stoical r even a Socratic insensibility. | ||||
With more reason, criticism has attacked the peculiar representation of the third gospel. The strengthening angel has created no little difficulty to the ancient Church on dogmatical grounds, to modern exposition on critical grounds. An ancient scholium on the consideration, that he who was adored and glorified ivith fear and trembling by all the celestial powers, did, not need the strengthening of the angel, one {P.723} point in the angelic appearance for criticism to grapple with, is indicated by the circumstance that Luke is the only evangelist from whom we learn it. If, according to the ordinary presupposition, the first and fourth Gospels are of apostolic origin; why this silence as to the angel on the part of Matthew, who is believed to have been in the garden, why especially on the part of John, who was among the three in the nearer neighbourhood of Jesus? If it be said: because, sleepy as they were, and at some distance, and moreover under cover of the night, they did not observe him: it must be asked, how are we to suppose that Luke received this information? That, assuming the disciples not to have themselves observed the appearance, Jesus should have narrated it to them on that evening, there is, from the intense excitement of those hours and the circumstance that the return of Jesus to his disciples was immediately followed by the arrival of Judas, little probability; and as little, that he communicated to them in the days after the resurrection, and that nevertheless this information appeared worthy of record to none but the third evangelist, who yet received it only at second hand. As in this manner there is every presumption against the historical character of the angelic appearance; why should not this also, like all appearances of the same kind which have come under our notice, especially in the story of the infancy of Jesus, be interpreted by us mythically? Gabler has been before us in advancing the idea, that in the primitive Christian community the rapid transition from the most violent mental conflict to the most tranquil resignation, which was observable in Jesus on that night, was explained, agreeably to the Jewish mode of thought, by the intervention of a strengthening angel, and that this explanation may have mingled itself with the narrative: Schleiermacher, too, finds it the most probable that this moment, described by Jesus himself as one of hard trial, was early glorified in hymns by anelic appearances, and that this embellishment, originally intended in a merely poetical sense, was received by the narrator of the third gospel as historical. | ||||
The other feature peculiar to Luke, namely, the bloody sweat, was early felt to be no less fraught with difficulty than the strengthening by the angel. At least it appears to have been this more than anything else, which occasioned the exclusion of the entire addition in Luke, v. 43 and 44, from many ancient copies of the Gospels. For as the orthodox, who according to Epiphanias rejected the passage, appear to have shrunk the most from the lowest degree of fear which is expressed by the bloody sweat: so to the docetic opinions of some who did not receive this passage,)) this was the only particular which could give offence. Thus in an earlier age, age, {P.724} doubts were raised respecting the fitness of the bloody sweat of Jesus on dogmatical considerations: while in more modern times this has been done on physiological grounds. It is true that authorities are adduced for instances of bloody sweat from Aristotle down to the more recent investigators of nature: but such a phenomenon is only mentioned as extremely rare, and as a symptom of decided disease. Hence Paulus points to the term as it were, as indicating that it is not directly a bloody sweat which is here spoken of, but only a sweat which might be compared to blood: this comparison, however, he refers only to the thick appearance of the drops, and Olshausen also agrees with him thus far, that a red colour of the perspiration is not necessarily included in the comparison. But in the course of a narrative which is meant as a prelude to the sanguinary death of Jesus, it is the most natural to take the comparison of the sweat to drops of blood, in its full sense. Further, here, yet more forcibly than in relation to the angelic appearance, the question suggests itself: how did Luke obtain this information? or to pass by all questions which must take the same form in this instance as in the previous one, how could the disciples, at a distance and in the night, discern the falling of drops of blood? According to Paulus indeed it ought not to be said that the sweat fell, for as the word "falling" refers not to sweat, but to the "drops of blood", which are introduced merely for the purpose of comparison, it is only meant that a sweat as thick and heavy as falling drops of blood stood on the brow of Jesus. But whether it be said: the sweat fell like drops of blood to the earth, or: it was like drops of blood falling to the earth, it comes pretty much to the same thing; at least the comparison of a sweat standing on the brow to blood falling on the earth would not be very apt, especially if together with the falling, we are to abstract also the colour of the bood, so that of the words, as it were drops of blood "falling on the ground, as it were drops," would properly have any decided meaning. Since then we can neither comprehend the circumstance, nor conceive what historical authority for it the narrator could have had, let us, with Schleiermacher, rather take this feature also as a poetical one construed historically by the evangelist, or better still, as a mythical one, the origin of which may be easily explained from the tendency to perfect the conflict in the garden as a prelude to the sufferings of Jesus on the cross, by showing that not merely the psychical aspect of that suffering was foreshadowed in the mental trouble, but also its physical aspect, in the bloody sweat. | ||||
As a counterpoise to this peculiarity of Luke, his two predecessors have, as we have said, the twofold occurrence of the number three, the three disciples taken apart, and the three retirements and prayers of Jesus. It has indeed been contended that so restless {P.725} a movement hither and there, so rapid an alternation of retirement and return, is entirely suited to the state of mind in which Jesus then was, and also, that in the repetition of the prayer there is correctly shown an appropriate gradation, a more and more complete resignation to the will of the Father. But that the two narrators count the retirements of Jesus, marking them by the expressions "a second time" an "a third time" ( e)k deuterou and e)k tritou,) at once shows that the number three was a point of importance to them; and when Matthew, though he certainly gives in the second prayer an expression somewhat different from that of the first, in the third makes Jesus only repeat the same words, rov avrbv koyov, and when Mark does this even the second time, this is a significant proof that they were embarrassed how to fill up the favourite number three with appropriate matter. According to Olshausen, Matthew with his three acts of this conflict, must be right in opposition to Luke, because these three attacks made on Jesus through he medium of fear, correspond to the three attacks through the medium of desire, in the story of the temptation. This parallel is well founded; it only leads to an opposite result to that deduced by Olshausen. For which is more probable; that in both cases the threefold repetition of the attack had an objective ground, in a latent law of the kingdom of spirits, and hence is to be regarded as really historical; or that it had merely a subjective ground in the manner of the legend, so that the occurrence of this number here, as certainly as above in the story of the temptation, points to something mythical? | ||||
If then we subtract the angel, the bloody sweat, and the precisely threefold repetition of the retirement and prayer of Jesus, as mythical additions, there remains so far, as an historical kernel, the fact, that Jesus on that evening in the garden experienced a violent access of fear, and prayed that his sufferings might be averted, with the reservation nevertheless of an entire submission to the will of God: and at this point of the inquiry, it is not a little surprising, on the ordinary view of the relation between our Gospels, that even this fundamental fact of the story in question, is wanting in the Gospel of John. | ||||