| 128. Examination of Jesus Before the High Priest. | ||||
FROM The Place of arrest the Synoptics state Jesus to have been led to the high priest, whose name, Caiaphas, is however only mentioned by Matthew; while John represents him as being led in the first instance to Annas, the father-in-law of the existing high priest; and only subsequently to Caiaphas (Matt. xxvi.57ff. parall., John xviii. 12 fF.). The important rank of Annas renders this representation of John as conceivable as the silence of the Synoptics is explicable on the ground that the ex-high priest had no power of deciding in this cause. But it is the more surprising that, as must be believed from the first glance, the fourth evangelist merely gives some details of the transaction with Annas, and appears entirely to pass by the decisive trial before the actual high priest, except that he states Jesus to have been led away to Caiaphas. There was no more ready expedient for the harmonists than the supposition, which is found e. g. in Euthymius, that John, in consistency with the supplementary charactr of his gospel, preserved the examination before Armas as being omitted by the Synoptics, while he passed by that before Caiaphas, because it was described with sufficient particularity by his predecessors. This opinion, that John and the Synoptics speak of two entirely distinct trials, has a confirmation in the fact that the tenor of the respective trials is totally different. In that which the Synoptics describe, according to Matthew and Mark, the false witnesses first appear against Jesus; the high priest then asks him if he really pretends to be the Messiah, and on receiving an affirmative answer, declares him guilty of blasphemy and worthy of death, whereupon follows maltreatment of his person. In the trial depicted by John, Jesus is merely questioned concerning his disciples and his doctrine, he appeals to the publicity of his conduct, | ||||
{} and after having been maltreated for this reply by an attendant (vwijpBTTjrt, is sent away without the passing of any sentence. That the fourth evangelist should thus give no particulars concerning the trial before Caiaphas is the more surprising, since in the one before Annas, if it be this which he narrates, according to his own representation nothing was decided, and consequently the grounds for the condemnation of Jesus by the Jewish authorities, and the sentence itself, are altogether wanting in his gospel. To explain this by the supplementary object of John is to impute to hint too irrational a mode of procedure; for if he omitted facts because the other evangelists had already given them, without intimating that he did so purely for that reason, he could only reckon on introducing confusion, and entailing on himself the suspicion of having given a false narrative. He can hardly have had the opinion that the trial before Annas was the principal one, and that therefore it was allowable to omit the other,since he reports no judgment as having been passed in the former; but if he knew the trial before Caiaphas to have been the principal one, and yet gave no more particular information concerning it, this also was a highly singular course for him to take. | ||||
Thus the very simplest view of the case seems at once to point to the attempt to discover in the account of the fourth gospel indications that it also is to be understood of the trial before Caiaphas. What affords the strongest presumption of the identity of the two trials is the identity of an incident concomitant with both, John as well as the Synoptics making Peter deny Jesus during the trial detailed. It is further remarkable that after Annas has been spoken of, at v. 13, as the father-in-law of Caiaphas, there follows at v. 14, a more precise designation of Caiaphas as the author of the fatal counsel, recorded in John xi. 50., although apparently the evangelist proceeds to narrate a trial held, not before Caiaphas, but before Annas. Moreover in the description of the trial itself, there is mention throughout of the palace and of questions from the high priest, a title which John nowhere else applies to Annas, but only to Caiaphas. But that in accordance with the above supposition, the evangelit from v. 15 should be describing something which passed before Caiaphas, appears impossible from v. 24, for it is there first said that Annas sent Jesus to Caiaphas, so that he must until then have been before Annas. With ready thought this difficulty was first met by removing the 24th verse to the place where it was wanted, namely, after v. 13, and laying the blame of its present too late position on the negligence of transcribers. As however this transposition, being destitute of any critical authority, must appear an arbitrary and violent expedient for getting rid of the difficulty, it was next tried whether the statement in v. 24, without being actually moved from its place, might not receive such an interpretation as to come in point of sense after v. 13; i.e. the word {P.743} a)pesteilen was taken as a pluperfect, and it was supposed that John intended here to supply retrospectively what he had forgotten to observe at v. 13, namely, that Annas immediately sent Jesus to Caiaphas, so that the trial just described was conducted by the latter. As the general possibility of such a grammatical expedient is admissible, the only question is whether it be accordant with the style of the present writer, and whether it be intimated in the context. In the latter respect it is certainly true that if nothing important had occurred in the presence of Annas, the evangelist, in annexing to his notice of the relationship of Annas to Caiaphas the more precise designation of the latter, might be drawn on to speak without further preface of the trial before Caiaphas, and might afterwards, by way of appendix, at some resting place, as here at the close of the transactions of the high priest with Jesus, intimate the transition which he had made. An accurate Greek writer certainly in this case, if he did not use the pluperfect, would at least have made evident the explanatory reference to what had preceded, by the addition of a gar to the aorist. Our evangelist however, in whom the characteristic of the Hellenistic writers to connect their propositions but loosely, in accordance with the genius of the Hebrew language, is very strongly marked, might perhaps have introduced that supplementary observation even without a particle, or, according to the ordinary reading, by oun, which is not merely indicative that a subject is continued, but also that it is resumed. If these considerations be held to establish that he also intended to narrate the trial before Caiaphas: it is clear from the aspect of his account taken by itself, as well as from the previous comparison with the synoptic one, that his narrative cannot be complete. | ||||
We turn therefore to the account of the Synoptics, and among them also, namely, between the two first and the third, we find numerous divergencies. According to the former, when Jesus was brought into the palace of the high priest, the scribes and elders were already assembled, and while it was still night proceeded to hold a trial, in which firsi witnesses appeared, and then the high priest addressed to him the decisive question, on the answer to which the assembly declared him worthy of death (in John also the trial goes forward in the night, but there is no intimation of the presence of the great council). According to the representation of the third gospel, on the other hand, Jesus throughout the night is merely kept under guard in the high priest's palace and maltreated by the underlings; and when at the break of da the Sanhedrin assembles, no witnesses appear, but the high priest precipitates the sentence by the decisive question. Now, that in the depth of the night, while Judas was gone out with the uard, the members of the council should have assembled themselves for the reception of Jesus, might be regarded as improbable, and in so far, the preference might {P.744} be given to the representation of the third gospel, which makes them assemble at daybreak only; were it not that Luke himself neutralizes this advantage by making the high priests and elders present at the arrest; a zeal which might well fiave driven them straightway to assemble for the sake of accelerating the conclusion. But in the account of Matthew and Mark also there is this singularity, that after they have narrated to us the whole trial together with the sentence, they yet (xxvii. 1. and xv. 1.) say: "when the morning was come, they took counsel," thus making it appear, if not that the members of the Sanhedrin reassembled in the morning, which could hardly be, seeing that they had been together the whole night; yet that they now first came to a definite resolution against Jesus, though, according to these same evangelists, this had already been done in the nocturnal council. It may be said that to the sentence of death already passed in the night, was added n the morning the resolution to deliver Jesus to Pilate: but according to the then existing state of the law this followed as a matter of course, and needed no special resolution. That Luke and John omit the production of the false witnesses, is to be regarded as a deficiency in their narrative. For from the coincidence of John ii. 19. and Acts vi. 14. with Matthew and Mark, it is highly probable that the declaration about the destruction and rebuilding of the temple was really uttered by Jesus; while that that declaration should be used as an article of accusation against him on his trial was an almost necessary result. The absence of this weighty point in Luke, Schleiermacher explains by the circumstance, theit the author of this passage in the third gospel had indeed followed the escort which conducted Jesus from the garden, but had with most others been excluded from the palace of the high priest, and consequently narrated what occurred there merely from hearsay. But, not to anticipate future points, thesingle trait of the cure of the servant's ear suffices to preclude our attributing- to the author of this portion of Luke's gospel so close a proximity to the fact. It rather appears that the above declaration came to the third evangelist under the form of an article of accusation against Stephen, instead of Jesus; while the fourth has it only as a declaration from Jesus, and not as an article of accusation against him. This subject having however necessarily come under our observation at an earlier point of our inquiry, it is needless to pursue it further here. | ||||
When Jesus made no answer to the allegations of the witnesses, he was asked, according to the two first evangelists, by the high priest, in the third gospel, without the above cause, by the Sanhedrin, whether he actually maintained that he was the Messiah (the Son of God)? To this question according to the two former he {P.745} at once replies in the affirmative, in the words su legeij, (you have said (so),) and e)gw ei)mi (I am,) and adds that hereafter or immediately they would see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of the divine power and coming in the clouds of heaven; according to Luke, on the other hand, he first declares that his answer will be of no avail, and then adds that hereafter the Son of a man shall sit on the right hand of the power of God; whereupon all eagerly ask: Are you then the Son of God? and he replies in the affirmative. Thus Jesus here expresses the expectation that by his death he will at once enter into the glory of sitting as Messiah at the right hand of God, according to Ps. cx. 1. which he had already, Matt. xxii. 44, interpreted of the Messiah. For even if he at first perhaps thought of attaining his Messianic glorification without the intervention of death, because this intervention was not presented to him by the ideas of the age; if it was only at a later period, and as a result of cicumstances, that the foreboding of such a necessity began to arise and gradually to acquire distinctness in his mind: now, a prisoner, forsaken by his adherents, in the presence of the rancorously hostile Sanhedrin, it must, if he would retain the conviction of his Messiahship, become a certainty to him, that he could enter into his Messianic glorification by death alone. When, according to the two first evangelists, Jesus adds to the "sitting on the right hand of power" the "coming in the clouds of heaven," he predicts, as on an earlier occasion, his speedy advent, and in this instance he decidedly predicts it as a return. Olshausen maintains that the ap' a)rti of Matthew ought to be referred only to kaqhmenon etc.,, because it would not suit e)rxomenon etc. since it is not to be conceived that Jesus could then have represented himself as about to come in the clouds: a purely dogmatical difficulty, which does not exist in our point of view, but which cannot in any point of view warrant such an offenceagainst grammatical interpretation as this of Olshausen. On the above declaration of Jesus, according to Matthew and Mark the high priest rends his clothes, declaring Jesus convicted of blasphemy, and the council pronounces him guilty of death; and in Luke also, all those assembled observe that now there is no need of any further witness, since the criminal declaration has been uttered by Jesus in their own hearing. | ||||
To the sentence is then added in the two first evangelists the maltreatment of Jesus, which John, who here mentions no sentence, represents as following the appeal of Jesus to the publicity of his work, while Luke places it before the trial; more probably because it was not any longer precisely known when this maltreatment occurred, than because it was repeated at various times and under various circumstances. In John the maltreatment is said to proceed from an attendant, in Luke, from "the men that held Jesus;' in Mark, on the contrary, those who began to spit in the face of Jesus must have been some of those (who had just before con- {P.747} demned him, since he distinguishes the "servants" from them; and in Matthew also, who, without introducing a new nominative proceeds merely with "then they began" it is plainly the members of the Sanhedrin themselves who descend to such unworthy conduct: which Schleiermacher justly considers improbable, and in so far prefers the representation of Luke to that of Matthew. In John, the maltreatment consists in a blow on the cheek with the palm of the hand, which an attendant gives Jesus on account of a supposed insolent answer to the high priest; in Matthew and Mark, in spitting on the face and blows on the head and cheek, to which it is added, in Luke also, that he was blindfolded, then struck on the face, and scoffingly asked to attest his Messianic second sight by telling who was the giver of the blow. According to Olshausen, the spirit of prophecy did not scorn to predict these rudenesses in detail, and at the same lime to describ the state of mind which the holy One of God opposed to the unholy multitude. He correctly adduces in relation to this scene Isai. 1. 6 f.; (LXX.); I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that pL cked off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting etc, (comp. Mic. iv. 14.); and for the manner, in which Jesus bore all this, the well known passage Isai. liii. 7., where the servant of God is represented as enduring maltreatment in silence. But the interpretation of these passages in Isaiah as prophecies concerning the Messiah is equally opposed to the context in both instances: consequently the agreement of the result with these passages must either have been the effect of human design, or purely accidental. Now it is certain that the servants and soldiers in their maltreatment had not the intention of causing prophecies to be fulfilled in Jsus; and it will hardly be chosen to suppose that Jesus effected silence with this view; while to deduce from mere chance a coincidence which certainly, as Olshausen says, extends to minutias, is always unsatisfactory. Probable as it is from the rude manners of that age, that Jesus was maltreated when a prisoner, and moreover that amongst other things he received just such insults as are described by the evangelists: it is yet scarcely to be denied, that their descriptions are modelled on prophecies which, when once Jesus appeared as a sufferer and maltreated person, were applied to him; and however consistent it may be with the character of Jesus that he should have borne this maltreatment patiently, and repelled improper questions by a dignified silence: the evangelists would scarcely have noticed it if it had not been their intention thus to exhibit the fulfilment of Old Testament oracles. | ||||