| 136. The Watch At the Grave of Jesus. | ||||
ON The Following Day, the Sabbath,; the chief priests and Pharisees, according to Matthew (xxvii.62ff.) came to Pilate, and with reference to the prediction of Jesus, that he should rise again after three days, requested him to place a watch by his grave, lest his disciples should take occasion from the expectation which that prediction had awakened, to steal his body and then spread a report that he was risen again. Pilate granted their request, and accordingly they went away, sealed the stone, and placed the watch before the grave. The subsequent resurrection of Jesus, (we must here anticipate so far,) and the angelic appearances which accompanied it, so terrified the guards, that they "became as dead men," but however, hastened to the city and gave an account of the event to the chief priests. The latter, after having deliberated on the subject in an assembly with the elders, bribed the soldiers to pretend that the disciples had stolen the body by night; so, the narrator adds, this report was disseminated, and was persisted in up to his time (xxviii. 4,11ff.). | ||||
In this narrative, peculiar to the first gospel, critics have found all kinds of difficulties, which have been exposed with the most acumen by the author of the Wolfenb ttel Fragments, and after him {P.805} by Paulus. The difficulties he first of all in this: that neither the requisite conditions of the event, nor its necessary consequences, are presented in the rest of the New Testament history. As regards the former, it is not to be conceived how the Sanhedrists could obtain the information, that Jesus was to return to life three days after his death: since there is no trace of such an idea having existed even among his disciples. They say: We remember that that deceiver said, ivhile he was yet alive, etc. If we are to understand from this that they remembered to have heard him speak to that effect: Jesus, according to the Gospel accounts, never spoke plainly of his resurrection in the presence of his enemies; and the figurative discourses which remained unintelligible to his confidential disciples, could still less be understood by the Jewish hierarchs, who were less accustomed to his mode of thought and expression. If, however, the Sanhedrists merely intend to say, that they had heard from others of hs having given such a promise: this intelligence could only have proceeded from the disciples; but as these had not, either before or after the , the slightest anticipation of his resurrection, they could not have excited such an anticipation in others not to mention that we have been obliged to reject as unhistorical the whole of the predictions of the resurrection lent to Jesus in the Gospels. Equally incomprehensible with this knowledge on the part of the enemies of Jesus, is the silence of his friends, the apostles and the other evangelists besides Matthew, concerning a circumstance so favourable to their cause. It is certainly applying too modern a standard to the conduct of the disciples to say with the Wolfenb ttel Fragmentist, that they must have entreated from Pilate a letter under his seal in attestation of the fact that a watch had been set over the grave: but it must be held surprising that in none of the apostolic speeches is there anywhere an appeal to so striking a fact, and that even in the Gospels, with the exception of the first, it has left no discoverable trace. An attempt has been made to explain this silence from the consideration, that the bribing of the guards by the Sanhedrin had rendered an appeal to them fruitless: but truth is not so readily surrendered to such obvious falsehoods, and at all events, when the adherents of Jesus had to defend themselves before the Sanhedrin, the mention of such a fact must have been a powerful weapon. The cause is already half given up when its advocates retreat to the position, that the disciples probably did not become acquainted with the true cause of the event immediately, but only later, when the adiers began to betray the secret. For even if the guards in the first instance merely set afloat the tale of the theft, and thus admitted that they had been placed by the grave, the adherents of Jesus could already construe for themselves the real state of the case, and might boldly {P.806} appeal to the guards, who must have been witnesses of something quite different from the theft of a corpse. But lest we be told of the invalidity of an argument drawn from the merely negative fact of silence, there is something positive narrated concerning a part of the adherents of Jesus, namely, the women, which is not reconcile-able with the fact of a watch being placed at the grave. Not only do the women who resort to the grave on the morning after the Sabbath, intend to complete the embalming, which they could not hope to be permitted to do, if they knew that a watch was placed before the grave, and that this was besides sealed: but according to Mark their whole perplexity on their way to the grave turns upon the question, who will roll away the stone for them from the grave; a clear proof that they knew nothing of the guards, since these either would not have allowed them to remove the stone, however light, or if they would have allowed this, would also have helped them to roll away a heavier one; so hat in any case the difficulty as to the weight of the stone would have been superfluous. But that the placing of the watch should have remained unknown to the women is, from the attention which everything relative to the end of Jesus excited in Jerusalem (Luke xxiv. 18), highly improbable. | ||||
But within the narrative also, every feature is full of difficulties, for, according to the expression of Paulus, no one of the persons who appear in it, acts in accordance with his character. That Pilate should have granted the request of the Jewish magistrates for a watch, I will not say without hesitation, but so entirely without ridicule, must be held surprising after his previous conduct; such minor particulars might however be merely passed over by Matthew in his summary mode of recounting the incidents. It is more astonishing that the guards should have been so easily induced to tell a falsehood which the severity of Roman discipline made so dangerous, as that they had failed in their duty by sleeping on their post; especially as, from the bad understanding which existed between the Sanhedrin and the procurator, they could not know how far the mediation promised by the former would avail. But the most inconceivable feature is the alleged conduct, of the Sanhedrin. The difficulty which lies in their ging to the heathen procurator on the sabbath, defiling themselves by approaching the grave, and placing a watch, has certainly been overstrained by the i'ragmentist; but their conduct, when the guards, returning from the grave, apprised them of the resurrection of Jesus, is truly impossible. They believe the assertion of the soldiers that Jesus had arisen out of his grave in a miraculous manner. How could the council, many of whose members were Sadducecs, receive this as credible? Even the Pharisees in the Sanhedrin, though they held in theory the possibility {P.807} of a resurrection, would not, with the mean opinion which they entertained of Jesus, be inclined to believe in his resurrection; especially as the assertion in the mouth of the guards sounded just like a falsehood invented to screen a failure in duty. The real Sanhe-drists, on hearing such an assertion from the soldiers, would have replied with exasperation: You lie! you have slept and allowed him to be stolen; but you will have to pay dearly for this, when it comes to be investigated by the procurator. But instead of this, the San-hedrists in our gospel speak them fair, and entreat them thus: Tell a lie, say that you have slept and allowed him to be stolen: moreover, they pay them richly for the falsehood, and promise to exculpate them to the procurator. This is evidently spoken entirely on the Christian presupposition of the reality of the resurrection of Jesus; a presupposition however which is quite incorrectly attributed to the members of the Sanhedrin. It is also a difficulty, not merely searched out y the Fragmentist, but even acknowledged by orthodox expositors, that the Sanhedrin, in a regular assembly, and after a formal consultation, should have resolved to corrupt the soldiers and put a he into their mouths. That in this manner a college of seventy men should have officially decided on suggesting and rewarding the utterance of a falsehood, is, as Olshausen justly observes, too widely at variance with the decorum, the sense of propriety, inseparable from such an assembly. The expedient of supposing that it was merely a private meeting, since only the chief priests and elders, not the scribes, 'are said to have embraced the resolution of bribing the soldiers, would involve the singularity, that in this assembly the scribes were absent, while in the shortly previous interview with the procurator, where the scribes are represented by the Pharisees who formed their majority, the elders were wanting: whence it is evident rather that, it being inconvenient invariably to designate the Sanhedrin by a full enumeration of its constituent parts, it was not seldom indicated by the mention of only some or one of these. If it therefore remains that according to Matthew the high council must in a formal session have resolved on bribing the guards: such an act of baseness could only be attributed to the council as such, by the rancour of the primitive Christians, among whom our story arose. | ||||
These difficulties in the present narrative of the first gospel have been felt to be so pressing, that it has been attempted to remove them by the supposition of interpolation; which has lately been moderated into the opinion, that while the story did not indeed proceed from the apostle Matthew himself, it was not however added by a hand otherwise alien to our gospel, but was inserted by the Greek translator of the Hebrew Matthew. Against the former {P.808} supposition the absence of all critical authority is decisive; the appeal of those who advance the other opinion to the unapostolic character of the story, would not warrant its separation from the context of the main narrative, unless that narrative itself were already proved to be of apostolic origin; while the story is so far from presenting any want of connection with the rest, that, on the contrary, Paulus is right in his remark that an interpolator (or inserting translator) would scarcely have given himself the trouble to distribute his interpolation in three different places (xxvii. 62-66; xxviii. 4; 11-15), but would have compressed it into one passage, or at most two. Neither can the question be settled so cheaply as Olshausen imagines, when he concludes that the entire narrative is apostolic and correct, save that the evangelist erred in representing the corruption of the guards as being resolved on in full council, whereas the affair was probably managed in secret by Caiaphas alone: as if ths assembly of the council were the sole difficulty of the narrative, and as if, when errors had insinuated themselves in relation to this particular, they might not extend to others also. | ||||
Paulus correctly points out how Matthew himself, by the statement: and this saying is commonly reported among the Jews to this day, indicates a calumnious Jewish report as the source of his narrative. But when this theologian expresses the opinion that the Jews themselves propagated the story, that they had placed a watch at the grave of Jesus, but that the guards had permitted his body to be stolen: this is as perverted a view as that of Hase, when he conjectures that the report in question proceeded first of all from the friends of Jesus, and was afterwards modified by his enemies. For as regards the former supposition, Kuin l has already correctly remarked, that Matthew merely designates the assertion respecting the theft of the corpse as a Jewish report, not the entire narrative of the placing of a watch; neither is there any reason to be conceived why the Jews should have fabricated such a report as that a watch was set at the grave of Jesus: Paulus says, it was hoped thereby to render the assertion hat the body of Jesus was stolen by his disciples more easy of acceptation with the credulous: but those must indeed have been very credulous who did not observe, that the placing of the watch was the very thing to render a furtive removal of the body of Jesus improbable. Paulus appears to represent the matter to himself thus: the Jews wished to obtain witnesses, as it were to the accusation of a theft, and for this purpose fabricated the story of the guard being placed by the grave. But that the guards with open eyes quietly beheld the disciples of Jesus carry away his body, no one could credit: while, if they saw nothing of this, because they slept, they gave no testimony, since they-could then only by inference arrive at the conclusion, that the body might have been stolen: a conclusion which could be drawn just as well without them. Thus in no way can the watch have belonged to the {P.809} Jewish basis of the present narrative; but the report disseminated among the Jews consisted, as the text also says, merely in the assertion that the disciples had stolen the body. As the Christians wished to oppose this calumny, there was formed among them the legend of a watch placed at the grave of Jesus, and now they could boldly confront their slanderers with the question: how can the body have been carried away, since you placed a watch at the grave and sealed the stone? And because, as we have ourselves proved in the course of our inquiry, a legend is not fully convicted of groundlessness until it has been shown how it could arise even without historical grounds: it was attempted on the side of the Christians, in showing what was supposed to be the true state of the case, to expose also the origin of the false legend, by deriving the falsehood propagated among the Jews from the contrivance of the Sanhedrin, and their corruption of the guards. Thus the truth is precisely the reverse of what Hase says, nmely, that the legend probably arose among the friends of Jesus and was modified by his enemies: -the friends first had an inducement to the fiction of the watch, when the enemies had already spoken of a theft. | ||||