i. Anticipated Confessions.
What has just been said will apply especially to the terms in which the first disciples who gathered round our Lord are described as giving in their adhesion. The author of the Gospel was himself a convinced Christian—a Christian so convinced that he could hardly recall the time when he had been anything else. It was natural to him to think of his comrades in the faith as he thought of himself. And if he puts into their mouths stronger expressions than they actually used, it was only a little antedating the fact.
But, apart from this, it is a question whether we ourselves do not read into the words more than they really contain. There can be no doubt that the half-century, or rather more, before the fall of Jerusalem was a time of high-strung expectation on the part of the Jews. The belief that the Messiah was about to appear was widely diffused among all classes of the people. It was this belief which gave a transient success to the many pretenders of whom we read in the Acts and in the pages of Josephus. There was the feeling that the Messiah might come at any moment, and no Jew would have been surprised if He had appeared in his own immediate neighbourhood. Vague rumours were everywhere about, and we may be sure would readily attach themselves to individuals. It is probable enough that among the crowds which gathered round the Baptist this expectation was even more rife than elsewhere. Those who came to his baptism, we may well believe, were among the most earnest, the most patriotic, and the most sanguine spirits of the nation. That little groups, united by local ties, would be readily formed, and readily seek to attach themselves to one who seemed to possess the qualities of a leader, would be only what we should expect. And if their enthusiasm was easily aroused, that would be all in harmony with their surroundings.
Perhaps the most remarkable of all the anticipations in these early chapters is the announcement attributed to the Baptist, ‘Behold, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!’ There is no doubt that the Baptist had a prophetic gift. In all our authorities he is represented as predicting the coming greatness of his successor. But it was one thing to feel a dim presentiment of a mission higher than his own, and another thing to predict for that mission at the very outset a form which it did indeed actually take, but which it seems impossible that anything should have suggested at the moment. It would be difficult to find a better example of what we may call the ‘interpretative function’ of the Evangelist. It is evident that the events of these first days made the deepest impression upon him, an impression that no lapse of time could obliterate. Certainly something occurred which in later years gave its shape to this remarkable saying. In the next chapter we have a similar saying, the history of which is fully related: ‘When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he spake this; and they believed the scripture, and the word which Jesus had said.’ In this case the whole process was consciously realized; the Evangelist distinguished in his own mind between the word as originally spoken and the sense which he was led to put upon it. May we not suppose that in regard to the earlier saying a similar process went on, but with just the difference that it was in great part unconscious, and not conscious? The Baptist is represented as repeating his exclamation twice; but on the second occasion the qualifying clause is dropped; the words are only, ‘Behold, the Lamb of God!’ Is it not possible that this, or something like it, is all that was actually spoken? Perhaps not so much even as this; but in some way or other we may believe that the Baptist did, as a matter of fact, compare the Figure approaching him to a lamb. This comparison sank deep into the mind of one at least of his hearers; and imperceptibly the words filled out with all the full religious significance of the lamb—the paschal lamb, the lamb dumb before his shearers, the suffering Servant, whose sufferings were also an atonement, the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world.
This is a process which psychologically we can follow. But here, as in so many other places, we can follow it far more easily, if we take as our starting-point some actual phrase which the Evangelist had heard and which had lodged in his mind, than if we are compelled to regard it as pure invention. We may well ask what conceivable train of thought could put it into the head of a second-century writer to introduce so strange and remote a thought at a point in his narrative with which it seems to have no natural connexion.