One objection to the genuineness of the synoptical discourses on the second advent, is yet in reserve; it has, however, less weight in our point of view than in that of the prevalent criticism of the gospels. This objection is derived from the absence of any detailed description of the second advent of Jesus in the Gospel of John.[106] It is true that the fundamental elements of the doctrine of Christ’s return are plainly discoverable in the fourth gospel also.[107] Jesus therein ascribes to himself the offices of the future judgment, and the awaking of the dead ([John v. 21–30]); which last is not indeed numbered among the concomitants of the advent of Christ in the synoptical gospels, but not seldom appears in that connexion elsewhere in the New Testament (e.g. [1 Cor. xv. 23]; [1 Thess. iv. 16]). When Jesus, in the fourth gospel, sometimes denies that he is come into the world for judgment ([iii. 17], [viii. 15], [xii. 47]), this refers only to his first presence on earth, and is limited by opposite declarations, in which he asserts that he is come into the world for judgment ([ix. 39], comp. [viii. 16]), to the sense that the object of his mission is not to condemn but to save, and that his judgment is not individual or partial; that it consists, not in an authoritative sentence proceeding subjectively from himself, but in an objective act proceeding from the intrinsic tendency of things, a doctrine which is significantly expressed in the declaration, that him who hears his word without believing he judges not, but the word, which he has spoken, shall judge him in the last day (ὁ λόγος, ὂν ἐλάλησα, κρινεῖ αὐτὸν ἐν τῇ ἐσχάτῃ ἡμέρᾳ, [xii. 48]). Further, when the Jesus of John’s gospel says of the believer: οὐ κρίνεται, he is not judged, εἰς κρίσιν οὐκ ἔρχεται, he shall not come into judgment ([iii. 18], [v. 24]), this is to be understood of a judgment with a condemnatory issue; when on the contrary, it is said of the unbeliever: ἤδη κέκριται, he is judged already ([iii. 18]), this only means that the assigning of the merited lot to each is not reserved until the future judgment at the end of all things, since each one in his inward disposition bears within himself the fate which is his due. This does not exclude a future solemn act of judgment, wherein that which has at present only a latent existence will be made matter of awful revelation; for in the very passage last quoted we find the consignment to condemnation, and elsewhere the awarding of future blessedness ([v. 28 f.], [vi. 39 f.], [54]), associated with the last day and the resurrection. [[597]]In like manner, Jesus says in Luke also, in the same connexion in which he describes his return as a still future, external catastrophe, [xvii. 20 f.]: The kingdom of God cometh not with observation; neither shall they say, lo here! or, lo there! for behold the kingdom of God is within you. A certain interpretation of the words uttered by the Jesus of John’s gospel, supposes him even to intimate that his return was not far distant. The expressions already mentioned in the farewell discourses, in which Jesus promises his disciples not to leave them comfortless, but, after having gone to the Father, shortly ([xvi. 16]) to come again to them ([xiv. 3], [18]), are not seldom understood of the return of Christ at the last day;[108] but when we hear Jesus say of this same return, that he will therein reveal himself only to his disciples, and not to the world ([xiv. 19], comp. [22]), it is impossible to think of it as the return to judgment, in which Jesus conceived that he should reveal himself to good and bad without distinction. There is a particularly enigmatical allusion to the coming of Christ in the appendix to the fourth gospel, [chap. xxi.]. On the question of Peter as to what will become of the apostle John, Jesus here replies, If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee? ([v. 22]) whence, as it is added, the Christians inferred that John would not die, since they supposed the coming (ἔρχεσθαι) here spoken of, to be the final return of Christ, in which those who witnessed it were to be changed, without tasting death ([1 Cor. xv. 51 f.]). But, adds the author correctively, Jesus did not say, the disciple would not die, but only, if he willed that he should tarry till he came, what was that to Peter? Hereby the Evangelist may have intended to rectify the inference in two ways. Either it appeared to him erroneous to identify the remaining until Jesus came, with not dying, i.e. to take the coming of which Jesus here spoke for the last, which would put an end to death; and in that case he must have understood by it an invisible coming of Christ, possibly in the destruction of Jerusalem:[109] or, he held it erroneous that what Jesus had only said hypothetically—even if he willed the given case, that was no concern of Peter’s—should be understood categorically, as if such had really been the will of Jesus; in which case the ἔρχομαι would retain its customary sense.[110]
If, according to this, all the main features of the doctrine of the second advent are put into the mouth of Jesus in the fourth gospel also, still we nowhere find anything of the detailed, graphic description of the external event, which we read in the synoptical gospels. This relation between the two representations, creates no slight difficulty on the ordinary view of the origin of the gospels, and especially that of the fourth. If Jesus really spoke of his return so fully and solemnly as the synoptists represent him to have done, and treated of the right knowledge and observation of the signs as something of the highest importance; it is inconceivable that the author of the fourth gospel could pass over all this, if he were an immediate disciple of Jesus. The usual mode of accounting for such an omission, by the supposition that he believed this part of the teaching of Jesus to be sufficiently known from the synoptical gospels, or from oral tradition, is the more inadequate here in proportion as all which bears a prophetic character, especially when relating to events at once so much longed for and dreaded, is exposed to misinterpretation; as we may see from the rectification just noticed, which the author of John xxi. found it necessary to apply to the opinion of his contemporaries concerning the promise given by Jesus to John. Thus, in the present case, an explanatory word would have been highly seasonable and useful, especially [[598]]as the representation of the first gospel, which made the end of all things follow immediately on the destruction of Jerusalem, must be the more an occasion of doubt and offence the nearer the latter event came, and in a still greater degree when it was past. And who was more capable of affording such enlightenment than the favourite disciple, particularly if, according to [Mark xiii. 3], he was the only Evangelist who had been present at the discourse of Jesus on this subject? Hence, here again, a special reason for his silence is sought in the alleged destination of his gospel for non-judaical, idealizing Gnostics, whose point of view those descriptions would not have suited, and were therefore omitted.[111] But precisely in relation to such readers, it would have been a culpable compliance, a confirmation in their idealizing tendency, had John, out of deference to them, suppressed the real side of the return of Christ. The apostle must rather have withstood the propensity of these people to evaporate the external, historical part of Christianity, by giving due prominence to it; as, in his epistle, in opposition to their Docetism, he lays stress on the corporeality of Jesus: so, in opposition ta their idealism, he must have been especially assiduous to exhibit in the return of Christ the external facts by which it would be signalized. Instead of this, he himself speaks nearly like a Gnostic, and constantly aims, in relation to the return of Christ, to resolve the external and the future into the internal and the present. Hence there is not so much exaggeration, as Olshausen supposes, in the opinion of Fleck, that the representation of the doctrine of Jesus concerning his return in the synoptical gospels, and that given in the fourth, exclude each other;[112] for if the author of the fourth gospel be an apostle, the discourses on the second advent which the three first Evangelists attribute to Jesus, cannot have been so delivered by him, and vice versâ. We, however, as we have said, cannot avail ourselves of this argument, having long renounced the pre-supposition that the fourth gospel had an apostolic origin. But, on our point of view, we can fully explain the relation which the representation of the fourth gospel bears to that of the synoptists. In Palestine, where the tradition recorded by the three first gospels was formed, the doctrine of a solemn advent of the Messiah which was there prevalent, and which Jesus embraced, was received in its whole breadth into the Christian belief: whereas in the Hellenistic-theosophic circle in which the fourth gospel arose, this idea was divested of its material envelopment, and the return of Christ became the ambiguous medium between a real and an ideal, a present and a future event, which it appears in the fourth gospel. [[599]]
[1] His predictions concerning particular circumstances of his passion, uttered shortly before its occurrence, in the last days of his life, can only be considered farther on, in the history of those days. [↑]
[2] Comp. Olshausen, bibl. Comm., 1, s. 528. [↑]
[3] Gesenius, Jesaias, iii. 137 ff.; Hitzig, Comm. zu Jes., s. 550. [↑]
[4] Gesenius, ut sup. s. 158 ff.; Hitzig, s. 577 ff.; Vatke, bibl. Theol. 1, s. 528 ff. [↑]
[5] De Wette, Comm. zu den Psalmen, s. 514 ff.; 3te Aufl. [↑]
[7] Paulus, exeg. Handb. 3, b, s. 677 ff., and De Wette in loc. [↑]