Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Japan" (part) to "Jeveros" / Volume 15, Slice 3

by Various

We now come to the final scenes. The passover was approaching, and plots were being laid for His destruction. He Himself spoke mysteriously of His burial, when a woman poured a vase of costly ointment upon His head. Final Scenes. To some this seemed a wasteful act; but He accepted it as a token of the love which gave all that was in its power, and He promised that it should never cease to illustrate His Gospel. Two of the disciples were sent into Jerusalem to prepare the Passover meal. During the meal Jesus declared that He should be betrayed by one of their number. Later in the evening He gave them bread and wine, proclaiming that these were His body and His blood—the tokens of His giving Himself to them, and of a new covenant with God through His death. As they withdrew to the Mount of Olives He foretold their general flight, but promised that when He was risen He would go before them into Galilee. Peter protested faithfulness unto death, but was told that he would deny his Master three times that very night. Then coming to a place called Gethsemane, He bade the disciples wait while He should pray; and taking the three who had been with Him at the Transfiguration He told them to tarry near Him and to watch. He went forward, and fell on the ground, praying that “the cup might be taken away” from Him, but resigning Himself to His Father’s will. Presently Judas arrived with a band of armed men, and greeted his Master with a kiss—the signal for His arrest. The disciples fled in panic, after one of them had wounded the high priest’s servant. Only a nameless young man tried to follow, but he too fled when hands were laid upon him. Before the high priest Jesus was charged, among other accusations, with threatening to destroy the Temple; but the matter was brought to an issue when He was plainly asked if He were “the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One.” He answered that He was, and He predicted that they should see the fulfilment of Daniel’s vision of the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power. Thereupon He was condemned to death for manifest blasphemy, and a scene of cruel mockery followed. Meanwhile Peter in the court below had been sitting with the servants, and in his anxiety to escape recognition had thrice declared that he did not know Jesus. Thus the night passed, and in the morning Jesus was taken to Pilate, for the Jewish council had no power to execute their decree of death. Pilate’s question, “Art Thou the King of the Jews?” shows the nature of the accusation which was thought likely to tell with the Roman governor. He had already in bonds one leader of revolution, whose hands were stained with blood—a striking contrast to the calm and silent figure who stood before him. At this moment a crowd came up to ask the fulfilment of his annual act of grace, the pardon of a prisoner at the Passover. Pilate, discerning that it was the envy of the rulers which sought to destroy an inconvenient rival, offered “the King of the Jews” as the prisoner to be released. But the chief priests succeeded in making the people ask for Barabbas and demand the crucifixion of Jesus. Pilate fulfilled his pledge by giving them the man of their choice, and Jesus, whom he had vainly hoped to release on a satisfactory pretext, he now condemned to the shameful punishments of scourging and crucifixion; for the cross, as Jesus had foreseen, was the inevitable fate of a Jewish pretender to sovereignty. The Roman soldiers mocked “the King of the Jews” with a purple robe and a crown of thorns. As they led Him out they forced the cross, which the sufferer commonly carried, upon the shoulders of one Simon of Cyrene, whose son’s Alexander and Rufus are here mentioned—probably as being known to St Mark’s readers; at any rate, it is interesting to note that, in writing to the Christians at Rome, St Paul a few years earlier had sent a greeting to “Rufus and his mother.” Over the cross, which stood between two others, was the condemnatory inscription, “The King of the Jews.” This was the Roman designation of Him whom the Jewish rulers tauntingly addressed as “the King of Israel.” The same revilers, with a deeper truth than they knew, summed up the mystery of His life and death when they said, “He saved others, Himself He cannot save.”

A great darkness shrouded the scene for three hours, and then, in His native Aramaic, Jesus cried in the words of the Psalm, “My God, My God, why has Thou forsaken Me?” One other cry He uttered, and the end came, and at that moment the veil of the Temple was rent from top to bottom—an omen of fearful import to those who had mocked Him, even on the cross, as the destroyer of the Temple, who in three days should build it anew. The disciples of Jesus do not appear as spectators of the end, but only a group of women who had ministered to His needs in Galilee, and had followed Him up to Jerusalem. These women watched His burial, which was performed by a Jewish councillor, to whom Pilate had granted the body after the centurion had certified the reality of the unexpectedly early death. The body was placed in a rock-hewn tomb, and a great stone was rolled against the entrance. Sunset brought on the Jewish sabbath, but the next evening the women brought spices to anoint the body, and at sunrise on the third day they arrived at the tomb, and saw that the stone was rolled away. They entered and found a young man in a white robe, who said, “He is risen, He is not here,” and bade them say to His disciples and Peter, “He goeth before you into Galilee; there ye shall see Him, as He said unto you.” In terror they fled from the tomb, “and they said nothing to any man, for they feared....”

So with a broken sentence the narrative ends. The document is imperfect, owing probably to the accidental loss of its last leaf. In very early times attempts were made to furnish it with a fitting close; but neither of the supplements which we find in manuscripts can be regarded as coming from the original writer. If we ask what must, on grounds of literary probability, have been added before the record was closed, we may content ourselves here with saying that some incident must certainly have been narrated which should have realized the twice-repeated promise that Jesus would be seen by His disciples in Galilee.

3. Document used by St Matthew and St Luke.—We pass on now to compare with this narrative of St Mark another very early document which no longer exists in an independent form, but which can be partially reconstructed from the portions of it which have been embodied in the Gospels of St Matthew and St Luke.

When we review St Mark’s narrative as a whole we are struck, first of all, with its directness and simplicity. It moves straightforward upon a well-defined path. It shows us the Lord Jesus entering on the mission predicted by the Baptist without declaring Himself to be the Messiah; attracting the multitudes in Galilee by His healing power and His unbounded sympathy, and at the same time awakening the envy and suspicion of the leaders of religion; training a few disciples till they reach the conviction that He is the Christ, and then, but not till then, admitting them into the secret of His coming sufferings, and preparing them for a mission in which they also must sacrifice themselves; then journeying to Jerusalem to fulfil the destiny which He foresaw, accepting the responsibility of the Messianic title, only to be condemned by the religious authorities as a blasphemer and handed over to the Roman power as a pretender to the Jewish throne. That is the story in its barest outline. It is adequate to its presumed purpose of offering to distant Gentile converts a clear account of their Master’s earthly work, and of the causes which led to His rejection by His own people and to His death by Roman crucifixion. The writer makes no comment on the wonderful story which he tells. Allusions to Jewish customs are, indeed, explained as they occur, but apart from this the narrative appears to be a mere transcript of remembered facts. The actors are never characterized; their actions are simply noted down; there is no praise and no blame. To this simplicity and directness of narrative we may in large measure attribute the fact that when two later evangelists desired to give fuller accounts of our Lord’s life they both made this early book the basis of their work. In those days there was no sense of unfairness in using up existing materials in order to make a more complete treatise. Accordingly so much of St Mark’s Gospel has been taken over word for word in the Gospels of St Luke and St Matthew that, if every copy of it had perished, we could still reconstruct large portions of it by carefully comparing their narratives. They did not hesitate, however, to alter St Mark’s language where it seemed to them rough or obscure, for each of them had a distinctive style of his own, and St Luke was a literary artist of a high order. Moreover, though they both accepted the general scheme of St Mark’s narrative, each of them was obliged to omit many incidents in order to find room for other material which was at their disposal, by which they were able to supplement the deficiencies of the earlier book. The most conspicuous deficiency was in regard to our Lord’s teaching, of which, as we have seen, St Mark had given surprisingly little. Here they were happily in a position to make a very important contribution.

For side by side with St Mark’s Gospel there was current in the earliest times another account of the doings and sayings of Jesus Christ. Our knowledge of it to-day is entirely derived from a comparison of the two later evangelists who embodied large portions of it, working it in and out of the general scheme which they derived from St Mark, according as each of them thought most appropriate. St Luke appears to have taken it over in sections for the most part without much modification; but in St Matthew’s Gospel its incidents seldom find an independent place; the sayings to which they gave rise are often detached from their context and grouped with sayings of a similar character so as to form considerable discourses, or else they are linked on to sayings which were uttered on other occasions recorded by St Mark. It is probable that many passages of St Luke’s Gospel which have no parallel in St Matthew were also derived from this early source; but this is not easily capable of distinct proof; and, therefore, in order to gain a secure conception of the document we must confine ourselves at first to those parts of it which were borrowed by both writers. We shall, however, look to St Luke in the main as preserving for us the more nearly its original form.

We proceed now to give an outline of the contents of this document. To begin with, it contained a fuller account of the teaching of John the Baptist. St Mark tells us only his message of hope; but here we read the severer language with which he called men to repentance. We hear his warning of “the coming wrath”: his mighty Successor will baptize with fire; the fruitless tree will be cast into the fire; the chaff will be separated from the wheat and burned with unquenchable fire; the claim to be children of Abraham will not avail, for God can raise up other children to Abraham, if it be from the stones of the desert. Next, we have a narrative of the Temptation, of which St Mark had but recorded the bare fact. It was grounded on the Divine sonship, which we already know was proclaimed at the Baptism. In a threefold vision Jesus is invited to enter upon His inheritance at once; to satisfy His own needs, to accept of earthly dominion, to presume on the Divine protection. The passage stands almost alone as a revelation of inner conflict in a life which outwardly was marked by unusual calm.

Not far from the beginning of the document there stood a remarkable discourse delivered among the hills above the lake. It opens with a startling reversal of the common estimates of happiness and misery. In the light of the The Sermon on the Mount. coming kingdom it proclaims the blessedness of the poor, the hungry, the sad and the maligned; and the woefulness of the rich, the full, the merry and the popular. It goes on to reverse the ordinary maxims of conduct. Enemies are to be loved, helped, blessed, prayed for. No blow is to be returned; every demand, just or unjust, is to be granted: in short, “as ye desire that men should do to you, do in like manner to them.” Then the motive and the model of this conduct are adduced: “Love your enemies ... and ye shall be sons of the Highest; for He is kind to the thankless and wicked. Be merciful, as your Father is merciful; and judge not, and ye shall not be judged.” We note in passing that this is the first introduction of our Lord’s teaching of the fatherhood of God. God is your Father, He says in effect; you will be His sons if like Him you will refuse to make distinctions, loving without looking for a return, sure that in the end love will not be wholly lost. Then follow grave warnings—generous towards others, you must be strict with yourselves; only the good can truly do good; hearers of these words must be doers also, if they would build on the rock and not on the sand. So, with the parable of the two builders, the discourse reached its formal close.

It was followed by the entry of Jesus into Capernaum, where He was asked to heal the servant of a Roman officer. This man’s unusual faith, based on his soldierly sense of discipline, surprised the Lord, who declared that it had no equal in Israel itself. Somewhat later messengers arrived from the imprisoned Baptist, who asked if Jesus were indeed “the coming One” of whom he had spoken. Jesus pointed to His acts of healing the sick, raising the dead and proclaiming good news for the poor; thereby suggesting to those who could understand that He fulfilled the ancient prophecy of the Messiah. He then declared the greatness of John in exalted terms, adding, however, that the least in the kingdom of God was John’s superior. Then He complained of the unreasonableness of an age which refused John as too austere and Himself as too lax and as being “the friend of publicans and sinners.” This narrative clearly presupposes a series of miracles already performed, and also such a conflict with the Pharisees as we have seen recorded by St Mark. Presently we find an offer of discipleship met by the warning that “the Son of Man” is a homeless wanderer; and then the stern refusal of a request for leave to perform a father’s funeral rites.

Close upon these incidents follows a special mission of disciples, introduced by the saying: “The harvest is great, but the labourers are few.” The disciples as they journey are to take no provisions, but to throw themselves Other Sayings of Jesus. on the bounty of their hearers; they are to heal the sick and to proclaim the nearness of the kingdom of God. The city that rejects them shall have a less lenient judgment than Sodom; Tyre and Sidon shall be better off than cities like Chorazin and Bethsaida which have seen His miracles; Capernaum, favoured above all, shall sink to the deepest depth. If words could be sterner than these, they are those which follow: “He that heareth you heareth Me; and he that rejecteth you rejecteth Me; but He that rejecteth Me rejecteth Him that sent Me.” This reference to His own personal mission is strikingly expanded in words which He uttered on the return of the disciples. After thanking the Father for revealing to babes what He hides from the wise, He continued in mysterious language: “All things are delivered to Me by My Father; and none knoweth who the Son is but the Father; and who the Father is but the Son, and he to whom the Son chooseth to reveal Him.” Happy were the disciples in seeing and hearing what prophets and kings had looked for in vain.