Our contention is that the claims of Jesus were not so strange and shocking as to place Him without the pale of the law and to deny Him its ordinary protection; that His pretensions were not those of an insane man; that if He was not the Son of God He was guilty of blasphemy; and that if He was the Son of God He was innocent. We further contend that all these things were subjects of legitimate judicial examination by Hebrew judges under Hebrew law, and that Jesus should have had His day in court.
A very brief examination of the question of anthropomorphism in its connection with the claims of Jesus will demonstrate the fallacy of the arguments of Rabbi Wise and of those who agree with him. Candor compels us to admit that the Jewish conception of Jehovah at the time of the crucifixion was very foreign to the notion of a God of flesh and bone. Hebrew monotheism taught the doctrine of one God who was purely spiritual, and therefore invisible, intangible, and unapproachable. Judaism delighted to lift its deity above the sensual, material, and corporeal things of earth, and to represent Him as a pure and sinless spirit in a state of awful and supreme transcendence. Our first impression, then, is that this dogma of divine unity and spirituality must have received a dreadful shock when Jesus, a carpenter of Nazareth, whose mother, father, brothers, and sisters were known, confronted the high priest and declared to him that He was God. But the shock was certainly not so great that Caiaphas and his colleagues, after a moment's composure and reflection, could not have concluded that the pretensions of Jesus were not wholly at variance with the revelations of Hebrew theology in the earlier years of the Commonwealth of Israel. They might have judged His claims to be unfounded, but they were certainly not justified in pronouncing Him insane, or in ignoring His rights under the law to be heard and to have His defense considered. Their arrest and trial of the prisoner was the consummation of a number of secret meetings in which the astounding personality and marvelous performances of Jesus were debated and discussed with fear and trembling. The raising of Lazarus from the dead had created a frightful panic among the Sadducean oligarchy. Far from regarding Him as an obscure person whose claims were ridiculous and whose mind was unbalanced, the priests feared lest all men might believe on Him, and boldly declared that such was the influence of His deeds that His single life might be balanced against the existence of a whole nation.[327]
What the judges of the Sanhedrin should have done in examining the merits of the defense of Jesus was: (1) To consider whether, in the light of Hebrew scripture and tradition, a god of flesh and bone, representing the second person of a Duality or a Trinity of gods, was possible; (2) to weigh thoroughly the claims of Jesus, in the light of testimony properly adduced at the trial, that He was this second person of a Duality or Trinity of gods.
In making this examination, let us bear in mind, the members of the court were not to look forward, but backward. They were to examine the past, not the future, in reference to the present. Furthermore, they were not to consider so much a Trinity as a Duality of gods; for it must be remembered that the Holy Ghost was not a feature of the trial. The Athanasian creed and the proceedings of the Nicene Council were not binding upon Caiaphas and his fellow-judges. Nor were the teachings of the New Testament scriptures published to the world more than a generation after the trial. They were to consider the divine pretensions of Jesus in the light of the teachings and revelations of the Law and the Prophets. They were to measure His claims by these standards in the light of the evidence adduced before them.
With a view to a thorough and systematic examination of the merits of the defense of Jesus, Caiaphas, as presiding officer of the Sanhedrin, should have propounded to his fellow-judges the following initial questions: (1) Do the Law and the Prophets reveal the doctrine of a plurality of gods among the Israelites? That is, has Jehovah ever begotten, or has He ever promised to beget, a Son of equal divinity with Himself? Was this Son to be, or is He to be born of a woman; and to have, therefore, the form of a man and the attributes of a human being? Was this Son to be, or is He to be at any time identical with the Father? Do the Law and the Prophets tell us unmistakably that Jehovah ever appeared upon the earth in human form and exhibited human attributes? Do they contain a promise from the Father that He would send His Son to the earth to be the Redeemer of men and the Regenerator of the world? (2) Do the credentials of Jesus, the prisoner at the bar, in the light of the evidence before us, entitle Him to be considered this Son and Ambassador of God, sent from the Father to redeem mankind?
It follows logically and necessarily that if affirmative answers were not given to the first set of questions an examination of the second would be useless. Let us conceive, then, that the judges of the Sanhedrin had employed this method. What answers, we may ask, would they have developed to these questions from the Sacred Books?
At the outset it is safe to say that negative answers would have been given, if the judges had considered the claims of Jesus with reference alone to the prevailing Pharisaic teachings of the days of Jesus. And in this connection let us note that the Hebrew conception of Jehovah had materially changed in the time intervening between the Mosaic dispensation and the coming of the Christ. The spiritual growth of the nation had been characterized at every step by marked aversion to anthropomorphism—the ascription to God of human form and attributes. In the Pentateuch there is a prevailing anthropomorphic idea of Jehovah. He is frequently talked about as if He were a man. Human passions and emotions are repeatedly ascribed to Him. This was inevitable among a primitive people whose crude religious consciousness sought to frame from the analogy of human nature a visible symbol of the Deity and a sensible emblem of religious faith. All early religions have manifested the same anthropomorphic tendencies. Both Judaism and Christianity have long since planted themselves upon the fundamental proposition that God is a spirit. But both these systems of religion have in all ages been compelled to run the gantlet of two opposing tendencies: one of which sought by a living, personal communion with God through Moses and through Christ, by means of human attributes and symbols, an intimate knowledge and immediate benefit of the divine nature; the other, from a horror of anthropomorphism, tending to make God purely passionless and impersonal, thus reducing Him to a bare conception without form or quality, thus making Him a blank negation.
The successive steps in the progress of weeding out anthropomorphisms from the Pentateuch may be clearly traced in later Hebrew literature. The Prophets themselves were at times repelled by the sensuous conceptions of God revealed by the writings of Moses. The great lawgiver had attributed to Jehovah the quality of repentance, a human attribute. "And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart," says Genesis vi. 6. But a later writer, the prophet Samuel, denied that God had such a quality. "And also the Strength of Israel will not lie nor repent: for he is not a man, that he should repent."[328] And the prophet Hosea affirms this declaration when he places in the mouth of Jehovah the affirmation: "For I am God and not man."[329]
At a still later age, when the notion of the supreme transcendence of Jehovah had become prevalent, it was considered objectionable to make God say, "I will dwell in your midst"; as a substitute, "I shall cause you to dwell" was adopted. "To behold the face of God" was not a repulsive phrase in the ancient days of Hebrew plainness and simplicity, but later times sought to eradicate the anthropomorphism by saying instead, "to appear before God."
The Septuagint, the Greek version of the Bible in use at the time of Christ, reveals the same tendency toward paraphrasing or spiritualizing the anthropomorphic phrases of the older Bible. In this translation the "image of God" of the older Hebrew literature becomes "the glory of God," and "the mouth of God" is expressed by "the voice of the Lord."