Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (864 page)

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 Sanhedrim 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 Sanhedrim. The difficulty which lies in their going to the heathen procurator on the Sabbath, defiling themselves by approaching the grave, and placing a watch, has certainly been overstrained by the Fragmentist; 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 Sadducees, receive this as credible? Even the Pharisees in the Sanhedrim, though they held in theory the possibility

* Olshausen overlooks the latter point when he (ut sup.) says the watch had not received the command to prevent the completion of the interment.

† Olshausen indeed is here still so smitten with awe, that he supposes Pilate to have been penetrated with an indescribable feeling of dread on hearing this communication from the Sanhedrists, s. 505.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 Sanhedrists, 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 Sanhedrists 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 Sanhedrim. It is also a difficulty, not merely searched out by the Fragmentist, but even acknowledged by orthodox expositors,
^*
that the Sanhedrim, in a regular assembly, and after a formal consultation, should have resolved to corrupt the soldiers and put a lie 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 Sanhedrim 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 anecdote 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 suppoposition of interpolation;
^‡
which has lately been moderated into the opinion, that while the anecdote 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

* Olshausen, s 506.

† Michaelis, ut sup. s. 198 f.

‡ Stroth, in Eichhorn’s Repertorium, 9, s. 141.

§ Kern, über den Ursprung des Ev. Matth. Tüb. Zeitschrift, 1834, 2, s. 100 f.; comp. 123. Compare my Review, Jahrbücher f. wiss. Kritik, Nov. 1834; now in the Charakteristiken u. Kritiken, s. 280.supposition the absence of all critical authority is decisive; the appeal of those who advance the other opinion to the unapostolic character of the anecdote, 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 anecdote is so far from presenting any want of connexion 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 this 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, Kuinöl 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 that 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

* Hase, L. J., § 145.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 Sanhedrim, and their corruption of the guards. Thus the truth is precisely the reverse of what Hase says, namely, 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.
^*

§ 137. FIRST TIDINGS OF THE RESURRECTION.

That the first news of the grave of Jesus being opened and empty on the second morning after his burial, came to the disciples by the mouth of women, is unanimously stated by the four Evangelists: but in all the more particular circumstances they diverge from each other, in a way which has presented the richest material for the polemic of the Wolfenbüttel Fragmentist, and on the other hand has given abundant work to the harmonists and apologists, without there having been hitherto any successful attempt at a satisfactory mediation between the two parties.
^†

Leaving behind the difference which is connected with the divergencies in the history of the burial, as to the object of the women in resorting to the grave, — namely, that according to the two intermediate Evangelists they intended to embalm the body of Jesus, according to the two others merely to pay a visit to the grave, — we find, first, a very complicated divergency relative to the number of the women who made this visit. Luke merely speaks indefinitely of many women; not alone those whom he describes xxiii. 55, as having come with Jesus from Galilee, and of whom he mentions by name, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, but also
certain others with them
t
i
n
e
V
s
u
n
a
u
t
a
i
V
(xxiv. 1). Mark has merely three women; two of those whom Luke also names, but as the third, Salome instead of Joanna (xvi. 1). Matthew has not this third woman, respecting whom the two intermediate Evangelists

* Comp. Theile, zur Biogr. Jesu, § 37; Weisse, die Evang. Gesch. 2, s. 343 f.

† Comp. Theile, ut sup.differ, but merely the two Maries concerning whom they agree (xxviii. 1). Lastly, John has only one of these, Mary Magdalene (xx. 1). The time at which the women go to the grave is likewise not determined with uniformity; for even if the words of Matthew,
In the end of the sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week,
o
y
e
s
a
b
b
a
t
o
w
n
t
h
e
p
i
f
w
s
k
o
u
s
h
e
i
V
m
i
a
n
s
a
b
b
a
t
w
n
,
make no difference,
^*
still the addition of Mark :
at the rising of/he sun,
a
n
a
t
e
i
l
a
n
t
o
V
t
o
u
h
l
i
o
u
,
are in contradiction with the expressions
when it was yet dark,
s
k
o
t
i
a
V
e
t
i
o
u
s
h
V
,
in John, and
very early in the morning,
o
r
q
r
o
u
b
a
q
e
i
V
,
in Luke. — In relation to the circumstances in which the women first saw the grave there may appear to be a difference, at least between Matthew and the three other Evangelists. According to the latter, as they approach and look towards the grave, they see that the stone has already been rolled away by an unknown hand: whereas the narrative of the first Evangelist has appeared to many to imply that the women themselves beheld the stone rolled away by an angel. — Manifold are the divergencies as to what the women further saw and learned at the grave, According to Luke they enter into the grave, find that the body of Jesus is not there, and are hence in perplexity, until they see standing, by them two men in shining garments, who announce to them his resurrection. In Mark, who also makes them enter into the grave, they see only one young man in a long white garment, not standing, but sitting on the right side, who gives them the same intelligence. In Matthew they receive this information before they enter into the grave, from the angel, who after rolling away the stone had sat upon it. Lastly, according to John, Mary Magdalene, as soon as she sees the stone taken away, and without witnessing any angelic appearance, runs back into the city. — Moreover the relation in which the disciples of Jesus are placed with respect to the first news of his resurrection is a different one in the different gospels. According to Mark, the women, out of fear, tell no one of the angelic appearance which they have beheld; according to John, Mary Magdalene has nothing more to say to John and Peter, to whom she hastens from the grave, than that Jesus is taken away; according to Luke, the women report the appearance to the disciples in general, and not merely to two of them; while according to Matthew, as they were in the act of hastening to the disciples, Jesus himself met them, and they were able to communicate this also to the disciples. In the two first gospels nothing is said of one of the disciples himself going to the grave on hearing the report of the women; according to Luke, Peter went thither, found it empty and returned wondering, and from Luke xxiv. 24 it appears that other disciples besides him went thither in a similar manner; according to the fourth gospel Peter was accompanied by John, who on this occasion was convinced of the resurrection of Jesus. Luke says that Peter made his visit to the sepulchre after he had already been