SECTION IX

the crucifixion-the death of Jesus

(Mat 27:33-56. Mar 15:22-41. Luk 23:33-49. Joh 19:17-30)

As soon as the representatives of the old world, who led the Lord away to crucifixion, were arrived with Him at Golgotha, the execution was prepared. They began it by offering Him a draught of benumbing effect—namely, a wine spiced with myrrh. They considered it an act of kindness to offer Him in the usual manner a means of stupifying Himself, and thereby of deadening His perception of the horrors and torments of the frightful death of the cross.

The inclination apparently to strengthen himself with intoxicating drink, is generally characteristic of the man of the old world immersed in the slavish life of nature. But he mostly believes that he is justified and instructed in arming himself by this means against sorrow and suffering, against tortures and terror. It is therefore not to be wondered at, if this custom was generally prevalent, especially in pre-Christian antiquity. The Roman soldier carried his wine with him, which was of an inferior quality, but was often strengthened in its effect probably by mixture with spices.¹ Among the Jews, even in later times, it had become a prevailing custom to offer a draught of intoxicating and stupifying wine to those who were being led to execution;² and the Rabbis conceived that they saw therein a custom of pious gentleness, which they sought to base even upon a passage of Holy Scripture.³ Even in the days of the Christian martyrs, it still occurred that sympathizing brethren in the faith, and friends of those condemned to death, offered in compassion such a cup to them on their journey to the place of execution.⁴

Even to the Lord this cup was thus handed. The Evangelist Matthew says, that they gave Him vinegar mingled with gall. It is evident that he selected this expression with distinct remembrance of a passage in the Psalms, in the text, ‘They gave Me also gall for My meat, and in My thirst they gave Me vinegar to drink’ (Psa 69:21). But it is to be observed that he has not cited the passage, probably because the typical sign was not reflected again in its Christologic fulfilment with sufficient definiteness for his manner of consideration. In any case, it cannot be supposed that he would have designated the draught by an unfitting name for the sake of the text in the Psalms.⁵ It was likely that only a bad sort of wine would be given to those who were led away to capital punishment, especially, moreover, if the wine was to be changed by the addition of bitter spices into a compound draught. Moreover, the ancients were actually accustomed to describe such poorer sorts of wine as vinegar wine, or slightingly even as vinegar.⁶ Thus it was also natural to make the dose of bitters which was put into the wine as strong as possible, if it was required to make of it a stupifying potion for a condemned person.⁷ And such an ingredient might then be characterized as gall.⁸ The draught presented to Jesus must have had, according to Matthew’s expression, the two qualities in the highest measure—it was as poor and as intoxicating as possible.

Thus the old world came also before the Lord with this supposed remedy of its ability. Sepp thinks that the pious women who lamented Jesus had prepared for Him this myrrh and wine. Thus it must have been a Jewish custom for the women in Jerusalem to interest themselves sympathizingly in the malefactors in this manner, and to care for them with the usual restoratives. But we cannot suppose that pious women, who lamented for the Lord, offered Him vinegar and gall.⁹ Rather might we conceive of the ancient world as being represented in this case by an old but kind-natured enchantress, who knew no better counsel and comfort against the terrors of death and the mockery of hell, than her sense-confounding medicated wine.

Jesus received the cup handed to Him with divinely free simplicity. For He had been long athirst, after so many tortures and troubles of body and soul. He was athirst, but nevertheless He first of all placed the vessel to His lips to prove and taste it. But when He had tasted, He would not drink of it; He recognized at once the meaning of this draught. A whole world of temptations exhaled before Him from its intoxicating odour. It was as if the great world-delusion, which fancies that it actually overcomes the critical moments of life by reeling in intoxication over them, had accredited this cup to Him. And as, in that moment when He addressed the weeping women of Jerusalem, the unhappy mothers were present to His soul, who, in the destruction of the city, should fill it with their lamentations; thus He saw assuredly in the Spirit, at this moment, millions of unhappy men who sought for their strength in the stupefaction of the intoxicating cup. Thus as He answered for His own soul, so reconciling and redeeming He became security for humanity, which even in this way, greedy and deceitful, charmed and chained by the dark wonder-powers of nature, wished to reel towards the abyss. He knew that there was still a struggle awaiting Him, which He could only undergo in perfect clearness of spirit. His pure soul revolted a thousand times more from the slavish condition into which the false use of the powers of nature can bring man, than from the benumbing effect of torture and anguish which might be made ready for Him by the world. And how could He have recourse to the stupifying slumbrous juices of nature,¹⁰ when He had come to redeem the world from all sin, also from all the corruption of self-distraction, of self-darkening, and self-poisoning, by the misuse of the powers of nature,—from all mingling of the pure inspiration with the ecstacy of drunkenness,—from all superstition in magic potions and arts of poisoning,—when He recognized Nature herself in her dim life as a groaning creature, which He would glorify by the freedom of the children of God? Thus here, as ever, He asserted the heavenly perfection and divine dignity of His personality. He declined the draught, and, as the Evangelists significantly remark, He would not drink it. Although, probably, they would have constrained Him, He would not.

Thus He gave to the world a sign, and threw a light especially upon the carnal meaning in the supposed kindliness of the Rabbis, which pleased them so well.

We do not indeed read anything of His having condemned that cup in the abstract. For He knew well that poisons and medicines in nature are not absolutely opposed: as if, according to superstitious fancy perchance, the former were the creation of Satan, and must of necessity always be hurtful; and the latter, on the other hand, were gifts of heaven, and must, under all conditions, operate healthfully. He knew well, that in the use of nature everything depends upon measure and relation; that man is to learn to value, to use, and to master everything in his spirit as a work of the Spirit. Thus freely He took the refreshing draught at the end of His struggle, just as He here, with royal repugnance, declined the stupifying cup.

In that moment when the soldiers fastened the cross in the ground, when they placed in order the instruments of torture, when they were preparing to draw Him up by cords, and to nail Him to the cross, even the rudest men among those who surrounded Him might have been seized with a feeling of horror; and the sympathizing spectators might think again and again that it would be better for Him to take a restorative after the usual manner. But although even His holy tender life trembled before the torture of the cross, as the lily quakes in the tempest, yet He suffered patiently in the great calm purity of His Spirit, till the rude hands laid hold of Him, stripped Him,¹¹ and drew Him up upon the cross.¹²

First of all, the outstretched arms were bound to the cross-beams. The body rested in the middle, as if seated upon a projecting peg, that its weight might not tear down the hands from the nails with which they would be fastened. The feet also were bound. Hereupon came the nailing.¹³

And that it was not only the hands but the feet also that were nailed, is plainly deducible from the passage of Luke (Luk 24:39); according to which, Christ, after His resurrection, showed to the disciples the marks of His crucifixion in His hands and feet. It is plain, besides, from the most definite testimonies of the old Church fathers, who lived in a time when the punishment of crucifixion was still in use; which testimonies are likewise confirmed by the intimations of heathen writers.¹⁴

Negative criticism, which so timorously avoids the spirit of the prophecy how, according to the tradition, the Prince of this world was to be associated with the cross, will gradually lay less stress upon the assertion that the feet of Jesus were merely bound, if it finds that ecclesiastical theology of our day cannot any more lay altogether the same weight upon the reference of this fact to the text, Psa 22:17, as the elder Church theologians have done.¹⁵ It has become more ready to look without prejudice in this respect, since it no longer depends upon the hypothesis of the seeming death of Christ, and thus also needs no more to proceed on the supposition, that at His resurrection He must have had sound (unwounded) feet.¹⁶

But even although the feet of Jesus had not been pierced, the internal relation between His crucifixion suffering and Psa 22:1-31 would not be in the least degree set aside. This relation consists in the fact that the sacred singer, in a wonderful significant form of feeling (that is to say, lyrical-prophetical, not conscious and historical-prophetical), by anticipation perceived and represented the sorrow of Christ, and that this representation, unconsciously to himself, but to the spirit which inspired him consciously, expressed the most manifold sympathies in special features of the passion of Christ. To these sympathies belongs also the above-mentioned place in the Psalms.

After that Jesus had been thus nailed to the cross, the tablet with the inscription, Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews, was fastened over His head. But as now the soldiers hereupon were prosecuting their duty, and crucified the two criminals on the right and the left hand of Jesus, it would for the first time be quite plain what this arrangement—namely, in connection with that inscription—must mean. Matthew has brought out the significance of this relation in a lively manner, by associating the crucifixion of the two thieves with the notification of that inscription.¹⁷

The Jews observed immediately what this contrivance of Pilate implied. They found in it the bitterest outrage upon their nation. The circumstance excited the more attention, that the inscription was drawn up in the three great languages of the world.¹⁸ This observation resulted in the rapid spreading of the intelligence of this affront into the city, and the hastening out of many citizens of Jerusalem to read the offensive inscription. John calls attention on this occasion to the circumstance, that the place of skulls was adjacent to the city, whereby it was easy for the offended people to run backwards and forwards between Golgotha and the city. The matter was so grievous to the Jewish popular spirit, that the high priests considered themselves engaged to present themselves to Pilate with the petition that he would correct the inscription; that it should be that Jesus had said of Himself that He was the King of the Jews. But the offended man, who had proved himself in the region of justice so helplessly weak, was acting now again in the element of his assumed power of stubbornness, of arbitrary power, of haughtiness, and of vindictiveness. He rejected the petitioners briefly and arrogantly with the word, ‘What I have written, I have written.’

As if he had meant to say, You have, it is true, made me take back my spoken word, but my written word I will maintain inviolate. In what was written he would abide immovably. Thus he spoke not only in the reaction of his wounded obstinacy against his fickleness, but also in accordance with the laws of his administration of the bureaucracy which he represented; and especially he spoke thus as a Roman.

This was not the last time that Roman pride and arrogant assurance uttered the words, What I have written, I have written.

Thus the rulers of the Jewish people were sent home from Pilate with a fresh humiliation. For at this moment the retribution was beginning quietly to operate which made the Jewish people a contempt and a scorn for all peoples; for that the Jews in rejecting Christ had cast away the inmost heart of their nationality—their glory. Thus it was ordained of God, that the crucifixion of Christ itself was to assume a form whereby it would become a disgrace to the Jewish nation.

This decision appeared to favour the honour of Jesus. But the arrangement had another barb, which wounded the heart of the Lord in a peculiar manner. And Luke tells us how, in that moment when they had crucified the two thieves with the Lord, the one on His right hand, and the other on His left, Jesus turned Himself praying to God, ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do!’

In this intercessory prayer, Christ plainly refers to all those who have been concerned in His crucifixion,—not merely the four soldiers who might thoughtlessly, in an obtuse and rough manner, discharge the office of nailing Him to the cross in the more precise sense, but also the worldly powers in whose service they acted—the Jewish hierarchy, the Roman government—nay, humanity itself in its old nature, as represented in this case by the spirit of the Roman and Jewish people. The first word that Christ uttered on the cross was thus an intercession for His enemies. Hence it is manifest that He keeps and approves His doctrine as expressed in that most difficult precept which closes with the words, ‘Pray for those which despitefully use you, and persecute you’—keeps it even in the sharpest moment of trial, and even to death. This intercession, moreover, was at the same time the loosing of the power of the death of the cross; a gospel which revealed to humanity that His love was victorious over its hatred, and that thus also His death would tend not to their condemnation, but to their reconciliation; that His blood, which had begun to trickle down from hands and feet, and was reddening the soil of the accursed place of skulls, speaketh better things than the blood of Abel (Heb 12:24).

For the word of the intercession is to be taken, first of all, in its most general meaning. The world nails Him on the cross, Christ prays for forgiveness of their guilt. But yet the special circumstances under which He spake these words have to be considered,—namely, that they crucified Him in this form as the King of the Jews, with His imputed companions. Therefore they reckoned Him among malefactors, according to the word of the prophet (Mar 15:28; comp. Isa 53:12). They set Him forth as the prince of malefactors; yea, they suffered Him to appear with the two criminals as the symbolic image of that mysterious kingdom in which the Jews hoped. In the form of the three crucified ones upon Golgotha, the world-spirit sought to represent the Messiah with His elected ones, Him and the whole kingdom of heaven, as a contemptible mingling of fanaticism and crime. The Jewish hierarchs probably felt something of the burning mockery of their religion which Pilate allowed in this arrangement, but they did not feel that it was they themselves who had impelled him to this exposure. With their darkened spiritual vision, they could only see in the fact an insult to their people, who, nevertheless, were still supposed to be so rich in honour still; while that insult did indeed represent a great mockery of the kingdom of God in its King and in His elect, of which their unbelief was in the greatest measure guilty.

If we have in mind the special relation of the word of Christ, we perceive, moreover, the expression of His kingly consciousness, of His perfect assurance of the kingdom, in the words, ‘they know not what they do!’ It must not be overlooked that Christ founded His intercession for men on the words, They know not what they do! The world in general was entirely benefited by this intercession; for it knew not effectually, in the dream and slumber of its infinite perplexity, that in this moment it had nailed to the cross the Lord of glory. But it benefited the individuals who were involved in the guilt of the crucifixion, in proportion as they in fact knew not what they did. But none could know it entirely. For how could the sin become wholly clear to itself? But He who knew altogether what they did, set infinite love, eternal grace, over against overwhelming guilt.

Those to whom the intercession most immediately referred—the soldiery, namely, who executed the crucifixion-gave the most evident testimony that they knew not what they did. After they had finished their work they shared among them His clothes, which by Roman right fell to their lot.¹⁹ Of the upper garment they probably made four parts, loosening the seams.²⁰ But the under garment could not thus be unsewn, because it was without seam—worked in one piece—a kind of dress which resembled the priestly garment, as it must have been in use, however, among the poor Galileans generally as well.²¹ That they might not spoil this garment by rending it, they drew lots for it. John observes that the scripture was thus fulfilled, ‘They parted My raiment among them, and for My vesture they did cast lots’ (Psa 22:18). Thus did the soldiers, he adds significantly, as if he would say, Even these rude men from distant lands were placed under the law by which they must co-operate to the fulfilment of Scripture, although naturally they did so with entire unconsciousness. In thus casting lots upon the vesture of Christ, the amusement of the soldiers took the character of a game at dice,—a character which the deeper consideration of the contrasts involved in the history of passion cannot have overlooked. In any case, in the eagerness with which even at the foot of the cross the soldiers participate in the booty, in the haste with which they arrive at the thought of casting lots upon the garment of Christ, they show that they are engaged, even in these circumstances, with great power of roughness and carelessness, in the element of the common worldly life of the soldier.

Thus they sate there (at all events beginning to play), and took charge of their service of watching, in respect of the Crucified One, which was appointed to prevent the criminal from being prematurely or illegally taken away.²²

The friends of Jesus had not, in the meantime, lost sight of Him. They had followed Him from far, at greater or less distance, according as they could, either with a view to external circumstances or to internal dispositions (Luk 23:49). But now, in the first moments in which Christ hung upon the cross, the greatest possibility became manifest to them of approaching Him more nearly. The Jews in multitudes ran back to the city, in vexation at the inscription on the cross; the high priests wrangled with Pilate; the Roman soldiers divided the relics of Christ, and cast lots for His vesture. It was a moment of which true love availed itself. Soon some members of the family of Christ were standing close by the cross, of whom, for instance, John names to us the mother of Jesus, His mother’s sister, Mary, the wife of Cleophas,²³ and Mary Magdalene. We gather from the result, that John himself was also there. Jesus looked upon His mother, and saw standing by her the disciple whom He loved; and now it became plain how infinitely rich He still was, although hanging naked upon the cross; and although the soldiers had just divided His clothes among them. He had nothing earthly to bequeath to His disciples, and what would it have been to them in this moment? He was the source, however, of a nobler legacy. Turning to His mother, He said, ‘Woman (trembling, helpless being²⁴), behold thy son;’ and to His friend, ‘Behold thy mother.’ It is doubtless of special meaning that Jesus does not name the names; it testifies of the everlasting rule of that sharp-sighted prudence, which, in its indissoluble harmony with the true simplicity of the dove, was comparable even to the wisdom of the serpent; and even in the moment of self-sacrificing heroism did not forget its office and its duty. Although now only individual witnesses were standing under the cross, Jesus might be willing, nevertheless, to avoid naming the names of His people, in order not to betray them to their enemies. What a comforting light-beam of love, strong as heaven, He threw with this double saying into the mournful darkness of His disciples! How spiritually and how holily He knew how to link these two together-two of the most chosen souls whom, after Him, the earth had seen, and who, just for that reason, must suffer, mourn, and be afflicted, more terribly and deeply for Him than any others! And how marvellously He knew how to support them! The desertion of the mother He entirely relieved, by giving her a son. The most comfortless thing to the woman, in her destitution of comfort, is when she loses the accustomed spiritual support, the strong manly firmness to which she was accustomed. Hitherto Mary had been accustomed to lean upon the holy Son, as upon a rock: this support was in some measure supplied to her now (as it could not be supplied to her by her step-sons the sons of Alphæus); it was given to her in the friend of her Son. But what most of all sustains the man for whom life seems to have lost its value, is the sense of a new important duty which binds him to life with new bonds. Such a great duty the Lord gave to the favoured disciple, in committing to him the care of His mother. John and Mary would indeed have remained, even without this arrangement of Jesus, in close spiritual fellowship; but the Lord gave to this fellowship a form by which it became right and duty in the face of the world,—a defined sacred household tie—the highest, tenderest relation of piety—between mother and son. And thus, likewise, is declared, that in this appointment Christ cared at the same time for the others who stood near,—namely, for Mary Cleophas and Mary Magdalene. To the two other Marys, and to all His friends, He gave a central place in the house that He founded in their midst, and in which, so to speak, His house-fatherhood prolonged itself upon earth. The household of John was from that time to form the ground of union for His elected ones. John understood Him even in this moment. From that hour he took Mary, as his mother, unto his own home. In the spiritual meaning, however, John has remained for all times the central point for the elect and nearest kindreds of the family of Jesus. And in this character He will remain till Jesus comes again (Joh 21:1-25).

Thus, little knew the Spirit of the dying Christ of despair; thus, little did He become indifferent to the necessity and the equity of life, of need, of friendship, and of love. Down from the cross, on the place of skulls of the old world, He appoints those associations which, as the hearths of faith, of love, and of hope, surrounded by the fragmentary world of unbelief, of hatred, and of wretchedness, point across to the everlasting city of God, which is their home.

But if John tells us that from that hour he considered Mary as his mother, and took her to himself, he gives to us therewith a token of peace out of the night of the disciples, male and female, of Jesus. They thus understood His institution, and acknowledged it, as a security for the continuing prevalence of His love, for the continuing value of life. Although, even in these hours, a sword passed through the mother’s soul, yet she still proved, by acquiescing in this appointment of her Son’s love, that her soul did not despair, but with His Spirit struggled upwards out of the darkness of this temptation-that she still loved, lived, believed, and hoped. This is true also of John, and all the disciples. Although the manner of their hope might be very various, they did not remain so absolutely destitute of comfort, after such signs of faith, as they are usually represented to be by Catholic poetry and tradition. Yet, even at this moment, when their earthly world and hope was altogether crumbling to pieces, the presentiment of the new world must have unfolded itself in the depth of their soul, at the glimpse of divine power with which the Crucified died, veiled indeed, at first, in the twilight of unconscious longing and in severe birth-throes. The whole spirit and connection of evangelic history assures us, that even the sons of Alphæus, who in a peculiar degree had hoped for the earthly glory of Jesus, and therefore probably had also been in a peculiar degree shaken, stood in need now of a supporting and comforting centre, such as was given to them and all the disciples in the person of John.

The tide of the enemies of Jesus which for a while had ebbed from Golgotha, to rush angrily back upon the judgment-house on the temple-mountain, soon flowed back again as strongly as ever. As soon as the answer of Pilate was known, the Jews thought they had a reason for venting their rage in aggravated measure against Jesus. They wished now, in spite of the inscription, to manifest very decidedly that they had nothing to do with the Crucified One. Thus they stood now close by the place of execution, passed backwards and forwards, and reviled Him, wagging their heads at Him. For the most part, the reviling was coined into the catchword,²⁵ ‘Ha, Thou that destroyest the temple, and buildest it again in three days, save Thyself! Come down from the cross!’ Between whiles occurred the expression, ‘If Thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross.’ Plainly they wished now to bring into prominence as strongly as possible the religious reproach that He is a blasphemer of God, in order to form a counterpoise to the inscription of Pilate. They thought that His claim to be able to build a new temple was contradicted most fatally by the cross. Of an operation by the Spirit through suffering they had thus no presentiment, in spite of the voices of their prophets. They were therein glad to submit to the misinterpretation which the word of Christ about His building of the temple had undergone in the mouth of the false hearers and witnesses. They did not perceive that it was they themselves who were even now putting down the temple of God, and that Jesus decided the speedy rebuilding of it in His present sufferings by His labour in the Spirit. Gradually a second class of mockers associated itself from the people with these despisers of Jesus, Pharisees and scribes, even high-priestly persons. These could introduce more variety into their mockery, but at the same time they enhanced the bitterness and malice of it. ‘He hath saved others, Himself He cannot save.’ How gladly would they have made use of the fact that He was now sacrificing His life on the cross, and which they laid hold of in the distorted form that He could not help Himself, in order to blot out the great recollection that He had helped so many others. Nevertheless they did not venture directly to deny this. Still they combined the compulsory acknowledgment in such a manner with the wondering question, Can He not help Himself? that this must needs throw back a doubt even upon that acknowledgment. But their outcry proved that they were wholly unable to conceive of the miraculous power of Christ as the Holy Spirit’s power, which was conditioned upon obedience, even to the death upon the cross, but only as a limitless magic of absolutely arbitrary power, of which they fancied that He must needs turn it before all things to His own advantage, if it were generally in any measure at His command. The second word with which they mocked Him is manifestly at the same time a bitter criticism of the inscription over the cross, ‘If He be Christ, the King of Israel, let Him now descend from the cross, that we may see it, and believe on Him.’ We think we perceive in this cry, again, the dull sound of the inveterate enmity with which the Jews rejected the Lord, because He would not be a Christ in their sense,—an enmity which Pilate had lately roused anew. In minds which were so darkened as these, the superstition might even now be longingly looking askance at the possibility that Jesus might, by a miracle, free Himself from the cross, and destroy the Romans. In their ecclesiastical pride, they fancied that He must still always receive it as a favour if they did homage to Him. This, indeed, is not the first meaning of their words: they mock, and mean to mock. But out of the frivolous mockery is always suggested a serious thought, a fancy, or even an ejaculation. And thus it is here; at all events, the fathers in Israel must have a dim, despairing, and bitter feeling that they have rejected their Messiah, even although this does not come up to the level of consciousness. Thence is explained, also, the form of the third reviling, ‘He trusted in God; let Him deliver Him, if He will have Him: for He said, I am the Son of God’ (or, according to Luke, His elected). It is not to be denied but that these words of the reviling of Christ pass over into the blasphemy of God. They must needs acknowledge, however unwillingly, that Jesus trusted in God. If His confidence, then, is confounded, as they assume, the reproach falls back upon God. The word, moreover, has in itself the form of the bitterest ill-feeling against God Himself—of real blasphemy. The critic who wants to make it out improbable that the Jewish hierarchs thus spoke,²⁶ has never observed apparently how frequently fanaticism, in the moments of rage, when it purposes to be exceedingly zealous for God, involuntary falls into blasphemy of God.²⁷

This time also, according to Luke, the example of the Jews operated contagiously upon the heathen soldiers. They copied their example by beginning likewise to deride the Crucified One. They stepped up to Him, offered Him (probably pledging Him, in soldier fashion) their sour soldiers’ wine, and required Him, if He was the King of the Jews, to deliver Himself. Luke, in this place, mentions the inscription over the Crucified One, an intimation that the soldiers took occasion from its words to mock Him again. It might perhaps be possible, moreover, that they quoted the words in the meaning of Pilate, in order, by the way, to irritate the Jews.

The sound of revilings, however, was to attain its highest point in a still more frightful fact. The malefactors also who were crucified with Him reviled Him, according to the account of the first Evangelists. Luke, on the other hand, relates, with more circumstantiality, that one of the malefactors suspended with Him reviled Him, saying, ‘If thou be the Christ, save Thyself and us;’ but that He was rebuked by the other malefactor with the words, ‘Dost thou not fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath done nothing amiss.’ Then turning to Jesus, he said the words, ‘Lord, remember me when Thou comest into Thy kingdom!’ This distinction is not easily explained. It is not sufficient here to observe, that the two first Evangelists only narrate indefinitely, while Luke gives a more accurate account. The two declare, with sufficient accuracy, that Jesus was reviled by those who were crucified with Him; while Luke, as it were by anticipation, represents a contrast between the hardened and the repentant thief. In the first testimony, it is not to be overlooked that it is furnished by the Evangelists of whom one is an apostle; neither in the second is it to be disregarded, that it bears on itself the characteristic features of truth in a high degree, and entirely belongs to the family of those extraordinary traits of the operation of grace which Luke gathered with so much zeal. Besides, it would contradict the general credibility of that Evangelist, if it were to be supposed that in this place he has taken up an apocryphal narrative instead of a genuine one. Therefore those who conceive that both testimonies must in some measure be received,—namely, that first of all the two thieves were hostile to the Lord, but that subsequently the one became of a changed mind and repented,—appear to be justified in, and indeed compelled to, this assumption by the precision of the evangelic narratives. It is certainly very difficult to figure to one’s self such a change; but it is not impossible. How often, in the case of one called by God to repentance, even in the midst of the last temptation to seek peace once again in the way of the old life, does the conscience become fully aroused! Thus, perchance, according to this view, the better of the thieves, in spite of deep movements of heart towards repentance, which occurred in him in spite of the first holy impression which he had received from Jesus, may have allowed himself at first to be carried away once more by the spirit of fellowship to join with his companion in wounding the Lord with unbecoming speech, whom that more evil associate, who probably had hitherto been his master in evil—his evil genius—had set him the example. But even while he was thus, for the last time, striking the old note, he might have become conscious of the falsehood that it contained,—of the contradiction involved, to the better feeling which was working itself upwards from his heart. And it would be no wonder if in this case his last error should have hastened his conversion. In this behalf it is, moreover, to be remembered, that the two first Evangelists tell us of the two thieves that they reviled Jesus (ὠνείδιζον); while in Luke it is said of the wicked thief, that he blasphemed Him (ἐβλασφήμει αὐτὸν). This difference is very important, and if carefully considered, may perhaps lead to a solution of the difficulty.

When Jesus was thus scoffed and mocked by the most various persons as He hung on the cross, His fellow-sufferers also began to revile Him, or to utter reproaches to Him.²⁸ But they abused Him in the most different feeling, in the most different manner; and in the one his heart was soon turned to the repentance from which proceeded the prayer of faith, while the other became the victim of the despairing rage in which he blasphemed the Lord. But how could such a contrast be developed out of the fact, that they had both first of all assailed the Crucified One, and wounded Him with reproaches?

These thieves were both of them probably robbers in the manner in which at that time there appeared many in Judea; chiliastic plunderers, probably seditious men, such as Barabbas; perhaps also partakers in the same conspiracy in which he had committed a murder. The fact that the Jews so passionately begged the release of Barabbas, was no doubt suspicious to Pilate, with reason: it testified of the secret sympathy which was felt by the Jews of that time for all actual theocratic demagogues and rebels against the Roman power; and this induced him to have the two seditious men who had remained in prison led to execution immediately. But the disposition and the vices of these rebels seem to have been radically different. Both had revolted for the liberty of the Jews, for the theocratic kingdom, and had become criminals in the fanatical excitement, whereby they wished to bring about that liberty. But the one appears to have devoted himself with an honest, if a darkened and deluded mind, to the freedom and the hope of Israel, while the other had made that idea serviceable to his gloomy passions. In the former, the thoughts of angry discontent against Jehovah and His coming Anointed, which often strongly affected the better minds in Israel,—as, for instance, they were illustrated in that doubt of the Baptist about the mission of Christ, and in the sword-blow of Peter,—became exaggerated and embodied, till they resulted in a crime against society, and guilt that deserved death; while in the latter, that gloomy, thoroughly sordid, despairing and desperately wicked chiliastic feeling which animated the policy of Caiaphas and the treachery of Judas, had become realized in the form of political crime. In this respect they were both substantially at one, that the failure of their undertaking had filled them with rage. Thus they were led with Jesus to Golgotha. They saw that they were set forth as partakers of one offence with Him. They knew, no doubt, that many among the people had expected that Jesus would redeem Israel; and they perhaps had a dim feeling that He was the man on whom, in some mysterious manner, the destiny of Israel depended. Thus their rage was naturally directed against Him. But thus different was their disposition; thus different was the spirit in which they bore ill-will to Him; and thus contrasted were the results also which these dispositions ensured. In that hour in which the hope of Israel in the kingdom of God was more than ever shaken; in that hour in which Christ Himself, in the perfect sanctity of His feeling, could utter the cry, My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me? in which a sword passed through the soul of Mary, and in which John the Baptist, in disturbed mood, could have, with repeated emphasis, urged the question, Art thou He that should come?—in such an hour, it might easily be understood how an erring, misguided man, who had become a criminal by theocratic delusion, and who really had a heart for the freedom and hope of Israel in their higher meaning, should, at his first glance on the crucified Jesus, express the final ebullition of his bitter discontent in a sinful manner, by making reproaches against Him, because He had not proved His spiritual power by the destruction of His enemies and the enemies of His people. He might angrily and abusively, and yet with an honest intention, challenge Him to come down now in triumph from the cross, and turn judgment to victory over His enemies. If he reproached the Lord in this meaning, it was at least a proof that he regarded Him as the Messiah, but that he had not yet submitted to Him in spirit. He was then, so to speak, a lively representation of all those feelings of anger with which the disciples at first perceived that their Lord was determined to go the way of suffering. But He might now also become a type of all those Jews who turned to Christianity, when they beheld, in the destruction of Jerusalem, their hope of the present manifestation of their people’s glory crumble into ruins; nay, a type of the purified Messianic hope of the disciples themselves. And thus it happened. With the last effervescence of his anger his haughty spirit gave way. He broke down in view of the divine patience and assurance with which Christ met death. And now, even the evil spirit of despair, with which his companion in guilt began to blaspheme the Lord, helped to bring him to a decision.

Both the thieves, in their addresses to Christ, prove themselves to be men who had formerly hoped for the Messianic kingdom, and probably had, in the character of chiliasts made a disturbance for it. But in the case of the hardened one, the worm of despair breaks forth from the heart of his scattered hope; in the case of the repentant one, there rises from the dissolving smoke of a criminal fanaticism the flame of the assurance of the future kingdom of God brightening heavenward. The despairing one cries out in mockery: If thou art Christ, save Thyself and us. If this present life be not saved—if it is to pass to death through the suffering of the cross,—he cannot believe on the Christ. Only a Christ of this world has any reality for him: with his life here his Christ melts away from him. But the other begins to see with perfect clearness, when he beholds this man, usually, in all probability, so imperious in spirit, now so lamentably despairing. As plants ripen under the tropical sun, thus his repentance and his faith are developed under the twofold influence under which he finds himself in that critical hour, between the heavenly, victorious spirit of Christ, and the hellish despair of his companion. It is certain to him that this Jesus overcomes everything by His patience. Thence also it is certain to him, that in His sufferings He proves Himself to be the Messiah, and that through His sufferings He establishes a kingdom, and that in the glory of this kingdom He will one day come even to the spirits in the kingdom of the dead. And in the light of this acknowledgment he beholds now the guilt of his companion as well as his own. Thus he rebukes his partner in guilt, he acknowledges his own misdoing, and he entreats Christ for His grace. For all that, there still is left the question why the two first Evangelists have recorded nothing of the repentance of this thief, and Luke nothing of his previous offence. But here once more, it is perhaps to be remembered that several of the notices of Luke bear the stamp of being attributable to the evangelic recollection of the mother of Jesus.²⁹ This appears to be the case with this communication. Mary must have been standing very near to the cross when this conversation between Jesus and the thief occurred. She thus could know the particulars of his conversion; and if she regarded his first unbecoming expressions with reference to his conversion, she might easily let them slip. On the other hand, the two first Evangelists appear to represent a group of disciples to whom the unfolding of the contrast between the two thieves did not come so immediately into view.

The repentant thief implored the Lord with an expression which was very customary in Israel, especially at departure, ‘Remember me! remember me,’ he prayed, ‘when Thou comest in Thy kingdom.’

But the Lord consoled him with the great promise, ‘Verily I say unto thee, This day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise.’ In this word all is certainty. The confidence in the earnestness of the sorrow of the thief, his pardon, the assurance of eternal life, the promise of his blessed union with Jesus, the speedy fulfilment of all his wishes, the promise of his exaltation into heaven even on that day; all is introduced and affirmed by the dying Jesus with an oath.

The repentant thief, with the word of his repentance which he uttered, had also done a great deed of repentance. In the hour of death he had set himself free from the strong bands of fellowship which had previously chained him to a daring offender; and had openly acknowledged his sins. And thus the word of his faith in Jesus was a great act of his faith also. He attained to the faith, and confessed the faith in the glory of Jesus in an hour in which, outlawed, condemned, regarded as one among malefactors, apparently forsaken of God as he was forsaken of men, Jesus Himself hung dying on the cross. But the royal majesty with which Jesus received him—with which he welcomed the notorious robber, who had been obtruded upon Him in external fellowship in suffering, to a spiritual fellowship of His present sufferings and of His coming glory,—with which He received him without conditions, without appointment of any intervals of delay;—this was the first manifestation of that boundless glory of grace which first began to operate with His crucifixion. In all points His grant went far beyond the prayer of the poor man. Remember me! he asked. On the other hand, Jesus gave him the assurance that he should live with Him as His companion. He would have been gladly cheered with the expectation of an undefined future. Jesus, on the other hand, says to him that this day his blessedness should begin. He did not hope to be received among the members of the kingdom before the revelation of the kingdom; but Jesus gives him the assurance that He will take him up after his death into paradise—thus into a spiritual kingdom of heaven.³⁰ Thus limitlessly could His grace, which was just now breaking through the darkness of the world’s curse, be revealed to the thief, because the faith of the thief was so great. That penitent owed nothing more to the world-he was free from it by the payment of his life. From his wicked comrade he had become free by his word of admonition. Moreover, from his guilt, as from his old Jewish delusion, the grace made him now free which had disclosed to him the kingdom of patience as the kingdom of the victorious spirit. The beam of certainty of life in the asseveration of Christ made him free from the fear of death; and that spirit of salvation, for whom one day can be as a thousand years, and whose rapid and great effects of salvation he had implored by his rapid and great repentance, set him free from all the conditions of the time of expectation.

The first word of Christ on the cross was a triumph of His love of His enemy in the presence of the enemies who nailed Him there. The second word was a triumph of His love of His friend in the face of a destruction of life which seemed to bid defiance to all bonds of soul. The third word is a triumph of His grace in the face of the final doom itself, with its sanguinary terrors. Since the time that Christ thus on the scene of death (upon the place of execution) pardoned the bleeding criminal in the dying hour, while He Himself, the true High Priest in the form of the criminal, hung there with pierced hands; since then, the faith in His heroic form has expanded in the world,—the faith which is often manifest in the repentance of the most degraded malefactors, in the repentance of the dying,—the faith which believes in the possibility of the conversion of great sinners, in the truth of late conversion,—the faith which can see the place of execution change into an entrance-hall to the throne of everlasting grace, into the sanctuary of reconciliation, and which gladly ventures to preach the Gospel even to the poor in the hour of death, in prisons, and on places of execution.

It has been rightly pointed out that the frightful form of that despairing man who died in the midst of blasphemies of the Crucified One, whom he beheld by sight, does not permit any misinterpretation of this glory of grace, in the interest of presumptuous frivolity.

In the first period of Christ’s passion on the cross, He had enjoyed quiet for a moment, and had been able to take leave of His disciples. Then followed the period when the hatred of men raged at large against Him, for the last time in which the ‘procession’ of blasphemers passed by Him, the floods of mockery overflowed upon Him. Mockery is at all times the show of spiritual ascendancy, the appearance of victory. The mockery of the wicked is the triumph, the scornful laughter, of the wicked. Thus Jesus allowed to pass over Him now, in every form of mockery, the great scornful laughter of hell, which regarded Him as destroyed. But the appearance of victory melted before the certainty of victory with which He pardoned the thief. Hatred was dumb, and His love kept the last word. Despair was dumb, and His living Spirit preached immortality and meeting again. The judgment, the shame, and the death vanished away as His grace, so to speak, took the thief by the hand to lead him up into the lofty heaven. But now gradually approached the third, the greatest and most mysterious period of His passion.

Already, from the sixth hour, the clearness of day, of the mid-day, began to be obscured. Gradually there spread a darkness over the whole land, increasing in fearful intensity even till the ninth hour. This darkening of the earth, according to an acknowledged observation, did not proceed from an eclipse of the sun (since such a phenomenon in the days of Easter, at the time of the full moon, could not occur); rather, according to Luke, the darkening of the sun was the last result of the darkening of the earth. Consequently this darkness must have had its cause in a peculiar derangement of the terrestrial atmosphere. The signs which occurred later give reason to suppose that this darkening of the land was a precursor of a great earthquake.

But the darkness which went forth to heaven was an external image of the condition of soul which the suffering Christ was now undergoing in silence upon the cross. The bodily effects of His suffering on the cross began to be manifested. The external fire-brand of the wounds in the hands, in the feet, on the brow, on the lacerated back, stretched upon the rough beam of the cross, and the internal glow of fever, were wasting His strength. The great disturbances in the peaceful living flow of His pure blood oppressed His head, agonized His heart, and perturbed the transparent mirror of His pure sense of life. In these tortures Jesus hung there quiet, silent, and struggling, under the mourning aspect of heaven, which was darkening more and more. Thus He hung for more than two hours, till nearly three o’clock in the afternoon. At length the dizziness of weakness must declare itself generally,—that condition in which consciousness will begin to reel, to dream, and then perhaps again to start up again among frightful forms of fancy. He saw death always approaching and overshadowing His life; and He tasted it as only the subtle pure life itself could taste death. A flood of unconsciousness would throw itself over that clear consciousness of eternal life,—a dreamy form of nightly horrors over that spirit of eternal clearness,—a sense of groundless failure and decay over that confidence with which, in His innermost heart, He constantly sate in the bosom of the Father. But when death thus came upon Him, He felt how thoroughly one He had become with humanity, in its destiny of death, by His faithful love; it was to Him as if His consciousness would melt into one with the consciousness of suffering, dying humanity,—as if all its feelings of being forsaken of God in death would be crowded together as into a focus in His breast. He felt the death of humanity; humanity came to the perfect feeling of its death in His heart. And now, for the last time, the tempting spirit once more approached Him. With that sympathy of death, He would inspire Him with all the wild phantasms of the gloomy horror of death as felt by His race. He would represent death as a dark divinity, fill His soul with despair, and suggest ravings out of His own spirit. Against this temptation, however, Christ gathered Himself together with the whole force of His being; and as with the wrath of a lion directed against the fear of death, as with the supplication of a child turned to God, He cries out, ‘My God! My God! why hast Thou forsaken Me?’

This word of Christ may easily be misunderstood more than any, because it is just the last decisive word of His contest in which He wins the victory,—and because, therefore, in it is combined into one the deepest appearance of human despair with the deepest resistance of divine dependence,—nay, because in this word death appears in its last struggle with life as it is entwined with victory. In the apprehension of this we attain before all things the right tone of every individual expression in the Spirit. According to the several partial tones is modified the understanding of the word. It may, indeed, be probably assumed that Christ uttered this cry with conscious remembrance of the words with which the 22d Psalm opens. For as there the sacred singer, in the spirit of Messianic longing, cried upwards to God out of the depth of the Spirit of Christ, so now Christ cries up to God in the spirit of Messianic sympathy out of the depth of the human death-need. But if it is thought that Christ would not thus have uttered these words if He had not by reciting or praying, according to the old Scripture word, wished to strengthen Himself³¹ by that Psalm, it is forgotten that every Messianic feeling of the Old Testament must be realized in Him,—that Christ did not externally imitate, but in the deepest truth internally accomplished, what was written. If it were otherwise, the mysterious words of Christ would be deprived of all the original freshness and energy of His spiritual utterance. Moreover, if we take the expression, My God, My God, here in the diluted form of a cry become more or less habitual, and if we overlook the emphasis in the questioning Why? in order the more to lay stress upon the subsequent expression of neglect, we come to the view that the words could contain an outcry of real despair, or even the testimony of a darkening of the consciousness of God in Jesus.³² But thus is denied the definite emphasis which the outcry, My God, My God, must needs have in the mouth of Christ. In these words it is determined that God remains His God, that His consciousness even now is in perfect harmony with God, as if He embraced Him with both arms. The questioning Why? moreover, is the perfectly devout question of the suffering holy child to His Eternal Father, the concentrated expression of all questions which sorrowing humanity addresses to the Unsearchable; the great wherefore, which is permitted to the troubled human race, on the administration of God in His infinitely pure glorification. This question of Christ looks back to the guilt of humanity, which must be atoned for; it looks up to the countenance of the Father, in which judgment is transfigured into deliverance; it looks forward to the salvation which proceeds out of this suffering. Because humanity had forsaken God, God appeared to be willing to join with it in forsaking their Holy Prince, who would not forsake humanity; but because He would neither forsake God nor forsake humanity, the terror of the desertion of God incurred by the world must be loosed in His soul, and even in the depth of this terror He must find God once more in the glory of His grace on behalf of humanity. But, finally, the words may be weakened in their meaning, if the complaining cry, Thou forsaken Me! be not apprehended in their full force and depth.³³ The more we yield ourselves up reverentially to the power of this word,—a power derived from all its associations,—the more we feel that it is just at this point that the great apparent contradiction—the deepest desertion of God, and the closest nearness to Him—judgment and reconciliation—consciousness of death and victory over death—is solved; that thus Christ has completed His work with this saying, which is His last and greatest work.

If it were to be asked, how could His bodily experience on the cross depress Him again once more into this depth of misery, after He in His Spirit (Joh 13:32) and in His soul (in Gethsemane) had already overcome the world, it is to be considered that in Christ the Word became flesh; and that for that very reason the everlasting Word in Him must suffer in the death-pangs of His corporeity; or, in other words, that His suffering of death was just the completion of all His other suffering—in the same way as His corporeity was the completion of His incarnation. In His death on the cross He underwent the whole death-pang of humanity, in a completeness that in the Spirit alone He could not have undergone it. In this passion, His spirit- and soul-life must thus also undergo a new depth of human wretchedness, which it had not yet experienced; and yet the struggles that He had passed through before were not repeated in this passion. At the Passover He endured the final contest with the worldly mind of the fallen world; in Gethsemane, with its sorrow and its aversion. Here upon Golgotha He went through the contest with death itself, and, indeed, He went through it in the unity of His nature, so that spirit, soul, and body were working together here also in one power. For how could His corporeity have suffered without a soul; and, destitute of spirit, how could His bodily suffering have become His, since His body was the manifestation, the organ, and the highest and closest expression of His soul-life and spirit-life? But it is thought that in the unity of His contest might still be perceived the various manifestations of the several powers of His nature; while the Spirit of Christ addresses to the Father, as a simple child-like question, the significant Why? He opposes it as a thing infinitely foreign,—to death in its human deformity (in the aspect which he presents to Him as the king of terrors). While the soul of Christ, with deepest reality, takes refuge in God with its twofold appeal to Him, it declares, at the same time, the horror with which the frightful form of death fills it; and while He complains of His bodily feeling of death to His God, as the last and deepest suffering of His life, He intimates, at the same time, that death in itself is the manifestation of the desertion of God.

But these several points of the complaint of Jesus must pre-eminently be recognized in their unity. This unity consists in His uttering before His Father the confession, that in the feeling of His death He is experiencing a sense of His desertion; but in His declaration, at the same time, of His assurance, that He nevertheless abides, under this wonderful appearance of desertion, indissolubly united with Him.

And therein consists the victory of Christ over death, that He acknowledges it as the appearance of the desertion of God, and names it by its right name; that He saw in this desertion an inscrutable arrangement and judgment of His God; and that, nevertheless, in this judgment, He found His God, acknowledged and held Him fast as His God, in the deepest and most special sense.

And thus, before His consciousness, the threatening form of death is dissolved in the form of the desertion of God: this desertion is lost in the form of inscrutable arrangement, and the gloomy decree is finally lost in the certainty of the presence of His God. All terrible forms disappear from His eyes before the form of light, into whose arms He has thrown Himself, with the appeal, My God! My God!

In God’s judgment He has hailed God as the deliverer. It is manifest, from His whole feeling of His life and of His work as Redeemer, that He thus appealed to God in the name of humanity. It is manifest, also, from the significant, simple, child-like question Why? The answer of God to this question lies in the assurance which thenceforward He attained, that the salvation of the world was accomplished.

How could it be doubted that, in dying as Christ died, in dying with Christ’s consciousness, He had experienced death in its deepest human depth—that He thus tasted death by God’s grace for all? But if He has experienced the death of humanity in His death, so also He has experienced the desertion of God, which humanity is conscious of in a thousand troubled and confused perceptions. He has acknowledged in His Spirit-bodily life, in a perfectly defined feeling of the effect of this desertion, that this desertion is the spiritual essence of death. And if He has considered this suffering as an act of God, He has pointed to it as the judgment which He endures in Himself, because He endures the death of humanity in Himself; whose form, however, is changed in His consciousness into the announcement of His God-thus even into deliverance itself.

Thus this word of Christ is His greatest deed. But the act of Christ corresponds to the act of God. That moment in which, as the Lion of Judah, He cries out to His Father against the threatening and terrible form of death (as it seeks to appear to Him, in His sympathy with humanity, as an independent power in the appearance of a gloomy divinity, and so to tempt Him to despair), and throws Himself, nevertheless, on the heart of the Father, through the real terrors of death, of the desertion of God, of the world, and the world’s judgment,—that is the point at which the Father, as in a holy exultation, draws Him up to His heart, as His thoroughly approved, well-authenticated child, as the truly discovered Priest-King of humanity. The cry of Christ, My God! My God! expresses the presentiment that just at this time God appears out of His retirement—that the Sun of Grace shines forth from the clouds of judgment.

If the question be suggested, How could Christ have felt Himself forsaken of God, since He was still the Son of God?³⁴ it is the same as is expressed in other words, How did He undergo the feeling of death? how could He die? And this latter form of the question is not the easier, but the more difficult form. For the appearance of God’s desertion is just the first spiritual name—the first explanation of the dark riddle which we call death. Certainly, even this first explanation of death has still its obscurity; this is plain from the great Why? of Christ. The fuller explanation of death consists in the fact that this desertion is an arrangement of God—a judgment upon the world, which is changed through Christ’s consciousness into nearness to God, sense of God, and reconciliation. The Adamic view of the world is indeed of a totally opposite disposition. It is confessed in the gloomy error, that the judgment is explained by removing the agency of God far away from it; that God’s desertion is explained by conceiving of it only as death and the feeling of death; and death is explained by putting it back into the gloom of absolute natural necessity. Thus generally it is minded to regard punishment as being explained in its apprehension entirely as evil; or rather, we should say, it will not apprehend it, because it will leave it as an absolutely dark thing of nature, as a fatality, to the decision of fate. On the other hand, evil is enveloped in gloom, if it is considered as the will of God; but especially if it is considered as punishment. Christianity, indeed, loses sight of the conception of punishment in the kingdom of grace; but here it is not condemned into the not understood form of evil, but it glorifies itself into the chastising arrangements of delivering grace.

The most difficult question thus remains, How can the Son of God have suffered death? And in the most difficult view, this is its purport. How is the fact that Christ died, to be reconciled with the doctrine of His Godhead? First of all, the great misunderstanding must be got rid of, which encourages the notion that the conditioned is the limited,—that that which is determined is a matter of fate, a matter removed from God’s control. The Son of God represents the nature of God, just in His self-determination, in His self-conditioning. And in His human manifestation He advances from conditional to conditional, even to the death on the cross. But exactly the point at which conditionality threatens to become the annihilation of His being, is the point at which all His conditionality is perfected in God, as self-conditioning. He dies with the perfect consciousness that He dies in His God; and therewith He abolishes the old significance of death, according to which it had terrified humanity, as if it were another gloomy God. He has the power to lay down His life, and He uses it; therefore also He has the power to take His life again. He can allow His sense of life to melt away in God’s ordinance, therefore He can attain it again in the depth of the divinity. And as He glorifies all finiteness by His finiteness, all conditionality through His conditionality (He being the most contemned and unworthy of all), so also He explains the darkest depths of all human conditionalities-death. He changes it into a mysterious point of new formation of His life in God. In Him also the consciousness of the divinity itself comes in contact with the consciousness of death. The heart of God feels the breath of death in the dying heart which forms the centre of humanity, but absolutely for that reason death dies in the heart of God. The Eternal God, who in the mission of death makes known the lofty supremacy of His administration over the creature, expresses in the death of His Son the sympathy of His nature with the death of humanity. But when the death of the Son of God is changed immediately into the victory over death, there is revealed therein the truth that death is only a special appointment in the administration of God, only a special angel among the spirits of His revelation,—that its apparent independence constantly melts away in its omnipresence, the death of the mere creature in His new creating breath of life, the death of the sinner in His punitive righteousness, the death of the faithful in His grace, the death of the only beloved Son in His present divinity itself.

Thus, then, the answer to the question is anticipated, How could the Son of God feel Himself forsaken of God? The question is, first of all, How could He give this name to the sense of death—the sense of God’s desertion? Here we must observe, before all, that for Him the feeling and the consciousness of life was absolutely one with the feeling and the consciousness of the presence of God. When thus the presentiment of death came over Him as a convulsion of His life, as a darkening of His consciousness, when the dizziness of weakness veiled His spirit, we understand that His consciousness of God was disturbed in the same measure that His consciousness of life wavered. Here occurred the moment when the sphere of His conditionality on the part of God threatened to shrink even to the annihilation of His consciousness; therefore this form of His conditionality must have appeared to Him as an expression of the desertion of God. Added to this, He experienced in Himself, in His feeling of death by the sympathy of His Spirit, the world’s sense of death, and was tempted by the unbounded despair in this sense of death. In a moment in which His self-consciousness wavered, that dark feeling of death in its giant-might threatened to surprise Him in His weakness, and to obscure His consciousness of God. The abyss of all the God-desertion of the world yawned before His failing sense of life. Hence He both could and must characterize His position as a feeling of apparent desertion of God. But just as in the divine knowledge of His death He overcame death, He overcame, in the consciousness of God contained in His Spirit, that appearance of desertion of God in His feeling. In the enduring clearness of His God-consciousness, He did away with the gloom in the suffering of His own consciousness. Moreover, if we refer this experience of Christ specially to His divinity, there will indeed arise the deepest contradiction in the assertion that God saw Himself forsaken of God. But that great mystery does not occur in this formula, since it cannot once be said that the Son of God saw Himself forsaken by the Father. He felt the desertion of God, but He did away with this feeling in the God-consciousness of His Spirit. And thus in His death-pang that contrast was manifested which pervades the whole world,—the contrast according to which God is present not only in doing, but also in suffering; not only in the terrors that the world excites, but also in the fears that the world suffers; not only in man’s deep sense of life, but also in his dread of death; not only in the revealings, but also in the hidings of His glory. And it actually constitutes the significance of that cry of Christ’s, that it represents this contrast in its deepest power, in the crisis of its world-historical variance, in which it seems to become an absolute contradiction, but only to disclose its everlasting harmony. Here, where the trembling of feeling of God-desertion is combined with the loud appeal of God-assurance in the dying heart of Christ, and where the former is dissolved into the latter,—here it is plain that God has adopted into His consciousness not less the dying pains of all the world than the ordinances of death upon all the world, and that in His Spirit they are explained everlastingly as ordinances for the salvation of the world.

It is manifest that we may not rest in the explanation of this feeling of Christ as being a feeling of God-desertion, as we have said, from the question itself that Christ utters, Why hast Thou forsaken Me? We cannot for a moment conceive that Christ in this word intended to reproach the Father, or that He meant to complain with displeasure of the suffering appointed for Him. But the question cannot be only a formula; just as little, finally, can it be a question of perplexity or of suspicion, as though He had not known at all wherefore this desertion of God came upon Him. But what in His spiritual consciousness He well knew already, He craved to know now also in the feeling of His life. He asks the Father out of His own heart, and this heart expects and obtains the answer which makes itself manifest in the great peace of His death. But for our knowledge He has already answered this question in His wandering upon earth; for example, in the words, This is My blood of the New Testament, which is shed for many for the forgiveness of sins (Mat 26:28). For the sake of humanity, therefore, He felt Himself forsaken of God. He thus underwent the judgment of God which, in the gloomy God-desertion of the world, makes itself known (especially also in the fact that it crucified Him) in His suffering of death.

But not in His consciousness as punishment, not for His heart as judgment. The elder theology, when it ventured upon this assertion, made a way for the attacks and mistakes which it subsequently incurred on this point. As closely as it accords with the nature of Christ’s consciousness that He must experience in His sympathy with the world the doom of the world, so closely likewise does it accord with that nature that in His experience this doom should brighten into deliverance; that the form of punishment should change to Him into the form of salvation. In the suffering of the Son of God, it must be plain that God does not as an enemy prosecute man, in chastising him—in allowing His judgments to pass upon him, as the conscience-stricken man is always ready to fancy. And thus in the suffering of Christ there was given to man the sign and seal of reconciliation with God.

Those, therefore, who should separate the judgment of God upon the world from the suffering of death that Christ sustained, would also, without perceiving it, deprive that suffering of God’s light and salvation, and darken the newly beaming day of grace, in which the old terrors, death, despair, the sense of God’s desertion, and all the darkness of punishment, are softened and changed into certainties of chastisement, into angels of salvation. They must, moreover, suppose that Christ’s question, as a question, had no meaning, and that the Inscrutable had never answered that Why? even to this day.

We must acknowledge it as a mystery, that in a sinner’s awakened consciousness of guilt it is one and the same conscience which represents itself at once as God’s punishing angel and as a poor trembling sinner,—that it thus appears to divide itself into a hostile opposition, and nevertheless in the unity of his being is more effectual than ever. And thus also we know that the true human judge may grow pale and tremble in the power of sympathy with the human malefactor, whom he must condemn, as if he himself felt his guilt in his own heart, although at the same time he represents with judicial severity the sacred justice which judges the sinner. And was not Christ in His human feeling to be conscious of the judgment of the world at the moment when God had given up the world into that doom of its blindness that it nailed Him on the cross? But just as the human judge beholds, in the punishment which he tremblingly decrees for the ill-doer, a justice and a benevolence of God, so Christ in His unity with God knows that the grace of God to humanity will reveal itself in that judgment whose consciousness only He possesses. And therefore He may well implore for His heart this unveiling of God’s grace with the question Why? and express in the question itself the confidence that God will answer Him. Thus, as God is everywhere present in the awakened conscience of the sinner, and not only in his terrors, but also in the suffering of his repentance; as He is present in the punitive severity of the judge, as well as in his trembling sympathy, so in His highest glory He is present in the sacred consciousness of Christ, that now the judgment upon the world is come to pass—present in His anguish as well as in His triumph. And this consciousness of Christ informs us of the consciousness wherewith God, in the sacred darkness of His righteous administration, fulfils through all the world His inscrutable judgments, in that all their deadly and painful effects are known to His sympathy, while His grace changes these terrors into salvation.

If we thus fairly present to ourselves that the soul of Christ could express itself in no higher strain than in that exclamation to God, My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me? and that this question of Christ certainly met a substantial answer from God which was in proportion to itself, we have this acknowledged, that with this appeal of Christ the work of salvation was also substantially decided as a victory over death.

But because this word of Christ expresses the moment in which judgment is accomplished in victory, while the feeling of the world’s judgment flashes through Him, and this feeling through His faithfulness to God is changed into the assurance of the world’s redemption; thus also the earthly mind, as it is still disposed to despair, may think it perceives even here the most terrible cry of despair, although the saying is always more and more revealing itself to faith as the watchword of Christ’s victory over death.

Thus, under the cross of Christ itself, Christ’s appeal was even at that time perceived by the disciples, although only dimly in its divine power. Even to its original expression it stamped itself indelibly on their minds.³⁵ By others, on the contrary, the same word, even on the spot, was most wickedly misinterpreted. Some of the people who stood under the cross remarked at the same time, ‘Behold, He calleth Elias!’ These must have been people who were in some degree familiar with the Jewish theology. They knew that Elias was to return as Christ’s forerunner, and to prepare a way for Him.³⁶ They alluded to that, in observing, mockingly, that Jesus called for Elias. But even in this hateful disfigurement of His word, the involuntary acknowledgment is expressed, that His cry to God was filled with an energy of soul, a freshness of life, which astonished the hearers; a prayerful cry as clear and strong as if He had called some one at hand to help,—notwithstanding in this interpretation we have a proof that Christ was crucified by His enemies, not only in His personal manifestation, but also in His individual sayings. That exegesis was a type of the thousandfold twisting of His word out of the infinite into the finite, out of the wonderful into the unusual, out of the Christian into the heathenish, which it was to experience even down to the latest days.

Whilst in the meanwhile the spectators were still busied with this saying, they heard a new cry of Jesus—the word, ‘I thirst.’

This saying probably intimates no new access of His suffering. Rather it is a proof that the evening-time had begun to appear in His soul. Hitherto the tension of His spiritual conflict had not suffered Him to think of the ardent thirst which consumed Him. But with His last, hottest struggle, He won the victory. God must have answered Him in His soul, otherwise He could not even now again have thought specially upon His bodily need, and on its satisfaction.³⁷ John also suggests this. He writes, ‘When Jesus knew that all things were now accomplished (that the Scripture might be fulfilled³⁸), He said, I thirst!’ It is plain, as the undistorted meaning of the Evangelist, that He does not mean to say that Jesus spoke this word with a purpose only of fulfilling the Scripture. If we assume the contrary,³⁹ we must suppose that, according to the view of the Evangelists, He did not really thirst, and that He did not care in the most exact sense, therefore, to receive a draught. Moreover, it is forgotten that the same John, a little before, and altogether in a similar manner, says, that the soldiers would not rend the garment of Christ, that the Scripture might be fulfilled—to wit, the passage of the Psalms quoted. In that place (19:24) it is certainly not to be thought of that the soldiers would have cast lots about the vesture of Christ for the sake of the fulfilment of the Scripture, of which they knew nothing. In that case, therefore, the Evangelist referred the act of the soldiers, in the most significant manner, to the ruling of Providence which led them, so that they unconsciously were compelled to fulfil the Scripture. And was he here, on the contrary, in the most spiritless manner, to relate an entirely cognate fact? Certainly the Evangelist might, with entire confidence, assume that Jesus, in this saying also—I thirst—thought on the prophetic element of that description of the fearful thirst in Psa 22:1-31, as He generally referred in His sufferings to the prophetic tone of that psalm.

If we have rightly apprehended the previous word of Christ, in which He complains to the Father of His desertion, the word ‘I thirst’ looks like the word of a hero who had not been conscious that his wounds were bleeding, and that he needed strengthening, until the rage of the battle had ceased; of a hero who begins, in the feeling of his victory, to think upon his own refreshment, and now requests a draught from those who stand around. Thus Christ, in the presentiment of His death, asks for one more draught for refreshment, after He has already struggled through the great contest with death. And so also this word is to us, first of all, a great and auspicious sign.

Moreover, in that case, the same word is to us a faithful representation of His position. The Man with the gushing spring of everlasting life in His heart, who formerly spoke the word to the Samaritan woman, Whoever shall drink of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst again, here makes the acknowledgment, I thirst. This word has exactly the same special emphasis with which it is related of Him that He was hungry after He had fasted in the wilderness for forty days. There He was overtaken by hunger in its gigantic power, here by thirst. Even in the endurance of hunger and thirst, He is the fellow-sufferer with humanity, and has become its Prince, its Comforter, and Deliverer. It was to Him now as if all the freshness and fulness of His life were dried up, so wasted was His strength, so withered His life, so breathed through by the fever-glow of His suffering: His whole nature cried out for a last refreshment.⁴⁰ And yet even now He was the miraculous spring from which streams forth unfailingly the water of everlasting life, from which it streams even forth in the complaint itself—I thirst!

There is a thirst of the soul which only God can appease—the need of the eternal refreshment of that everlasting creation of God out of the fulness of His eternal life. In this respect Christ could never suffer the wasting thirst; rather He was Himself, in His unity with God, constantly the living spring. Even in the feeling of His desertion itself, it was only for a moment that the terrors of that thirst, of that want of the world separated from God, filled Him with dismay. But there is also a thirst of life which, according to God’s ordinance, can only be satisfied by nature, by life, and the love of men. The life planted in the world must be refreshed also in the currents of the actual life of the world. And this thirst Jesus must have actually experienced in the most susceptible manner when He was placed and appointed in the midst of the world as the absolutely sound man, to be refreshed by the whole creation, to be gladdened by the blessings of the entire humanity. Thus He experienced more than any what it means to thirst—to be in want of the refreshing freshness of nature, the comforting hand and love of humanity. But that He expressed this experience in one single complaining cry, is to us a direct proof that His soul altogether depended on God, and was anew refreshed with His divine fulness. For with this saying He turned again to humanity.

He might now with one last effort have been able easily to overcome His thirst, if He had cared to be able to do so—to seal the bravery of His, life with an action of proud stoicism. But such apparent heroisms belong to the pre-Christian standpoint. The Founder of a religion which preaches the resurrection of the body, even in His complaint, I thirst, asserted the claim of corporeity, the claim of One parched with thirst, especially of One thirsting in the hour of death; yea, not only the claim, but also the duty of the thirsty One, to seek for Himself refreshment in the ordinance of the sacred life which God has appointed for His life. Thus also He separates His case from all false super-humanity of human pride, whether it be characterized as stoicism, as monachism, or as spiritual abuse of that which is corporeal.

Doubtless it was not permitted to the friends of Christ to hand Him one more refreshing draught. Nevertheless, Jesus uttered His complaint. In the midst of the company of His rude guards—of His stern enemies-He let fall the word, and in so doing has been found the greatest triumph of His love; and rightly. Neither pride nor rancour, nor even mistrust, seals His mouth in this company; not pride;—not even now, when the great feeling is coming on Him, that He has accomplished the deliverance of the world. The first word which He utters in this perfect consciousness, that He henceforward is the King on the throne of grace, is a prayerful complaint, like the word of a beggar. And, moreover, no rancour restrains Him, although these men would already have given Him to drink in scorn and mockery, and are representatives of a world which has given Him to drink, at His departure, of gall and vinegar. Even the simple but difficult tension wherewith for a long time He must have restrained Himself in silence towards these men, is past now. He not only can, but He must even now show them again the entire divine impartiality of His love—show it in the form of so humiliating a complaint; yea, He will, and must: it is a necessity to Him, for the breath of God’s reconciliation blows around Him, the Spirit of peace begins to brighten the dark world anew for Him; and in this mood it becomes even a necessity for Him to give to men one more final sign of love, to receive one more token of love from them. As thus He thirsts for the refreshment of the draught, so He thirsts for the draught of refreshing love; thus also for one last human greeting, for a human blessing. And if this feature of His thirst be prosecuted even to its deepest meaning, it may perhaps be said, that here there is an entirely peculiar degree of feeling—He thirsted after the souls of men. But it must always appear to us especially remarkable in the word of Jesus, that no mistrust restrained Him from confiding His necessity to the bystanders. After all the experiences which He had had of the power of evil in the human heart, He had nevertheless preserved His confidence in the return of the Spirit of love. And how should He not, when He had just rescued the dying love of humanity in His heart? Even now He began to awaken it in the hearts again of them that stood around, and no word could be more appropriate for that purpose than the word of His faithful prayer.

And the word of Christ produced an instantaneous effect. Close by stood a vessel filled with the common wine frequently alluded to; immediately one of them sprang to it, filled a sponge, fastened it to a reed (of the hyssop plant⁴¹), and came and gave Him to drink. According to John, several were concerned in doing this; but it is strange that in Matthew’s account the rest at this moment cried out, ‘Stop! (ἄφες) let us see whether Elias will come to save Him;’ whilst in Mark the man who offered Him the draught said these words, as crying to the others to stop (ἄφετε). According to Mark, it is plain that the cry could not have been intended to withhold the draught. It might be supposed that this action indicated the separation of two worlds. In the words of this people there is still perceived a faint echo of the previous mockery; but in their deed is manifest already the power of Christ’s spirit, which constrained them into the service of love. But apparently, even in this latter expression itself, the mocking spirit was much subdued. The heaven above them had become more and more gloomy. The impression made on them by this marvellous darkness, by the dying Christ, by the unprecedented excitement of feeling of the whole people, had become more and more powerful. Finally, the piercing cry of Christ filled them with a dismay never known before.⁴² Thus probably a disposition had come over them, in which they would consider it probable that Elias, as the prophet of retributive punishment, might actually break forth out of the invisible world (comp. Luk 23:48). A great terror of spirit would seize them in spite of the military watch which was present, in spite of the publicity of the place and the multitude of spectators. Already, even at the moment in which Jesus cried out the words, ‘Eli, Eli,’ the spirit of fear must have influenced them, in order to lead them to that marvellous idea, ‘He calleth for Elias.’ They put this idea, it is true, into the form of mockery; but probably only to enable them to resist their fear. But the thought does not leave them; and when they now cry to one another, ‘Hold, let us see whether Elias will come and help Him,’ it is as if we heard a crowd of frightened men, who seek to rid themselves in a dark forest from the fear of spirits, and so cry to one another, as if for a jest, the name of the dreaded being. They appear to joke; but if we listen more closely, we observe how they tremble; and it was probably this disposition especially, in which the man who handed to the Lord the last draught said these words. He could only approach Him with fear.

Jesus accepted the last poor refreshment which the man offered Him. He drank the sour wine; the draught of honour which was administered to Him at the completion of His work. How often with such wine, sour as vinegar, has the world again and again given Him to drink, in like manner, in His misunderstood, struggling, bleeding, dying witnesses!

And now, with His last strength, He took leave of His friends, as He cried to them, ‘It is finished.’ Finished was His holy life; with His life, His struggle; with His struggle, His work; with His work, the redemption; with the redemption, the foundation of the new world. And therewith substantially, in the sight of God, in His eternity, in the depth of life of the world and of the believing heart, all was finished. With this triumphant cry He confirmed the Gospel to His disciples—the Gospel which He had announced to them, and had bestowed on the world. In this word He once more comprised all that He had said to them in the high-priestly prayer. At that time all had been finished in His Spirit, but now also all is finished in the destiny of His life. This word was His last to men. John kept it in his heart, and delivered it to the Church as the great word of His farewell to humanity.

But then Jesus turned to His Father, crying with a loud voice, ‘Father, into Thine hands I commend My Spirit!’

No shadowy form of a dark destiny stands before Him at the end of His career, although He must die on the cross; the countenance of the Father shines before Him. He does not behold His life melting away into the gloomy floods of mortality. He commends it into the hands of His Father. It is not alone in the general spirit of humanity that He will continue to live. He will live on in the definite personality of His own Spirit, embraced by the special protection and faithfulness of His Father. Thus He does not surrender His life despondingly to death for destruction, but with triumphant consciousness to the Father for resurrection. It was the very centre of His testament: assurance of life; surrender of His life into the hand of a living Father. With loud voice He exclaimed it to the world, which will for ever and ever sink into the heathenish consciousness of death, of the fear of death, of despair of immortality and resurrection, because it for ever and ever allows the consciousness of the personality of God, and of personal union with Him, to be obscured and shaken. With the heart of a lion, the dying Christ once more testified of life with an expression which was connected with the word of the Old Testament Psalm (Psa 31:5), and testified that the Spirit of eternal life was already operative in prophetic anticipation in the old covenant. Thus living as ever, He surrendered His life, through death, to the eternally living One. His death was the last and highest fact, the crown of His holy life.

The Evangelist Luke probably is indebted for the remembrance of this last word of Jesus to a witness who, at the death of Jesus, stood beneath His cross, probably as in the case of many other remembrances,—to the mother of Jesus. Disciples standing farther away had been, for the most part, startled by the penetrating awakening tone of this last word of Christ. This indelible impression stamped itself on the two first Gospels. They only relate that Jesus, with a loud cry, gave up the ghost.⁴³

At the moment when Jesus, with a loud voice, surrendered His Spirit to the Father, there ensued a great earthquake, which rent the rocks. Probably the darkening of the face of the earth, which had already lasted three hours, had now reached its crisis. It had been the premonitory symptom of the earthquake. This earthquake was its accomplishment. The history of the world is full of suggestions that the evolution of the earth’s destiny runs parallel with the history of humanity; and therefore great earthquakes and other natural phenomena have been referred to the death of great men. But that the death of Christ was actually attended by a great earthquake, is entirely in accordance with that mysterious connection between the royal centre of this world and its external cosmical circumference. The earthly world feels that its King dies—that His death lays the foundation for its destruction and for its glorification. It feels a birth-pang of development, through which it progresses into a new stage of its dark life, as is accordant with this revolution of humanity which has now begun.⁴⁴

These appearances in nature, however, become to us at once symbols of the effect of the death of Jesus in the moral world—of His influence upon the hearts of men. This influence showed itself first of all in the most remarkable manner in the case of the Roman centurion who stood beneath the cross, and had the charge of the execution.

It is a circumstance of indescribably beautiful spiritual truth which the Evangelists narrate, that the heathen captain actually, by the startling power in the last cry of Christ, arrived at an assured conviction of His glory. The Roman warrior thought, perhaps, that he had long known what it was to die. And probably he knew, in fact, what honourable death was, according to the principles of Roman bravery—he might have become familiar with it upon many a field of slaughter. But the majesty of voluntary death, which made itself known in the thunder of the power with which Jesus committed His soul to God—this was new to him, and took possession of his soul, as a revelation of the Eternal Godhead. This divine death awakened him to a new life. As if beside himself for excitement, the man began to speak wonderful words. He praised God on account of this event; and it was the least thing, that he praised Him as a righteous man, whom he was commissioned to put to death as a malefactor (Luk 23:47). He asserted with an oath, that Jesus is the Son of God. He did not, perhaps, assert this in the sense of a developed Christian acknowledgment; but neither did he assert it in the spirit of heathen superstition. Doubtless the centurion knew of the reproach under which the Jews had brought Christ to the cross,—namely, that He had made Himself the Son of God. This was what he now confirmed by oath, the assertion of Christ about Himself, although he only knew very dimly how to develop to himself its meaning. That this was the reference of his word, Matthew gives us certainly to infer: ‘Yea, in truth, this was the Son of God.’ As if he had meant to say, It was in truth as He said; and He was not a blasphemer of God, as His enemies wished to stamp Him. The earthquake especially led him to this certainty, with the signs by which it was accompanied. He saw in it a testimony of God. Even his companions were possessed by this spirit. Full of fear, they agreed in his testimony.

Thus this believing heathen, with his companions upon Golgotha, became the first representative of the heathen world, which in after times bowed the knee before the might of Christ’s cross. Yea, this witness of Christ, with his assertion that Christ was verily the Son of God, seems already to deliver to the Jews a sentence of punishment for their rejection of Him as a blasphemer of God. But the Jewish people began to quake under the great signs of God which testified for the honour of Christ: many a conscience awoke—many people were moved—a sense of fearful foreboding ran through the crowds, noisily cursing and triumphing. They had come in a crowd diabolically stirred up to crucify the Lord; silently, dejected, one by one, they stole away from Golgotha. Many smote on their breast.⁴⁵

And thus, finally, the opponents left the field to the disciples of Christ. The acquaintance of Jesus—who had stood afar off in order to look towards Him always as if they had been chained to the place, especially the pious women who had joined themselves, for the sake of service, to His procession from Galilee, and among whom especially Mary Magdalene, the Mary of Cleophas, and Salome, are named to us—were the last upon the sacred spot. They did not lose the dying One from their view; and the signs also by which God glorified His Only-begotten in death were not lost for them. But the more these signs began to appear, and the more the adversaries began fearfully to retreat, so much the more courageously they could advance. Probably they were even there as ear-witnesses, when the Roman centurion asserted the righteousness and glory of Christ. And when Jesus had died, they might advance as His heirs.

The bequest of His last words had been already communicated to them. As, after the deluge, the seven-coloured rainbow arched itself in the clouds over the earth and announced to the family of Noah the return of the delivering sun; as it was made to him a sacrament of the covenant that God would not henceforth destroy humanity with water, so the seven last words shone forth to their shattered hearts as the spiritual rainbow of grace. Doubtless they were afflicted even to death. The death of Christ had buried their old world in its waves, as formerly Noah saw the old world buried in the waves. But as the sign of the covenant of the seven colours of the celestial light comforted him, so the sign of the covenant of the seven heavenly words comforted them. They could not take leave of Golgotha comfortless when this heavenly sign shone to them. Although even now they still felt it to be gloomy, yet they had received the consolation that they should attain a new life out of this flood of death, into which in spirit they had been plunged down with the Lord, so that to them a fairer world than the new world of Noah must emerge out of this deluge. And as they were the inheritors of the last words of Jesus, they now hoped with stimulated courage to become also the heirs of His corpse.

Moreover, the death of Christ manifested its effect in other ways—in events which of themselves indeed were of a dark and enigmatical kind, but in connection with the leading occurrence became the liveliest symbols. The Evangelist Matthew has preserved the reference to these features, and has recorded them in words which in fact have the ring of a hymn, without at the same time losing their historical character. For here the history itself takes the character of a hymn. The earthquake, under the sign of which Jesus died, had not only been announced by the darkening of heaven, but also by a peculiar occurrence in the temple. Just as, in the general way, the actual appearance of a convulsion of the earth is known at first by objects in the dwellings beginning to shake, by houses cracking, bells in the towers ringing, or dwellings bursting into flames, so in this case the earthquake especially announced itself by the veil of the temple (which separated the holy place from the holiest of all) being rent in twain from the top to the bottom.⁴⁶

The details of the rending of the veil were of secondary importance to the Evangelist. And although he has not declared himself on the symbolic significance of this event, yet probably it was this significance which induced him to record it. It is true that the moment of the death of Jesus was not primarily the crisis at which the temple was forsaken of its Divinity. Rather the temple had become a desolation when, on account of the unbelief of His people, Christ had been compelled to take leave of it.⁴⁷ But that invisible fact was now manifested in a definite sign, and actually contemporaneously with the moment in which the unbelief of the Jewish people became in the most glaring manner a world-historical phenomenon—in the death-suffering of Christ, which it inflicted upon Him. When, in so momentous an hour, in an extraordinary manner, the curtain which veiled the Holy of Holies was rent, this must appear to the believing mind as a sign from God that the old worship of the temple was now abrogated, and for the time to come rejected, by Jehovah. But it is not God’s manner to abolish old institutions without bringing forward their essential principle in new appointments. He does not allow the shell to break until the kernel is fully ripened. Even in this point Christ is the very image of the Father—Christ as not having come to destroy the law, but to fulfil it. And such a fulfilment was even now coming to pass. In the place of the symbolic atonement came the real one in all its powers. The work of the real High Priest abrogated the symbolic priesthood; the sacrifice of His blood, in the power of His everlasting Spirit, supplanted the types of the symbolic blood of the sacrifice of animals; the symbolic day of atonement was displaced by the holy feast-day of the great surrender of Christ to the Father in the name of humanity; and the offering of the real sacrificial blood did not occur in that place where the presence of the holy God was represented by mysterious signs and terrible concealment, but publicly on the accursed place of execution, where Jesus found the presence of His God even in the midst of the horror of apparent desertion by Him, in the midst of ignominy and shame, suffering and death, in the glory of grace, and surrendered Himself to the Holy One with the sacrifice of His life. If we now keep in view the characteristic fact that Jesus accomplished His sacrifice through death and entered into the holiest of all; the true holiest of all is, in fact, heaven itself.⁴⁸ But the real veil which, at the same time with the symbolical one, was rent in twain from the top to the bottom, is therefore that terrible curtain of the fear of death, of the suffering of death, and of judgment, which had until then terrified humanity, and thus deterred it from returning to God. With the death of Jesus this curtain is rent in twain-this was to be intimated by that sign of God in the temple. It is rent in twain from the top to the bottom, or, as Luke says, rent in the midst. The old heathen horror and Jewish trembling at suffering, at the cross, at disgrace, and the night of death, and at the judicial administration of God in this relation, is completely dissolved through Christ for all who believe on Him. The Christian finds now, in the midst of the judgment of Christ, the atonement; and by this knowledge, again, he finds the peace of the atonement, even in the judgments of his life. The entrance into the holiest of all, the admittance to the throne of grace, is thus free for all the world through the blood of Christ—for all who come thither in the power and fellowship of His death.

Another event which, according to Matthew, was associated with the death of Christ, was still more mysterious. We must seek to follow out the view of the Evangelist according to its inward motives, even to the point where He allows this event to appear in the full expression of its mysterious nature. Thus the first change which was connected with the death of Jesus was that the veil of the temple was rent. Thus an essentially new relation appeared in the centre of the present spiritual world. Thereupon was perceived the earthquake itself. Rending of rocks testified of His power, and proved that earthly nature itself had experienced the influence of this suffering of death. But here, in the deep foundations of the earthly sphere, the effect of Christ’s death did not cease. The Evangelist continues: ‘And the graves were opened, and many bodies of saints which slept arose.’ Thus the death of Jesus has not only changed the relations of this present spiritual world in association with the circumstances of the earthly world, but also the relations of the after world of spirits of the kingdom of the dead in its deepest ground and centre, and has therewith announced a gradual transformation of it, which must one day be completed.

But whence has the Evangelist any certain information of the last event? ‘And they came out of their graves.’ He relates further: ‘And after His resurrection they went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.’ These appearances form the foundation of this special information. The poetic colouring of the narrative cannot justify us in this case in denying its historical intention and nature. In a circle of living people, which was equally friendly to the saintly dead and to the living Evangelists, several men contemporaneously, after the resurrection of Christ, related that the spirits of pious dead people appeared to them. These appearances had the peculiarity, that they were so frequent—that the risen saints appeared to many. In that case, they represented themselves to those who saw them in the dawn of the new life of corporeality. They were thus of a happier kind—blossoms of resurrection; and they even characterized themselves thus, that they referred all to the death of Jesus, although they did not appear till after His resurrection.

First of all, it is manifest that the Evangelist answers for the truth of those occurrences by His testimony. In the circle of believers, sights of this kind were frequently experienced after the resurrection,—appearances, namely, of risen saints. But, consequently, the Spirit of truth also which guided the Evangelist gives security, as a spirit of examination, for the objective truth of these events. The visions of good men in the world of time were actually occasioned by changes in the condition of spirits in the kingdom of the dead, in which changes the future resurrection was announced; and these visions were caused by intelligence which related to the resurrection. But that the Evangelist intended to speak of the commencement of a proper resurrection, and of purely external appearances—this does not appear from his statement. The great fact to him is rather this, that the death of Jesus exercises an animating influence upon the world of the dead,—that this is first of all expressed in the kingdom of the pious dead, in the beginnings of embodiment, and made itself known by wonderful bright appearances in the night-life of pious living persons.

Thus the death of Christ has annulled death, even down into the kingdom of the dead. He declared His power in all the spheres of life. In mighty signs He has manifested Himself as the power of the awakening of spirits, of the reconciliation of the world, of the glorification of the earth, and of the resurrection of the dead.

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Notes

1. The supposition of the ancient Church, that in the crucifixion both the hands and feet of the Lord were nailed to the cross, was disputed since 1792, by Dr Paulus, who maintained that the feet of Jesus were only bound. This assertion was expressly confuted by Hengstenberg, Hug, and Bähr. (Comp. Tholuck, die Glaubwürdigkeit, p. 367.) Lately Hug has reverted to the question in his Gutachten, ii. 174. Compare also Friedlieb, p. 144. The text referred to in Luke furnishes the first proof of the complete nailing. The testimonies of the oldest fathers of the Church confirm this-fathers who wrote upon this subject at a time when the punishment of the cross was still in use, especially the passage in Tertullian, adv. Marcion, I. iii. 19, where he represents the nailing referred to of the hands and of the feet as the peculiar atrocitas crucis. See Neander, p. 464. Among the testimonies in the heathen writings, the familiar passage in Plautus (Mostellaria, Act II., scene i. 13) has considerable weight.

‘Ego dabo ei talentum, primus qui in crucem excucurrerit
Sed ea lege, ut offigantur bis pedes, bis brachia.’

2. Upon the import of the words כָאֲרִי יֶדַי וְרַגְלַי, compare Hengstenberg, Christologie, i. 178; Hitzig, die Psalmen, ii. 37; Ewald, die Psalmen, 168. The agreement especially of the Alexandrine and Syriac versions is in favour of the usual ecclesiastical interpretation. When, however, Hengstenberg desires to show that the text cannot in this sense refer either to David or to any other sufferer except the Messiah, he proceeds from a standing which does not distinguish between the lyrically unconscious prophecies, which generally pervade the Psalms (according to their nature), and the portions that contain historically conscious prophecies. And this argument is substantially turned against himself, if it is remembered that the Psalm must first of all set forth the poet’s feeling. Ewald, with reason, insists that the word must be taken in the connection of the situation described. Therefore the passage speaks of a sufferer whom the adversaries have already condemned to death, and whose clothes they are purposing to divide. Thus he understands, with reference to the root, כאר כור, &c., the word which he reads, כָאֲרוּ, of binding, chaining. But the word appears actually in the connection to be intended to convey a much deeper sorrow. Perhaps the view of the poet is engaged with these images. In vers. 13 and 14, the enemies compass him about. In vers. 15 and 16, his bodily strength and his living courage entirely give way, and he sinks down. In vers. 17 and 18, they begin to lay hold on him, surrounding him like greedy dogs (smelling around and snapping) to destroy him. Here is suggested a considerable enhancement for the parallel case, which as yet is to be expected. The image of the dogs may be enhanced, when it is said of the wicked that they fall like a lion upon his hands and feet (as if to gnaw them off). The interpretation of Paulus and Hitzig corresponds to this. Just in the same way, moreover, the image of the eagerness with which they show enmity to him may be enhanced. This occurs as well in Ewald as in the ecclesiastical interpretation. Whilst, however, the latter, according to ordinary comprehension, is little accommodated or clear, the former gives, as we have said, a meaning too feeble. Thus, we might be inclined to give the preference to the interpretation of Fuller and Jahn, who, following Aquila, give to the word כוּר the meaning fœdare, if this meaning were properly established (comp. thereupon Hengstenberg, 181). The dogs, for instance, had already begun to gnaw the limbs of the sufferer, to tear off their flesh. The picture of the mistreatment is completed, ver. 17. The destruction of the sufferer is then considered as decided, when the adversaries began to part his garments among them, ver. 18. He seems to them to be destroyed. But now, moreover, he attains new vitality in the recourse to his God, although, so to speak, he gets into the jaw of the lion, ver. 21. The frequent recurrence of the lion’s mouth commends, especially in one passage, the interpretation;—‘as a lion.’ But still the old interpreters must have had significant reasons in their agreement for their view. But if we abide by this, the view must probably be thus defined, that the teeth of grinning wild beasts must have at first hacked (yea, pierced through) the hands and feet of the sufferer; and this remains a vivid prophecy of the passion of the cross.

3. Strauss intimates (ii. 523) that the author of the fourth Gospel must have gathered the information about the soldiers sharing among themselves the clothes of Jesus, and casting lots upon His vesture, from the passage in Psa 22:19, and that without consideration of the Hebrew parallelism in that place. ‘So that we should thus have in the fourth Evangelist precisely the same treatment which we have found in the history of the Entry. In the case of the first, in both cases, there is the reduplication of an originally single feature, arising from a mistaken apprehension of the å in the Hebrew parallelism.’ We should thus have the very remarkable circumstance, that the first Evangelist does not recognize the Hebrew parallelism in the first case; in the second, however, he has recognized it; whilst, on the other hand, the fourth Evangelist did appreciate the parallelism in the first case, but in the second did not. Upon the assumed difficulty that the first Gospel seems to imply that the lots were cast upon all the garments of of Jesus, comp. Ebrard, 436.

4. Tradition has given names to both the thieves. See Sepp thereupon, 557. Upon the tradition in respect of the age of Mary and of John at the time of the crucifixion, see Sepp, 560.

5. The many relations between Psa 22:1-31 and the history of the passion, which induced Tertullian to observe of that psalm, that it contained ‘totam Christi passionem,’ have been rightly brought forward by Strauss (ii. 525); but if thereupon anything should be inferred against the authenticity of the evangelic history of the passion, it proceeds out of the same horror entertained by the critic against all prophetic significance in the relation between the Old and New Testaments, which has induced him so often to regard the greatest New Testament facts as the paltriest imitations of Moses, arising from Old Testament sympathies.

6. The contradictions that Strauss seeks to discover in the several narratives of the Evangelists upon the presence of the friends of Jesus at the crucifixion, in that the two first merely mention several Galilean women; Luke, all the acquaintances of Jesus, and thus probably also the twelve; but the fourth Evangelist names John, and among the women, ‘instead of the mother of the sons of Zebedee, the mother of Jesus,’—are probably sufficiently explained by the remark that the individual Evangelists have not sought to draw up any register of the friends of Jesus who were present beneath the cross; but, besides, they may be explained from the fact that their several assertions, as has been shown, rest upon the most subtle shades of the individual evangelic recollection, view, and representation.

The same remark applies to the communication of the seven sayings, as recorded by the several reporters. Comp. Ebrard.

7. On the narrative of the darkening of the sun at the death of Jesus, Strauss remarks, that the supposition ‘of a supernatural origin of the darkness, in default of any sufficient purpose for such a miracle, appears without foundation.’ As regards the supernatural origin, Theism must needs maintain such an origin for all obscurations of the earth and sun, irrespective of the mediation of the same by nature. But if the critic here finds the mysterious fact without foundation, in ‘default of any sufficient purpose,’ it is to be added to the long score of his offences against his own philosophy and his own dogmatism. Assuredly, according to such criticism, one might expunge from history everything of deep significance, everything mysterious, everything ætherially subtle, tragically great, theocratically marvellous; nay, everything that should seem strange to the common-place mind, in officially pronounced default of a sufficing purpose. Even in the rending of the veil of the temple, our teleologic critic again will feel the absence of the purpose. It is remarkable that the critic probably has a consciousness that the several extraordinary events at the death of Jesus must have been only several branches of one great event, but that he nevertheless separates them into wholly distinct prodigies—darkening of heaven, rending of the veil, and earthquake.

Upon the mention of the darkening of the earth recorded by the Evangelists, in ancient writers, comp. Neander, 467. ‘The fathers of the first century refer frequently to a statement made by Phlegon, the author of a chronicle under the Cæsar Hadrian. Eusebius quotes his words in his Chronicon, under the fourth year of the 202d Olympiad: ἔκλειψις ἡλίου μεγίστη τῶν ἐγνωσμένων πρότερον, καὶ νὺξ ὣρα ἕκτη τῆς ἡμέρας ἐγένετο ὥστε καὶ ἀστέρας ἐν οὐρανῷ φανῆναι.’ A great earthquake in Bithynia had destroyed most part of Nicæa (l. c. p. 614). Consequently, the eclipse of the sun mentioned by Phlegon was no ordinary one, but a phenomenon associated with a great earthquake. Hence, when Hug remarks that the passage of Phlegon is nothing to the purpose, because he speaks of an eclipse of the sun, which is not to be thought of at the time of the Israelitish Passover, he has overlooked the close relation of that eclipse to the earthquake. Strauss remarks against the application of the passage, that in it there is only the Olympiad mentioned, scarcely the year; but certainly not the time of year nor the day. From the omission of the last, indeed, no difficulty would arise if it were conceded that the fourth year of the 202d Olympiad was about coincident with the year of Jesus’ death, 783. But the two historical points, according to our chronological assumptions, do not harmonize sufficiently for us to appeal to the passage indicated, since the fourth year of the 202d Olympiad falls in the year 785 u.c., thus two years too late for us (Brinkmeier, Chronologie, 208). The more accurate definitions we leave to the consideration of chronologists. Even from the circumstance that the ancients frequently referred eclipses that occurred to the deaths of great men which followed nearly at the same time, Strauss will borrow an argument against the reality of this darkness. On the other hand, Hug observes: ‘At the death of Romulus there occurred an eclipse, also at the death of Cæsar, and also at the going out of Pelopidas to the ill-omened murder of Perseus,’ &c. Hence the following conclusion is drawn: ‘Instead of being defences of the credibility of the evangelic history, these parallels are so many premisses to the conclusion that even here we have only a Christian tradition, arising out of widely diffused ideas, which would have all nature join with her solemn garb of mourning in solemnizing the tragic death of the Messiah.’ A counter question is, Are the appearances themselves untrue, because the popular opinion conceived that when they occurred together with great events, preceded or followed them, they were associated with them, and took them for heavenly intimations—ostenta, portenta, prodigia? In fact, and finally, extraordinary phenomena must be actually taken out of the recollection of the world, in order fundamentally to remove the indestructible inclination of ‘susceptible people’ to bring the great moments in the life of nature into relation with the great moments in the history of humanity.

By the καταπέτασμα can only be meant the curtain of the Holy of holies; not, as Hug thinks (188), the outer veil (comp. Heb 6:19; Heb 9:3; Heb 10:20). Hug thinks that the high priests would have hushed it up if it had been the inner curtain. Sepp, on the other hand (581), says that the priest who looks after the evening sacrifice in the temple had related with pale astonishment to the people outside what had happened. If we consider the great inaccessibility of the Holy of holies, it is clear that in the case mentioned the temple itself was made inaccessible for a while to most of the priests, until the Holy of holies was veiled again, and the curtain was again repaired, and that thus a cessation in the worship of sacrifice would arise. Thence probably such an event must have been known to the people. Strauss finds it difficult, according to the order of precedence of Lightfoot, to refer the rending of the veil to the earthquake, since it is not easily understood ‘how this latter would be able to rend a flexible, freely suspended curtain.’ It has been answered thereto that that curtain was strained (Sepp, iii. 510). But then Strauss asks again, how it happened that no part of the building was destroyed previously. On the other hand, however, it is asked, Whence is the critic aware that this was not the case? According to Jerome, the gospel of the Hebrews related that an immense beam of the temple did fall down. If we suppose, then, that such a beam fell athwart the covering of the veil, we have suggested to us the possibility of the rent occurring from the top to the bottom. The Jewish tradition plainly points to noticeable events in the temple, when it relates that, forty years before the destruction of the temple, the light on the golden candlestick was extinguished, the gate of the temple flew open at night-time of its own accord, &c. (comp. Sepp, 581). Even in kindred traditions, which refer to the time of the destruction itself, the gloomy feeling of the Jewish people is expressed that God had forsaken the temple (Tacit. Hist. v. 13). For the rest, if a critic will suppose that the New Testament writers must have appealed to the rending of the veil in the arguments against the Jews (Strauss, 537), we are reminded of the familiar charge of that critic, that John the Baptist must have testified to the Messiahship of Jesus, on the authority of his mother Elizabeth.

Even for the appearances of the spirits which were connected with the death of Christ, Strauss again can find no ‘sufficient purpose.’ On several explanations of the place referred to, compare Strauss, 541.

8. At the close of the consideration of the crucifixion, the critic (Strauss) refers to the time. ‘The numbering of the hours makes a peculiar difficulty in this case.’ We have noticed it above.

1) Rosenmülleri Scholia in Matt, in loc. Compare Plautus, Miles. Glor. iii. 2, 23.

2) Kuinœl, Evang. Matt, in loc. Friedlieb, 1 41; Sepp, 540. That it was a Roman custom to give such a draught to the condemned, as Olshausen observes, iv. 230, is not proved. [Lightfoot quotes from the Talmud, 'To those that were to be executed, they gave a grain of myrrh infused in wane to drink, that their senses might be dulled ; as it is said, "Give strong drink to them that are ready to die, and wine to those that are of a sorrowful heart."'—ED.]

3) Prov. xxxi. 6. Compare the places referred to.

4) Neander, 464; Sepp, 541.

5) As Strauss thinks himself compelled to assume, in order to make out a differ ence (ii. 514).

6) Friedlieb, 141 ; Hug, 178. 'Between οῖνος and ὄξος, they (the ancients) had a medium ὀξίνης, tasteless as wine, and nearer to vinegar, but too weak for a good
vinegar.'

7) Tholuck, die Glaubwürdigkeit, 365: 'The Jewish Sanhedrim prescribed for this purpose a grain of frankincense, mixed with a cup of wine, which, according to Dioscorides, must have the distinct effect ; but the same physician proposes myrrh also for this purpose, and we read also of,, its use in such a case in Apuleius.'—Sepp, 541. [These references, and many others, are given in the learned and valuable work of Bynæus above referred to (iii. 268). He quotes from Faber, 'Dioscorides notat myrrhce vim inesse KapuTLKrjv. Ideo qui gravia subituri erant tormenta, quo fortius en tolerarent, leviusque sensibus gravedine sopitis afficerentur, rnyrrham precsumebant. And then the instances from the Ass of Apuleius are given.—ED.]

8) Friedlieb, 141: 'χολὴ is the Chaldee לענה, which everywhere signifies the bitter material, &c. [Meyer and Alford refuse to reconcile Matthew and Mark on this point. Lightfoot supposes that Mark gives the cup its usual customary technical name; while Matthew specifies the ingredients actually mixed in this particular cup, which were, for greater mockage, and out of more bitter rancour,' vinegar and gall. Olshausen and Alexander agree with the author in supposing that the cheap sour wine of the soldiers is accurately named ὄξος, and that myrrh, gall, and other bitter substances are put for the whole class.—ED.]

9) Sepp will have it that the soldiers had taken away the 'rich and fiery wine' from the pious women, and substituted in its stead that poor and common draught.

10) The Romans named a draught of this kind, expressively, 'Sopor.'

11) On the unclothing, Friedlieb, 143. [Or Lipsius, De Cruce, ii. 7. Also, Apuleius has the striking comparison, 'naked as a new-born babe; or as the crucified.'—ED.]

12) There was a twofold manner of crucifixion. Either the condemned were lifted up to the cross, already erected, or they were fastened to it while it was still on the ground; the former manner seems to have been the more usual. The proofs of this are in Friedlieb, 142. [Lipsius shows that both modes were used. Of Pionius, the martyr, he quotes, that he divested himself of his garments, stretched himself on the cross, and gave the soldiers liberty to fix the nails, and then eum igitur ligno fixu.ni erexerunt. But he shows that it was much more common first to erect the cross, and then to set the condemned on the small projecting bar and proceed with the fixing to the cross. It seems doubtful Whether ladders were used for this purpose. Bynæus agrees with Salmasius in thinking that the ordinary height of the feet of the crucified above the ground was no more than three or four feet, although in some cases it was undoubtedly much greater. The hyssop stalk on which the sponge was presented to our Lord on the cross was only 1½ foot long; and the stroke of the spear was probably a level thrust, and not from below upwards.—ED.]

13) Friedlieb, 144.

14) Note 1.

15) Neander, 464.

16) Strauss, ii. 513.

17) Τότε σταυροῦνται σὺν αὐτῷ, &c. As Strauss has not acknowledged the motive of the intelligent Evangelist in mentioning the execution of the thieves put here in this connection, he has come to the observation that Matthew refers to something of peculiar consequence.

18) On the characterizing of these three languages by the Jews, see Sepp, 549.

19) Friedlieb, 149.

20) John, vers. 23, 24; comp. Sepp, 553. Four soldiers were required, according to the Roman appointment of military service, 'ad excubias.'—Hug, ii. 181.

21) Friedlieb, 149; Sepp, iii. 552.

22) Friedlieb, 149; Sepp, iii. 553.

23) According to Wieseler, p. 146.

24) See above, vol. ii. p. 20.

25) 'Uneducated men frequently choose a catchword, which they constantly repeat, because they do not know how to bring out any connected discourse. Thus here it was the word, The destroyer of the temple' &c. Rauschenbusch, 420.

26) Strauss, ii. 526. It would indeed make the acceptance difficult, of the fact that the members of the Sanhedrim thus blasphemed God, if it were to be supposed that they consciously made use of the words which, in Ps. xxii. 8, were attributed to the enemies of the godly man. But this supposition is in no wise necessary. For the rest, it is just that the same criticism which cannot allow man in good things to transcend the sphere of a school-boy mediocrity, should seek in evil things to maintain him as much as possible in the sphere of security.

27) For example, in frightful imprecations.

28) The word ὀνειδίζειν is of very comprehensive meaning. It has not only the signification to abuse, to revile, but also to make reproaches, blamingly to upbraid anybody with anything, &c. The word ὄνειδος, whence it is derived, 'was used originally without question, as κλέος, φήμη, ὄνομα, fama and honos—as well of good as of evil report;' thus ὀνειδίζειν may mean also to praise—to exalt—to glorify.

29) See above, vol. i. p. 296.

30) On the Jewish doctrine of paradise, see Sepp, iii. 557.

31) Thus Schleierrnacher, Glaubenslekre, ii. 154; Neander, 466; and others. Compare, on the other hand, Olshausen, iv. 239; Strauss, ii. 529.

32) The latter view is to be found in De Wette on Matt. 238.

33) As De Wette, p. 239. He indeed contends with reason against the view of Olshausen, according to which, in this suffering of Jesus, His physical tortures must have been combined with a divesting of His soul of divine power.

34) Strauss, ii. 529.

35) In the most exact manner in Mark, in the Aramtean dialect, Eloi, Eloi, &c. Here probably it is to be remembered, that in his great death-struggle, as in his conscious circumstances, a man frequently speaks most accurately his original dialect.

36) Generally Elias was among the Jews a patron of the distressed. Comp. Sepp, 566.

37) Thus also the consciousness of hunger on the part of Jesus in the forty days temptation in the desert, was restrained until towards its conclusion ; and also the Lord still did not think of the satisfaction of His hunger so long as the tempter appealed to that necessity, and generally was before Him.

38) Comp. Luke xxii. 37, 38.

39) As Strauss is quite inclined to do (ii. 517), with the timid expression, 'Thus He appears almost to wish to say.'

40) On the torment of thirst in the crucified, see Sepp, 560.

41) Upon this plant, compare Sepp, 563.

42) Olshausen has denied the jesting tone in the words ; but, on the other hand, he rightly refers to the mysterious awe which came over their spirits. Strauss thinks, indeed, that this awe and trembling belongs rather to the unscientific disposition of the biblical commentator (531). According to him, it would not be scientific to observe the slighter expressions of a reasonable awe in the presence of the cross.

43) 'Jesus must' (Strauss, 531), 'according to Matthew and Mark, merely have cried aloud; but according to Luke, He must have cried aloud the words, ΙΙάτερ, &c. As though He must not, according to Matthew and Mark, have cried something aloud, if He cried aloud at all.'—Ebrard.

44) See above, p. 93. Compare Horn. viii. 18.

45) The critic Strauss will not understand this, 545.

46) According to Luke's account (ver. 45), the rending of the veil might be considered as a sign of the approaching earthquake, since here also it follows the darkening of the heaven.

47) See above, p. 74.

48) Heb. ix. 24.