(Mat_4:13-17; Mar_1:14, Mar_1:15; Luk 4:15-32)

The visit to Nazareth was in many respects decisive. It presented by anticipation an epitome of the history of the Christ. He came to His own, and His own received Him not. The first time He taught in the Synagogue, as the first time He taught in the Temple, they cast Him out. On the one and the other occasion, they questioned His authority, and they asked for a ‘sign.’ In both instances, the power which they challenged was, indeed, claimed by Christ, but its display, in the manner which they expected, refused. The analogy seems to extend even farther – and if a misrepresentation of what Jesus had said when purifying the Temple formed the ground of the final false charge against Him, the taunt of the Nazarenes: ‘Physician, heal thyself!’ found an echo in the mocking cry, as He hung on the Cross: ‘He saved others, Himself He cannot save.’

It is difficult to understand how, either on historical grounds, or after study of the character of Christ, the idea could have arisen that Jesus had offered, or that He had claimed, to teach on that Sabbath in the Synagogue of Nazareth. Had He attempted what, alike in spirit and form, was so contrary to all Jewish notions, the whole character of the act would have been changed. As it was, the contrast with those by whom He was surrounded is almost as striking, as the part which He bore in the scene. We take it for granted, that what had so lately taken place in Cana, at only four miles’ distance, or, to speak more accurately, in Capernaum, had become known in Nazareth. It raised to the highest pitch of expectancy the interest and curiosity previously awakened by the reports, which the Galileans had brought from Jerusalem, and by the general fame which had spread about Jesus. They were now to test, whether their countryman would be equal to the occasion, and do in His own city what they had heard had been done for Capernaum. To any ordinary man the return to Nazareth in such circumstances must have been an ordeal. Not so to the Christ, Who, in utter self-forgetfulness, had only this one aim of life – to do the Will of Him that sent Him. And so His bearing that day in the Synagogue is itself evidence, that while in, He was not of, that time.

Realising the scene on such occasions, we mark the contrast. As there could be no un-Jewish forwardness on the part of Jesus, so, assuredly, would there be none of that mock-humility of reluctance to officiate, in which Rabbinism delighted. If, as in the circumstances seems likely, Jesus commenced the first part of the service, and then pronounced before the ‘Ark’ those Eulogies which were regarded as, in the strictest sense, the prayer (tep̱ilah), we can imagine – though we can scarcely realise – the reverent solemnity, which would seem to give a new meaning to each well-remembered sentence. And in His mouth it all had a new meaning. We cannot know what, if any, petitions He inserted, though we can imagine what their spirit would have been. And now, one by one, Priest, Levite, and, in succession, five Israelites, had read from the Law. There is no reason to disturb the almost traditional idea, that Jesus Himself read the concluding portion from the Prophets, or the so-called hap̱tarah. The whole narrative seems to imply this. Similarly, it is most likely that the hap̱tarah for that day was taken from the prophecies of Isaiah, and that it included the passage quoted by the Evangelist as read by the Lord Jesus. We know that the ‘rolls’ on which the Law was written were distinct from those of the Prophets; and every probability points to it, that those of the Prophets, at least the Greater, were also written on separate scrolls. In this instance we are expressly told, that the minister ‘delivered unto Him the book of the prophet Esaias,’ we doubt not, for the hap̱tarah, and that, ‘when He had unrolled the book,’ He ‘found’ the place from which the Evangelist makes quotation.

When unrolling, and holding the scroll, much more than the sixty-first chapter of Isaiah must have been within range of His eyes. On the other hand, it is quite certain that the verses quoted by the Evangelist could not have formed the whole hap̱tarah. According to traditional rule, the hap̱tarah ordinarily consisted of not less than twenty-one verses, though, if the passage was to be ‘targumed,’ or a sermon to follow, that number might be shortened to seven, five, or even three verses. Now the passage quoted by Luke consists really of only one verse (Isa_61:1), together with a clause from Isa_58:6, and the first clause of Isa_61:2. This could scarcely have the whole hap̱tarah. There are other reasons also against this supposition. No doubt Jesus read alike the hap̱tarah and the text of His discourse in Hebrew, and then ‘targumed’ or translated it: while Luke, as might be expected quotes (with but two trifling alterations) from the rendering of the LXX. But, on investigation, it appears that one clause is omitted from Isa_61:1. and that between the close of Isa_61:1 and the clause of Isa_61:2, which is added, a clause is inserted from the LXX. of Isa_58:6. This could scarcely have been done in reading the hap̱tarah. But if, as we suppose, the passages quoted formed the introductory text of Christ’s discourse, such quotation and combination were not only in accordance with Jewish customs but formed part of the favourite mode of teaching – the ḥaraz – or stringing, like pearls, passage to passage, illustrative of each other. In the present instance, the portion of the scroll which Jesus unrolled may have exhibited in close proximity the two passages which formed the introductory text (the so-called peṯiḥah). But this is of comparatively small interest, since both the omission of a clause from Isa_61:1, and the insertion of another adapted from Isa_58:6, were evidently intentional. It might be presumptuous to attempt stating the reasons which may have influenced the Saviour in this, and yet some of them will instinctively occur to every thoughtful reader.

It was, indeed, Divine ‘wisdom’ – ‘the Spirit of the Lord’ upon Him, which directed Jesus in the choice of such a text for His first Messianic Sermon. It struck the key-note to the whole of His Galilean ministry. The ancient Synagogue regarded Isa_61:1, Isa_61:2, as one of the three passages, in which mention of the Holy Ghost was connected with the promised redemption. In this view, the application which the passage received in the discourse of our Lord was peculiarly suitable. For the words in which Luke reports what followed the peṯiḥah, or introductory text, seem rather a summary, than either the introduction or part of the discourse of Christ. ‘This day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears.’ A summary this, which may well serve to guide in all preaching. As regards its form, it would be: so to present the teaching of Holy Scripture, as that it can be drawn together in the focus of one sentence; as regards its substance, that this be the one focus: all Scripture fulfilled by a present Christ. And this – in the Gospel which He bears to the poor, the release which He announces to the captives, the healing which He offers to those whom sin had blinded, and the freedom He brings to them who were bruised; and all as the trumpet-blast of God’s Jubilee into His world of misery, sin, and want! A year thus begun would be glorious indeed in the blessings it gave.

There was not a word in all this of what common Jewish expectancy would have connected with, nay, chiefly accentuated in an announcement of the Messianic redemption; not a word to raise carnal hopes, or flatter Jewish pride. Truly, it was the most un-Jewish discourse for a Jewish Messiah of those days, with which to open His Ministry. And yet such was the power of these ‘words of grace,’ that the hearers hung spell-bound upon them. Every eye was fastened on Him with hungry eagerness. For the time they forgot all else – Who it was that addressed them, even the strangeness of the message, so unspeakably in contrast to any preaching of Rabbi or Teacher that had been heard in that Synagogue. Indeed, one can scarcely conceive the impression which the Words of Christ must have produced, when promise and fulfilment, hope and reality, mingled, and wants of the heart, hitherto unrealised, were wakened, only to be more than satisfied. It was another sphere, another life. Truly, the anointing of the Holy Ghost was on the Preacher, from Whose lips dropped these ‘words of grace.’ And if such was the announcement of the Year of God’s Jubilee, what blessings must it bear in its bosom!

The discourse had been spoken, and the breathless silence with which, even according to Jewish custom, it had been listened to, gave place to the usual after-sermon hum of an Eastern Synagogue. On one point all were agreed: that they were marvellous words of grace, which had proceeded out of His mouth. And still the Preacher waited, with deep longing of soul, for some question, which would have marked the spiritual application of what He had spoken. Such deep longing of soul is kindred to, and passes into almost sternness, just because he who so longs is so intensely in earnest, in the conviction of the reality of his message. It was so with Jesus in Nazareth. They were indeed making application of the Sermon to the Preacher, but in quite different manner from that to which His discourse had pointed. It was not the fulfilment of the Scripture in him, but the circumstance, that such an one as the Son of Joseph, their village carpenter, should have spoken such words, that attracted their attention. Not, as we take it, in a malevolent spirit, but altogether unspiritually, as regarded the effect of Christ’s words, did one and another, here and there, express wonderment to his neighbour.

They had heard, and now they would fain have seen. But already the holy indignation of Him, Whom they only knew as Joseph’s son, was kindled. The turn of matters; their very admiration and expectation; their vulgar, unspiritual comments: it was all so entirely contrary to the Character, the Mission, and the Words of Jesus. No doubt they would next expect, that here in His own city, and all the more because it was such, He would do what they had heard had taken place in Capernaum. It was the world-old saying, as false, except to the ear, and as speciously popular as most such sayings: ‘Charity begins at home’ – or, according to the Jewish proverb, and in application to the special circumstances: ‘Physician, heal thyself.’ Whereas, if there is any meaning in truth and principle; if there was any meaning and reality in Christ’s Mission, and in the discourse He had just spoken, Charity does not begin at home; and ‘Physician, heal thyself’ is not of the Gospel for the poor, nor yet the preaching of God’s Jubilee, but that of the Devil, whose works Jesus had come to destroy. How could He, in His holy abhorrence and indignation, say this better than by again repeating, though now with different application, that sad experience, ‘No prophet is accepted in his own country,’ which He could have hoped was for ever behind Him; and by pointing to those two Old Testament instances of it, whose names and authority were most frequently on Jewish lips? Not they who were ‘their own,’ but they who were most receptive in faith – not Israel, but Gentiles, were those most markedly favoured in the ministry of Elijah and of Elisha.

As we read the report of Jesus’ words, we perceive only dimly that aspect of them which stirred the wrath of His hearers to the utmost, and yet we do understand it. That He should have turned so fully the light upon the Gentiles, and flung its large shadows upon them; that ‘Joseph’s Son’ should have taken up this position towards them; that He would make to them spiritual application unto death of His sermon, since they would not make it unto life: it stung them to the quick. Away He must out of His city; it could not bear His Presence any longer, not even on that holy Sabbath. Out they thrust Him from the Synagogue; forth they pressed Him out of the city; on they followed, and around they beset Him along the road by the brow of the hill on which the city is built – perhaps to that western angle, at present pointed out as the site. This, with the unspoken intention of crowding Him over the cliff, which there rises abruptly about forty feet out of the valley beneath. If we are correct in indicating the locality, the road here bifurcates, and we can conceive how Jesus, Who had hitherto, in the silence of sadness, allowed Himself almost mechanically to be pressed onwards by the surrounding crowd, now turned, and by that look of commanding majesty, the forthbreaking of His Divine Being, which ever and again wrought on those around miracles of subjection, constrained them to halt and give way before Him, while unharmed He passed through their midst. So did Israel of old pass through the cleft waves of the sea, which the wonder-working rod of Moses had converted into a wall of safety. Yet, although He parted from it in judgment, not thus could the Christ have finally and for ever left His own Nazareth.

Cast out of His own city, Jesus pursued His solitary way towards Capernaum. There, at least, devoted friends and believing disciples would welcome Him. There, also, a large draught of souls would fill the Gospel-net. Capernaum would be His Galilean home. Here He would, on the Sabbath-days, preach in that Synagogue, of which the good centurion was the builder, and Jairus the chief ruler. These names, and the memories connected with them, are a sufficient comment on the effect of His preaching: that ‘His word was with power.’ In Capernaum, also, was the now believing and devoted household of the court-officer, whose only son the Word of Christ, spoken at a distance, had restored to life. Here also, or in the immediate neighbourhood, was the home of His earliest and closest disciples, the brothers Simon and Andrew, and of James and John, the sons of Zebedee.

From the character of the narrative, and still more from the later call of these four, it would seem that, after the return of Jesus from Judaea into Galilee, His disciples had left Him, probably in Cana, and returned to their homes and ordinary avocations. They were not yet called to forsake all and follow Him – not merely to discipleship, but to fellowship and Apostolate. When He went from Cana to Nazareth, they returned to Capernaum. They knew He was near them. Presently He came; and now His Ministry was in their own Capernaum, or in its immediate neighbourhood.

For Capernaum was not the only place where He taught. Rather was it the centre for itinerancy through all that district, to preach in its Synagogues. Amidst such ministry of quiet ‘power,’ chiefly alone and unattended by His disciples, the summer passed. Truly, it was summer in the ancient land of Zebulun and Naphtali, in the Galilee of the Gentiles, when the glorious Light that had risen chased away the long winter’s darkness, and those who had been the first exiles in Assyrian bondage were the first brought back to Israel’s true liberty, and by Israel’s Messiah-King. To the writer of the first Gospel, as, long years afterwards, he looked back on this, the happy time when he had first seen the Light, till it had sprung up even to him ‘in the region and shadow of death,’ it must have been a time of peculiarly bright memories. How often, as he sat at the receipt of custom, must he have seen Jesus passing by; how often must he have heard His Words, some, perhaps, spoken to himself, but all falling like good seed into the field of his heart, and preparing him at once and joyously to obey the summons when it came: Follow Me! And not to him only, but to many more, would it be a glowing, growing time of heaven’s own summer.

There was a dim tradition in the Synagogue, that this prediction, ‘The people that walk in the darkness see a great light,’ referred to the new light, with which God would enlighten the eyes of those who had penetrated into the mysteries of Rabbinic lore, enabling them to perceive concerning ‘loosing and binding, concerning what was clean and what was unclean.’ Others regarded it as a promise to the early exiles, fulfilled when the great liberty came to them. To Levi-Matthew it seemed as if both interpretations had come true in those days of Christ’s first Galilean ministry. Nay, he saw them combined in a higher unity when to their eyes, enlightened by the great Light, came the now knowledge of what was bound and what loosed, what unclean and clean, though quite differently from what Judaism had declared it to them; and when, in that orient Sun, the promise of liberty to long-banished Israel was at last seen fulfilled. It was, indeed, the highest and only true fulfilment of that prediction of Isaiah, in a history where all was prophetic, every partial fulfilment only an unfolding and opening of the bud, and each symbolic of further unfolding till, in the fulness of time, the great Reality came, to which all that was prophetic in Israel’s history and predictions pointed. And so as, in the evening of his days, Levi-Matthew looked back to distant Galilee, the glow of the setting sun seemed once more to rest on that lake, as it lay bathed in its sheen of gold. It lit up that city, those shores, that custom-house; it spread far off, over those hills, and across the Jordan. Truly, and in the only true sense, had then the promise been fulfilled: ‘To them which sat in the region and shadow of death, light is sprung up.’

(John 5)

The shorter days of early autumn had come, and the country stood in all its luxurious wealth of beauty and fruitfulness, as Jesus passed from Galilee to what, in the absence of any certain evidence, we must still be content to call ‘the Unknown Feast’ in Jerusalem. Thus much, however, seems clear that it was either the ‘Feast of Wood-offering on the 15th of Abh (in August), when, amidst demonstrations of joy, willing (givers brought from all parts of the country the wood required for the service of the Altar; or else the ‘Feast of Trumpets’ on the 1st of Tishri (about the middle of September), which marked the beginning of the New (civil) Year. The journey of Christ to that Feast and its results are not mentioned in the Synoptic Gospels, because that Judaean ministry which, if the illustration be lawful, was the historical thread on which John strung his record of what the Word spake, lay, in great measure, beyond their historical standpoint. Besides, this and similar events belonged, indeed, to that grand Self-Manifestation of Christ, with the corresponding growth of opposition consequent upon it, which it was the object of the Fourth Gospel to set forth; but it led to no permanent results, and so was outside the scope of the more popular, pragmatic record, which the other Gospels had in view.

There may in this instance, however, have been other reasons also for their silence. It has already been indicated that, during the summer of Christ’s first Galilean, ministry, when Capernaum was His centre of action, the disciples had returned to their homes and usual avocations, while Jesus moved about chiefly alone and unattended. This explains the circumstance of a second call, even to His most intimate and closest followers. It also accords best with that gradual development in Christ’s activity, which commencing with the more private teaching of the new Preacher of Righteousness in the villages by the lake, or in the Synagogues, expanded into that publicity in which He at last appears, surrounded by His Apostles, attended by the loving ministry of those to whom He had brought healing of body or soul, and followed by a multitude which everywhere pressed around Him for teaching and help.

This more public activity commenced with the return of Jesus from ‘the Unknown Feast’ in Jerusalem. There He had, in answer to the challenge of the Jewish authorities, for the first time set forth His Messianic claims in all their fulness. And there, also, He had for the first time encountered that active persecution unto death, of which Golgotha was the logical outcome. This Feast, then, was the time of critical decision. Accordingly, as involving the separation from the old state and the commencement of a new condition of things, it was immediately followed by the call of His disciples to a new Apostleship. In this view, we can also better understand the briefness of the notices of His first Galilean ministry, and how, after Christ’s return from that Feast, His teaching became more full, and the display of His miraculous power more constant and public.

It seems only congruous, accordant with all the great decisive steps of Him in Whose footprints the disciples trod, only after He had marked them, as it were, with His Blood – that He should have gone up to that Feast alone and unattended. That such had been the case, has been inferred by some from this, that the narrative of the healing of the impotent man reads so Jewish, that the account of it appears to have been derived by John from a Jew at Jerusalem.  Others have come to the same conclusion from the meagreness of details about the event. But it seems implied in the narrative itself, and the marked and exceptional absence of any reference to disciples leads to the obvious conclusion, that they had not been with their Master.

But, if Jesus was alone and unattended at the Feast, the question arises, whence the report was derived of what He said in reply to the challenge of the Jews? Here the answer naturally suggests itself, that the Master Himself may, at some later period of His life – perhaps during His last stay in Jerusalem – have communicated to His disciples, or else to him who stood nearest to Him, the details of what had passed on the first occasion when the Jewish authorities had sought to extinguish His Messianic claims in His blood. If that communication was made when Jesus was about to be offered up, it would also account for what otherwise might seem a difficulty: the very developed form of expression in which His relation to the Father, and His own Office and Power, are presented. We can understand how, from the very first, all this should have been laid before the teachers of Israel. But in view of the organic development of Christ’s teaching, we could scarcely expect it to have been expressed in such very full terms, till near the close of His Ministry.

But we are anticipating. The narrative transports us at once to what, at the time, seems to have been a well-known locality in Jerusalem, though all attempts to identify it, or even to explain the name Bethesda, have hitherto failed. All we know is, that it was a pool enclosed within five porches, by the sheep-market, presumably close to the ‘Sheep-Gate.’ This, as seems most likely, opened from the busy northern suburb of markets, bazaars, and workshops, eastwards upon the road which led over the Mount of Olives and Bethany to Jericho. In that case, most probability would attach to the identification of the Pool Bethesda with a pool somewhat north of the so-called Birket Israîl. At present it is wholly filled with rubbish, but in the time of the Crusaders it seems to have borne the name of the Sheep-pond, and, it was thought, traces of the five porches could still be detected. Be this as it may, it certainly bore in the ‘Hebrew’ – or rather Aramaean – ‘tongue,’ the name beṯesda. No doubt this name was designative, though the common explanations – beṯ ḥisda (so most modern writers, and Watkins) ‘House of Mercy’ (?), beṯ Isteḇa (אִסְטְבָא Delitzsch), ‘House of Porches,’ and beṯ zeyṯa (Westcott) ‘House of the Olive’ – seem all unsatisfactory. More probability attaches to the rendering beṯ Asuṯa (Wuensche), or beṯ Asyaṯa, ‘House of Healing.’ But as this derivation offers linguistic difficulties, we would suggest that the second part of the name (Beth-Esda) was really a Greek word Aramaised. Here two different derivations suggest themselves. The root-word of Esda might either express to ‘become well’ – Beth ἱᾶσθαι – or something akin to the Rabbinic zit  (זיט =ζῆθι). In that case, the designation would agree with an ancient reading of the name, Bethzatha. Or else, the name Bethesda might combine, according to a not uncommon Rabbinic practice, the Hebrew Beth with some Aramaised form derived from the Greek word ζέω, ‘to boil’ or ‘bubble up’ (subst. ζέσις); in which case it would mean ‘the House of Bubbling-up,’ viz. water. Any of the three derivations just suggested would not only give an apt designation for the pool, but explain why John, contrary to his usual practice, does not give a Greek equivalent for a Hebrew term.

All this is, however, of very subordinate importance, compared with the marvellous facts of the narrative itself. In the five porches surrounding this pool lay ‘a great multitude of the impotent,’ in anxious hope of a miraculous cure. We can picture to ourselves the scene. The popular superstitious, which gave rise to what we would regard as a peculiarly painful exhibition of human misery of body and soul, is strictly true to the times and the people. Even now travellers describe a similar concourse of poor crippled sufferers, on their miserable pallets or on rugs, around the mineral springs near Tiberias, filling, in true Oriental fashion, the air with their lamentations. In the present instance there would be even more occasion for this than around any ordinary thermal spring. For the popular idea was, that an Angel descended into the water, causing it to bubble up, and that only he who first stepped into the pool would be cured. As thus only one person could obtain benefit, we may imagine the lamentations of the ‘many’ who would, perhaps, day by day, be disappointed in their hopes. This bubbling up of the water was, of course, due not to supernatural but to physical causes. Such intermittent springs are not uncommon, and to this day the so-called ‘Fountain of the Virgin’ in Jerusalem exhibits the phenomenon. It is scarcely necessary to say, that the Gospel-narrative does not ascribe this ‘troubling of the waters’ to Angelic agency, nor endorses the belief, that only the first who afterwards entered them, could be healed. This was evidently the belief of the impotent man, as of all the waiting multitude. But the words in Joh_5:4 of our Authorised Version, and perhaps, also, the last clause of Joh_5:3, are admittedly an interpolation.

In another part of this book it is explained at length, how Jewish belief at the time attached such agency to Angels, and how it localised (so to speak) special Angels in springs and rivers; and we shall have presently to show, what were the popular notions about miraculous cures. If, however, the belief about Bethesda arose merely from the mistaken ideas about the cause of this bubbling of the water, the question would naturally suggest itself, whether any such cases as those described had ever really occurred, and, if not, how such a superstition could have continued. But that such healing might actually occur in the circumstances, no one would be prepared to deny, who has read the accounts of pilgrimages to places of miraculous cure, or who considers the influence of a firm expectancy on the imagination, especially in diseases which have their origin in the nervous system. This view of the matter is confirmed, and Scripture still further vindicated from even the faintest appearance of endorsing the popular superstition, by the use of the article in the expression ‘a multitude of the impotent’ (πλῆθος τῶν ἀσθενούντων), which marks this impotence as used in the generic sense, while the special diseases, afterwards enumerated without the article, are ranged under it as instances of those who were thus impotent. Such use of the Greek term, as not applying to any one specific malady, is vindicated by a reference to Mat_8:17 and Mar_6:56, and by its employment by the physician Luke. It is, of course, not intended to imply, that the distempers to which this designation is given had all their origin in the nervous system; but we argue that, if the term ‘impotent’ was the general, of which the diseases mentioned in Joh_5:3 were the specific – in other words, that, if it was an ‘impotence,’ of which these were the various manifestations – it may indicate, that they all, so far as relieved, had one common source, and this, as we would suggest, in the nervous system.

With all reverence, we can in some measure understand, what feelings must have stirred the heart of Jesus, in view of this suffering, waiting ‘great multitude.’ Why, indeed, did He go into those five porches, since He had neither disease to cure, nor cry for help had come to Him from those who looked for relief to far other means? Not, surely, from curiosity. But as one longs to escape from the stifling atmosphere of a scene of worldly pomp, with its glitter and unreality, into the clearness of the evening-air, so our Lord may have longed to pass from the glitter and unreality of those who held rule the Temple, or who occupied the seat of Moses in their Academies, to what was the atmosphere of His Life on earth, His real Work, among that skittering, ignorant multitude, which, in its sorrow, raised a piteous, longing cry for help where it had been misdirected to seek it.

And thus we can here also perceive the deep internal connection between Christ’s miracle of hearing ‘the impotent man’ and the address of mingled sadness and severity, in which He afterwards set before the Masters in Israel the one truth fundamental in all things. We have only, so to speak, to reverse the formal order and succession of that discourse, to gain an insight into what prompted Jesus to go to Bethesda, and by His power to perform this healing. He had been in the Temple at the Feast; He had necessarily been in contact – it could not be otherwise, when in the Temple – with the great ones of Israel. What a stifling atmosphere there of glitter and unreality! What had He in common with those who ‘received glory one of another, and the glory which cometh from the One only God’ they sought not? How could such men believe? The first meaning, and the object of His Life and Work, was as entirely different from their aims and perceptions, as were the respective springs of their inner being. They clung and appealed to Moses; to Moses, whose successors they claimed to be, let them go! Their elaborate searching and sifting of the Law in hope that, by a subtle analysis of its every particle and letter, by inferences from, and a careful drawing of a prohibitive hedge around, its letter, they would possess themselves of eternal life, what did it all come to? Utterly self-deceived, and far from the truth in their elaborate attempts to outdo each other in local ingenuity, they would, while rejecting the Messiah sent from God, at last become the victims of a coarse Messianic impostor. And even in the present, what was it all? Only the letter – the outward! All the lessons of their past miraculous history had been utterly lost on them. What had there been of the merely outward in its miracles and revelations? It had been the witness of the Father; but this was the very element which, amidst their handling of the external form, they perceived not. Nay, not only the unheard Voice of the Father, but also the heard voice of the Prophets – a voice which they might have heard even in John the Baptist. They heard, but did not perceive it – just as, in increasing measure, Christ’s sayings and doings, and the Father and His testimony, were not perceived. And so all hastened on to the judgment of final unbelief, irretrievable loss, and self-caused condemnation. It was all utterly mistaken; utter, and, alas! guilty perversion, their elaborate trifling with the most sacred things, while around them were suffering, perishing men, stretching ‘lame hands’ into emptiness, and wailing out their mistaken hopes into the eternal silence.

While they were discussing the niceties of what constituted labour on a Sabbath, such as what infringed its sacred rest or what constituted a burden, multitudes of them who laboured and were heavy laden were left to perish in their ignorance. That was the Sabbath, and the God of the Sabbath of Pharisaism; this the rest, the enlightenment, the hope for them who laboured and were heavy laden, and who longed and knew not where to find the true Sabbatismos! Nay, if the Christ had not been the very opposite of all that Pharisaism sought, He would not have been the Orient Sun of the Eternal Sabbath. But the God Who ever worked in love, Whose rest was to give rest, Whose Sabbath to remove burdens, was His Father. He knew Him; He saw His working; He was in fellowship of love, of work, of power with Him. He had come to loose every yoke, to give life, to bring life, to be life – because He had life: life in its fullest sense. For, contact with Him, whatever it may be, gives life: to the diseased, health; to the spiritually dead, the life of the soul; to the dead in their graves, the life of resurrection. And all this was the meaning of Holy Scripture, when it pointed forward to the Lord’s Anointed; and all this was not merely His own, but the Father’s Will – the Mission which He had given Him, the Work which He had sent Him to do.

Translate this into deed, as all His teachings have been, are, and will be, and we have the miraculous cure of the impotent man, with its attendant circumstances. Or, conversely, translate that deed, with its attendant circumstances, into words, and we have the discourse of our Lord. Moreover, all this is fundamental to the highest understanding of our Lord’s history. And, therefore, we understand how, many years afterwards, the beloved disciple gave a place to this miracle, when, in the full ripeness of spiritual discernment, he chose for record in his Gospel from among those ‘many signs,’ which Jesus truly did, only five as typical, like the five porches of the great Bethesda of His help to the impotent, or like the five divisions into which the Psalter of praise was arranged. As he looked back, from the height where he stood at his journey’s end, to where the sun was setting in purple and golden glory far across the intervening landscape, amidst its varying scenes this must have stood out before his sight, as what might show to us that ‘Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing we might have life through His Name.

And so, understanding from what He afterwards said to ‘the Jews’ what He thought and felt in going thither, we are better prepared to follow the Christ to Bethesda. Two pictures must have been here simultaneously present to His mind. On the one side, a multitude whose sufferings and false expectancies rose, like the wail of the starving for bread; and, on the other side, the neighbouring Temple, with its priesthood and teachers, who, in their self-seeking and the trifling of their religious externalism, neither understood, heard, nor would have cared for such a cry. If there was an Israel, Prince with God, and if there was a God of the Covenant, this must not, cannot be; and Christ goes to Bethesda as Israel’s Messiah, the Truth, and the Life. There was twofold suffering there, and it were difficult to know which would have stirred Him most: that of the body, or the mistaken earnestness which so trustfully looked for Heaven’s relief – yet within such narrow limits as the accident or good fortune of being first pushed into the Angel-troubled waters. But this was also a true picture of His people in their misery, and in their narrow notions of God and of the conditions of His blessing. And now Israel’s Messiah had at last come. What would we expect Him to have done? Surely not to preach controversial or reformatory doctrines; but to do, if it were in Him, and in doing to speak. And so in this also the Gospel-narrative proves itself true, by telling that He did, what alone would be true in a Messiah, the Son of God. It is, indeed, impossible to think of Incarnate Deity – and this, be it remembered, is the fundamental postulate of the Gospels – as brought into contact with misery, disease, and death without their being removed. That power went forth from Him always, everywhere, and to all, is absolutely necessary, if He was the Son of God, the Saviour of the world. And so the miracles, as we mistakenly term the result of the contact of God with man, of the Imanuel (God with us), are not only the golden ladder which leads up to the Miracle, God manifest in the flesh, but the steps by which He descends from His height to our lowliness.

The waters had not yet been ‘troubled,’ when He stood among that multitude of sufferers and their attendant friends. It was in those breathless moments of the intense suspense of expectancy, when every eye was fixed on the pool, that the eye of the Saviour searched for the most wretched object among them all. In him, as a typical case, could He best do and teach that for which He had come. This ‘impotent’ man, for thirty-eight years a hopeless sufferer, without attendant or friend among those whom misery – in this also the true outcome of sin – made so intensely selfish; and whose sickness was really the consequence of his sin, and not merely in the sense which the Jews attached to it – this now seemed the fittest object for power and grace. For, most marked in this history is the entire spontaneity of our Lord’s help. It is idle to speak either of faith or of receptiveness on the man’s part. The essence of the whole lies in the utter absence of both; in Christ’s raising, as it were, the dead, and calling the things that are not as though they were. This, the fundamental thought concerning His Mission and power as the Christ shines forth as the historical background in Christ’s subsequent, explanatory discourse. The ‘Wilt thou be made whole?’ with which Jesus drew the man’s attention to Himself, was only to probe and lay bare his misery. And then came the word of power, or rather the power spoken forth, which made him whole every whit. Away from this pool, in which there was no healing; away – for the Son of God had come to him with the outflowing of His power and pitying help, and he was made whole. Away with his bed, not, although it was the holy Sabbath, but just because it was the Sabbath of holy rest and holy delight!

In the general absorbedness of all around, no ear, but that to which it had been spoken, had heard what the Saviour had said. The waters had not been troubled, and the healing had been all unseen. Before the healed man, scarcely conscious of what had passed, had, with new-born vigour, gathered himself up and rolled together his coverlet to hasten after Him, Jesus had already withdrawn.  In that multitude, all thinking only of their own sorrows and wants, He had come and gone unobserved. But they all now knew and observed this miracle of healing, as they saw this unbefriended and most wretched of them all healed, without the troubling of waters or first immersion in them. Then there was really help in Israel, and help not limited to such external means! How could Christ have taught that multitude, nay, all Jerusalem and Jewry, all this, as well as all about Himself, but by what He did? And so we learn here also another aspect of miracles, as necessary for those who, weary of Rabbinic wrangling, could, in their felt impotence, only learn by what He did that which He would say.

We know it not, but we cannot believe that on that day, nor, perhaps, thenceforth on any other day, any man stepped for healing into the bubbling waters of Bethesda. Rather would they ask the healed man, Whose was the word that had brought him healing? But he knew Him not. Forth he stepped into God’s free air, a new man. It was truly the holy Sabbath within, as around him; but he thought not of the day, only of the rest and relief it had brought. It was the holy Sabbath, and he carried on it his bed. If he remembered that it was the Sabbath, on which it was unlawful to carry forth anything – a burden, he would not be conscious that it was a burden, or that he had any burden; but very conscious that He, Who had made him whole, had bidden him take up his bed and walk. These directions had been bound up with the very word (‘Rise’) in which his healing had come. That was enough for him. And in this lay the beginning and root of his inward healing. Here was simple trust, unquestioning obedience to the unseen, unknown, but real Saviour. For he believed Him, and therefore trusted in Him, that He must be right; and so, trusting without questioning, he obeyed.

The Jews saw him, as from Bethesda he carried home his ‘burden.’ Such as that he carried were their only burdens. Although the law of Sabbath-observance must have been made stricter in later Rabbinic development, when even the labour of moving the sick into the waters of Bethesda would have been unlawful, unless there had been present danger to life, yet, admittedly, this carrying of the bed was an infringement of the Sabbatic law, as interpreted by traditionalism. Most characteristically, it was this external infringement which they saw, and nothing else; it was the Person Who had commanded it Whom they would know, not Him Who had made whole the impotent man. Yet this is quite natural, and perhaps not so different from what we may still witness among ourselves.

It could not have been long after this – most likely, as soon as possible – that the healed man and his Healer met in the Temple. What He then said to him, completed the inward healing. On the ground of his having been healed, let him be whole. As he trusted and obeyed Jesus in the outward cure, so let him now inwardly and morally trust and obey. Here also this looking through the external to the internal, through the temporal to the spiritual and eternal, which is so characteristic of the after-discourse of Jesus, nay, of all His discourses and of His deeds, is most marked. The healed man now knew to Whom he owed faith, gratitude, and trust of obedience; and the consequences of this knowledge must have been incalculable. It would make him a disciple in the truest sense. And this was the only additional lesson which he, as each of us, must learn individually and personally: that the man healed by Christ stands in quite another position, as regards the morally right, from what he did before – not only before his healing, but even before his felt sickness, so that, if he were to go back to sin, or rather, as the original implies, continue to sin,’ a thing infinitely worse would come to him.

It seems an idle question, why the healed man told the Jews that it was Jesus. It was only natural that he should do so. Rather do we ask, How did he know that He Who had spoken to him was Jesus? Was it by the surrounding of keen-eyed, watchful Rabbis, or by the contradiction of sinners? Certain we are, that it was far better Jesus should have silently withdrawn from the porches of Bethesda to make it known in the Temple, Who it was that had done this miracle. Far more effectually could He so preach its lesson to those who had been in Bethesda, and to all Jewry.

And yet something further was required. He must speak it out in clear, open words, what was the hidden inward meaning of this miracle. As so often, it was the bitter hatred of His persecutors which gave Him the opportunity. The first forthbursting of His Messianic Mission and Character had come in that Temple, when He realised it as His Father’s House, and His Life as about His Father’s business. Again had these thoughts about His Father kindled within Him in that Temple, when, on the first occasion of His Messianic appearance there, He had sought to purge it, that it might be a House of Prayer. And now, once more in that House, it was the same consciousness about God as His Father, and His Life as the business of His Father, which furnished the answer to the angry invectives about His breach of the Sabbath-Law. The Father’s Sabbath was His; the Father worked hitherto and He worked; the Father’s work and His were the same; He was the Son of the Father. And in this He also taught, what the Jews had never understood, the true meaning of the Sabbath-Law, by emphasising that which was the fundamental thought of the Sabbath – ‘Wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it:’ not the rest of inactivity, but of blessing and hallowing.

Once more it was not His whole meaning, but only this one point, that He claimed to be equal with God, of which they took hold. As we understand it, the discourse beginning with Joh_5:19 is not a continuation of that which had been begun in Joh_5:17, but was delivered on another, though probably proximate occasion. By what He had said about the Father working hitherto and His working, He had silenced the multitude, who must have felt that God’s rest was truly that of beneficence, not of inactivity. But He had raised another question, that of His equality with God, and for this He was taken to task by the Masters in Israel. To them it was that He addressed that discourse which, so to speak, preached His miracle at the Pool of Bethesda. Into its details we cannot enter further than has already been done. Some of its reasonings can be clearly traced, as starting from certain fundamental positions, held in common alike by the Sanhedrists and by Christ. Others, such as probably in answer to unreported objections, we may guess at. This may also account for what may seem occasional abruptness of transitions.

But what most impresses us, is the majestic grandeur of Christ’s self-consciousness in presence of His enemies, and yet withal the tone of pitying sadness which pervades His discourse. The time of the judgment of silence had not yet come. And for the present the majesty of His bearing overawed them, even as it did His enemies to the end, and Christ could pass unharmed from among them. And so ended that day in Jerusalem. And this is all that is needful for us to know of His stay at the Unknown Feast. With this inward separation, and the gathering of hostile parties closes the first and begins the second, stage of Christ’s Ministry.

(Mat_4:18-22; Mar_1:16-20; Luk_5:1-11)

We are once again out of the stifling, spiritual atmosphere of the great City, and by the glorious Lake of Galilee. They were other men, these honest, simple, earnest, impulsive Galileans, than that self-seeking, sophistical, heartless assemblage of Rabbis, whose first active persecution Jesus had just encountered, and for the time overawed by the majesty of His hearing. His return to Capernaum could not have remained unknown. Close by, on either side of the city, the country was studded with villages and towns, a busy, thriving, happy multitude. During that bright summer He had walked along that Lake, and by its shore and in the various Synagogues preached His Gospel. And they had been ‘astonished at His doctrine, for His word was with power.’ For the first time they had heard what they felt to be ‘the Word of God,’ and they had learned to love its sound. What wonder that, immediately on His return, ‘the people pressed upon Him to hear’ it.

If we surrender ourselves to the impression which the Evangelic narratives give us when pieced together, it would almost seem, as if what we are about to relate had occurred while Jesus was returning from Jerusalem. For, the better reading of Mar_1:16 gives this as the mark of time: ‘As He was passing on by the Sea of Galilee.’ But perhaps, viewed in connection with what follows, the impression may be so far modified, that we may think of it as on the first morning after His return. It had probably been a night of storm on the Lake. For, the toil of the fishermen had brought them no draught of fishes, and they stood by the shore, or in the boats drawn up on the beach, casting in their nets to ‘wash’ them of the sand and pebbles, with which such a night’s work would clog them, or to mend what had been torn by the violence of the waves. It was a busy scene; for, among the many industries by the Lake of Galilee, that of fishing was not only the most generally pursued, but perhaps the most lucrative.

Tradition had it, that since the days of Joshua, and by one of his ten ordinances, fishing in the Lake, though under certain necessary restrictions, was free to all. And as fish was among the favorite articles of diet, in health and sickness, on week-days and especially at the Sabbath-meal, many must have been employed in connection with this trade. Frequent, and sometimes strange, are the Rabbinic advices, what kinds of fish to eat at different times, and in what state of preparation. They were eaten fresh, dried, or pickled; a kind of ‘relish’ or sauce was made of them, and the roe also prepared. We are told, how the large fish was carried to market slung on a ring or twine, and the smaller fish in baskets or casks. In truth, these Rabbis are veritable connoisseurs in this delicacy; they discuss their size with exaggerations, advise when they are in season, discern a peculiar flavour in the same kinds if caught in different waters, and tell us how to prepare them most tastefully, cautioning us to wash them down, if it cannot be with water, with beer rather than wine.  It is one of their usual exaggerations, when we read of 300 different kinds of fish at a dinner given to a great Rabbi, although the common proverb had it, to denote what was abundant, that it was like ‘bringing fish to Acco.’ Besides, fish was also largely imported from abroad. It indicates the importance of this traffic, that one of the gates of Jerusalem was called ‘the fish-gate.’ Indeed, there is a legend to the effect, that not less than 600,000 casks of sardines were every week supplied for the fig-dressers of King Jannaeus. But, apart from such exaggerations, so considerable was this trade that, at a later period, one of the Patriarchs of the Sanhedrin engaged in it, and actually freighted ships for the transport of fish.

These notices, which might be largely multiplied, are of more than antiquarian interest. They give a more vivid idea of life by the Lake of Galilee, and show that those engaged in that trade, like Zebedee and his sons (זְבַדְיָה), ‘the God-given,’ like Theodore and Dorothea), were not unfrequently men of means and standing. This irrespective of the fact, that the Rabbis enjoined some trade or industrial occupation on every man, whatever his station. We can picture to ourselves, on that bright autumn morning, after a stormy night of bootless toil, the busy scene by the Lake, with the fishermen cleaning and mending their nets. Amidst their work they would scarcely notice the gathering crowd. As we have suggested from the better reading of Mar_1:16, it was Christ’s first walk by the Lake on the morning after His return from Judaea. Engaged in their fishing on the afternoon, evening, and night of His arrival in Capernaum they would probably not have known of His presence till He spake to them. But He had come that morning specially to seek four of these fishers, that He might, now that the time for it had come, call them to permanent discipleship – and, what is more, fit them for the work to which he would call them.

Jewish customs and modes of thinking at that time do not help us further to understand the Lord’s call of them, except so far as they enable us more clearly to apprehend what the words of Jesus would convey to them. The expression ‘Follow Me’ would be readily understood, as implying a call to become the permanent disciple of a teacher. Similarly, it was not only the practice of the Rabbis, but regarded as one of the most sacred duties, for a Master to gather around him a circle of disciples. Thus, neither Peter and Andrew, nor the sons of Zebedee, could have misunderstood the call of Christ, or even regarded it as strange. On that memorable return from His Temptation in the wilderness they had learned to know Him as the Messiah, and they followed Him. And, now that the time had come for gathering around Him a separate discipleship, when, with the visit to the Unknown Feast, the Messianic activity of Jesus had passed into another stage, that call would not come as a surprise to their minds or hearts.

So far as the Master was concerned, we mark three points. First, the call came after the open breach with, and initial persecution of, the Jewish authorities. It was, therefore, a call to fellowship in His peculiar relationship to the Synagogue. Secondly, it necessitated the abandonment of all their former occupations, and, indeed, of all earthly ties. Thirdly, it was from the first, and clearly, marked as totally different from a call to such discipleship, as that of any other Master in Israel. It was not to learn more of doctrine, nor more fully to follow out a life-direction already taken, but to begin, and to become, something quite new, of which their former occupation offered an emblem. The disciples of the Rabbis, even those of John the Baptist, ‘followed,’ in order to learn; they, in order to do, and to enter into fellowship with His Work. ‘Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.’ It was then quite a new call this, which at the same time indicated its real aim and its untold difficulties. Such a call could not have been addressed to them, if they had not already been disciples of Jesus, understood His Mission, and the character of the Kingdom of God. But, the more we think of it, the more do we perceive the magnitude of the call and of the decision which it implied – for, without doubt, they understood what it implied, as clearly, in some respects perhaps more clearly, than we do. All the deeper, then, must have been their loving belief in Him, and their earnest attachment, when, with such unquestioning trust, and such absolute simplicity and entireness of self-surrender, that it needed not even a spoken Yea on their part, they forsook ship and home to follow Him. And so, successively, Simon and Andrew, and John and James those who had been the first to hear, were also the first to follow Jesus. And ever afterwards did they remain closest to Him, who had been the first fruits of His Ministry.

If is not well to speak too much of the faith of men. With all the singleness of spiritual resolve – perhaps, as yet, rather impulse which it implied, they probably had not themselves full or adequate conception of what it really meant. That would evolve in the course of Christ’s further teaching, and of their learning in mind and heart. But, even thus, we perceive that in their own call they had already, in measure, lived the miracle of the draught of fishes, which they were about to witness. What had passed between Jesus and, first, the sons of Jona, and then those of Zebedee, can scarcely have occupied many minutes. But already the people were pressing around the Master in eager hunger for the Word; for, all the livelong night their own teachers had toiled, and taken nothing which they could give them as food. To such call the Fisher of Men could not be deaf. The boat of Peter shall be His pulpit; He had consecrated it by consecrating its owner. The boat has been thrust out a little from the land, and over the soft ripple of the waters comes the strange melody of that Word. We need scarcely ask what He spake. It would be of the Father, of the Kingdom, and of those who entered it – like what He spake from the Mount, or to those who laboured and were heavy laden. But it would carry to the hearers the wondrous beauty and glory of that opening Kingdom, and, by contrast, the deep poverty and need of their souls. And Peter had heard it all in the boat, as he sat close by, in the shadow of His Majesty. Then, this was the teaching of which he had become a disciple; this, the net and the fishing to which he was just called. How utterly miserable, in one respect, must it have made him! Could such an one as he ever hope, with whatever toil, to be a successful fisher?

Jesus had read his thoughts, and much more than read them. It was all needed for the qualifying of Peter especially, but also of the others who had been called to be fishers of men. Presently it shall be all brought to light; not only that it may be made clear, but that, alike, the lesson and the help may be seen. And this is another object in Christ’s miracles to His disciples: to make clear their inmost thoughts and longings, and to point them to the right goal. ‘Launch out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught.’ That they toil in vain all life’s night, only teaches the need of another beginning. The ‘nevertheless, at Thy word,’ marks the new trust, and the new work as springing from that trust. When Christ is in the boat and bids us let down the net, there must be ‘a great multitude of fishes.’ And all this in this symbolic miracle. Already ‘the net was breaking,’ when they beckoned to their partners in the other ship, that they should come and help them. And now both ships are burdened to the water’s edge.

But what did it all mean to Simon Peter? He had been called to full discipleship, and he had obeyed the call. He had been in his boat beside the Saviour, and heard what He had spoken, and it had gone to his heart. And now this miracle which he had witnessed! Such shoal of fish in one spot on the Lake of Galilee was not strange. The miraculous was, that the Lord had seen through those waters down where the multitude of fishes was, and bidden him let down for a draught. He could see through the intervening waters, right down to the bottom of that sea; He could see through him, to the very bottom of Peter’s heart. He did see it – and all that Jesus had just spoken meant it, and showed him what was there. And could he then be a fisher of men, out of whose heart, after a life’s night of toil the net would come up empty, or rather only clogged with sand and torn with pebbles? This is what he meant when ‘he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying: Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.’ And this is why Jesus comforted him: ‘Fear not, from henceforth thou shalt catch men.’ And so also, and so only, do we, each of us, learn the lesson of our calling, and receive the true comfort in it. Nor yet can anyone become a true fisher of men in any other than such manner.

The teaching and the comfort required not to be repeated in the life of Peter, nor in that of the others who witnessed and shared in what had passed. Many are the truths which shine out from the symbolism of this scene, when the first disciples were first called. That call itself; the boat; the command of Christ, despite the night of vain toil; the unlikely success; the net and its cast at the bidding of Christ, with the absolute certitude of result, where He is and when He bids; the miraculous direction to the spot; the multitude of fishes enclosed; the net about to break, yet not breaking; the surprise, as strange perhaps as the miracle itself; and then, last of all, the lesson of self-knowledge and humiliation: all these and much more has the Church most truly read in this history. And as we turn from it, this stands out to us as its final outcome and lesson: ‘And when they had brought their ships to land, they forsook all and followed Him.’

(Mat_8:14-17; Mar_1:21-34; Luk_4:33-41)

It was the Holy Sabbath – the first after He had called around Him His first permanent disciples; the first, also, after His return from the Feast at Jerusalem. Of both we can trace indications in the account of that morning, noon, and evening which the Evangelists furnish. The greater detail with which Mark, who wrote under the influence of Peter, tells these events, shows the freshness and vividness of impression on the mind of Peter of those early days of his new life. As indicating that what is here recorded took place immediately after the return of Jesus from Jerusalem, we mark, that as yet there were no watchful enemies in waiting to entrap Him in such breach of the Law, as might furnish ground for judicial procedure. But, from their presence and activity so soon afterwards, we infer, that the authorities of Jerusalem had sent some of their familiars to track His steps in Galilee.

But as yet all seemed calm and undisturbed. Those simple, warm-hearted Galileans yielded themselves to the power of His words and works, not discerning hidden blasphemy in what He said, nor yet Sabbath-desecration in His healing on God’s holy day. It is morning, and Jesus goes to the Synagogue at Capernaum. To teach there, was now His wont. But frequency could not lessen the impression. In describing the Influence of His Person or words the Evangelists use a term, which really means amazement. And when we find the same word to describe the impression of the ‘Sermon on the Mount,’ the inference is naturally suggested, that it presents the type, if it does not sum up the contents, of some of His Synagogue-discourses. It is not necessary to suppose that, what held His hearers spellbound, had necessarily also its effect on their hearts and lives. Men may be enraptured by the ideal without trying to make it the real. Too often it is even in inverse proportion; so that those who lead not the most moral lives even dare to denounce the New Testament standpoint, as below their own conceptions of right and duty. But there is that in man, evidence of his origin and destiny, which always and involuntarily responds to the presentation of the higher. And in this instance it was not only what He taught, but the contrast with that to which they had been accustomed on the part of ‘the Scribes,’ which filled them with amazement. There was no appeal to human authority, other than that of the conscience; no subtle logical distinctions, legal niceties, nor clever sayings. Clear, limpid, and crystalline, flowed His words from out the spring of the Divine Life that was in Him.

Among the hearers in the Synagogue that Sabbath morning was one of a class, concerning whose condition, whatever difficulties may attach to our proper understanding of it, the reader of the New Testament must form some definite idea. The term ‘demoniacal possession’ occurs not in the New Testament. We owe it to Josephus, from whom it has passed into ecclesiastical language. We dismiss it the more readily, that, in our view, it conveys a wrong impression. The New Testament speaks of those who had a spirit, or a demon, or demons, or an unclean spirit, or the spirit of all unclean demons, but chiefly of persons who were ‘demonised.’ Similarly, it seems a strange inaccuracy on the part of commentators to exclude from the Gospel of John all notice of the ‘demonised.’ That the Fourth Gospel, although not reporting any healing of the demonised, shares the fundamental view of the Synoptists, appears not only from Joh_7:20, Joh_8:48, Joh_8:52, but especially from Joh_8:49 and Joh_10:20, Joh_10:21. We cannot believe that the writer of the Fourth Gospel would have put into the mouth of Jesus the answer ‘I am not a demon,’ or have allowed Him, to be described by His friends as not one ‘demonised,’ without a single word to show dissent from the popular view, if he had not shared the ideas of the Synoptists. In discussing a question of such very serious import in the study and criticism of the Gospels, the precise facts of the case should in the first place be clearly ascertained.

The first question here is, whether Christ Himself shared the views, not indeed of His contemporaries (for these, as we shall see, were very different), but of the Evangelists in regard to what they call the ‘demonised?’ This has been extensively denied, and Christ represented as only unwilling needlessly to disturb a popular prejudice, which He could not at the time effectually combat. But the theory requires more than this; and, since Christ not only tolerated, but in addressing the demonised actually adopted, or seemed to adopt, the prevailing view, it has been argued, that, for the sake of these poor afflicted persons, He acted like a physician who appears to enter into the fancy of his patient, in order the more effectually to heal him of it. This view seems, however, scarcely worth refuting since it imputes to Jesus, on a point so important, a conduct not only unworthy of Him, or indeed of any truly great man, but implies a canon of ‘accommodation’ which might equally be applied to His Miracles, or to anything else that contravened the notions of an interpreter, and so might transform the whole Gospel-narratives into a series of historically untrustworthy legends. But we will not rest the case on what might be represented as an appeal to prejudice. For, we find that Jesus not only tolerated the popular ‘prejudice,’ or that He ‘adopted it for the sake of more readily healing those thus afflicted’ – but that he even made it part of His disciples’ commission to ‘cast out demons,’ and that, when the disciples afterwards reported their success in this, Christ actually made it a matter of thanksgiving to God. The same view underlies His reproof to the disciples, when failing in this part of their work; while in Luk_11:19, Luk_11:24, He adopts, and argues on this view against the Pharisees. Regarded therefore in the light of history, impartial criticism can arrive at no other conclusion, than that Jesus of Nazareth shared the views of the Evangelists as regards the ‘demonised.’

Our next inquiry must be as to the character of the phenomenon thus designated. In view of the fact that in Mar_9:21, the demonised had been such ‘of a child,’ it is scarcely possible to ascribe it simply to moral causes. Similarly, personal faith does not seem to have been a requisite condition of healing. Again, as other diseases are mentioned without being attributed to demoniacal influence, and as all who were dumb, deaf, or paralysed would not have been described as ‘demonised,’ it is evident that all physical, or even mental distempers of the same class were not ascribed to the same cause: some might be natural, while others were demoniacal. On the other hand, there were more or less violent symptoms of disease in every demonised person, and these were greatly aggravated in the last paroxysm, when the demon quitted his habitation. We have, therefore, to regard the phenomena described as caused by the influence of such ‘spirits,’ primarily, upon that which forms the nexus between body and mind, the nervous system, and as producing different physical effects, according to the part of the nervous system affected. To this must be added a certain impersonality of consciousness, so that for the time the consciousness was not that of the demonised, but the demoniser, just as in certain mesmeric states the consciousness of the mesmerised is really that of the mesmeriser. We might carry the analogy farther, and say, that the two states are exactly parallel – the demon or demons taking the place of the mesmeriser, only that the effects were more powerful and extensive, perhaps more enduring. But one point seems to have been assumed, for which there is, to say the least, no evidence, viz., that because, at least in many cases, the disease caused by the demon was permanent, therefore those who were so affected were permanently or constantly under the power of the demon. Neither the New Testament, nor even Rabbinic literature, conveys the idea of permanent demoniac indwelling, to which the later term ‘possession’ owes its origin. On the contrary, such accounts, as that of the scene in the Synagogue of Capernaum, convey the impression of a sudden influence, which in most cases seems occasioned by the spiritual effect of the Person or of the Words of the Christ. To this historical sketch we have only to add, that the phenomenon is not referred to either in the Old Testament or in the Apocrypha, nor, for that matter, in the Mishnah, where, indeed, from the character of its contents, one would scarcely expect to find it. But we find it mentioned not only in the New Testament, but in the writings of Josephus. The references in heathen or in Christian writings posterior to those of the New Testament lie beyond our present inquiry.

In view of these facts, we may arrive at some more definite conclusions. Those who contend that the representations of the Evangelists are identical with the popular Jewish notions of the time, must be ill acquainted with the latter. What these were, is explained in another place. Suffice it here to state that, whatever want of clearness there may be about the Jewish ideas of demoniac influences, there is none as to the means proposed for their removal. These may be broadly classified as: magical means for the prevention of such influences (such as the avoidance of certain places, times, numbers, or circumstances; amulets, etc.); magical means for the cure of diseases; and direct exorcism (either by certain outward means, or else by formulas of incantation). Again, while the New Testament furnishes no data by which to learn the views of Jesus or of the Evangelists regarding the exact character of the phenomenon, it furnishes the fullest details as to the manner in which the demonised were set free. This was always the same. It consisted neither in magical means nor formulas of exorcism, but always in the Word of Power which Jesus spake, or entrusted to His disciples, and which the demons always obeyed. There is here not only difference, but contrariety in comparison with the current Jewish notions, and it leads to the conclusion that there was the same contrast in His views, as in His treatment of the ‘demonised.’

Jewish superstition in regard to the demoniacal state can, therefore, no more affect the question of the credibility of the Gospel accounts of it, than can quotations from heathen or from post-Apostolic Christian writers. In truth, it must be decided purely on New Testament grounds; and resolves itself into that of the general trustworthiness of the Evangelic narratives, and of our estimate of the Person of Christ. Thus viewed, he who regards Jesus as the Messiah and the Son of God can be in no doubt. If we are asked to explain the rationale of the phenomenon, or of its cessation – if, indeed, it has wholly and everywhere ceased – we might simply decline to attempt that for which we have not sufficient data, and this, without implying that such did not exist, or that, if known, they would not wholly vindicate the facts of the case. At any rate, it does not follow that there are no such data because we do not possess them; nor is there any ground for the contention that, if they existed, we ought to possess them. For, admittedly, the phenomenon was only a temporary one.

And yet certain considerations will occur to the thoughtful reader, which, if they do not explain, will at least make him hesitate to designate as inexplicable, the facts in question. In our view, at least, he would be a bold interpreter who would ascribe all the phenomena even of heathen magic to jugglery, or else to purely physical causes. Admittedly they have ceased, or perhaps, as much else, assumed other forms, just as, so far as evidence goes, demoniac influence has – at least in the form presented in the New Testament. But, that it has so ceased, does not prove that it never existed. If we believe that the Son of God came to destroy the works of the Devil, we can understand the developed enmity of the kingdom of darkness; and if we regard Christ as Very God, taking, in manner to us mysterious, Humanity, we can also perceive how the Prince of Darkness might, in counterfeit, seek through the demonised a temporary dwelling in Humanity for purposes of injury and destruction, as Christ for healing and salvation. In any case, holding as we do that this demoniac influence was not permanent in the demonised, the analogy of certain mesmeric influences seems exactly to apply. No reference is here made to other supernatural spirit-influences of which many in our days speak, and which, despite the lying and imposture probably connected with them, have a background of truth and reality, which, at least in the present writer’s experience, cannot be absolutely denied. In the mysterious connection between the sensuous and supersensuous, spirit and matter, there are many things which the vulgar ‘bread-and-butter philosophy’ fails rightly to apportion, or satisfactorily to explain. That, without the intervention of sensuous media, mind can, may, and does affect mind; that even animals, in proportion to their sensitiveness, or in special circumstances, are affected by that which is not, or else not yet, seen, and this quite independently of man; that, in short, there are not a few phenomena ‘in heaven and earth’ of which our philosophy dreams not – these are considerations which, however the superficial sciolist may smile at them, no earnest inquirer would care to dismiss with peremptory denial. And superstition only begins when we look for them, or else when we attempt to account for and explain them, not in the admission of their possibility.

But, in our view, it is of the deepest importance always to keep in mind, that the ‘demonised’ was not a permanent state, or possession by the powers of darkness. For, it establishes a moral element, since, during the period of their temporary liberty, the demonised might have shaken themselves free from the overshadowing power, or sought release from it. Thus the demonised state involved personal responsibility, although that of a diseased and disturbed consciousness.

In one respect those who were ‘demonised’ exhibited the same phenomenon. They all owned the Power of Jesus. It was not otherwise in the Synagogue at Capernaum on that Sabbath-morning. What Jesus had spoken produced an immediate effect on the demonised, though one which could scarcely have been anticipated. For, there is authority for inserting the word ‘straightway’ immediately after the account of Jesus’ preaching. Yet, as we think of it, we cannot imagine that the demon would have continued silent nor yet that he could have spoken other than the truth in the Presence of the God-Man. There must be, and yet there cannot be, resistance. The very Presence of the Christ meant the destruction of this work of the Devil. Involuntarily, in his confessed inability of disguise or resistance, he owns defeat, even before the contest. ‘What have we to do with Thee, Jesus of Nazareth? Thou art come to destroy us! I know thee who Thou art, the Holy One of God.’ And yet there seems in these words already an emergence of the consciousness of the demonised, at least in so far that there is no longer confusion between him and his tormenter, and the latter speaks in his own name. One stronger than the demon had affected the higher part in the demonised. It was the Holy One of God, in Whose Presence the powers of moral destruction cannot be silent, but must speak, and own their subjection and doom. That Christ needs not to contend that He is the Christ, is itself victory.

But this was not all. He had come not only to destroy the works of the Devil. His Incarnation meant this – and more: to set the prisoners free. By a word of command He gagged the confessions of the demon, unwillingly made, and even so with hostile intent. It was not by such voices that He would have His Messiahship ever proclaimed. Such testimony was wholly unfitting and incongruous; it would have been a strange discord on the witness of the Baptist and the Voice which had proclaimed Him from heaven. And, truly, had it been admitted, it would have strangely jarred in a Life which needed not, and asked not even the witness of men, but appealed straightway to God Himself. Nor can we fail to perceive how, had it been allowed, it would have given a true ground to what the Pharisees sought to assign as the interpretation of His Power, that by the Prince of Demons He cast out demons. And thus there is here also deep accord with the fundamental idea which was the outcome of His Temptation: that not the seemingly shortest, but the Divine way must lead Him to the goal, and that goal not Royal proclamation, but the Resurrection.

The same power which gagged the confession also bade the demon relinquish his prey. One wild paroxysm – and the sufferer was forever free. But on them all who saw and heard it fell the utter stupor and confusion of astonishment. Each turned to his neighbour with the inquiry: ‘What is this? A new doctrine with authority! And He commandeth the unclean spirits, and they obey Him.’ Well might they inquire. It had been a threefold miracle: a new doctrine;’ ‘with authority;’ and obedience of the unclean spirits to His command. There is throughout, and especially in the account of the casting out of the demon, such un-Jewish simplicity, with entire absence of what would have been characteristic in a Jewish exorcist; such want of all that one would have expected, if the event had been invented, or coloured for a purpose, or tinged by contemporary notions; and, withal, such sublimity and majesty, that it is difficult to understand how any one can resist the impression of its reality, or that He Who so spake and did was in truth the Son of God.

From the Synagogue we follow the Saviour, in company with His called disciples, to Peter’s wedded home. But no festive meal, as was Jewish wont, awaited them there. A sudden access of violent ‘burning fever,’ such as is even now common in that district, had laid Peter’s mother-in-law prostrate. If we had still any lingering thought of Jewish magical cures as connected with those of Jesus, what is now related must dispel it. The Talmud gives this disease precisely the same name (אשתא צמירתא, Eshaṯa ṣemirta), ‘burning fever,’ and prescribes for it a magical remedy, of which the principal part is to tie a knife wholly of iron by a braid of hair to a thornbush, and to repeat on successive days Exo_3:2, Exo_3:3, then Exo_3:4, and finally Exo_3:5, after which the bush is to be cut down, while a certain magical formula is pronounced. How different from this, alike in its sublime simplicity and in the majestic bearing of Him Who healed, is the Evangelic narrative of the cure of Peter’s mother-in-law. To ignore, in our estimate of the trustworthiness of the Gospels, this essential contrast, would be a grave historical mistake. Jesus is ‘told’ of the sickness; He is besought for her who is stricken down. In His Presence disease and misery cannot continue. Bending over the sufferer, He ‘rebuked the fever,’ just as He had rebuked ‘the demon’ in the Synagogue, and for the same reason, since all disease, in the view of the Divine Healer, is the outcome of sin. Then lifting her by the hand, she rose up, healed, to ‘minister’ unto them. It was the first Diaconate of woman in the Church – might we not almost say, in the world? – a Diaconate to Christ, and to those that were His; the Diaconate of one healed by Christ; a Diaconate immediately following such healing. The first, this, of a long course of woman’s Diaconate to Christ, in which, for the first time, woman attained her true position. And what a Sabbath-meal it must have been, after that scene in the Synagogue and after that healing in the house, when Jesus was the Guest, they who had witnessed it all sat at meat with Him, and she who had been healed was the Deaconess. Would that such were ever our Christian festive meals!

It was evening. The sun was setting, and the Sabbath past. All that day it had been told from home to home what had been done in the Synagogue; it had been whispered what had taken place in the house of their neighbour Simon. This one conviction had been borne in upon them all, that ‘with authority’ He spake, with authority and power He commanded even the unclean spirits, and they obeyed. No scene more characteristic of the Christ than that on this autumn evening at Capernaum. One by one the stars had shone out over the tranquil Lake and the festive city, lighting up earth’s darkness with heaven’s soft brilliancy, as if they stood there witnesses, that God had fulfilled His good promise to Abraham. On that evening no one in Capernaum thought of business, pleasure, or rest. There must have been many homes of sorrow, care, and sickness there, and in the populous neighbourhood around. To them, to all, had the door of hope now been opened. Truly, a new Sun had risen on them, with healing in His wings. No disease too desperate, when even the demons owned the authority of His mere rebuke. From all parts they bring them: mothers, widows, wives, fathers, children, husbands – their loved ones, the treasures they had almost lost; and the whole city throngs – a hushed, solemnised, overawed multitude – expectant, waiting at the door of Simon’s dwelling. There they laid them, along the street up to the marketplace, on their beds; or brought them, with beseeching look and word. What a symbol of this world’s misery, need, and hope; what a symbol, also, of what the Christ really is as the Consoler in the world’s manifold woe! Never, surely, was He more truly the Christ; nor is He in symbol more truly such to us and to all time, than when, in the stillness of that evening, under the starlit sky, He went through that suffering throng, laying His hands in the blessing of healing on every one of them, and casting out many devils. No picture of the Christ more dear to us, than this of the unlimited healing of whatever disease of body or soul. In its blessed indefiniteness it conveys the infinite potentiality of relief, whatever misery have fallen on us, or whatever care or sorrow oppress us. He must be blind, indeed, who sees not in this Physician the Divine Healer; in this Christ the Light of the World; the Restorer of whom sin had blighted; the Joy in our world’s deep sorrow. Never was prophecy more truly fulfilled than, on that evening, this of Isaiah: ‘Himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses.’ By His Incarnation and Coming, by His taking our infirmities, and bearing our sicknesses – for this in the truest and widest sense is the meaning of the Incarnation of the Christ – did He become the Healer, the Consoler of humanity, its Saviour in all ills of time, and from all ills of eternity. The most real fulfilment this, that can be conceived, of Isaiah’s rapt vision of Who and what the Messiah was to be, and to do; not, indeed, what is sometimes called fulfilment, or expected as such, in a literal and verbal correspondence with the prediction. An utterly mechanical, external, and unspiritual view this of prophecy, in which, in quite Jewish literalism, the spirit is crushed by the letter. But, viewed in its real bearing on mankind with its wants, Christ, on that evening, was the real, though as yet only initial, fulfilment of the world’s great hope, to which, centuries before, the God-directed hand of the prophet had pointed.

So ended that Sabbath in Capernaum: a Sabbath of healing, joy, and true rest. But far and wide, into every place of the country around, throughout all the region of Galilee, spread the tidings, and with them the fame of Him Whom demons must obey, though they dare not pronounce Him the Son of God. And on men’s ears fell His Name with sweet softness of infinite promise, ‘like rain upon the mown grass, as showers that water the earth.’

(Mat_4:23; Mat_8:2-4; Mar_1:35-45; Luk_4:42-44; Luk_5:12-16)

A day and an evening such as of that Sabbath of healing in Capernaum must, with reverence be it written, have been followed by what opens the next section. To the thoughtful observer there is such unbroken harmony in the Life of Jesus, such accord of the inward and outward, as to carry instinctive conviction of the truth of its record. It was, so to speak, an inward necessity that the God-Man, when brought into contact with disease and misery, whether from physical or supernatural causes, should remove it by His Presence, by His touch, by His Word. An outward necessity also, because no other mode of teaching equally convincing would have reached those, accustomed to Rabbinic disputations, and who must have looked for such a manifestation from One Who claimed such authority. And yet, so far from being a mere worker of miracles, as we should have expected if the history of His miracles had been of legendary origin, there is nothing more marked than the pain, we had almost said the humiliation, which their necessity seems to have carried to His heart. ‘Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe;’ ‘an evil and adulterous generation seeketh a sign;’ ‘blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed’ – such are the utterances of Him Who sighed when He opened the ears of the deaf and bade His Apostles look for higher and better things than power over all diseases or even over evil spirits.  So would not the Messiah of Jewish legend have spoken or done; nor would they who invented such miracles have so referred to them.

In truth, when, through the rift in His outward history, we catch a glimpse of Christ’s inner Being, these miracles, so far as not the outcome of the mystic union of the Divine and the Human in His Person, but as part of His Mission, form part of His Humiliation. They also belong to that way which He had chosen in his initial conquest of the Tempter in the Wilderness, when He chose, not the sudden display of absolute power for the subdual of His people, but the painful, slow method of meeting the wants, and addressing Himself to the understanding and capacity of those over Whom He would reign. In this view, it seems as if we could gain a fresh understanding, not only of the expediency of His final departure, so far as concerned the future teaching of the disciples by the Holy Spirit, but of His own longing for the Advent of the Comforter. In truth, the two teachers and the two modes of teaching could not be together, and the Ascension of the Christ, as the end of His Humiliation, marked the Advent of the Holy Ghost, as bestowing another mode of teaching than that of the days of His Humiliation.

And so, thinking of the scene on the evening before, we can understand how, ‘very early, while it was still very dark,’ Jesus rose up, and went into a solitary place to pray. The use of the same expression in Mar_13:35 enables us to fix the time as that of the fourth night-watch, or between three and six o’clock of the morning. It was not till some time afterwards, that even those, who had so lately been called to His closest fellowship, rose, and, missing Him, followed. Jesus had prayed in that solitude, and consecrated it. After such a day, and in prospect of entering on His second journey through Galilee – this time in so far different circumstances – He must prevent the dawn of the morning in prayer. And by this also would they learn, that He was not merely a worker of miracles, but that He, Whose Word demons obeyed, lived a Life, not of outward but of inward power, in fellowship with His Father, and baptized his work with prayer. But as yet, and, indeed, in measure all through His Life on earth, it seemed difficult for them in any measure to realise this. ‘All men seek for Thee,’ and therefore they would have had Him return to Capernaum. But this was the very reason why He had withdrawn ere dawn of day. He had come forth, and that, not to attract the crowds, and be proclaimed a King, but to preach the Kingdom of God. Once more we say it: so speaks not, nor acts the hero of Jewish legend!

As the three Synoptists accordantly state, Jesus now entered on His second Galilean journey. There can be little doubt, that the chronological succession of events is here accurately indicated by the more circumstantial narrative in Mark’s Gospel. The arrangement of Luke appears that of historical grouping, while that of Matthew is determined by the Hebraic plan of his Gospel, which seems constructed on the model of the Pentateuch, as if the establishment of the Kingdom by the Messiah were presented as the fulfilment of its preparatory planting in Israel. But this second journey through Galilee, which the three Gospels connect with the stay at Capernaum, marks a turning-point in the working of the Christ. As already stated, the occurrences at the ‘Unknown Feast,’ in Jerusalem, formed a new point of departure. Christ had fully presented His claims to the Sanhedrists, and they had been fully rejected by the Scribes and the people. Henceforth He separated Himself from that ‘untoward generation;’ henceforth, also, began His systematic persecution by the authorities, when His movements were tracked and watched. Jesus went alone to Jerusalem. This, also, was fitting. Equally so, that on His return He called His disciples to be His followers; and that from Capernaum He entered, in their company, on a new phase in His Work.

Significantly, His Work began where that of the Rabbis, we had almost said of the Old Testament saints, ended. Whatever remedies, medical, magical, or sympathetic, Rabbinic writings may indicate for various kinds of disease, leprosy is not included in the catalogue. They left aside what even the Old Testament marked as moral death, by enjoining those so stricken to avoid all contact with the living, and even to bear the appearance of mourners. As the leper passed by, his clothes rent, his hair dishevelled, and the lower part of his face and his upper lip covered, it was as one going to death who reads his own burial-service, while the mournful words, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ which he uttered, proclaimed that his was both living and moral death. Again, the Old Testament, and even Rabbinism, took, in the measures prescribed in leprosy, primarily a moral, or rather a ritual, and only secondarily a sanitary, view of the case. The isolation already indicated, which banished lepers from all intercourse except with those similarly stricken, and forebade their entering not only the Temple or Jerusalem, but any walled city, could not have been merely prompted by the wish to prevent infection. For all the laws in regard to leprosy are expressly stated not to have application in the case of heathens, proselytes before their conversion, and even of Israelites on their birth. The same inference must also be drawn from the circumstance, that the priestly examination and subsequent isolation of the leper were not to commence during the marriage week, or on festive days, since, evidently, infection would have been most likely to spread in such circumstances.

It has already been stated, that Rabbinism confessed itself powerless in presence of this living death. Although, as Michaelis rightly suggests, the sacrificial ritual for the cleansed leper implies, at least, the possibility of a cure, it is in every instance traced to the direct agency of God. Hence the mythical theory, which, to be rational, must show some precedent to account for the origination of the narrative in the Gospel, here once more breaks down. Keim cannot deny the evident authenticity of the Evangelic narrative, and has no better explanation to offer than that of the old Rationalists – which Strauss had already so fully refuted – that the poor sufferer only asked of Jesus to declare, not to make, him clean. In truth, the possibility of any cure through human agency was never contemplated by the Jews. Josephus speaks of it as possibly granted to prayer, but in a manner betokening a pious phraseology without serious meaning. We may go further, and say that not only did Rabbinism never suggest the cure of a leper, but that its treatment of those sufferers presents the most marked contrast to that of the Saviour. And yet, as if writing its own condemnation, one of the titles which it gives to the Messiah is ‘the Leprous,’ the King Messiah being represented as seated in the entrance to Rome, surrounded by, and relieving all misery and disease, in fulfilment of Isa_53:4. 

We need not here enumerate the various symptoms, by which the Rabbinic law teaches us to recognise true leprosy. Anyone capable of it might make the medical inspection, although only a descendant of Aaron could formally pronounce clean or unclean. Once declared leprous, the sufferer was soon made to feel the utter heartlessness of Rabbinism. To banish him outside walled towns may have been a necessity, which, perhaps, required to be enforced by the threatened penalty of forty stripes save one. Similarly, it might be a right, even merciful, provision, that in the Synagogues lepers were to be the first to enter and the last to leave, and that they should occupy a separate compartment (meḥiṣah), ten palms high, and six feet wide. For, from the symbolism and connection between the physical an the psychical, the Old Testament, in its rites and institutions, laid the greatest stress on ‘clean and unclean.’ To sum it up in briefest compass, and leaving out of view leprosy of clothes or houses, according to the Old Testament defilement was conveyed only by the animal body, and attached to no other living body than that of man, nor could any other living body than that of man communicate defilement. The Old Testament mentioned eleven principal kinds of defilement. These, as being capable of communicating further defilement, were designated Aḇoṯ hatumeoṯ – ‘fathers of defilements’ – the defilement which they produced being either itself an Aḇ hatumeah, or else a ‘Child,’ or a ‘Child’s Child of defilement’ (ולד יולד ולד הטומאה). We find in Scripture thirty-two Aḇoṯ hatumeoṯ, as they are called. To this Rabbinic tradition added other twenty-nine. Again, according to Scripture, those ‘fathers of defilements’ affected only in two degrees; the direct effect produced by them being designated ‘the beginning,’ or ‘the first,’ and that further propagated, ‘the second’ degree. But Rabbinic ordinances added a third, fourth, and even fifth degree of defilement. From this, as well as the equally intricate arrangements about purification, the Mishnic section about ‘clean and unclean’ is at the same time the largest and most intricate in the Rabbinic code, while its provisions touched and interfered, more than any others, with every department of life.

In the elaborate code of defilements leprosy was not only one of ‘the fathers of uncleanness,’ but, next to defilement from the dead, stood foremost amongst them. Not merely actual contact with the leper, but even his entrance defiled a habitation, and everything in it, to the beams of the roof. But beyond this, Rabbinic harshness or fear carried its provisions to the utmost sequences of an unbending logic. It is, indeed, true that, as in general so especially in this instance, Rabbinism loved to trace disease to moral causes. ‘No death without sin, and no pain without transgression;’ ‘the sick is not healed, till all his sins are forgiven him.’ These are oft-repeated sayings; but, when closely examined, they are not quite so spiritual as they sound. For, first, they represent a reaction against the doctrine of original sin, in the sense that it is not the Fall of man, but one’s actual transgression, to which disease and death are to be traced according to the saying: ‘Not the serpent kills, but sin.’  But their real unspirituality appears most clearly, when we remember how special diseases were traced to particular sins. Thus, childlessness and leprosy are described as chastisements, which indeed procure for the sufferer forgiveness of sins, but cannot, like other chastisements, be regarded as the outcome of love, nor be received in love. And even such sentiments in regard to sufferings are immediately followed by such cynical declarations on the part of Rabbis so afflicted, as that they loved neither the chastisement, nor its reward. And in regard to leprosy, tradition had it that, as leprosy attached to the house, the dress, or the person, these were to be regarded as always heavier strokes, following as each successive warning had been neglected, and a reference to this was seen in Pro_19:29.  Eleven sins are mentioned which bring leprosy, among them preeminently those of which the tongue is the organ.

Still, if such had been the real views of Rabbinism one might have expected that Divine compassion would have been extended to those, who bore such heavy burden of their sins. Instead of this, their burdens were needlessly increased. True, as wrapped in mourner’s garb the leper passed by, his cry ‘Unclean!’ was to incite others to pray for him – but also to avoid him. No one was even to salute him; his bed was to be low, inclining towards the ground. If he even put his head into a place, it became unclean. No less a distance than four cubits (six feet) must be kept from a leper; or, if the wind came from that direction, a hundred were scarcely sufficient. Rabbi Meir would not eat an egg purchased in a street where there was a leper. Another Rabbi boasted, that he always threw stones at them to keep them far off, while others hid themselves or ran away.  To such extent did Rabbinism carry its inhuman logic in considering the leper as a mourner, that it even forbade him to wash his face.

We can now in some measure appreciate the contrast between Jesus and His contemporaries in His bearing towards the leper. Or, conversely, we can judge by the healing of this leper of the impression which the Saviour had made upon the people. He would have fled from a Rabbi; he came in lowliest attitude of entreaty to Jesus. Criticism need not so anxiously seek for an explanation of his approach. There was no Old Testament precedent for it: not in the case of Moses, nor even in that of Elisha, and there was no Jewish expectancy of it. But to have heard Him teach, to have seen or known Him as healing all manner of disease, must have carried to the heart the conviction of His absolute power. And so one can understand this lowly reverence of approach, this cry which has so often since been wrung from those who have despaired of all other help: ‘If Thou wilt, Thou canst make me clean.’ It is not a prayer, but the ground-tone of all prayer – faith in His Power, and absolute committal to Him of our helpless, hopeless need. And Jesus, touched with compassion, willed it. It almost seems, as if it were in the very exuberance of power that Jesus, acting in so direct contravention of Jewish usage, touched the leper. It was fitting that Elisha should disappoint Naaman’s expectancy, that the prophet would heal his leprosy by the touch of his hand. It was even more fitting that Jesus should surprise the Jewish leper by touching, ere by His Word He cleansed him. And so, experience ever finds that in Christ the real is far beyond the ideal. We can understand, how, from his standpoint, Strauss should have found it impossible to understand the healing of leprosy by the touch and Word of Jesus. Its explanation lies in the fact, that He was the God-Man. And yet, as our inner tending after God and the voice of conscience indicate that man is capable of adoption into God’s family, so the marked power which in disease mind has over body points to a higher capability in Man Perfect, the Ideal Man, the God-Man, of vanquishing disease by His Will.

It is not quite so easy at first sight to understand, why Christ should with such intense earnestness, almost vehemence, have sent the healed man away – as the term bears, ‘cast him out. Certainly not (as Volkmar – fantastically in error on this, as on so many other points – imagines) because He disapproved of his worship. Rather do we once more gather, how the God-Man shrank from the fame connected with miracles – specially with such an one – which as we have seen, were rather of inward and outward necessity than of choice in His Mission. Not so – followed by a curious crowd, or thronged by eager multitudes of sightseers, or aspirants for temporal benefits – was the Kingdom of Heaven to be preached and advanced. It would have been the way of a Jewish Messiah, and have led up to His royal proclamation by the populace. But as we study the character of the Christ, no contrast seems more glaring – let us add, more painful – than that of such a scene. And so we read that, when, notwithstanding the Saviour’s charge to the healed leper to keep silence, it was nevertheless – nay, as might perhaps have been expected – all the more made known by him – as, indeed, in some measure it could scarcely have remained entirely unknown, He could no more, as before, enter the cities, but remained without in desert places, whither they came to Him from every quarter. And in that withdrawal He spoke, and healed, ‘and prayed.’

Yet another motive of Christ’s conduct may be suggested. His injunction of silence was combined with that of presenting himself to the priest and conforming to the ritual requirements of the Mosaic Law in such cases. It is scarcely necessary to refute the notion, that in this Christ was prompted either by the desire to see the healed man restored to the society of his fellows, or by the wish to have some officially recognised miracle, to which He might afterwards appeal. Not to speak of the un-Christlikeness of such a wish or purpose, as a matter of fact, He did not appeal to it, and the healed leper wholly disappears from the Gospel-narrative. And yet his conforming to the Mosaic Ritual was to be ‘a testimony unto them.’ The Lord, certainly, did not wish to have the Law of Moses broken – and broken, not superseded, it would have been, if its provisions had been infringed before His Death, Ascension, and the Coming of the Holy Ghost had brought their fulfilment.

But there is something else here. The course of this history shows that the open rupture between Jesus and the Jewish authorities, which had commenced at the Unknown Feast at Jerusalem, was to lead to practical sequences. On the part of the Jewish authorities, it led to measures of active hostility. The Synagogues of Galilee are no longer the quiet scenes of His teaching and miracles; His Word and deeds no longer pass unchallenged. It had never occurred to these Galileans, as they implicitly surrendered themselves to the power of His words, to question their orthodoxy. But now, immediately after this occurrence, we find Him accused of blasphemy. They had not thought it breach of God’s Law when, on that Sabbath, He had healed in the Synagogue of Capernaum and in the home of Peter; but after this it became sinful to extend like mercy on the Sabbath to him whose hand was withered. They had never thought of questioning the condescension of his intercourse with the poor and needy; but now they sought to sap the commencing allegiance of His disciples by charging Him with undue intercourse with publicans and sinners, and by inciting against Him even the prejudices and doubts of the half-enlightened followers of His own Forerunner. All these new incidents are due to one and the same cause; the presence and hostile watchfulness of the Scribes and Pharisees, who now for the first time appear on the scene of His ministry. Is it too much then to infer, that, immediately after that Feast at Jerusalem, the Jewish authorities sent their familiars into Galilee after Jesus, and that it was to the presence and influence of this informal deputation that the opposition to Christ, which now increasingly appeared, was due? If so, then we see not only an additional motive for Christ’s injunction of silence on those whom He had healed, and for His own withdrawal from the cities and their throng, but we can understand how, as He afterwards answered those, whom John had sent to lay before Christ his doubts, by pointing to His works, so He replied to the sending forth of the Scribes of Jerusalem to watch, oppose, and arrest Him, by sending to Jerusalem as His embassy the healed leper, to submit to all the requirements of the Law. It was His testimony unto them – His, Who was meek and lowly in heart; and it was in deepest accord with what He had done, and was doing. Assuredly, He, Who brake not the bruised reed, did not cry nor lift up His Voice in the streets, but brought forth judgment unto truth. And in Him shall the nations trust!

(Mat_9:1-8; Mar_2:1-12; Luk_5:17-26)

It is a remarkable instance of the reserve of the Gospel-narratives, that of the second journey of Jesus in Galilee no other special event is recorded than the healing of the leper. And it seems also to indicate, that this one miracle had been so selected for a special purpose. But if, as we have suggested, after the ‘Unknown Feast,’ the activity of Jesus assumed a new and what, for want of a better name, maybe called an anti-Judaic character, we can perceive the reason of it. The healing of leprosy was recorded as typical. With this agrees also what immediately follows. For, as Rabbinism stood confessedly powerless in face of the living death of leprosy, so it had no word of forgiveness to speak to the conscience burdened with sin, nor yet word of welcome to the sinner. But this was the inmost meaning of the two events which the Gospel-History places next to the healing of the leper: the forgiveness of sins in the case of the paralytic, and the welcome to the chief of sinners in the call of Levi-Matthew.

We are still mainly following the lead of Mark, alike as regards the succession of events and their details. And here it is noteworthy, how the account in Mark confirms that by John of what had occurred at the Unknown Feast. Not that either Evangelist could have derived it from the other. But if we establish the trustworthiness of the narrative in Jn 5, which is unconfirmed by any of the Synoptists, we strengthen not only the evidence in favour of the Fourth Gospel generally, but that in one of its points of chief difficulty, since such advanced teaching on the part of Jesus, and such developed hostility from the Jewish authorities, might scarcely have been looked for at so early a stage. But when we compare the language of Mark with the narrative in Jn 5, at least four points of contact prominently appear. For, first, the unspoken charge of the Scribes, that in forgiving sins Jesus blasphemed by making Himself equal with God, has its exact counterpart in the similar charge against Him in Joh_5:18, which kindled in them the wish to kill Jesus. Secondly, as in that case the final reply of Jesus pointed to ‘the authority’ (ἐξουσία) which the Father had given Him for Divine administration on earth, so the healing of the paralytic was to show the Scribes that He had ‘authority’ (ἐξουσία) for the dispensation upon earth of the forgiveness of sins, which the Jews rightly regarded as the Divine prerogative. Thirdly, the words which Jesus spake to the paralytic: ‘Rise, take up thy bed, and walk,’ are to the very letter the same which are recorded as used by Him when He healed the impotent man at the Pool of Bethesda. Lastly, alike in the words which Jesus addressed to the Scribes at the healing of the paralytic, and in those at the Unknown Feast, He made final appeal to His works as evidential of His being sent by, and having received of, the Father ‘the authority’ to which He laid claim. It would be utterly irrational to regard these as coincidences, and not references. And their evidential force becomes the stronger, as we remember the entire absence of design on the part of Mark. But this correspondence not only supports the trustworthiness of the two independent narratives in Mark and in John, but also confirms alike that historical order in which we have arranged the events, and the suggestion that, after the encounter at the Unknown Feast, the authorities of Jerusalem had sent representatives to watch, oppose, and, if possible, entrap Jesus.

In another manner, also, the succession of events, as we have traced it, seems confirmed by the account of the healing of the paralytic. The second journey of Jesus through Galilee had commenced in autumn; the return to Capernaum was ‘after days,’ which, in common Jewish phraseology, meant a considerable interval. As we reckon, it was winter, which would equally account for Christ’s return to Capernaum, and for His teaching in the house. For, no sooner ‘was it heard that He was in the house,’ or, as some have rendered it, ‘that He was at home,’ than so many flocked to the dwelling of Peter, which at that period may have been ‘the house’ or temporary ‘home’ of the Saviour, as to fill its limited space to overflowing and even to crowd out to the door and beyond it. The general impression on our minds is, that this audience was rather in a state of indecision than of sympathy with Jesus. It included ‘Pharisees and doctors of the Law’ who had come on purpose from the towns of Galilee, from Judaea, and from Jerusalem. These occupied the ‘uppermost rooms,’ sitting. no doubt, near to Jesus. Their influence must have been felt by the people. Although irresistibly attracted by Jesus, an element of curiosity, if not of doubt, would mingle with their feelings, as they looked at their leaders, to whom long habit attached the most superstitious veneration. If one might so say, it was like the gathering of Israel on Mount Carmel, to witness the issue as between Elijah and the priests of Baal.

Although in no wise necessary to the understanding of the event, it is helpful to try and realise the scene. We can picture to ourselves the Saviour ‘speaking the Word’ to that eager, interested crowd, which would soon become forgetful even of the presence of the watchful ‘Scribes.’ Though we know a good deal of the structure of Jewish houses we feel it difficult to be sure of the exact place which the Saviour occupied on this occasion. Meetings for religious study and discussion were certainly held in the Aliyah or upper chamber. But, on many grounds, such a locale seems utterly unsuited to the requirements of the narrative. Similar objections attach to the idea, that it was the front room of one of those low houses occupied by the poor. Nor is there any reason for supposing that the house occupied by Peter was one of those low buildings, which formed the dwellings of the very poor. It must, at any rate, have contained, besides a large family room, accommodation for Peter and his wife, for Peter’s mother-in-law, and for Jesus as the honoured guest. The Mishnah calls a small house one that is 9 feet long by 12 broad, and a large house one that is 12 feet long by 15 broad, and adds that a dining-hall is 15 feet square, the height being always computed at half the length and breadth. But these notices seem rather to apply to a single room. They are part of a legal discussion, in which reference is made to a building which might be erected by a man for his son on his marriage, or as a dwelling for his widowed daughter. Another source of information is derived from what we know of the price and rental of houses. We read of a house as costing ten (of course, gold) dinars, which would make the price 250 silver dinars, or between 7l. and 8l. of our money. This must, however, have been ‘a small house,’ since the rental of such is stated to have been from 7s. to 28s. a year, while that of a large house is computed at about 9l. a year, and that of a courtyard at about 14s. a year.

All this is so far of present interest as it will help to show, that the house of Peter could not have been a ‘small one.’ We regard it as one of the better dwellings of the middle classes. In that case all the circumstances fully accord with the narrative in the Gospels. Jesus is speaking the Word, standing in the covered gallery that ran round the courtyard of such houses, and opened into the various apartments. Perhaps He was standing within the entrance of the guest-chamber, while the Scribes were sitting within that apartment, or beside Him in the gallery. The court before Him is thronged, out into the street. All are absorbedly listening to the Master, when of a sudden those appear who are bearing a paralytic on his pallet. It had of late become too common a scene to see the sick thus carried to Jesus to attract special attention. And yet one can scarcely conceive that, if the crowd had merely filled an apartment and gathered around its door, it would not have made way for the sick, or that somehow the bearers could not have come within sight, or been able to attract the attention of Christ. But with a courtyard crowded out into the street, all this would be, of course, out of the question. In such circumstances, what was to be done? Access to Jesus was simply impossible. Shall they wait till the multitude disperses, or for another and more convenient season? Only those would have acted thus who have never felt the preciousness of an opportunity, because they have never known what real need is. Inmost in the hearts of those who bore the paralysed was the belief, that Jesus could, and that he would, heal. They must have heard it from others; they must have witnessed it themselves in other instances. And inmost in the heart of the paralytic was, as we infer from the first words of Jesus to him, not only the same conviction, but with it weighed a terrible fear, born of Jewish belief, lest his sins might hinder his healing. And this would make him doubly anxious not to lose the present opportunity.

And so their resolve was quickly taken. If they cannot approach Jesus with their burden, they can let it down from above at His feet. Outside the house, as well as inside, a stair led up to the roof. They may have ascended it in this wise, or else reached it by what the Rabbis called ‘the road of the roofs,’ passing from roof to roof, if the house adjoined others in the same street. The roof itself, which had hard beaten earth or rubble underneath it, was paved with brick, stone, or any other hard substance, and surrounded by a balustrade which, according to Jewish Law, was at least three feet high. It is scarcely possible to imagine, that the bearers of the paralytic would have attempted to dig through this into a room below, not to speak of the interruption and inconvenience caused to those below by such an operation. But no such objection attaches if we regard it, not as the main roof of the house, but as that of the covered gallery under which we are supposing the Lord to have stood. This could, of course, have been readily reached from above. In such case it would have been comparatively easy to ‘unroof’ the covering of ‘tiles,’ and then, ‘having dug out’ an opening through the lighter framework which supported the tiles, to let down their burden ‘into the midst before Jesus.’ All this, as done by four strong men, would be but the work of a few minutes. But we can imagine the arresting of the discourse of Jesus, and the breathless surprise of the crowd as this opening through the tiles appeared, and slowly a pallet was let down before them. Busy hands would help to steady it, and bring it safe to the ground. And on that pallet lay one paralysed – his fevered face and glistening eyes upturned to Jesus.

It must have been a marvellous sight, even at a time and in circumstances when the marvellous might be said to have become of every-day occurrence. This energy and determination of faith exceeded aught that had been witnessed before. Jesus saw it, and He spake. For, as yet, the blanched lips of the sufferer had not parted to utter his petition. He believed, indeed, in the power of Jesus to heal, with all the certitude that issued, not only in the determination to be laid at His feet, but at whatever trouble and in any circumstances, however novel or strange. It needed, indeed, faith to overcome all the hindrances in the present instance; and still more faith to be so absorbed and forgetful of all around, as to be let down from the roof through the broken tiling into the midst of such an assembly. And this open outburst of faith shone out the more brightly, from its contrast with the covered darkness and clouds of unbelief within the breast of those Scribes, who had come to watch and ensnare Jesus.

As yet no one had spoken, for the silence of expectancy had fallen on them all. Could He, and, if He could, would He help – and what would He do? But He, Who perceived man’s unspoken thoughts, knew that there was not only faith, but also fear, in the heart of that man. Hence the first words which the Saviour spake to him were: ‘Be of good cheer.’ He had, indeed, got beyond the coarse Judaic standpoint, from which suffering seemed an expiation of sin. It was argued by the Rabbis, that, if the loss of an eye or a tooth liberated a slave from bondage, much more would the sufferings of the whole body free the soul from guilt; and, again, that Scripture itself indicated this by the use of the word ‘covenant,’ alike in connection with the salt which rendered the sacrifices meet for the altar, and sufferings,  which did the like for the soul by cleansing away sin. We can readily believe, as the recorded experience of the Rabbis shows. that such sayings brought neither relief to the body, nor comfort to the soul of real sufferers. But this other Jewish idea was even more deeply rooted, had more of underlying truth, and would, especially in presence of the felt holiness of Jesus, have a deep influence on the soul, that recovery would not be granted to the sick unless his sins had first been forgiven him. It was this deepest, though, perhaps, as yet only partially conscious, want of the sufferer before Him, which Jesus met when, in words of tenderest kindness, He spoke forgiveness to his soul, and that not as something to come, but as an act already past: ‘Child, thy sins have been forgiven.’ We should almost say, that He needed first to speak these words, before He gave healing: needed, in the psychological order of things; needed, also, if the inward sickness was to be healed, and because the inward stroke, or paralysis, in the consciousness of guilt, must be removed, before the outward could be taken away.

In another sense, also, there was a higher ‘need be’ for the word which brought forgiveness, before that which gave healing. Although it is not for a moment to be supposed, that, in what Jesus did, He had primary intention in regard to the Scribes, yet here also, as in all Divine acts, the undesigned adaptation and the undesigned sequences are as fitting as what we call the designed. For, with God there is neither past nor future; neither immediate nor mediate; but all is one, the eternally and God-pervaded Present. Let us recall, that Jesus was in the presence of those in whom the Scribes would feign have wrought disbelief, not of His power to cure disease – which was patent to all – but in His Person and authority; that, perhaps, such doubts had already been excited. And here it deserves special notice, that, by first speaking forgiveness, Christ not only presented the deeper moral aspect of His miracles, as against their ascription to magic or Satanic agency, but also established that very claim, as regarded His Person and authority, which it was sought to invalidate. In this forgiveness of sins He presented His Person and authority as Divine, and He proved it such by the miracle of healing which immediately followed. Had the two been inverted, there would have been evidence, indeed, of His power, but not of His Divine Personality, nor of His having authority to forgive sins and this, not the doing of miracles, was the object of His teaching and Mission, of which the miracles were only secondary evidence.

Thus the inward reasoning of the Scribes, which was open and known to Him Who readeth all thoughts, issued in quite the opposite of what they could have expected. Most unwarranted, indeed, was the feeling of contempt which we trace in their unspoken words, whether we read them: ‘Why doth this one thus speak blasphemies?’ or, according to a more correct transcript of them: ‘Why doth this one speak thus? He blasphemeth!’ Yet from their point of view they were right, for God alone can forgive sins; nor has that power ever been given or delegated to man. But was He a mere man, like even the most honoured of God’s servants? Man, indeed; but ‘the Son of Man’ in the emphatic and well-understood sense of being the Representative Man, who was to bring a new life to humanity; the Second Adam, the Lord from Heaven. It seemed easy to say: ‘Thy sins have been forgiven.’ But to Him, Who had ‘authority’ to do so on earth, it was neither more easy nor more difficult than to say: ‘Rise, take up thy bed, and walk.’ Yet this latter, assuredly, proved the former, and gave it in the sight of all men unquestioned reality. And so it was the thoughts of these Scribes, which, as applied to Christ, were ‘evil’ – since they imputed to Him blasphemy – that gave occasion for offering real evidence of what they would have impugned and denied. In no other manner could the object alike of miracles and of this special miracle have been so attained as by the ‘evil thoughts’ of these Scribes, when, miraculously brought to light, they spoke out the inmost possible doubt, and pointed to the highest of all questions concerning the Christ. And so it was once more the wrath of man which praised Him!

‘And the remainder of wrath did he restrain.’ As the healed man slowly rose, and, still silent, rolled up his pallet, a way was made for him between this multitude which followed him with wondering eyes. Then, as first mingled wonderment and fear fell on Israel on Mount Carmel, when the fire had leaped from heaven, devoured the sacrifice, licked up the water in the trench, and even consumed the stones of the altar, and then all fell prostrate, and the shout rose to heaven: ‘Jehovah, He is the Elohim!’ so now, in view of this manifestation of the Divine Presence among them. The amazement of fear fell on them in this Presence, and they glorified God, and they said: ‘We have never seen it on this wise!’

(Mat_9:9-13; Mar_2:13-17; Luk_5:27-32; Mat_10:2-4; Mar_3:13-19; Luk_6:12-19)

In two things chiefly does the fundamental difference appear between Christianity and all other religious systems, notably Rabbinism. And in these two things, therefore, lies the main characteristic of Christ’s work; or, taking a wider view, the fundamental idea of all religions. Subjectively, they concern sin and the sinner; or, to put it objectively, the forgiveness of sin and the welcome to the sinner. But Rabbinism, and every other system down to modern humanitarianism – if it rises so high in its idea of God as to reach that of sin, which is its shadow – can only generally point to God for the forgiveness of sin. What here is merely an abstraction, has become a concrete reality in Christ. He speaks forgiveness on earth, because He is its embodiment. As regards the second idea, that of the sinner, all other systems know of no welcome to him till, by some means (inward or outward), he have ceased to be a sinner and become a penitent. They would first make him a penitent, and then bid him welcome to God; Christ first welcomes him to God, and so makes him a penitent. The one demands, the other imparts life. And so Christ is the Physician, Whom they that are in health need not, but they that are sick. And so Christ came not to call the righteous but sinners – not to repentance, as our common text erroneously puts it in Mat_9:13, and Mar_2:17, but to Himself, to the Kingdom; and this is the beginning of repentance.

Thus it is that Jesus, when His teaching becomes distinctive from that of Judaism, puts these two points in the foreground: the one at the cure of the paralytic, the other in the call of Levi-Matthew. And this, also, further explains His miracles of healing as for the higher presentation of Himself as the Great Physician, while it gives some insight into the nexus of these two events, and explains their chronological succession. It was fitting that at the very outset, when Rabbinism followed and challenged Jesus with hostile intent, these two spiritual facts should be brought out, and that, not in a controversial, but in a positive and practical manner. For, as these two questions of sin and of the possible relation of the sinner to God are the great burden of the soul in its upward striving after God, so the answer to them forms the substance of all religions. Indeed, all the cumbrous observances of Rabbinism – its whole law – were only an attempted answer to the question: How can a man be just with God?

But, as Rabbinism stood self-confessedly silent and powerless as regarded the forgiveness of sins, so it had emphatically no word of welcome or help for the sinner. The very term ‘Pharisee,’ or ‘separated one,’ implied the exclusion of sinners. With this the whole character of Pharisaism accorded; perhaps, we should have said, that of Rabbinism, since the Sadducean would here agree with the Pharisaic Rabbi. The contempt and avoidance of the unlearned, which was so characteristic of the system, arose not from mere pride of knowledge, but from the thought that, as ‘the Law’ was the glory and privilege of Israel – indeed, the object for which the world was created and preserved – ignorance of it was culpable. Thus, the unlearned blasphemed his Creator, and missed or perverted his own destiny. It was a principle, that ‘the ignorant cannot be pious.’ On the principles of Rabbinism, there was logic in all this, and reason also, though sadly perverted. The yoke of ‘the Kingdom of God’ was the high destiny of every true Israelite. Only, to them it lay in external, not internal conformity to the Law of God: ‘in meat and drink,’ not ‘in righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.’ True, they also perceived, that ‘sins of thought’ and purpose, though uncommitted, were ‘more grievous than even sins of outward deed;’ but only in this sense, that each outward sin was traceable to inward dereliction or denial of the Law – ‘no man sinneth, unless the spirit of error has first entered into him.’ On this ground the punishment of infidelity or apostasy in the next world was endless, while that of actual transgressions was limited in duration. 

As ‘righteousness came by the Law,’ so also return to it on the part of the sinner. Hence, although Rabbinism had no welcome to the sinner, it was unceasing in its call to repentance and in extolling its merits. All the prophets had prophesied only of repentance. The last pages of the Tractate on the Day of Atonement are full of praises of repentance. It not only averted punishment and prolonged life, but brought good, even the final redemption to Israel and the world at large. It surpassed the observance of all the commandments, and was as meritorious as if one had restored the Temple and Altar, and offered all sacrifices. One hour of penitence and good works outweighed the whole world to come. These are only a few of the extravagant statements by which Rabbinism extolled repentance. But, when more closely examined, we find that this repentance, as preceding the free welcome of invitation to the sinner, was only another form of work-righteousness. This is, at any rate, one meaning of the saying which conjoined the Law and repentance, and represented them as preceding the Creation. Another would seem derived from a kind of Manichaean view of sin. According to it, God Himself was really the author of the yeṣer hara, or evil impulse (‘the law in our members’), for which indeed, there was an absolute necessity, if the world was to continue.  Hence, ‘the penitent’ was really ‘the great one,’ since his strong nature had more in it of the ‘evil impulse,’ and the conquest of it by the penitent was really of greater merit than abstinence from sin. Thus it came, that the true penitent really occupied a higher place – ‘stood where the perfectly righteous could not stand.’ There is then both work and merit in penitence; and we can understand, how ‘the gate of penitence is open, even when that of prayer is shut,’ and that these two sentences are not only consistent, but almost cover each other – that the Messianic deliverance would come, if all Israel did righteousness, and, again, if all Israel repented for only one day; or, to put it otherwise – if Israel were all saints, or all sinners.

We have already touched the point where, as regards repentance, as formerly in regard to forgiveness, the teaching of Christ is in absolute and fundamental contrariety to that of the Rabbis. According to Jesus Christ, when we have done all, we are to feel that we are but unprofitable servants. According to the Rabbis, as Paul puts it, ‘righteousness cometh by the Law’ and, when it is lost, the Law alone can restore life; while, according to Christian teaching, it only bringeth death. Thus there was, at the very foundation of religious life, absolute contrariety between Jesus and His contemporaries. Whence, if not from heaven, came a doctrine so novel as that which Jesus made the basis of His Kingdom?

In one respect, indeed, the Rabbinic view was in some measure derived from the Old Testament, though by an external and, therefore, false interpretation of its teaching. In the Old Testament, also, ‘repentance’ was teshuḇah (תשובה) ‘return;’ while, in the New Testament, it is ‘change of mind’ (μετανοια). It would not be fair here to argue, that the common expression for repenting was ‘to do penitence’ (עשה תשובה), since by its side we frequently meet that other: ‘to return in penitence’ (שוב בתשובה). Indeed, other terms for repentance also occur. Thus tohu (תהו) means repentance in the sense of regret;ḥaratah, perhaps, more in that of a change of mind; while teyuḇa or teshuḇah is the return of repentance. Yet, according to the very common Rabbinic expression, there is a ‘gate of repentance’ (שעה תשובה תיובא) through which a man must enter, and, even if ḥaratah be the sorrowing change of mind, it is at most only that gate. Thus, after all, there is more in the ‘doing of penitence’ than appears at first sight. In point of fact, the full meaning of repentance as teshuḇah, or ‘return,’ is only realised, when a man has returned from dereliction to observance of the Law. Then, sins of purpose are looked upon as if they had been unintentional – nay, they become even virtuous actions. 

We are not now speaking of the forgiveness of sins. In truth, Rabbinism knew nothing of a forgiveness of sin, free and unconditional, unless in the case of those who had not the power of doing anything for their atonement. Even in the passage which extols most the freeness and the benefits of repentance (the last pages of the Tractate on the Day of Atonement), there is the most painful discussion about sins great and small, about repentance from fear or from love, about sins against commands or against prohibitions; and, in what cases repentance averted, or else only deferred, judgment, leaving final expiation to be wrought by other means. These were: – personal sufferings, death, or the Day of Atonement. Besides these, there were always the ‘merits of the fathers;’ or, perhaps, some one good work done; or, at any rate, the brief period of purgatorial pain, which might open the gate of mercy. These are the so-called ‘advocates’ (peraqlitin, פּרקליטין) of the penitent sinner. In a classical passage on the subject, repentance is viewed in its bearing on four different spiritual conditions, which are supposed to be respectively referred to in Jer_3:22; Lev_16:30; Isa_22:14; and Psa_89:32. The first of these refers to a breach of a command, with immediate and persistent cry for forgiveness, which is at once granted. The second is that of a breach of a prohibition, when, besides repentance, the Day of Atonement is required. The third is that of purposed sin, on which death or cutting off had been threatened, when, besides repentance and the Day of Atonement, sufferings are required; while in open profanation of the Name of God, only death can make final atonement.

But the nature of repentance has yet to be more fully explained. Its gate is sorrow and shame. In that sense repentance may be the work of a moment, ‘as in the twinkling of an eye,’ and a life’s sins may obtain mercy by the tears and prayers of a few minutes’ repentance.’  To this also refers the beautiful saying, that all which rendered a sacrifice unfit for the altar, such as that it was broken, fitted the penitent for acceptance, since ‘the sacrifices of God were a broken and contrite heart.’ By the side of what may be called contrition, Jewish theology places confession (Vidui, וידוי) This was deemed so integral a part of repentance, that those about to be executed, or to die, were admonished to it. Achan of old had thus obtained pardon. But, in the case of the living all this could only be regarded as repentance in the sense of being its preparation or beginning. Even if it were ḥaratah, or regret at the past, it would not yet be teshuḇah, or return to God; and even if it changed purposed into unintentional sin, arrested judgment, and stayed or banished its Angel, it would still leave a man without those works which are not only his real destiny and merit heaven, but constitute true repentance. For, as sin is ultimately dereliction of the Law, beginning within, so repentance is ultimately return to the Law. In this sense there is a higher and meritorious confession, which not only owns sin but God, and is therefore an inward return to Him. So Adam, when he saw the penitence of Cain, burst into this Psalm, ‘It is a good thing to confess unto the Lord.’  Manasseh, when in trouble, called upon God and was heard, although it is added, that this was only done in order to prove that the door of repentance was open to all. Indeed, the Angels had closed the windows of Heaven against his prayers, but God opened a place for their entrance beneath His throne of glory. Similarly, even Pharaoh, who, according to Jewish tradition, made in the Red Sea confession of God, was preserved, became king of Nineveh, and so brought the Ninevites to true repentance, which verily consisted not merely in sackcloth and fasting, but in restitution, so that every one who had stolen a beam pulled down his whole palace to restore it.

But, after all, inward repentance only arrested the decrees of justice. That which really put the penitent into right relationship with God was good deeds. The term must here be taken in its widest sense. Fasting is meritorious in a threefold sense: as the expression of humiliation, as an offering to God, similar to, but better than the fat of sacrifices on the altar, and as preventing further sins by chastening and keeping under the body. A similar view must be taken of self-inflicted penances.  On the other hand, there was restitution to those who had been wronged – as a woman once put it to her husband, to the surrender of one’s ‘girdle.’  Nay, it must be of even more than was due in strict law. To this must be added public acknowledgment of public sins. If a person had sinned in one direction, he must not only avoid it for the future, but aim at doing all the more in the opposite direction, or of overcoming sin in the same circumstances of temptation. Beyond all this were the really good works, whether occupation with the Law or outward deeds, which constituted perfect repentance. Thus we read, that every time Israel gave alms or did any kindness, they made in this world great peace, and procured great Paracletes between Israel and their Father in Heaven. Still farther, we are told what a sinner must do who would be pardoned. If he had been accustomed daily to read one column in the Bible, let him read two; if to learn one chapter in the Mishnah, let him learn two. But if he be not learned enough to do either, let him become an administrator for the congregation, or a public distributor of alms. Nay, so far was the doctrine of external merit carried, that to be buried in the land of Israel was supposed to ensure forgiveness of sins. This may, finally, be illustrated by an instance, which also throws some light on the parable of Dives in Hades. Rabbi Simeon ben Lakish had in early life been the associate of two robbers. But he repented, ‘returned to his God with all his heart, with fasting and prayer, was early and late before God, and busied himself with the torah (Law) and the commandments.’ Then both he and his former companions died, when they saw him in glory, while themselves were in the lowest hell. And when they reminded God, that with Him there was no regard of persons, He pointed to the Rabbi’s penitence and their own impenitence. On this they asked for respite, that they might ‘do great penitence,’ when they were told that there was no space for repentance after death. This is farther enforced by a parable to the effect, that a man, who is going into the wilderness, must provide himself with bread and water while in the inhabited country, if he would not perish in the desert.

Thus, in one and another respect, Rabbinic teaching about the need of repentance runs close to that of the Bible. But the vital difference between Rabbinism and the Gospel lies in this: that whereas Jesus Christ freely invited all sinners, whatever their past, assuring them of welcome and grace, the last word of Rabbinism is only despair, and a kind of Pessimism. For, it is expressly and repeatedly declared in the case of certain sins, and, characteristically, of heresy, that, even if a man genuinely and truly repented, he must expect immediately to die – indeed, his death would be the evidence that his repentance was genuine, since, though such a sinner might turn from his evil, it would be impossible for him, if he lived, to lay hold on the good, and to do it.

It is in the light of what we have just learned concerning the Rabbinic views of forgiveness and repentance that the call of Levi-Matthew must be read, if we would perceive its full meaning. There is no need to suppose that it took place immediately on the cure of the paralytic. On the contrary, the more circumstantial account of Mark implies, that some time had intervened. If our suggestion be correct, that it was winter when the paralytic was healed at Capernaum, we may suppose it to have been the early spring-time of that favoured district, when Jesus ‘went forth again by the seaside.’ And with this, as we shall see, best agrees the succession of after-events.

Few, if any, could have enjoyed better opportunities for hearing, and quietly thinking over the teaching of the Prophet of Nazareth, than Levi-Matthew. There is no occasion for speculating which was his original, or whether the second name was added after his conversion, since in Galilee it was common to have two names – one the strictly Jewish, the other the Galilean. Nor do we wonder, that in the sequel the first or purely Jewish name of Levi was dropped, and only that of Matthew (mati, matai, mateya, matiṯyah), retained. The latter which is the equivalent of Nathanael, or of the Greek Theodore (gift of God), seems to have been frequent. We read that it was that of a former Temple-official, and of several Rabbis. It is perhaps of more interest, that the Talmud names five as the disciples of Jesus, and among them these two whom we can clearly identify: Matthew and Thaddaeus.

Sitting before his custom-house, as on that day when Jesus called him, Matthew must have frequently heard Him as He taught by the sea-shore. For this would be the best, and therefore often chosen, place for the purpose. Thither not only the multitude from Capernaum could easily follow; but here was the landing-place for the many ships which traversed the Lake, or coasted from town to town. And this not only for them who had business in Capernaum or that neighbourhood, but also for those who would then strike the great road of Eastern commerce, which led from Damascus to the harbours of the West. Touching the Lake in that very neighbourhood, it turned thence, northwards and westwards, to join what was termed the Upper Galilean road.

We know much, and yet, as regards details, perhaps too little about those ‘tolls, dues, and customs,’ which made the Roman administration such sore and vexatious exaction to all ‘Provincials,’ and which in Judaea loaded the very name of publican with contempt and hatred. They who cherished the gravest religious doubts as to the lawfulness of paying any tribute to Caesar, as involving in principle recognition of a bondage to which they would fain have closed their eyes, and the substitution of heathen kingship for that of Jehovah, must have looked on the publican as the very embodiment of anti-nationalism. But perhaps men do not always act under the constant consciousness of such abstract principles. Yet the endless vexatious interferences, the unjust and cruel exactions, the petty tyranny, and the extortionate avarice, from which there was neither defence nor appeal, would make it always well-nigh unbearable. It is to this that the Rabbis so often refer. If ‘publicans’ were disqualified from being judges or witnesses, it was, at least so far as regarded witness-bearing, because ‘they exacted more than was due.’ Hence also it was said, that repentance was specially difficult for tax-gatherers and custom-house officers. 

It is of importance to notice, that the Talmud distinguishes two classes of ‘publicans:’ the tax-gatherer in general (gabai), and the mokhes, or mokhsa, who was specially the douanier or custom-house official. Although both classes fall under the Rabbinic ban, the douanier – such as Matthew was – is the object of chief execration. And this, because his exactions were more vexatious, and gave more scope to rapacity. The gabai, or tax-gatherer, collected the regular dues, which consisted of ground-, income-, and poll-tax. The ground-tax amounted to one-tenth of all grain and one-fifth of the wine and fruit grown; partly paid in kind, and partly commuted into money. The income-tax amounted to 1 per cent.; while the head-money, or poll-tax, was levied on all persons, bond and free, in the case of men from the age of fourteen, in that of women from the age of twelve, up to that of sixty-five.

If this offered many opportunities for vexatious exactions and rapacious injustice, the mokhes might inflict much greater hardship upon the poor people. There was tax and duty upon all imports and exports; on all that was bought and sold; bridge-money, road-money, harbour-dues, town-dues, etc. The classical reader knows the ingenuity which could invent a tax, and find a name for every kind of exaction, such as on axles, wheels, pack-animals, pedestrians, roads, highways; on admission to markets; on carriers, bridges, ships, and quays; on crossing rivers, on dams, on licences, in short, on such a variety of objects, that even the research of modern scholars has not been able to identify all the names. On goods the ad valorem duty amounted to from 2½ to 5, and on articles of luxury to even 12½ per cent. But even this was as nothing, compared to the vexation of being constantly stopped on the journey, having to unload all one’s pack-animals, when every bale and package was opened, and the contents tumbled about, private letters opened, and the mokhes ruled supreme in his insolence and rapacity.

The very word mokhes seems, in its root-meaning, associated with the idea of oppression and injustice. He was literally, as really, an oppressor. The Talmud charges them with gross partiality, remitting in the case of those to whom they wished to show favour, and exacting from those who were not their favourites. They were a criminal race, to which Lev_20:5 applied. It was said, that there never was a family which numbered a mokhes, in which all did not become such. Still, cases are recorded when a religious publican would extend favour to Rabbis, or give them timely notice to go into hiding. If one belonging to the sacred association (a ḥaḇer) became either a gabai or a mokhes, he was at once expelled, although he might be restored on repentance. That there was ground for such rigour, appears from such an occurrence as when a mokhes took from a defenseless person his ass, giving him another, and very inferior, animal for it. Against such unscrupulous oppressors every kind of deception was allowed; goods might be declared to be votive offerings, or a person pass his slave as his son. 

The mokhes was called ‘great’ if he employed substitutes, and ‘small’ if he stood himself at the receipt of custom. Till the time of Caesar the taxes were farmed in Rome, at the highest bidding, mostly by a joint-stock company of the knightly order, which employed publicans under them. But by a decree of Caesar, the taxes of Judaea were no longer farmed, but levied by publicans in Judaea, and paid directly to the Government, the officials being appointed by the provincials themselves.  This was, indeed, a great alleviation, although it perhaps made the tax-gatherers only more unpopular, as being the direct officials of the heathen power. This also explains how, if the Mishnah forbids even the changing of money from the guilt-laden chest of a mokhes, or douanier, the Gemara adds, that such applied to custom-house officers who either did not keep to the tax appointed by the Government, or indeed to any fixed tax, and to those who appointed themselves to such office – that is, as we take it, who would volunteer for the service, in the hope of making profit on their own account. An instance is, however, related of a gabai, or tax-gatherer, becoming a celebrated Rabbi, though the taint of his former calling deterred the more rigid of his colleagues from intercourse with him. On heathen feast days toll was remitted to those who came to the festival. Sometimes this was also done from kindness. The following story may serve as a final illustration of the popular notions, alike about publicans and about the merit of good works. The son of a mokhes and that of a very pious man had died. The former received from his townsmen all honour at his burial, while the latter was carried unmourned to the grave. This anomaly was Divinely explained by the circumstances that the pious man had committed one transgression, and the publican had done one good deed. But a few days afterwards a further vision and dream was vouchsafed to the survivors, when the pious was seen walking in gardens beside water-brooks, while the publican was descried stretching out his tongue towards the river to quench his thirst, but unable to reach the refreshing stream.

What has been described in such detail, will cast a peculiar light on the call of Matthew by the Saviour of sinners. For, we remember that Levi-Matthew was not only a ‘publican,’ but of the worst kind: a ‘mokhes’ or douanier: a ‘little mokhes,’ who himself stood at his custom-house; one of the class to whom, as we are told, repentance offered special difficulties. And, of all such officials, those who had to take toll from ships were perhaps the worst, if we are to judge by the proverb: ‘Woe to the ship which sails without having paid the dues.’ And yet, after all, Matthew may have been only one of that numerous class to whom religion is merely a matter quite outside of, and in another region from life, and who, having first gone astray through ignorance, feel themselves ever farther repelled, or rather shut out, by the narrow, harsh uncharitableness of those whom they look upon as the religious and pious.

But now quite another day had dawned on him. The Prophet of Nazareth was not like those other great Rabbis, or their pietist, self-righteous imitators. There was that about Him which not only aroused the conscience, but drew the heart – compelling, not repelling. What He said opened a new world. His very appearance bespoke Him not harsh, self-righteous, far away, but the Helper, if not even the Friend, of sinners. There was not between Him and one like Matthew, the great, almost impassable gap of repentance. He had seen and heard Him in the Synagogue – and who that had heard His Words, or witnessed His power, could ever forget, or lose the impression? The people, the rulers, even the evil spirits, had owned His authority. But in the Synagogue Jesus was still the Great One, far-away from him; and he, Levi-Matthew, the ‘little Mokhes’ of Capernaum, to whom, as the Rabbis told him, repentance was next to impossible. But out there, in the open, by the seashore, it was otherwise. All unobserved by others, he observed all, and could yield himself, without reserve, to the impression. Now, it was an eager multitude that came from Capernaum; then, a long train bearing sufferers, to whom gracious, full, immediate relief was granted – whether they were Rabbinic saints, or sinners. And still more gracious than His deeds were His Words.

And so Matthew sat before his custom-house, and hearkened and hoped. Those white-sailed ships would bring crowds of listeners; the busy caravan on that highway would stop, and its wayfarers turn aside to join the eager multitude – to hear the Word or see the Word. Surely, it was not ‘a time for buying and selling,’ and Levi would have little work, and less heart for it at his custom-house. Perhaps he may have witnessed the call of the first Apostles; he certainly must have known the fishermen and ship-owners of Capernaum. And now it appeared, as if Jesus had been brought still nearer to Matthew. For, the great ones of Israel, ‘the Scribes of the Pharisees,’ and their pietist followers, had combined against Him, and would exclude Him, not on account of sin, but on account of the sinners. And so, we take it, long before that eventful day which for ever decided his life, Matthew had, in heart, become the disciple of Jesus. Only he dared not, could not, have hoped for personal recognition – far less for call to discipleship. But when it came, and Jesus fixed on him that look of love which searched the inmost deep of the soul, and made Him the true Fisher of men, it needed not a moment’s thought or consideration. When he spake it, ‘Follow Me,’ the past seemed all swallowed up in the present heaven of bliss. He said not a word, for his soul was in the speechless surprise of unexpected love and grace; but he rose up, left the custom-house, and followed Him. That was a gain that day, not of Matthew alone, but of all the poor and needy in Israel – nay, of all sinners from among men, to whom the door of heaven was opened. And, verily, by the side of Peter, as the stone, we place Levi-Matthew, as typical of those rafters laid on the great foundation, and on which is placed the flooring of that habitation of the Lord, which is His Church.

It could not have been long after this – probably almost immediately – that the memorable gathering took place in the house of Matthew, which gave occasion to that cavil of the Pharisaic Scribes, which served further to bring out the meaning of Levi’s call. For, opposition ever brings into clearer light positive truth, just as judgment comes never alone, but always conjoined with display of higher mercy. It was natural that all the publicans around should, after the call of Matthew, have come to his house to meet Jesus. Even from the lowest point of view, the event would give them a new standing in the Jewish world, in relation to the Prophet of Nazareth. And it was characteristic that Jesus should improve such opportunity. When we read of ‘sinners’ as in company with these publicans, it is not necessary to think of gross or open offenders, though such may have been included. For, we know what such a term may have included in the Pharisaic vocabulary. Equally characteristic was it, that the Rabbinists should have addressed their objection as to fellowship with such, not to the Master, but to the disciples. Perhaps, it was not only, nor chiefly, from moral cowardice, though they must have known what the reply of Jesus would have been. On the other hand, there was wisdom, or rather cunning, in putting it to the disciples. They were but initial learners – and the question was one not so much of principle, as of acknowledged Jewish propriety. Had they been able to lodge this cavil in their minds, it would have fatally shaken the confidence of the disciples in the Master; and, if they could have been turned aside, the cause of the new Christ would have been grievously injured, if not destroyed. It was with the same object, that they shortly afterwards enlisted the aid of the well-meaning, but only partially-instructed disciples of John on the question of fasting, which presented a still stronger consensus of Jewish opinion as against Christ, all the more telling, that here the practice of John seemed to clash with that of Jesus.

But there John was at the time in prison, and passing through the temporary darkness of a thick cloud towards the fuller light. But Jesus could not leave His disciples to answer for themselves. What, indeed, could or would they have had to say? And He ever speaks for us, when we cannot answer for ourselves. From their own standpoint and contention – nay, also in their own form of speech – He answered the Pharisees. And He not only silenced their gain-saying, but further opened up the meaning of His acting – nay, His very purpose and Mission. ‘No need have they who are strong and in health of a physician, but they who are ill.’ It was the very principle of Pharisaism which He thus set forth, alike as regarded their self-exclusion from Him and His consorting with the diseased. And, as the more Hebraic Matthew adds, applying the very Rabbinic formula, so often used when superficial speciousness of knowledge is directed to further thought and information: ‘Go and learn!’ Learn what? What their own Scriptures meant; what was implied in the further prophetic teaching, as correction of a one-sided literalism and externalism that misinterpreted the doctrine of sacrifices – learn that fundamental principle of the spiritual meaning of the Law as explanatory of its mere letter, ‘I will have mercy, and not sacrifice.’ They knew no mercy that was not sacrifice – with merit attaching; He no sacrifice, real and acceptable to God, that was not mercy. And this also is a fundamental principle of the Old Testament, as spiritually understood; and, being such a fundamental principle, He afterwards again applied this saying of the prophet to His own mode of viewing and treating the Sabbath-question.

This was one aspect of it, as Jesus opened up anew the Old Testament, of which their key of knowledge had only locked the door. There was yet another and higher, quite explaining and applying alike this saying and the whole Old Testament, and thus His own Mission. And this was the fullest unfolding and highest vindication of it: ‘For, I am not come to call righteous men, but sinners.’ The introduction of the words ‘to repentance’ in some manuscripts of Matthew and Mark shows, how early the full meaning of Christ’s words was misinterpreted by prosaic apologetic attempts, that failed to fathom their depth. For, Christ called sinners to better and higher than repentance, even to Himself and His Kingdom; and to ‘emendate’ the original record by introducing these words from another Gospel marks a purpose, indicative of retrogression. And this saying of Christ concerning the purpose of His Incarnation and Work: ‘to call not righteous men, but sinners,’ also marks the standpoint of the Christ, and the relation which each of us, according to his view of self, of righteousness, and of sin – personally, voluntarily, and deliberately – occupies towards the Kingdom and the Christ.

The history of the call of Matthew has also another, to some extent subordinate, historical interest, for it was no doubt speedily followed by the calling of the other Apostles. This is the chronological succession in the Synoptic narratives. It also affords some insight into the history of those, whom the Lord chose as bearers of His Gospel. The difficulties connected with tracing the family descent or possible relationship between the Apostles are so great, that we must forego all hope of arriving at any certain conclusion. Without, therefore, entering on details about the genealogy of the Apostles, and the varied arrangement of their names in the Gospels, which, with whatever uncertainty remaining in the end, may be learned from any work on the subject, some points at least seem clear. First, it appears that only the calling of those to the Apostolate is related, which in some sense is typical, viz. that of Peter and Andrew, of James and John, of Philip and Bartholomew (or Bar Telamyon, or Temalyon, generally supposed the same as Nathanael), and of Matthew the publican. Yet, secondly, there is something which attaches to each of the others. Thomas, who is called Didymus (which means ‘twin’), is closely connected with Matthew, both in Luke’s Gospel and in that of Matthew himself. James is expressly named as the son of Alphaeus or Clopas.  This we know to have been also the name of Matthew-Levi’s father. But, as the name was a common one, no inference can be drawn from it, and it does not seem likely that the father of Matthew was also that of James, Judas, and Simon, for these three seem to have been brothers. Judas is designated by Matthew as Lebbaeus, from the Hebrew leḇ, a heart, and is also named, both by him and by Mark, Thadaeus – a term which, however, we would not derive, as is commonly done, from ṯad, the ‘female breast,’ but following the analogy of the Jewish name ṯodah, from ‘praise.’ In that case both Lebbaeus and Thaddaeus would point to the heartiness and the Thanksgiving of the Apostle, and hence to his character. Luke simply designates him Judas of James, which means that he was the brother (less probably, the son) of James. Thus his real name would have been Judas Lebbaeus, and his surname Thaddaeus. Closely connected with these two we have in all the Gospels, Simon, surnamed Zelotes or Cananaean (not Canaanite), both terms indicating his original connection with the Galilean Zealot party, the ‘Zealots for the Law.’ His position in the Apostolic Catalogue, and the testimony of Hegesippus, seem to point him out as the son of Clopas, and brother of James, and of Judas Lebbaeus. These three were, in a sense, cousins of Christ, since, according to Hegesippus, Clopas was the brother of Joseph, while the sons of Zebedee were real cousins, their mother Salome being a sister of the Virgin. Lastly, we have Judas Iscariot, or Ish kerioṯ, ‘a man of Kerioth,’ a town in Judah. Thus the betrayer alone would be of Judaean origin, the others all of Galilean; and this may throw light on not a little in his after-history.

No further reference than this briefest sketch seems necessary, although on comparison it is clear that the Apostolic Catalogues in the Gospels are ranged in three groups, each of them beginning with respectively the same name (Simon, Philip, and James the son of Alphaeus). This, however, we may remark – how narrow, after all, was the Apostolic circle, and how closely connected most of its members. And yet, as we remember the history of their calling, or those notices attached to their names which afford a glimpse into their history, it was a circle, thoroughly representative of those who would gather around the Christ. Most marked and most solemn of all, it was after a night of solitary prayer on the mountain-side, that Jesus at early dawn ‘called His disciples, and of them He chose twelve, whom also He named Apostles,’ ‘that they should be with Him, and that He might send them forth to preach, and to have power to heal sickness and to cast out devils.’

(Mat 5-7)

It was probably on one of those mountain-ranges, which stretch to the north of Capernaum, that Jesus had spent the night of lonely prayer, which preceded the designation of the twelve to the Apostolate. As the soft spring morning broke, He called up those who had learned to follow Him, and from among them chose the twelve, who were to be His Ambassadors and Representatives.  But already the early light had guided the eager multitude which, from all parts, had come to the broad level plateau beneath to bring to Him their need of soul or body. To them He now descended with words of comfort and power of healing. But better yet had He to say, and to do for them, and for us all. As they pressed around Him for that touch which brought virtue of healing to all, He retired again to the mountain-height, and through the clear air of the bright spring day spake, what has ever since been known as the ‘Sermon on the Mount,’ from the place where He sat, or as that ‘in the plain’ (Luk_6:17), from the place where He had first met the multitude, and which so many must have continue to occupy while He taught.

The first and most obvious, perhaps, also, most superficial thought, is that which brings this teaching of Christ into comparison, we shall not say with that of His contemporaries – since scarcely any who lived in the time of Jesus said aught that can be compared with it – but with the best of the wisdom and piety of the Jewish sages, as preserved in Rabbinic writings. Its essential difference, or rather contrariety, in spirit and substance, not only when viewed as a whole, but in almost each of its individual parts, will be briefly shown in the sequel. For the present we only express this as deepest conviction, that it were difficult to say which brings greater astonishment (though of opposite kind): a first reading of the ‘Sermon on the Mount,’ or that of any section of the Talmud. The general reader is here at a disadvantage. From his upbringing in an atmosphere which Christ’s Words have filled with heaven’s music, he knows not, and cannot know, the nameless feeling which steals over a receptive soul when, in the silence of our moral wilderness, those voices first break on the ear, that had never before been wakened to them. How they hold the soul entranced, calling up echoes of inmost yet unrealised aspiration, itself the outcome of the God-born and God-tending within us, and which renders us capable of new birth into the Kingdom; call up, also, visions and longings of that world of heavenly song, so far away and yet so near us; and till the soul with subduedness, expectancy, and ecstasy! So the travel-stained wanderer flings him down on the nearest height, to feast his eyes with the first sight of home in the still valley beneath; so the far-off exile sees in his dreams visions of his child-life, all transfigured; so the weary prodigal leans his head in silent musing of mingled longing and rest on a mother’s knee. So, and much more; for, it is the Voice of God Which speaks to us in the cool of the evening, amidst the trees of the lost Garden; to us who, in very shame and sorrow, hide, and yet even so hear, not words of judgment but of mercy, not concerning an irrevocable, and impossible past, but concerning a real and to us possible future, which is that past, only better, nearer, dearer, – for, that it is not the human which has now to rise to the Divine, but the Divine which has come down to the human.

Or else, turn from this to a first reading of the wisdom of the Jewish Fathers in their Talmud. It little matters, what part be chosen for the purpose. Here, also, the reader is at disadvantage, since his instructors present to him too frequently broken sentences, extracts torn from their connection, words often mistranslated as regards their real meaning, or misapplied as regards their bearing and spirit; at best, only isolated sentences. Take these in their connection and real meaning, and what a terrible awakening Who, that has read half-a-dozen pages successively of any part of the Talmud, can feel otherwise than by turns shocked, pained, amused, or astounded? There is here wit and logic; quickness and readiness, earnestness and zeal, but by the side of it terrible profanity, uncleanness, superstition, and folly. Taken as a whole, it is not only utterly unspiritual, but anti-spiritual. Not that the Talmud is worse than might be expected of such writings in such times and circumstances, perhaps in many respects much better – always bearing in mind the particular standpoint of narrow nationalism, without which Talmudism itself could not have existed, and which therefore is not an accretion, but an essential part of it. But, taken not in abrupt sentences and quotations, but as a whole, it is so utterly and immeasurably unlike the New Testament, that it is not easy to determine which, as the case may be, is greater, the ignorance or the presumption of those who put them side by side. Even where spiritual life pulsates, it seems propelled through valves that are diseased, and to send the lifeblood gurgling back upon the heart, or along ossified arteries that quiver not with life at its touch. And to the reader of such disjointed Rabbinic quotations there is this further source of misunderstanding, that the form and sound of words is so often the same as that of the sayings of Jesus, however different their spirit. For, necessarily, the wine – be it new or old – made in Judaea, comes to us in Palistinian vessels. The new teaching, to be historically true, must have employed the old forms and spoken the old language. But the ideas underlying terms equally employed by Jesus and the teachers of Israel are, in everything that concerns the relation of souls to God, so absolutely different as not to bear comparison. Whence otherwise the enmity and opposition to Jesus from the first, and not only after His Divine claim had been pronounced? These two, starting from principles alien and hostile, follow opposite directions, and lead to other goals. He who has thirsted and quenched his thirst at the living fount of Christ’s Teaching, can never again stoop to seek drink at the broken cisterns of Rabbinism.

We take here our standpoint on Matthew’s account of the ‘Sermon on the Mount,’ to which we can scarcely doubt that by Luke is parallel. Not that it is easy, or perhaps even possible, to determine, whether all that is now grouped in the ‘Sermon on the Mount’ was really spoken by Jesus on this one occasion. From the plan and structure of Matthew’s Gospel, the presumption seems rather to the contrary. For, isolated parts of it are introduced by Luke in other connections, yet quite fitly. On the other hand, even in accordance with the traditional characterisation of Matthew’s narrative, we expect in it the fullest account of our Lord’s Discourses, while we also notice that His Galilean Ministry forms the main subject of the First Gospel. And there is one characteristic of the ‘Sermon on the Mount’ which, indeed, throws light on the plan of Matthew’s work in its apparent chronological inversion of events, such as in its placing the ‘Sermon on the Mount’ before the calling of the Apostles. We will not designate the ‘Sermon on the Mount’ as the promulgation of the New Law, since that would be a far too narrow, if not erroneous, view of it. But it certainly seems to correspond to the Divine Revelation in the ‘Ten Words’ from Mount Sinai. Accordingly, it seems appropriate that the Genesis-part of Matthew’s Gospel should be immediately followed by the Exodus-part, in which the new Revelation is placed in the forefront, to the seeming breach of historical order, leaving it afterwards to be followed by an appropriate grouping of miracles and events, which we know to have really preceded the ‘Sermon on the Mount.’

Very many-sided is that ‘Sermon on the Mount,’ so that different writers, each viewing it from his standpoint, have differently sketched its general outline, and yet carried to our minds the feeling that thus far they had correctly understood it. We also might attempt humble contribution towards the same end. Viewing it in the light of the time, we might mark in it alike advancement on the Old Testament (or rather, unfolding of its inmost, yet hidden meaning), and contrast to contemporary Jewish teaching. And here we would regard it as presenting the full delineation of the ideal man of God, of prayer, and of righteousness – in short, of the inward and outward manifestation of discipleship. Or else, keeping before us the different standpoint of His hearers, we might in this ‘Sermon’ follow up this contrast to its underlying ideas as regards: First, the right relationship between man and God, or true righteousness – what inward graces characterise and what prospects attach to it, in opposition to Jewish views of merit and of reward. Secondly, we would mark the same contrast as regards sin (hamartology), temptation, etc. Thirdly, we would note it as regards salvation (soteriology); and, lastly, as regards what may be termed moral theology: personal feelings, married and other relations, discipleship, and the like. And in this great contrast two points would prominently stand out: New Testament humility, as opposed to Jewish (the latter being really pride, as only the consciousness of failure, or rather, of inadequate perfectness, while New Testament humility is really despair of self); and again, Jewish as opposed to New Testament perfectness (the former being an attempt by means external or internal to strive up to God: the latter a new life, springing from God, and in God). Or, lastly, we might view it as upward teaching in regard to God: the King; inward teaching in regard to man: the subjects of the King; and outward teaching in regard to the Church and the world: the boundaries of the Kingdom.

This brings us to what alone we can here attempt: a general outline of the ‘Sermon on the Mount.’ Its great subject is neither righteousness, nor yet the New Law (if such designation be proper in regard to what in no real sense is a Law), but that which was innermost and uppermost in the Mind of Christ – the Kingdom of God. Notably, the Sermon on the Mount contains not any detailed or systematic doctrinal, nor any ritual teaching, nor yet does it prescribe the form of any outward observances. This marks, at least negatively, a difference in principle from all other teaching. Christ came to found a Kingdom, not a School; to institute a fellowship, not to propound a system. To the first disciples all doctrinal teaching sprang out of fellowship with Him. They saw Him, and therefore believed; they believed, and therefore learned the truths connected with Him, and springing out of Him. So to speak, the seed of truth which fell on their hearts was carried thither from the flower of His Person and Life.

Again, as from this point of view the Sermon on the Mount differs from all contemporary Jewish teaching, so also is it impossible to compare it with any other system of morality. The difference here is one not of degree, nor even of kind, but of standpoint. It is indeed true, that the Words of Jesus, properly understood, marks the utmost limit of all possible moral conception. But this point does not come in question. Every moral system is a road by which, through self-denial, discipline, and effort, men seek to reach the goal. Christ begins with this goal, and places His disciples at once in the position to which all other teachers point as the end. They work up to the goal of becoming the ‘children of the Kingdom;’ He makes men such, freely, and of His grace: and this is the Kingdom. What the others labour for, He gives. They begin by demanding, He by bestowing: because he brings good tidings of forgiveness and mercy. Accordingly, in the real sense, there is neither new law nor moral system here, but entrance into a new life: ‘Be ye therefore perfect, as your Father Which is in heaven is perfect.’

But if the Sermon on the Mount contains not a new, nor, indeed, any system of morality, and addresses itself to a new condition of things, it follows that the promises attaching for example, to the so-called ‘Beatitudes’ must not be regarded as the reward of the spiritual state with which they are respectively connected, nor yet as their result. It is not because a man is poor in spirit that his is the Kingdom of Heaven, in the sense that the one state will grow into the other, or be its result; still less is the one the reward of the other. The connecting link – so to speak, the theological copula between the ‘state’ and the promise – is in each case Christ Himself: because He stands between our present and our future, and ‘has opened the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers.’ Thus the promise represents the gift of grace by Christ in the new Kingdom, as adapted to each case.

It is Christ, then, as the King, Who is here flinging open the gates of His Kingdom. To study it more closely: in the three chapters, under which the Sermon on the Mount is grouped in the first Gospel the Kingdom of God is presented successively, progressively, and extensively. Let us trace this with the help of the text itself.

In the first part of the Sermon on the Mount the Kingdom of God is delineated generally, first positively, and then negatively, marking especially how its righteousness goes deeper than the mere letter of even the Old Testament Law. It opens with ten Beatitudes, which are the New Testament counterpart to the Ten Commandments. These present to us, not the observance of the Law written on stone, but the realisation of that Law which, by the Spirit, is written on the fleshly tables of the heart.

These Ten Commandments in the Old Covenant were preceded by a Prologue. The ten Beatitudes have, characteristically, not a Prologue but an Epilogue, which corresponds to the Old Testament Prologue. This closes the first section, of which the object was to present the Kingdom of God in its characteristic features. But here it was necessary, in order to mark the real continuity of the New Testament with the Old, to show the relation of the one to the other. And this is the object of Mat_5:17-20, the last-mentioned verse forming at the same time a grand climax and transition to the criticism of the Old Testament-Law in its merely literal application, such as the Scribes and Pharisees made. For, taking even the letter of the Law, there is not only progression, but almost contrast, between the righteousness of the Kingdom and that set forth by the teachers of Israel. Accordingly, a detailed criticism of the Law now follows – and that not as interpreted and applied by ‘tradition,’ but in its barely literal meaning. In this part of the ‘Sermon on the Mount’ the careful reader will mark an analogy to Ex 21:and Ex 22

This closes the first part of the ‘Sermon on the Mount.’ The second part is contained in Mt 6. In this the criticism of the Law is carried deeper. The question now is not as concerns the Law in its literality, but as to what constituted more than a mere observance of the outward commandments: piety, spirituality, sanctity. Three points here stood out specially – nay, stand out still, and in all ages. Hence this criticism was not only of special application to the Jews, but is universal, we might almost say, prophetic. These three high points are alms, prayer, and fasting – or, to put the latter more generally, the relation of the physical to the spiritual. These three are successively presented, negatively and positively. But even so, this would have been but the external aspect of them. The Kingdom of God carries all back to the grand underlying ideas. What were this or that mode of giving alms, unless the right idea be apprehended, of what constitutes riches, and where they should be sought? This is indicated in Mat_6:19-21. Again, as to prayer: what matters it if we avoid the externalism of the Pharisees, or even catch the right form as set forth in the ‘Lord’s Prayer,’ unless we realise what underlies prayer? It is to lay our inner man wholly open to the light of God in genuine, earnest simplicity, to be quite shone through by Him. It is, moreover, absolute and undivided self-dedication to God. And in this lies its connection, alike with the spirit that prompts almsgiving, and with that which prompts real fasting. That which underlies all such fasting is a right view of the relation in which the body with its wants stands to God – the temporal to the spiritual. It is the spirit of prayer which must rule alike alms and fasting, and pervade them: the upward look and self-dedication to God, the seeking first after the Kingdom of God and His Righteousness, that man, and self, and life may be baptized in it. Such are the real alms, the real prayers, the real fasts of the Kingdom of God.

If we have rightly apprehended the meaning of the two first parts of the ‘Sermon on the Mount,’ we cannot be at a loss to understand its third part, as set forth in the seventh chapter of Matthew’s Gospel. Briefly, it is this, as addressed to His contemporaries, nay, with wider application to the men of all times: First, the Kingdom of God cannot be circumscribed, as you would do it. Secondly, it cannot be extended, as you would do it, by external means, but cometh to us from God, and is entered by personal determination and separation. Thirdly, it is not preached, as too often is attempted, when thoughts of it are merely of the external. Lastly, it is not manifested in life in the manner too common among religionists, but is very real, and true, and good in its effects. And this Kingdom, as received by each of us, is like a solid house on a solid foundation, which nothing from without can shake or destroy.

The infinite contrast, just set forth, between the Kingdom as presented by the Christ and Jewish contemporary teaching is the more striking, that it was expressed in a form, and clothed in words with which all His hearers were familiar; indeed, in modes of expression current at the time. It is this which has misled so many in their quotations of Rabbinic parallels to the ‘Sermon on the Mount.’ They perceive outward similarity, and they straightway set it down to identity of spirit, not understanding that often those things are most unlike in the spirit of them, which are most like in their form. No part of the New Testament has had a larger array of Rabbinic parallels adduced than the ‘Sermon on the Mount;’ and this, as we might expect, because, in teaching addressed to His contemporaries, Jesus would naturally use the forms with which they were familiar. Many of these Rabbinic quotations are, however, entirely inapt, the similarity lying in an expression or turn of words. Occasionally, the misleading error goes even further, and that is quoted in illustration of Jesus’ sayings which, either by itself or in the context, implies quite the opposite. A detailed analysis would lead too far, but a few specimens will sufficiently illustrate our meaning.

To begin with the first Beatitude, to the poor in spirit, since theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven, this early Jewish saying is its very counterpart, marking not the optimism, but the pessimism of life: ‘Ever be more and more lowly in spirit, since the expectancy of man is to become the food of worms.’ Another contrast to Christ’s promise of grace to the ‘poor in spirit’ is presented in this utterance of self-righteousness on the part of Rabbi Joshua, who compares the reward formerly given to him who brought one or another offering to the Temple with that of him who is of a lowly mind (השרעתו שפל) to whom it is reckoned as if he had brought all the sacrifices. To this the saying of the great Hillel seems exactly parallel: ‘My humility is my greatness, and my greatness my humility,’ which, be it observed, is elicited by a Rabbinic accommodation of Psa_113:5, Psa_113:6 : ‘Who is exalted to sit, who humbleth himself to behold.’ It is the omission on the part of modern writers of this explanatory addition, which has given the saying of Hillel even the faintest likeness to the first Beatitude.

But even so, what of the promise of ‘the Kingdom of Heaven?’ What is the meaning which Rabbinism attaches to that phrase, and would it have entered the mind of a Rabbi to promise what he understood as the Kingdom to all men, Gentiles as well as Jews, who were poor in spirit? We recall here the fate of the Gentiles in Messianic days, and, to prevent misstatements, summarise the opening pages of the Talmudic tractate on idolatry. At the beginning of the coming era of the Kingdom, God is represented as opening the Torah, and inviting all who had busied themselves with it to come for their reward. On this, nation by nation appears – first, the Romans, insisting that all the great things they had done were only done for the sake of Israel, in order that they might the better busy themselves with the Torah. Being harshly repulsed, the Persians next come forward with similar claims, encouraged by the fact that, unlike the Romans, they had not destroyed the Temple. But they also are in turn repelled. Then all the Gentile nations urge that the Law had not been offered to them, which is proved to be a vain contention, since God had actually offered it to them, but only Israel had accepted it. On this the nations reply by a peculiar Rabbinic explanation of Exo_19:17, according to which God is actually represented as having lifted Mount Sinai like a cask, and threatened to put it over Israel unless they accepted the Law. Israel’s obedience, therefore, was not willing, but enforced. On this the Almighty proposes to judge the Gentiles by the Noachic commandments, although it is added, that, even had they observed them, these would have carried no reward. And, although it is a principle that even a heathen, if he studied the Law, was to be esteemed like the High-Priest, yet it is argued, with the most perverse logic, that the reward of heathens who observed the Law must be less than that of those who did so because the Law was given them, since the former acted from impulse, and not from obedience!

Even thus far the contrast to the teaching of Jesus is tremendous. A few further extracts will finally point the difference between the largeness of Christ’s World-Kingdom, and the narrowness of Judaism. Most painful as the exhibition of profanity and national conceit is, it is needful in order to refute what we must call the daring assertion, that the teaching of Jesus, or the Sermon on the Mount, had been derived from Jewish sources. At the same time it must carry to the mind, with almost irresistible force, the question whence, if not from God, Jesus had derived His teaching, or how else it came so to differ, not in detail, but in principle and direction, from that of all His contemporaries.

In the Talmudic passages from which quotation has already been made, we further read that the Gentiles would enter into controversy with the Almighty about Israel. They would urge, that Israel had not observed the Law. On this the Almighty would propose Himself to bear witness for them. But the Gentiles would object, that a father could not give testimony for his son. Similarly, they would object to the proposed testimony of heaven and earth, since self-interest might compel them to be partial. For, according to Psa_76:8, ‘the earth was afraid,’ because, if Israel had not accepted the Law, it would have been destroyed, but it ‘became still’ when at Sinai they consented to it. On this the heathen would be silenced out of the mouth of their own witnesses, such as Nimrod, Laban, Potiphar, Nebuchadnezzar, etc. They would then ask, that the Law might be given them, and promise to observe it. Although this was now impossible, yet God would, in His mercy, try them by giving them the Feast of Tabernacles, as perhaps the easiest of all observances. But as they were in their tabernacles, God would cause the sun to shine forth in his strength, when they would forsake their tabernacles in great indignation, according to Psa_2:3. And it is in this manner that Rabbinism looked for the fulfilment of those words in Psa_2:4 : ‘He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh, the Lord shall have them in derision,’ this being the only occasion on which God laughed! And if it were urged, that at the time of the Messiah all nations would become Jews, this was indeed true; but although they would adopt Jewish practices, they would apostatise in the war of Gog and Magog, when again Psa_2:4 would be realised: ‘The Lord shall laugh at them.’ And this is the teaching which some writers would compare with that of Christ! In view of such statements, we can only ask with astonishment: What fellowship of spirit can there be between Jewish teaching and the first Beatitude?

It is the same sad self-righteousness and utter carnalness of view which underlies the other Rabbinic parallels to the Beatitudes, pointing to contrast rather than likeness. Thus the Rabbinic blessedness of mourning consists in this, that much misery here makes up for punishment hereafter. We scarcely wonder that no Rabbinic parallel can be found to the third Beatitude, unless we recall the contrast which assigns in Messianic days the possession of earth to Israel as a nation. Nor could we expect any parallel to the fourth Beatitude, to those who hunger and thirst after righteousness. Rabbinism would have quite a different idea of ‘righteousness,’ considered as ‘good works,’ and chiefly as almsgiving (designated as ṣedaqah, or righteousness). To such the most special reward is promised, and that ex opere operato. Similarly, Rabbinism speaks of the perfectly righteous (צדיק  גמור) and the perfectly unrighteous, or else of the righteous and unrighteous (according as the good or the evil might weigh heaviest in the scale); and, besides these, of a kind of middle state. But such a conception as that of ‘hunger’ and ‘thirst’ after righteousness would have no place in the system. And, that no doubt may obtain, this sentence may be quoted: ‘He that says, I give this “Sela” as alms, in order that (בשביל) my sons may live, and that I may merit the world to come, behold, this is the perfectly righteous.’ Along with such assertions of work-righteousness we have this principle often repeated, that all such merit attaches only to Israel, while the good works and mercy of the Gentiles are actually reckoned to them as sin, though it is only fair to add that one voice (that of Jochanan ben Zakkai) is raised in contradiction of such horrible teaching.

It seems almost needless to prosecute this subject; yet it may be well to remark, that the same self-righteousness attaches to the quality of mercy, so highly prized among the Jews, and which is supposed not only to bring reward, but to atone for sins.  With regard to purity of heart, there is, indeed, a discussion between the school of Shammai and that of Hillel – the former teaching that guilty thoughts constitute sin, while the latter expressly confines it to guilty deeds. The Beatitude attaching to peace-making has many analogies in Rabbinism; but the latter would never have connected the designation of ‘children of God’ with any but Israel. A similar remark applies to the use of the expression ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ in the next Beatitude.

 A more full comparison than has been made would almost require a separate treatise. One by one, as we place the sayings of the Rabbis by the side of those of Jesus in this Sermon on the Mount, we mark the same essential contrariety of spirit, whether as regards righteousness, sin, repentance, faith, the Kingdom, alms, prayer, or fasting. Only two points may be specially selected, because they are so frequently brought forward by writers as proof; that the sayings of Jesus did not rise above those of the chief Talmudic authorities. The first of these refers to the well-known words of our Lord: ‘Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.’ This is compared with the following Rabbinic parallel, in which the gentleness of Hillel is contrasted with the opposite disposition of Shammai. The latter is said to have harshly repelled an intending proselyte, who wished to be taught the whole Law while standing on one foot, while Hillel received him with this saying: ‘What is hateful to thee, do not to another. This is the whole Law, all else is only its explanation.’ But it will be noticed that the words in which the Law is thus summed up are really only a quotation from Tob 4:15, although their presentation as the substance of the Law is, of course, original. But apart from this, the merest beginner in logic must perceive, that there is a vast difference between this negative injunction, or the prohibition to do to others what is hateful to ourselves, and the positive direction to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. The one does not rise above the standpoint of the Law, being as yet far from that love which would lavish on others the good we ourselves desire, while the Christian saying embodies the nearest approach to absolute love of which human nature is capable, making that the test of our conduct to others which we ourselves desire to possess. And, be it observed, the Lord does not put self-love as the principle of our conduct, but only as its ready test. Besides, the further explanation in Luk_6:38 should here be kept in view, as also what may be regarded as the explanatory additions in Mat_5:42-48.

The second instance, to which it seems desirable to advert, is the supposed similarity between petitions in the Lord’s Prayer, and Rabbinic prayers. Here, we may remark, at the outset, that both the spirit and the manner of prayer are presented by the Rabbis so externally, and with such details, as to make it quite different from prayer as our Lord taught His disciples. This appears from the Talmudic tractate specially devoted to that subject, where the both exact position, the degree of inclination, and other trivialities, never referred to by Christ, are dwelt upon at length as of primary importance. Most painful, for example, is it to find this interpretation of Hezekiah’s prayer, when the King is represented as appealing to the merit of his fathers, detailing their greatness in contrast to Rahab or the Shunammite, who yet had received a reward, and closing with this: ‘Lord of the world, I have searched the 248 members which Thou hast given me, and not found that I have provoked Thee to anger with any one of them, how much more then shouldest Thou on account of these prolong my life?’ After this, it is scarcely necessary to point to the self-righteousness which, in this as in other respects, is the most painful characteristic of Rabbinism. That the warning against prayers at the corner of streets was taken from life, appears from the well-known anecdote concerning one, Rabbi Jannai, who was observed saying his prayers in the public streets of Sepphoris, and then advancing four cubits to make the so-called supplementary prayer. Again, a perusal of some of the recorded prayers of the Rabbis will show, how vastly different many of them were from the petitions which our Lord taught. Without insisting on this, nor on the circumstance that all recorded Talmudic prayers are of much later date than the time of Jesus, it may, at the same time, be freely admitted that here also the form, and sometimes even the spirit, approached closely to the words of our Lord. On the other hand, it would be folly to deny that the Lord’s Prayer, in its sublime spirit, tendency, combination, and succession of petitions, is unique; and that such expressions in it as ‘Our Father,’ ‘the Kingdom,’ ‘forgiveness,’ ‘temptation,’ and others, represent in Rabbinism something entirely different from that which our Lord had in view. But, even so, such petitions as ‘forgive us our debts,’ could, as has been shown in a previous chapter, have no true parallel in Jewish theology.

Further details would lead beyond our present scope. It must suffice to indicate that such sayings as Mat_5:6, Mat_5:15, Mat_5:17, Mat_5:25, Mat_5:29, Mat_5:31, Mat_5:46, Mat_5:47; Mat_6:8, Mat_6:12, Mat_6:18, Mat_6:22, Mat_6:24, Mat_6:32; Mat_7:8, Mat_7:9, Mat_7:10, Mat_7:15, Mat_7:17-19, Mat_7:22, Mat_7:23, have no parallel, in any real sense, in Jewish writings, whose teaching, indeed, often embodies opposite ideas. Here it may be interesting, by one instance, to show what kind of Messianic teaching would have interested a Rabbi. In a passage which describes the great danger of intercourse with Jewish Christians, as leading to heresy, a Rabbi is introduced, who, at Sepphoris, had met one of Jesus’ disciples, named Jacob, a ‘man of Kerr Sekanya,’ reputed as working miraculous cures in the name of his Master. It is said, that at a later period the Rabbi suffered grievous persecution, in punishment for the delight he had taken in a comment on a certain passage of Scripture, which Jacob attributed to his Master. It need scarcely be said, that the whole story is a fabrication; indeed, the supposed Christian interpretation is not even fit to be reproduced; and we only mention the circumstance as indicating the contrast between what Talmudism would have delighted in hearing from its Messiah, and what Jesus spoke.

But there are points of view which may be gained from Rabbinic writings, helpful to the understanding of the ‘Sermon on the Mount,’ although not of its spirit. Some of these may here be mentioned. Thus, when we read that not one jot or tittle shall pass from the Law, it is painfully interesting to find in the Talmud the following quotation and mistranslation of Mat_5:17 : ‘I have come not to diminish from the Law of Moses, nor yet have I come to add to the Law of Moses.’  But the Talmud here significantly omits the addition made by Christ, on which all depends: ‘till all be fulfilled.’ Jewish tradition mentions this very letter yod as irremovable, adding, that if all men in the world were gathered together to abolish the least letter in the Law, they would not succeed. Not a letter could be removed from the Law – a saying illustrated by this curious conceit, that the yod which was taken by God out of the name of Sarah (Sarai), was added to that of Hoshea, making him Joshua (Jehoshua). Similarly, the guilt of changing those little hooks (‘tittles’) which make the distinction between such Hebrew letters as 

ד and ר

ה and ח

ב and כ

is declared so great, that, if such were done, the world would be destroyed. Again the thought about the danger of those who broke the least commandment is so frequently expressed in Jewish writings, as scarcely to need special quotation. Only, there it is put on the ground, that we know not what reward may attach to one or another commandment. The expression ‘they of old,’ quite corresponds to the Rabbinic appeal to those that had preceded, the zeqenim or rishonim. In regard to Mat_5:22, we remember that the term ‘brother’ applied only to Jews, while the Rabbis used to designate the ignorant – or those who did not believe such exaggerations, as that in the future God would build up the gates of Jerusalem with gems thirty cubits high and broad – as reyqa, with this additional remark, that on one occasion the look of a Rabbi had immediately turned the unbeliever into a heap of bones!

Again, the opprobrious term ‘fool’ was by no means of uncommon occurrence among the sages; and yet they themselves state, that to give an opprobrious by-name, or to put another openly to shame, was one of the three things which deserved Gehenna. To Mat_5:26 the following is an instructive parallel:’ ‘To one who had defrauded the custom-house, it was said: “Pay the duty.” He said to them “Take all that I have with me.” But the tax-gatherer answered him, “Thinkest thou, we ask only this one payment of duty? Nay, rather, that duty be paid for all the times in which according to thy wont, thou hast defrauded the custom-house.”’ The mode of swearing mentioned in Mat_5:35 was very frequently adopted, in order to avoid pronouncing the Divine Name. Accordingly, they swore by the Covenant, by the Service of the Temple, or by the Temple. But perhaps the usual mode of swearing, which is attributed even to the Almighty, is ‘By thy life’ (חייך). Lastly, as regards our Lord’s admonition, it is mentioned as characteristic of the pious, that their ‘yea is yea,’ and their ‘nay nay.’

Passing to Mt 6, we remember, in regard to Mat_6:2, that the boxes for charitable contributions in the Temple were trumpet-shaped, and we can understand the figurative allusion of Christ to demonstrative piety. The parallelisms in the language of the Lord’s Prayer – at least so far as the wording, not the spirit, is concerned, – have been frequently shown. If the closing doxology, ‘Thine is the Kingdom, and the power, and the glory,’ were genuine, it would correspond to the common Jewish ascription, from which, in all probability, it has been derived. In regard to Mat_6:14 and Mat_6:15, although there are many Jewish parallels concerning the need of forgiving those that have offended us, or else asking forgiveness, we know what meaning Rabbinism attached to the forgiveness of sins. Similarly, it is scarcely necessary to discuss the Jewish views concerning fasting. In regard to Mat_6:25 and Mat_6:34, we may remark this exact parallel: ‘Every one who has a loaf in his basket, and says, What shall I eat to-morrow? is one of little faith.’ But Christianity goes further than this. While the Rabbinic saying only forbids care when there is bread in the basket, our Lord would banish anxious care even if there were no bread in the basket. The expression in Mat_6:34 seems to be a Rabbinic proverb. Thus, we read: ‘Care not for the morrow, for ye know not what a day may bring forth. Perhaps he may not be on the morrow, and so have cared for a world that does not exist for him.’ Only here, also, we mark that Christ significantly says not as the Rabbis, but, ‘the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.’

In Mat_7:2, the saying about having it measured to us with the same measure that we mete, occurs in precisely true same manner in the Talmud, and, indeed, seems to have been a proverbial expression. The illustration in Mat_7:3 and Mat_7:4, about the mote and the beam, appears thus in Rabbinic literature: ‘I wonder if there is any one in this generation who would take reproof. If one said, Take the mote out of thine eye, he would answer, Take the beam from out thine own eye.’ On which the additional question is raised, whether any one in that generation were capable of reproving. As it also occurs with only trifling variations in other passages, we conclude that this also was a proverbial expression. The same may be said of gathering ‘grapes of thorns.’ Similarly, the designation of ‘pearls’ (Mat_7:6) for the valuable sayings of sages is common. To Mat_7:11 there is a realistic parallel, when it is related, that at a certain fast, on account of drought, a Rabbi admonished the people to good deeds, on which a man gave money to the woman from whom he had been divorced, because she was in want. This deed was made a plea in prayer by the Rabbi, that if such a man cared for his wife who no more belonged to him, how much more should the Almighty care for the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Upon this, it is added, the rain descended plentifully. If difference, and even contrast of spirit, together with similarity of form, were to be further pointed out, we should find it in connection with Mat_7:14, which speaks of the fewness of those saved, and also Mat_7:26, which refers to the absolute need of doing, as evidence of sonship. We compare with this what the Talmud says of Rabbi Simeon ben Jochai, whose worthiness was so great, that during his whole lifetime no rainbow was needed to ensure immunity from a flood, and whose power was such that he could say to a valley: Be filled with gold dinars. The same Rabbi was wont to say: ‘I have seen the children of the world to come, and they are few. If there are three, I and my son are of their number; if they are two, I and my son are they.’ After such expression of boastful self-righteousness, so opposed to the passage in the Sermon on the Mount, of which it is supposed to be the parallel, we scarcely wonder to read that, if Abraham had redeemed all generations to that of Rabbi Simon, the latter claimed to redeem by his own merits all that followed to the end of the world – nay, that if Abraham were reluctant, he (Simon) would take Ahijah the Shilonite with him, and reconcile the whole world! Yet we are asked by some to see in such Rabbinic passages parallels to the sublime teaching of Christ!

The ‘Sermon on the Mount’ closes with a parabolic illustration, which in similar form occurs in Rabbinic writings. Thus, the man whose wisdom exceeds his works is compared to a tree whose branches are many, but its roots few, and which is thus easily upturned by the wind; while he whose works exceed his wisdom is likened to a tree, whose branches are few, and its roots many, against which all the winds in the world would strive in vain. A still more close parallel is that in which the man who has good works, and learns much in the Law, is likened to one, who in building his house lays stones first, and on them bricks, so that when the flood cometh the house is not destroyed; while he who has not good work, yet busies himself much with the Law, is like one who puts bricks below, and stones above which are swept away by the waters. Or else the former is like one who puts mortar between the bricks, fastening them one to the other; and the other to one who merely puts mortar outside, which the rain dissolves and washes away.

The above comparisons of Rabbinic sayings with those of our Lord lay no claim to completeness. They will, however, suffice to explain and amply to vindicate the account of the impression left on the hearers of Jesus. But what, even more than all else, must have filled them with wonderment and awe was, that He Who so taught also claimed to be the God-appointed final Judge of all, whose fate would be decided not merely by professed discipleship, but by their real relation to Him (Mat_7:21-23). And so we can understand it, that, alike in regard to what He taught and what He claimed. ‘The people were astonished at His doctrine: for He taught them as One having authority – and not as the Scribes.’

(Mat_8:1, Mat_8:5-15; Mar_3:20, Mar_3:21; Luk_7:1-10)

We are once again in Capernaum. It is remarkable how much, connected not only with the Ministry of Jesus, but with His innermost Life, gathers around that little fishing town. In all probability its prosperity was chiefly due to the neighbouring Tiberias, which Herod Antipas had built, about ten years previously. Noteworthy is it also, how many of the most attractive characters and incidents in the Gospel-history are connected with that Capernaum, which, as a city, rejected its own real glory, and, like Israel, and for the same reason, at last incurred a prophetic doom commensurate to its former privileges.

But as yet Capernaum was still ‘exalted up to heaven.’ Here was the home of that believing Court-official, whose child Jesus had healed. Here also was the household of Peter; and here the paralytic had found, together with forgiveness of his sins, health of body. Its streets, with their outlook on the deep blue Lake, had been thronged by eager multitudes in search of life to body and soul. Here Matthew-Levi had heard and followed the call of Jesus; and here the good Centurion had in stillness learned to love Israel, and serve Israel’s King, and built with no niggard hand that Synagogue, most splendid of those yet exhumed in Galilee, which had been consecrated by the Presence and Teaching of Jesus, and by prayers, of which the conversion of Jairus, its chief ruler, seems the blessed answer. And now, from the Mount of Beatitudes, it was again to His temporary home at Capernaum that Jesus retired. Yet not either to solitude or to rest. For, of that multitude which had hung entranced on His Words many followed Him, and there was now such constant pressure around Him, that, in the zeal of their attendance upon the wants and demands of those who hungered after the Bread of Life, alike Master and disciples found not leisure so much as for the necessary sustenance of the body.

The circumstances, the incessant work, and the all-consuming zeal which even ‘His friends’ could but ill understand, led to the apprehension – the like of which is so often entertained by well-meaning persons in all ages, in their practical ignorance of the all-engrossing but also sustaining character of engagements about the Kingdom – that the balance of judgment might be overweighted, and high reason brought into bondage to the poverty of our earthly frame. In its briefness, the account of what these ‘friends,’ or rather ‘those from Him’ – His home – said and did, is most pictorial. On tidings reaching them, with reiterated, growing, and perhaps Orientally exaggerating details, they hastened out of their house in a neighbouring street to take possession of Him, as if He had needed their charge. It is not necessary to include the Mother of Jesus in the number of those who actually went. Indeed, the later express mention of His ‘Mother and brethren’ seems rather opposed to the supposition. Still less does the objection deserve serious refutation, that any such procedure, assuredly, on the part of the Virgin-Mother, would be incompatible with the history of Jesus’ Nativity. For, all must have felt, that ‘the zeal’ of God’s House was, literally, ‘consuming’ Him, and the other view of it, that it was setting on fire, not the physical, but the psychical framework of His humiliation, seems in no way inconsistent with what loftiest, though as yet dim, thought had come to the Virgin about her Divine Son. On the other hand, this idea, that He was ‘beside Himself,’ afforded the only explanation of what otherwise would have been to them well-nigh inexplicable. To the Eastern mind especially this want of self-possession, the being ‘beside’ oneself, would point to possession by another – God or Devil. It was on the ground of such supposition that the charge was so constantly raised by the Scribes, and unthinkingly taken up by the people, that Jesus was mad, and had a devil: not a demoniacal possession, be it marked, but possession by the Devil, in the absence of self-possessedness. And hence our Lord characterised this charge as really blasphemy against the Holy Ghost. And this also explains how, while unable to deny the reality of His Works, they could still resist their evidential force.

However that incident may for the present have ended, it could have caused but brief interruption to His Work. Presently there came the summons of the heathen Centurion and the healing of His servant, which both Matthew and Luke record, as specially bearing on the progressive unfolding of Christ’s Mission. Notably these two Evangelists; and notably-with variations due to the peculiar standpoint of their narratives. No really serious difficulties will be encountered in trying to harmonise the details of these two narratives; that is, if any one should attach importance to such precise harmony. At any rate, we cannot fail to perceive the reason of these variations. Meyer regards the account of Luke as the original, Keim that of Matthew – both on subjective rather than historical grounds. But we may as well note, that the circumstance, that the event is passed over by Mark, militates against the favourite modern theory of the Gospels being derived from an original tradition (what is called the ‘original Mark,’ Ur-Marcus).

If we keep in view the historical object of Matthew, as primarily addressing himself to Jewish, while Luke wrote more especially for Gentile readers, we arrive, at least, at one remarkable outcome of the variations in their narratives. Strange to say, the Judaean Gospel gives the pro-Gentile, the Gentile narrative the pro-Jewish, presentation of the event. Thus, in Matthew the history is throughout sketched as personal and direct dealing with the heathen Centurion on the part of Christ, while in the Gentile narrative of Luke the dealing with the heathen is throughout indirect, by the intervention of Jews, and on the ground of the Centurion’s spiritual sympathy with Israel. Again, Matthew quotes the saying of the Lord which holds out to the faith of Gentiles a blessed equality with Israel in the great hope of the future, while it puts aside the mere claim of Israel after the flesh, and dooms Israel to certain judgment. On the other hand, Luke omits all this. A strange inversion it might seem, that the Judaean Gospel should contain what the Gentile account omits, except for this, that Matthew argues with his countrymen the real standing of the Gentiles, while Luke pleads with the Gentiles for sympathy and love with Jewish modes of thinking. The one is not only an exposition, but a justification, of the event as against Israel; the other an Eirenicon, as well as a touching representation of the plea of the younger with his elder brother at the door of the Father’s House.

But the fundamental truth in both accounts is the same; nor is it just to say that in the narrative the Gentiles are preferred before Israel. So far from this, their faith is only put on an equality with that of believing Israel. It is not Israel, but Israel’s fleshly claims and unbelief, that are rejected and Gentile faith occupies, not a new position outside Israel, but shares with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob the fulfilment of the promise made to their faith. Thus we have here the widest Jewish universalism, the true interpretation of Israel’s hope; and this, even by the admission of our opponents, not as a later addition, but as forming part of Christ’s original teaching. But if so, it revives, only in accentuated manner, the question: Whence this essential difference between the teaching of Christ on this subject, and that of contemporary Rabbinism. Yet another point may be gained from the admissions of negative criticism, at least on the part of its more thoughtful representatives. Keim is obliged to acknowledge the authenticity of the narrative. It is immaterial here which ‘recension’ of it may be regarded as the original. The Christ did say what the Gospels represent! But Strauss has shown, that in such case any natural or semi-natural explanation of the healing is impossible. Accordingly, the ‘Trilemma’ left is: either Christ was really what the Gospels represent Him, or He was a daring enthusiast, or (saddest of all) He must be regarded as a conscious impostor. If either of the two last alternatives were adopted, it would, in the first instance, be necessary to point out some ground for the claim of such power on the part of Jesus. What could have prompted Him to do so? Old Testament precedent there was none; certainly not in the cure of Naaman by Elisha. And Rabbinic parallelism there was none. For, although a sudden cure, and at a distance, is related in connection with a Rabbi, all the circumstances are absolutely different. In the Jewish story recourse was, indeed, had to a Rabbi; but for prayer that the sick might be healed of God, not for actual healing by the Rabbi. Having prayed, the Rabbi informed the messengers who had come to implore his help, that the fever had left the sick. But when asked by them whether he claimed to be a prophet, he expressly repudiated any prophetic knowledge, far more any supernatural power of healing, and explained that liberty in prayer always indicated to him that his prayer had been answered. All analogy thus failing, the only explanation left to negative criticism, in view of the admitted authenticity of the narrative, is, that the cure was the result of the psychical influence of the Centurion’s faith and of that of his servant. But what, in that case, of the words which Jesus admittedly spoke? Can we, as some would have it, rationally account for their use by the circumstance that Jesus had had experience of such psychical influences on disease? or that Christ’s words were, so to speak, only an affirmation of the Centurion’s faith – something between a ‘benedictory wish’ and an act? Surely, suggestions like these carry their own refutation.

Apart, then, from explanations which have been shown untenable, what is the impression left on our minds of an event, the record of which is admitted to be authentic? The heathen Centurion is a real historical personage. He was captain of the troop quartered in Capernaum, and in the service of Herod Antipas. We know that such troops were chiefly recruited from Samaritans and Gentiles of Caesarea. Nor is there the slightest evidence that this Centurion was a ‘proselyte of righteousness.’ The accounts both in Matthew and in Luke are incompatible with this idea. A ‘proselyte of righteousness’ could have had no reason for not approaching Christ directly, nor would he have spoken of himself as ‘unfit’ that Christ should come under his roof. But such language quite accorded with Jewish notions of a Gentile, since the houses of Gentiles were considered as defiled, and as defiling those who entered them. On the other hand, the ‘proselytes of righteousness’ were in all respects equal to Jews, so that the words of Christ concerning Jews and Gentiles, as reported by Matthew, would not have been applicable to them. The Centurion was simply one who had learned to love Israel and to reverence Israel’s God; one who, not only in his official position, but from love and reverence, had built that Synagogue, of which, strangely enough, now after eighteen centuries, the remains, in their rich and elaborate carvings of cornices and entablatures, of capitals and niches, show with what liberal hand he had dealt his votive offerings.

We know too little of the history of the man, to judge what earlier impulses had led him to such reverence for Israel’s God. There might have been something to incline him towards it in his early upbringing, perhaps in Caesarea; or in his family relationships, perhaps in that very servant (possibly a Jew) whose implicit obedience to his master seems in part to have led him up to faith in analogous submission of all things to the behests of Christ. The circumstances, the times, the place, the very position of the man, make such suppositions rational, even suggest them. In that case, his whole bearing would be consistent with itself, and with what we know of the views and feelings of the time. In the place where the son of his fellow-official at the Court of Herod had been healed by the Word of Jesus, spoken at a distance, in the Capernaum which was the home of Jesus and the scene of so many miracles, it was only what we might expect, that in such a case he should turn to Jesus and ask His help. Quite consistent with his character is the straightforwardness of his expectancy, characteristically illustrated by his military experience – what Bengel designates as the wisdom of his faith beautifully shining out in the bluffness of the soldier. When he had learned to own Israel’s God, and to believe in the absolute unlimited power of Jesus, no such difficulties would come to him, nor, assuredly, such cavils rise, as in the minds of the Scribes, or even of the Jewish laity. Nor is it even necessary to suppose that, in his unlimited faith in Jesus, the Centurion had distinct apprehension of His essential Divinity. In general, it holds true, that, throughout the Evangelic history, belief in the Divinity of our Lord was the outcome of experience of His Person and Work, not the condition and postulate of it, as is the case since the Pentecostal descent of the Holy Ghost and His indwelling in the Church.

In view of these facts, the question with the Centurion would be: not, Could Jesus heal his servant, but, Would He do so? And again, this other specifically: Since, so far as he knew, no application from any in Israel, be it even publican or sinner, had been doomed to disappointment, would he, as a Gentile, be barred from share in this blessing? was he ‘unworthy,’ or, rather, ‘unfit’ for it? Thus this history presents a crucial question, not only as regarded the character of Christ’s work, but the relation to it of the Gentile world. Quite consistent with this – nay, its necessary outcome – were the scruples of the Centurion to make direct, personal application to Jesus. In measure as he reverenced Jesus, would these scruples, from his own standpoint, increase. As the houses of Gentiles were ‘unclean,’ entrance into them, and still more familiar fellowship, would ‘defile.’ The Centurion must have known this; and the higher he placed Jesus on the pinnacle of Judaism, the more natural was it for him to communicate with Christ through the elders of the Jews, and not to expect the Personal Presence of the Master, even if the application to him were attended with success. And here it is important (for the criticism of this history) to mark that, alike in the view of the Centurion, and even in that of the Jewish elders who undertook his commission. Jesus as yet occupied the purely Jewish standpoint.

Closely considered, whatever verbal differences, there is not any real discrepancy in this respect between the Judaean presentation of the event in Matthew and the fuller Gentile account of it by Luke. From both narratives we are led to infer that the house of the Centurion was not in Capernaum itself, but in its immediate neighbourhood, probably on the road to Tiberias. And so in Mat_8:7, we read the words of our Saviour when consenting: ‘I, having come, will hear him;’ just as in Luke’s narrative a space of time intervenes, in which intimation is conveyed to the Centurion, when he sends ‘friends’ to greet Christ’s actual coming into his house. Nor does Matthew speak of any actual request on the part of the Centurion, even though at first sight his narrative seems to imply a personal appearance. The general statement ‘beseeching Him’ – although it is not added in what manner, with what words, nor for what special thing – must be explained by the more detailed narrative of the embassy of Jewish Elders. There is another marked agreement in the seeming difference of the two accounts. In Luke’s narrative, the second message of the Centurion embodies two different expressions, which our Authorised Version unfortunately renders by the same word. It should read: ‘Trouble not Thyself, for I am not fit (Levitically speaking) that Thou shouldest enter under my roof;’ Levitically, or Judaistically speaking, my house is not a fit place for Thy entrance; ‘wherefore neither did I judge myself worthy (spiritually, morally, religiously) [ἠξίωσα, pondus habens, ejusdem ponderis cum aliquo, pretio aequans] to come unto Thee.’ Now, markedly, in Matthew’s presentation of the same event to the Jews, this latter ‘worthiness’ is omitted, and we only have Luke’s first term, ‘fit’ (ἱκανός): ‘I am not fit that thou shouldest come under my roof,’ my house is unfitting Thine entrance. This seems to bear out the reasons previously indicated for the characteristic peculiarities of the two narratives.

But in their grand leading features the two narratives entirely agree. There is earnest supplication for his sick, seemingly dying servant. Again, the Centurion in the fullest sense believes in the power of Jesus to heal, in the same manner as he knows his own commands as an officer would be implicitly obeyed; for, surely, no thoughtful reader would seriously entertain the suggestion, that the military language of the Centurion only meant, that he regarded disease as caused by evil demons or noxious powers who obeyed Jesus, as soldiers or servants do their officer or master. Such might have been the underlying Jewish view of the times; but the fact, that in this very thing Jesus contrasted the faith of the Gentile with that of Israel, indicates that the language in question must be taken in its obvious sense. But in his self-acknowledged ‘unfitness’ lay the real ‘fitness’ of this good soldier for membership with the true Israel and in his deep-felt ‘unworthiness’ the real ‘worthiness’ (the ejusdem ponderis) for ‘the Kingdom’ and its blessings. It was this utter disclaimer of all claim, outward or inward, which prompted that absoluteness of trust which deemed all things possible with Jesus, and marked the real faith of the true Israel. Here was one, who was in the state described in the first clauses of the ‘Beatitudes,’ and to whom came the promise of the second clauses; because Christ is the connecting link between the two, and because He consciously was such to the Centurion, and, indeed, the only possible connecting link between them.

And so we mark it, in what must be regarded as the high-point in this history, so far as its teaching to us all, and therefore the reason of its record in the New Testament, is concerned: that participation in the blessedness of the Kingdom is not connected with any outward relationship towards it, nor belongs to our inward consciousness in regard to it; but is granted by the King to that faith which in deepest simplicity realises, and holds fast by Him. And yet, although discarding every Jewish claim to them – or, it may be, in our days, everything that is merely outwardly Christian – these blessings are not outside, still less beyond, what was the hope of the Old Testament, nor in our days the expectancy of the Church, but are literally its fulfilment: the sitting down ‘with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob in the Kingdom of Heaven.’ Higher than, and beyond this not even Christ’s provision can take us.

But for the fuller understanding of the words of Christ, the Jewish modes of thought, which He used in illustration, require to be briefly explained. It was a common belief, that in the day of the Messiah redeemed Israel would be gathered to a great feast, together with the patriarchs and heroes of the Jewish faith. This notion, which was but a coarsely literal application of such prophetic figures as in Isa_25:6, had perhaps yet another and deeper meaning. As each weekly Sabbath was to be honoured by a feast, in which the best which the family could procure was to be placed on the board, so would the world’s great Sabbath be marked by a feast in which the Great Householder, Israel’s King, would entertain His household and guests. Into the painfully, and, from the notions of the times, grossly realistic description of this feast, it is needless here to enter. One thing, however, was clear: Gentiles could have no part in that feast. In fact, the shame and anger of ‘these’ foes on seeing the ‘table spread’ for this Jewish feast was among the points specially noticed as fulfilling the predictions of Psa_23:5. On this point, then, the words of Jesus in reference to the believing Centurion formed the most marked contrast to Jewish teaching.

In another respect also we mark similar contrariety. When our Lord consigned the unbelieving to ‘outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth,’ he once more used Jewish language, only with opposite application of it.gehinom – of which the entrance, marked by ever-ascending smoke, was in the valley of Hinnom, between two palm trees – lay beyond ‘the mountains of darkness.’ It was a place of darkness, to which, in the day of the Lord, the Gentiles would be consigned. On the other hand, the merit of circumcision would in the day of the Messiah deliver Jewish sinners from Gehinnom. It seems a moot question, whether the expression ‘outer darkness’  may not have been intended to designate – besides the darkness outside the lighted house of the Father, and even beyond the darkness of Gehinnom – a place of hopeless, endless night. Associated with it is ‘the weeping and the gnashing of teeth.’ In Rabbinic thought the former was connected with sorrow, the latter almost always with anger – not, as generally supposed, with anguish.

To complete our apprehension of the contrast between the views of the Jews and the teaching of Jesus, we must bear in mind that, as the Gentiles could not possibly share in the feast of the Messiah, so Israel had claim and title to it. To use Rabbinic terms, the former were ‘children of Gehinnom,’ but Israel ‘children of the Kingdom,’ or, in strictly Rabbinic language, ‘royal children,’ ‘children God,’ ‘of heaven,’ ‘children of the upper chamber’ (the Aliyah) and ‘of the world to come.’ In fact, in their view, God had first sat down on His throne as King, when the hymn of deliverance (Exo_15:1) was raised by Israel – the people which took upon itself that yoke of the Law which all other nations of the world had rejected.

Never, surely, could the Judaism of His hearers have received more rude shock than by this inversion of all their cherished beliefs. There was a feast of Messianic fellowship, a recognition on the part of the King of all His faithful subjects, a joyous festive gathering with the fathers of the faith. But this fellowship was not of outward, but of spiritual kinship. There were ‘children of the Kingdom,’ and there was an ‘outer darkness’ with its anguish and despair. But this childship was of the Kingdom, such as He had opened it to all believers; and that outer darkness theirs, who had only outward claims to present. And so this history of the believing Centurion is at the same time an application of the ‘Sermon on the Mount’ – in this also aptly following the order of its record – and a further carrying out of its teaching. Negatively, it differentiated the Kingdom from Israel; while, positively, it placed the hope of Israel, and fellowship with its promises, within reach of all faith, whether of Jew or Gentile. He Who taught such new and strange truth could never be called a mere reformer of Judaism. There cannot be ‘reform,’ where all the fundamental principles are different. Surely He was the Son of God, the Messiah of men, Who, in such surrounding, could so speak to Jew and Gentile of God and His Kingdom. And surely also, He, Who could so bring spiritual life to the dead, could have no difficulty by the same word, ‘in the self-same hour,’ to restore life and health to the servant of him, whose faith had inherited the Kingdom. The first grafted tree of heathendom that had so blossomed could not shake off unripe fruit. If the teaching of Christ was new and was true, so must His work have been. And in this lies the highest vindication of this miracle, – that He is the Miracle.

(Luk_7:11-17)

That early spring-tide in Galilee was surely the truest realisation of the picture in the Song of Solomon, when earth clad herself in garments of beauty, and the air was melodious with songs of new life. It seemed as if each day marked a widening circle of deepest sympathy and largest power on the part of Jesus; as if each day also brought fresh surprise, new gladness; opened hitherto unthought-of possibilities, and pointed Israel far beyond the horizon of their narrow expectancy. Yesterday it was the sorrow of the heathen Centurion which woke an echo in the heart of the Supreme Commander of life and death; faith called out, owned, and placed on the high platform of Israel’s worthies. To-day it is the same sorrow of a Jewish mother, which touches the heart of the Son of Mary, and appeals to where denial is unthinkable. In that Presence grief and death cannot continue. As the defilement of a heathen house could not attach to Him, Whose contact changed the Gentile stranger into a true Israelite, so could the touch of death not render unclean Him, Whose Presence vanquished and changed it into life. Jesus could not enter Nain, and its people pass Him to carry one dead to the burying.

For our present purpose it matters little, whether it was the very ‘day after the hearing of the Centurion’s servant, or ‘shortly afterwards’ that Jesus left Capernaum for Nain. Probably it was the morrow of that miracle, and the fact that ‘much people,’ or, rather ‘a great multitude,’ followed Him, seems confirmatory of it. The way was long – as we reckon, more than twenty-five miles; but, even if it was all taken on foot, there could be no difficulty in reaching Nain ere the evening, when so often funerals took place. Various roads lead to, and from Nain; that which stretches to the Lake of Galilee and up to Capernaum is quite distinctly marked. It is difficult to understand, how most of those who have visited the spot could imagine the place, where Christ met the funeral procession, to have been the rock-hewn tombs to the west of Nain and towards Nazareth. For, from Capernaum the Lord would not have come that way, but approach it from the north-east by Endor. Hence there can be little doubt, that Canon Tristram correctly identifies the now unfenced burying-ground, about ten minutes’ walk to the east of Nain, as that whither, on that spring afternoon, they were carrying the widow’s son. On the path leading to it the Lord of Life for the first time burst open the gates of death.

It is all desolate now. A few houses of mud and stone with low doorways, scattered among heaps of stones and traces of walls, is all that remains of what even these ruins show to have been once a city, with walls and gates. The rich gardens are no more, the fruit trees cut down, ‘and there is a painful sense of desolation’ about the place, as if the breath of judgment had swept over it. And yet even so we can understand its ancient name of Nain, ‘the pleasant,’ which the Rabbis regarded as fulfilling that part of the promise to Issachar: ‘he saw the land that it was pleasant.’ From the elevation on which the city stood we look northwards, across the wide plain, to wooded Tabor, and in the far distance to snow-capped Hermon. On the left (in the west) rise the hills beyond which Nazareth lies embosomed; to the right is Endor; southwards Shunem, and beyond it the Plain of Jezreel. By this path, from Endor, comes Jesus with His disciples and the great following multitude. Here, near by the city gate, on the road that leads eastwards to the old burying-ground, has this procession of the ‘great multitude,’ which accompanied the Prince of Life, met that other ‘great multitude’ that followed the dead to his burying. Which of the two shall give way to the other? We know what ancient Jewish usage would have demanded. For, of all the duties enjoined, none more strictly enforced by every consideration of humanity and piety, even by the example of God Himself, than that of comforting the mourners and showing respect to the dead by accompanying him to the burying.  The popular idea, that the spirit of the dead hovered about the unburied remains, must have given intensity to such feelings.

Putting aside later superstitions, so little has changed in the Jewish rites and observances about the dead, that from Talmudic and even earlier sources, we can form a vivid conception of what had taken place in Nain. The watchful anxiety; the vain use of such means as were known, or within reach of the widow; the deepening care, the passionate longing of the mother to retain her one treasure, her sole earthly hope and stay; then the gradual fading out of the light, the farewell, the terrible burst of sorrow: all these would be common features in any such picture. But here we have, besides, the Jewish thoughts of death and after death; knowledge just sufficient to make afraid, but not to give firm consolation, which would make even the most pious Rabbi uncertain of his future; and then the desolate thoughts connected in the Jewish mind with childlessness. We can realise it all: how Jewish ingenuity and wisdom would resort to remedies real or magical; how the neighbours would come in with reverent step, feeling as if the very shekhinah were unseen at the head of the pallet in that humble home; how they would whisper sayings about submission, which, when realisation of God’s love is wanting, seem only to stir the heart to rebellion against absolute power; and how they would resort to the prayers of those who were deemed pious in Nain.

But all was in vain. And now the well-known blast of the horn has carried tidings, that once more the Angel of Death has done his dire behest. In passionate grief the mother has rent her upper garment. The last sad offices have been rendered to the dead. The body has been laid on the ground; hair and nails have been cut, and the body washed, anointed, and wrapped in the best the widow could procure; for, the ordinance which directed that the dead should be buried in ‘wrappings’ (takhrikhin), or, as they significantly called it, the ‘provision for the journey’ (zevadaṯa), of the most inexpensive linen, is of later date than our period. It is impossible to say, whether the later practice already prevailed, of covering the body with metal, glass, or salt, and laying it either upon earth or salt.

And now the mother was left Oneneṯ (moaning, lamenting) – a term which distinguished the mourning before from that after burial. She would sit on the floor, neither eat meat, nor drink wine. What scanty meal she would take, must be without prayer, in the house of a neighbour, or in another room, or at least with her back to the dead. Pious friends would render neighbourly offices, or busy themselves about the near funeral. If it was deemed duty for the poorest Jew, on the death of his wife, to provide at least two flutes and one mourning woman, we may feel sure that the widowed mother had not neglected what, however incongruous or difficult to procure, might be regarded as the last tokens of affection. In all likelihood the custom obtained even then, though in modified form, to have funeral orations at the grave. For, even if charity provided for, an unknown wayfarer the simplest funeral, mourning-women would be hired to chaunt in weird strains the lament: ‘Alas, the lion! alas, the hero!’ or similar words, while great Rabbis were wont to bespeak for themselves a warm funeral oration (hesped, or hespera). For, from the funeral oration a man’s fate in the other world might be inferred; and, indeed, ‘the honour of a sage was in his funeral oration.’ And in this sense the Talmud answers the question, whether a funeral oration is intended to honour the survivors or the dead.

But in all this painful pageantry there was nothing for the heart of the widow, bereft of her only child. We can follow in spirit the mournful procession, as it started from the desolate home. As it issued, chairs and couches were reversed, and laid low. Outside, the funeral orator, if such was employed, preceded the bier, proclaiming the good deeds of the dead. Immediately before the dead came the women, this being peculiar to Galilee, the Midrash giving this reason of it, that woman had introduced death into the world. The body was not, as afterwards in preference, carried in an ordinary coffin of wood (Aron), if possible, cedarwood – on one occasion, at least, made with holes beneath; but laid on a bier, or in an open coffin (mitah). In former times a distinction had been made in these biers between rich and poor. The former were carried on the so-called dargash – as it were, in state – while the poor were conveyed in a receptacle made of wickerwork (keliḇa or kelikhah), having sometimes at the foot what was termed ‘a horn,’ to which the body was made fast. But this distinction between rich and poor was abolished by Rabbinic ordinance, and both alike, if carried on a bier, were laid in that made of wickerwork. Commonly, though not in later practice, the face of the dead body was uncovered. The body lay with its face turned up, and his hands folded on the breast. We may add, that when a person had died unmarried or childless, it was customary to put into the coffin something distinctive of them, such as pen and ink, or a key. Over the coffins of bride or bridegroom a baldachino was carried. Sometimes the coffin was garlanded with myrtle. In exceptional cases we read of the use of incense, and even of a kind of libation. We cannot, then, be mistaken in supposing that the body of the widow’s son was laid on the ‘bed’ (mitah), or in the ‘willow basket,’ already described (keliḇa, from keluḇ). Nor can we doubt that the ends or handles were borne by friends and neighbours, different parties of bearers, all of them unshod, at frequent intervals relieving each other, so that as many as possible might share in the good work. During these pauses there was loud lamentation; but this custom was not observed in the burial of women. Behind the bier walked the relatives, friends, and then the sympathising ‘multitude.’ For it was deemed like mocking one’s Creator not to follow the dead to his last resting-place, and to all such want of reverence Pro_17:5 was applied. If one were absolutely prevented from joining the procession, although for its sake all work, even study, should be interrupted, reverence should at least be shown by rising up before the dead. And so they would go on to what the Hebrews beautifully designated as the ‘house of assembly’ or ‘meeting,’ the ‘hostelry,’ the ‘place of rest,’ or ‘of freedom,’ the ‘field of weepers,’ the ‘house of eternity,’ or ‘of life.’

We can now transport ourselves into that scene. Up from the city close by came this ‘great multitude’ that followed the dead, with lamentations, wild chaunts of mourning women, accompanied by flutes and the melancholy tinkle of cymbals, perhaps by trumpets,  amidst expressions of general sympathy. Along the road from Endor streamed the great multitude which followed the ‘Prince of Life.’ Here they met: Life and Death. The connecting link between them was the deep sorrow of the widowed mother. He recognised her as she went before the bier, leading him to the grave whom she had brought into life. He recognised her, but she recognised Him not, had not even seen Him. She was still weeping; even after He had hastened a step or two in advance of His followers, quite close to her, she did not heed Him, and was still weeping. But, ‘beholding her,’ the Lord ‘had compassion on her.’ Those bitter, silent tears which blinded her eyes were strongest language of despair and utmost need, which never in vain appeals to His heart, Who has borne our sorrows. We remember, by way of contrast, the common formula used at funerals in Palestine, ‘Weep with them, all ye who are bitter of heart!’ It was not so that Jesus spoke to those around, nor to her, but characteristically: ‘Be not weeping.’ And what He said, that He wrought. He touched the bier – perhaps the very wicker basket in which the dead youth lay. He dreaded not the greatest of all defilements, – that of contact with the dead, which Rabbinism, in its elaboration of the letter of the Law, had surrounded with endless terrors. His was other separation than of the Pharisees: not that of submission to ordinances, but of conquest of what made them necessary.

And as He touched the bier, they who bore it stood still. They could not have anticipated what would follow. But the awe of the coming wonder – as it were, the shadow of the opening gates of life, had fallen on them. One word of sovereign command, ‘and he that was dead sat up, and began to speak.’ Not of that world of which he had had brief glimpse. For, as one who suddenly passes from dream-vision to waking, in the abruptness of the transition, loses what he had seen, so he, who from that dazzling brightness was hurried back to the dim light to which his vision had been accustomed. It must have seemed to him, as if he woke from long sleep. Where was he now? who those around him? what this strange assemblage and Who He, Whose Light and Life seemed to fall upon him?

And still was Jesus the link between the mother and the son, who had again found each other. And so, in the truest sense, ‘He gave him to his mother.’ Can any one doubt that mother and son henceforth owned, loved, and trusted Him as the true Messiah? If there was no moral motive for this miracle, outside Christ’s sympathy with intense suffering and the bereavement of death, was there no moral result as the outcome of it? If mother and son had not called upon Him before the miracle, would they not henceforth and for ever call upon Him? And if there was, so to speak, inward necessity, that Life Incarnate should conquer death – symbolic and typic necessity of it also – was not everything here congruous to the central fact in this history? The simplicity and absence of all extravagant details: the Divine calmness and majesty on the part of the Christ, so different from the manner in which legend would have coloured the scene, even from the intense agitation which characterised the conduct of an Elijah, an Elisha, or a Peter, in somewhat similar circumstances; and, lastly, the beauteous harmony where all is in accord, from the first touch of compassion till when, forgetful of the bystanders, heedless of ‘effect,’ He gives the son back to his mother – are not all these worthy of the event, and evidential of the truth of the narrative?

But, after all, may we regard this history as real – and, if so, what are its lessons? On one point, at least, all serious critics are now agreed. It is impossible to ascribe it to exaggeration, or to explain it on natural grounds. The only alternative is to regard it either as true, or as designedly false. Be it, moreover, remembered, that not only one Gospel, but all, relate some story of raising the dead – whether that of this youth, of Jairus’ daughter, or of Lazarus. They also all relate the Resurrection of the Christ, which really underlies those other miracles. But if this history of the raising of the young man is false, what motive can be suggested for its invention, for motive there must have been for it? Assuredly, it was no part of Jewish expectancy concerning the Messiah, that He would perform such a miracle. And negative criticism has admitted, that the differences between this history and the raising of the dead by Elijah or Elisha are so numerous and great, that these narratives cannot be regarded as suggesting that of the raising of the young man of Nain. We ask again: Whence, then, this history, if it was not true? It is an ingenious historical suggestion – rather an admission by negative criticism – that so insignificant, and otherwise unknown, a place as Nain would not have been fixed upon as the site of this miracle, if some great event had not occurred there which made lasting impression on the mind of the Church. What was that event, and does not the reading of this record carry conviction of its truth? Legends have not been so written. Once more, the miracle is described as having taken place, not in the seclusion of a chamber, nor before a few interested witnesses, but in sight of the great multitude which had followed Jesus, and of that other great multitude which came from Cana. In this twofold great multitude was there none, from whom the enemies of Christianity could have wrung contradiction, if the narrative was false? Still further, the history is told with such circumstantiality of details, as to be inconsistent with the theory of a later invention. Lastly, no one will question, that belief in the reality of such ‘raising from the dead’ was a primal article in the faith of the primitive Church, for which – as a fact, not a possibility – all were ready to offer up their lives. Nor should we forget that, in one of the earliest apologies addressed to the Roman Emperor, Quadratus appealed to the fact, that, of those who had been healed or raised from the dead by Christ, some were still alive, and all were well known. On the other hand, the only real ground for rejecting this narrative is disbelief in the Miraculous, including, of course, rejection of the Christ as the Miracle of Miracles. But is it not vicious reasoning in a circle, as well as begging the question, to reject the Miraculous because we discredit the Miraculous? and does not such rejection involve much more of the incredible than faith itself?

And so, with all Christendom, we gladly take it, in simplicity of faith, as a true record by true men – all the more, that they who told it knew it to be so incredible, as not only to provoke scorn, but to expose them to the charge of cunningly devising fables. But they who believe, see in this history, how the Divine Conqueror, in His accidental meeting with Death, with mighty arm rolled back the tide, and how through the portals of heaven which He opened stole in upon our world the first beam of the new day. Yet another – in some sense lower, in another, practically higher – lesson do we learn. For, this meeting of the two processions outside the gate of Nain was accidental, yet not in the conventional sense. Neither the arrival of Jesus at that place and time, nor that of the funeral procession from Nain, nor their meeting, was either designed or else miraculous. Both happened in the natural course of natural events, but their concurrence (συνκυρία  ) was designed, and directly God-caused. In this God-caused, designed concurrence of events, in themselves ordinary and natural, lies the mystery of special Providences, which, to whomsoever they happen, he may and should regard them as miracles and answer to prayer. And this principle extends much farther: to the prayer for, and provision of, daily bread, nay, to mostly all things, so that, to those who have ears to hear, all things around speak in parables of the Kingdom of Heaven.

But on those who saw this miracle at Nain fell the fear of the felt Divine Presence, and over their souls swept the hymn of Divine praise: fear, because a great Prophet was risen up among them; praise, because God had visited His people. And further and wider spread the wave – over Judaea, and beyond it, until it washed, and broke in faint murmur against the prison-walls, within which the Baptist awaited his martyrdom. Was He then the ‘Coming One?’ and, if so, why did, or how could, those walls keep His messenger within grasp of the tyrant?