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the Tem

rusalem.

and probably lest the rulers should have time to organise their hostile measures, Jesus disguises under ambiguous language his intention of going up to Jerusalem; he permits his brethren, who suppose that he is still in Galilee, to set forward without him. Still, however, his movements are the subject of anxious inquiry among the assembling multitudes in the capital; and many secret and half-stifled murmurs among the Galileans, some exalting his virtues, others representing him as a dangerous disturber of the public peace, keep up the general curiosity about his character and designs (1). On a sudden, in the midst of the festival, he ap- Jesus in pears in the Temple, and takes his station as a public teacher. ple at JeThe rulers seem to have been entirely off their guard; and the multitude are perplexed by the bold and as yet uninterrupted publicity, with which a man, whom the Sanhedrin were well known to have denounced as guilty of a capital offence, entered the court of the Temple, and calmly pursued his office of instructing the people. The fact that he had taken on himself that office was of itself unprecedented and surprising to many. As we have observed before, he belonged to no school, he had been bred at the feet of none of the recognised and celebrated teachers, yet he assumed superiority to all, and arraigned the whole of the wise men of vain glory rather than of sincere piety. His own doctrine was from a higher source, and possessed more undeniable authority. He even boldly anticipated the charge, which he knew would be renewed against him, his violation of the Sabbath by his works of mercy. He accused them of conspiring against his life; a charge which seems to have excited indignation as well as astonishment (2). The suspense and agitation of the assemblage are described with a few rapid, but singularly expressive, touches. It was part of the vague popular belief, that the Messiah would appear in some strange, sudden, and surprising manner. The circumstances of his coming were thus left to the imagination of each to fill up, according to his own notions of that which was striking and magnificent. But the extraordinary incidents which attended the birth of Jesus were forgotten, or had never been generally known; his origin and extraction were supposed to be ascertained; he appeared but as the legitimate descendant of a humble Galilean family; his acknowledged brethren were ordinary and undistinguished men. "We know this man whence he is; but when Christ cometh no man knoweth whence he is." His mysterious allusions to his higher descent were heard with mingled feelings of indignation and awe. On the multitude his wonderful works had made a favourable impression, which was not a little increased by the inactivity and hesitation of the rulers. The Sanhedrin, in which the Pharisaic

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Perplexity

of the

Sanhe

drin.

Woman

party still predominated, were evidently unprepared, and had concerted no measures either to counteract his progress in the public mind, or to secure his person. Their authority in such a case was probably, in the absence of the Roman prefect, or without the concurrence of the commander of the Roman guard in the Antonia, by no means clearly ascertained. With every desire, therefore, for his apprehension, they at first respected his person, and their non-interference was mistaken for connivance, if not as a sanction, for his proceedings. They determine at length on stronger measures; their officers are sent out to arrest the offender, but seem to have been overawed by the tranquil dignity and commanding language of Jesus, and were perhaps in some degree controlled by the manifest favour of the people (1).

On the great day of the feast the agitation of the assembly, as well as the perplexity of the Sanhedrin, is at its height. Jesus still appears publicly; he makes a striking allusion to the ceremonial of the day. Water was drawn from the hallowed fountain of Siloah, and borne into the Temple with the sound of the trumpet and with great rejoicing. "Who," say the Rabbins, "hath not seen the rejoicing on the drawing of this water, hath seen no rejoicing at all." They sang in the procession, "with joy shall they draw water from the wells of salvation (2)." In the midst of this tumult, Jesus, according to his custom, calmly diverts the attention to the great moral end of his own teaching, and in allusion to the rite, declares that from himself are to flow the real living waters of salvation. The ceremony almost appears to have been arrested in its progress; and open discussions of his claims to be considered as the Messiah divide the wondering multitude. The Sanhedrin find that they cannot depend on their own officers, whom they accuse of surrendering themselves to the popular deception, in favour of one condemned by the rulers of the nation. Even within their council, Nicodemus, the secret proselyte of Jesus, ventures to interfere in his behalf; and though, with the utmost caution, he appeals to the law, and asserts the injustice of condemning Jesus without a hearing: (he seems to have desired that Jesus might be admitted publicly to plead his own cause before the Sanhedrin), he is accused by the more violent of leaning to the Galilean party -the party which bore its own condemnation in the simple fact of adhering to a Galilean prophet. The council dispersed without coming to any decision.

On the next day, for the former transactions had taken place in taken in the earlier part of the week, the last, the most crowded and solemn

adultery. day of the festival, a more insidious attempt is made, whether from

a premeditated or fortuitous circumstance, to undermine the grow

(1) John, verse 32.

(2) John, vii. 32-39.; Lightfoot, in loco.

ing popularity of Jesus; an attempt to make him assume a judicial, authority in the case of a woman taken in the act of adultery. Such an act would probably have been resisted by the whole Sanhedrin as an invasion of their province; and as it appeared that he must either acquit or condemn the criminal, in either case he would give an advantage to his adversaries. If he inclined to severity, they might be able, notwithstanding the general benevolence of his character, to contrast their own leniency in the administration of the law (this was the characteristic of the Pharisaic party, which distinguished them from the Sadducees, and of this the Rabbinical writings furnish many curious illustrations), with the rigour of the new teacher, and thus to conciliate the naturally compassionate feelings of the people, which would have been shocked by the unusual spectacle of a woman suffering death, or even condemned to capital punishment, for such an offence (1). If, on the other hand, he acquitted her, he abrogated the express letter of the Mosaic statute; and the multitude might be inflamed by this new evidence of that which the ruling party had constantly endeavoured to instil into their minds, the hostility of Jesus to the law of their forefathers, and his secret design of abolishing the whole long-reverenced and heaven-enacted code. Nothing can equal, if the expression may be ventured, the address of Jesus, in extricating himself from this difficulty; his turning the current of popular odium, or even contempt, upon his assailants; the manner in which, by summoning them to execute the law, he extorts a tacit confession of their own loose morals, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her" (this being the office of the chief accuser); and finally shows mercy to the accused, without in the least invalidating the decision of the law against the crime, yet not without the most gentle and effective moral admonition.

Jesus teaches in

ple.

After this discomfiture of his opponents, Jesus appears to have been permitted to pursue his course of teaching undisturbed, until the Tem new circumstances occurred to inflame the resentment of his enemies. He had taken his station in a part of the Temple court called the Treasury. His language became more mysterious, yet at the same time more authoritative-more full of those allusions to his character as the Messiah, to his divine descent, and at length to his pre-existence. The former of these were in some degree familiar to the popular conception; the latter, though it entered into the higher notion of the Messiah, which was prevalent among those who entertained the loftiest views of his character, nevertheless, from the manner in which it was expressed, jarred with the harshest discord upon the popular ear. They listened with patience to

(1) Grotius has a different view:-Ut eum accusarent aut apud Romanos imminutæ majestatis, aut apud populum imminutæ libertatis. That

they might accuse him to the Romans of en-
croaching on their authority, or to the people
of surrendering their rights and independence.

Jesus while he proclaimed himself the light of the world though they questioned his right to assume the title of "Son of the Heavenly Father" without further witness than he had already produced, they yet permitted him to proceed in his discourse: they did not interrupt him when he still further alluded, in dark and ambiguous terms, to his own fate when he declared that God was with him, and that his doctrines were pleasing to the Almighty Father, a still more favourable impression was made, and many openly espoused his belief; but when he touched on their rights and privileges as descendants of Abraham, the subject on which above all they were most jealous and sensitive, the collision became inevitable. He spoke of their freedom, the moral freedom from the slavery of their own passions, to which they were to be exalted by the revelation of the truth; but freedom was a word which to them only bore another sense. They broke in at once with indignant denial that the race of Abraham, however the Roman troops were guarding their Temple, had ever forfeited their national independence (1). He spoke as if the legitimacy of their descent from Abraham depended not on their hereditary genealogy, but on the moral evidence of their similarity in virtue to their great forefather. The good, the pious, the gentle Abraham was not the father of those who were meditating the murder of an innocent man. If their fierce and sanguinary dispositions disqualified them from being the children of Abraham, how much more from being, as they boasted, the adopted children of God; the spirit of evil, in whose darkest and most bloody temper they were ready to act, was rather the parent of men with dispositions so diabolic (2). At this their wrath bursts forth in more unrestrained vehemence; the worst and most bitter appellations by which a Jew could express his hatred, were heaped on Jesus; he is called a Samaritan, and declared to be under dæmoniac possession. But when Jesus proceeded to assert his title to the Messiahship, by proclaiming that Abraham had received some intimation of the future great religious revolution to be effected by him; when he who was "not fifty years old" (that is, not arrived at that period when the Jews, who assumed the public offices at thirty, were released from them on account of their age), declared that he had existed before Abraham; when he thus placed himself not merely on an equality with, but asserted his immeasurable superiority to, the great father of their race; when he uttered the awful and significant words which identified him, as it were, with the great self-existent Deity, "Before Abraham was, I am," they immediately rushed forward to crush without trial, without further hearing, him whom they considered the self-convicted blasphemer. As there was always some work of

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building or repair going on within the Temple, which was not considered to be finished till many years after, these instruments for the fulfilment of the legal punishment were immediately at hand; and Jesus only escaped from being stoned on the spot by passing, during the wild and frantic tumult, through the midst of his assailants, and withdrawing from the court of the Temple.

man.

But even in this exigency he pauses at not great distance to per- Healing form an act of mercy (1). There was a man, notoriously blind the blind from his birth, who seems to have taken his accustomed station in some way leading to the Temple. Some of the disciples of Jesus had accompanied him, and perhaps, as it were, covered his retreat from his furious assailants; and as by this time, probably, being safe from pursuit, they stopped near the place where the blind man stood. The whole history of the cure of this blind man is remarkable, as singularly illustrative of Jewish feeling and opinion, and on account both of the critical juncture at which it took place, and the strict judicial investigation which it seems to have undergone before the hostile Sanhedrin The common popular belief ascribed every malady or affliction to some sin, of which it was the direct and providential punishment-a notion, as we have before hinted, of all others, the most likely to harden the bigoted heart to indifference, or even contempt and abhorrence of the heaven-visited, and therefore heaven-branded, sufferer. This notion, which however was so overpowered by the strong spirit of nationalism as to obtain for the Jews in foreign countries the admiration of the heathen for their mutual compassion towards each other, while they had no kindly feeling for strangers, no doubt, from the language of Jesus on many occasions, exercised a most pernicious influence on the general character in their native land, where the lessons of Christian kindliness and humanity appear to have been as deeply needed as they were unacceptable. But how was this notion of the penal nature of all suffering to be reconciled with the fact of a man being born subject to one of the most grievous afflictions of our nature-the want of sight? They were thus thrown back upon those other singular

(1) I hesitate at the arrangement of no passage in the whole narrative more than this history of the blind man. Many harmonists have placed it during the visit of Jesus to Jerusalem, at the Feast of Dedication. The connection in the original, however, seems more natural, as a continuation of the preceding incident; yet at first sight it seems extremely improbable that Jesus should have time during his hurried escape to work this miracle; and still more that he should again encounter his enraged adversaries without dangerous or fatal consequences. We may however suppose that this incident took place without the Temple, probably in the street leading down from the Temple to the Valley of Kidron, and to Bethany, where Jesus spent the night. The attempt to stone him was an outburst of popular tumult: it is clear that he had been guilty of no offence, legally capital,

or it would have been urged against him at his
last trial, since witnesses could not have been
wanting to his words: and it seems quite clear
that, however they might have been glad to
have availed themselves of any such ebullition of
popular violence, as a court, the Sanhedrin, di-
vided and in awe of the Roman power, was con-
strained to proceed with regularity, and accord-
ing to the strict letter of the law. Macknight
would place the cure immediately after the es-
cape from the Temple, the recognition of the
man, and the subsequent proceedings during the
visit at the Dedication. But in fact the popular
feeling seems to have been in a perpetual state
of fluctuation; at one instant their indignation
was inflamed by the language of Jesus, at the
next some one of his extraordinary works seems
to have caused as strong a sensation, at least
with a considerable party, in his favour.

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