§ 3. IMPRESSION OF THE DEATH AND THE RESURRECTION

OF JESUS

In this inner condition they are startled by their Master's terrible death. No clearer ray of light could fall on their manner of thought at that time than the words of the disciples. on the way to Emmaus. 'He was a prophet mighty in word and deed before God and all the people: our chief priests and rulers have delivered Him to death. But we thought it had been He who should have redeemed Israel" (Luke xxiv. 19, 20). They looked upon His whole past life and work, not as that of the Messiah, but as that of a prophet, and so it really was in its form; but they had believed that under this prophetic mantle the Messiah was concealed, and that some day He would exchange it for the king's mantle, and that on that day all that Israel had longed to see and possess would be realised. This hope was now destroyed, annihilated by the fearful guilt of their people and rulers. It certainly was not yet completely extinguished in their hearts. There continued in their hearts a love for Him, and with it a belief in Him also; their inner relation to Him, even without the resurrection, might not have given them anything to preach, but it would have remained. They would have clung to His promise of returning, which would now first have truly come to life in them; and loving hope rooting itself in that, would have accompanied them through life. But that would not have been a victorious hope, a hope so energetic as to impel them to joyous activity; their life would have been passed in unfruitful longing and idle waiting, which would have gradually become more faint through hope deferred. The miracle of the resurrection preserved them from this stunting of their inner life, which at the same time. would have frustrated all the wider results of Jesus' life for which they hoped, but it did not change their general view. It is wasted effort trying to explain the resurrection on purely subjective, psychological, or pathological grounds. Only as a truly objective supernatural event does it take its place in the historical and psychological conditions of the time.1 The

1 I may be allowed to express this briefly and tersely here after having repeatedly entered upon the minute proof of it, cf. my arguments against Holsten in the Stud. und Krit. 1870, 1871, and in my Leben Jesu, vol. i. ;

resurrection of Jesus, as well as the death of the Messiah, broke through the disciples' Jewish view of the world, in which there was no resurrection to a glorified immortal life before the last day; it cannot therefore have been a product of their own mind; and though for that very reason it revived their Messianic expectations, it did not by any means satisfy them or radically remodel them. They did not from that moment transfer their hopes to another higher world, to which notwithstanding His reappearance at the resurrection it was clear He henceforth belonged, but they continued to look for a return which should give Him back entirely to the earth and to His Church upon it, and so bring about the expected Messianic kingdom on the earth. His assumption into heaven, prepared for by the resurrection, appeared to them as but a brief delay which, unforeseen in their original expectations, was to be referred solely to the guilt of the people. We may even perceive that the disciples in the days immediately after the resurrection were employed in finding reason in Scripture for the course which events had taken, so unlike anything in their original expectations; they were searching through the Old Testament with the view of discovering that "the Messiah must suffer such things, and enter into His glory" (Luke xxiv. 26, 27, 44-46; Acts ii. 25-28, 34, 35). To them, therefore, nothing

also the two works by Steude, Die Visions hypothese in ihrer neuesten Vertretung, and Die Vertheidigung der Auferstehung Christi (both 1887). With reference to this, it seems to be the desire of the most recent and only scientific method, not to refute but to ignore such investigations and proofs, and to find some detail in the New Testament tradition which may serve as the starting-point for a thin woven and imaginative construction of history which gets rid of the miracle of the resurrection. Such a starting-point is given in poá vμā; eis Tanıña, Mark xiv. 28; Matt. xxvi. 32, wherein it is supposed we have the evidence of that flight on Good Friday which is attributed to the disciples, that far from the grave of Joseph of Arimathea, and under the power of old impressions in Galilee, they may dream of a resurrection of their Master. Criticism, otherwise so sharp sighted, does not see that thus itself passes into vision. For if the genuine kernel of the evangelic tradition is that He went before them into Galilee, then it was only after this period that they followed into Galilee Him who rose on the third day; and so the flight on the very night of the betrayal which is charged against them loses its last apparent support, and must positively be dismissed. See this more in detail in the recent third edition of my Leben Jesu.

is yet fulfilled by the resurrection of Jesus; only they have received an imperishable pledge that He lives and is exalted above all the malice of His foes, and that He can be near to them though they do not see Him; and certainly through this experience their inner relation to Him must have been very greatly strengthened, and themselves made fit for giving heroic effect to it in a hostile world.

§ 4. THE OUTPOURING OF THE SPIRIT

A new experience which followed naturally on the event. of Easter gave the immediate impulse to this. The wonderful experiences of Easter Day had their issue in a festival of their little community which made them altogether certain of their new connection with their glorified Master, a connection no longer visible, but all the more spiritual and inward. The new spiritual life which He breathed into them had glowed higher and hotter since Easter, and the hour must come when it would burst into flame. The Pentecost narrative of the Acts of the Apostles is simply the witness by one who only half understood it to a fact which, psychologically, is quite intelligible. At a time when the national festival of Pentecost had gathered them together, under the influence of their reflections on what they had seen at Easter, there appeared amongst them prophetic gifts, and even ecstatic conditions, in which they joyfully discovered the fulfilment of the promise of the Risen One to endow them with His Spirit. Those gifts of prophetic inspiration and ecstatic speech were not the Holy Spirit, which He had announced to them as the indwelling of His own glorified life. This Spirit, that is, the power of His own holy life operative in them, had been planted in germ within them long ago, and since the mighty events of His death and resurrection, to which the evangelist John immediately attaches the communication of the Spirit (xx. 22), that power had struggled upwards within them. But as they were wont, after the manner of the Old Testament, to regard the prophetic gifts as the supreme evidence of the Spirit, those phenomena were signs and pledges to them of that Spirit (Acts ii. 17 f.), and so they felt themselves from that hour endowed with power from on high,

BEYSCHLAG.-I.

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and produced thereby on that day greater results than ever Jesus Himself had obtained. Besides, this new miraculous event seemed to belong to their Jewish Messianic trains of thought. The prophets had predicted that the Messianic time should be announced, and the Messianic kingdom begin, with a universalising of God's prophetic gifts and an outpouring of His Spirit upon all flesh (Joel iii. 1-5; Acts ii. 17-21). Jesus, exalted to the right hand of God had now exercised the first act of His sovereignty, and sent down from heaven His first gift; in it they had the earnest of that fulfilment of all that the prophets had spoken, which should continuously make progress and could not be arrested. The view of the original apostles is thus throughout composed of two dissimilar elements; new and transcendent experiences are conceived by them in Old Testament forms, but these give only an elementary understanding of the experiences. The limits which this imposed upon their knowledge are made very apparent in two respects especially in the preponderance of the parousia idea, and in the correspondingly imperfect appreciation of the death upon the cross. Whilst the

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forces that were destined to renew the world's history were stirring in them, they thought that the end of time had come. Because, from the first, they had regarded the Messianic kingdom of glory as the real revelation of God's salvation, everything which they saw to be great was subordinated by them to this goal of their desire; everything is viewed in relation to this main fact, either as a preparation or a hindrance, and in their opinion these things cannot be long delayed after the Messiah has appeared. When they believed that they were already standing close beside this goal in the earthly days of Jesus, the unsusceptibility of their people and the rejection of the Messiah, which that brought about, can have appeared to them only as delaying it, and this view must have temporarily prevented them from seeing the independent greatness of the event on Golgotha as the turning-point of human history. The life of Jesus reached its completion upon the cross; in His death He overcame the world, and in that victory of His there should blossom a new life for the world; but these facts did not so much enlist their sympathy as fill them with an infinite

sorrow that Israel had rejected and trifled with her God-given Saviour. Now-they say to themselves-God has taken Him back to heaven, as the people were not worthy of Him; but He has granted to the guilty, whose ignorance is a sort of plea (Acts iii. 17), a last time for repentance and conversion. If the people perceive this, then they trust that God will again grant Him to His people, and bring about through Him all that He has graciously promised. If they do not perceive this, but continue in their wickedness, then will the irresistible day of the Lord come to judge them; and that day, whose anticipation lay on all earnest minds in Israel, could only be conceived by any prophet reared in Israel's ways of thought as the coming of the universal judgment of the world. This onesided view of salvation, with its longings all directed to the future, is certainly far from doing justice to the full significance of what the disciples had experienced in Jesus. It could not allow them to unfold in thought and doctrine the full meaning of that great divine event which went far beyond and even contradicted the Old Testament expectations, and so it hindered them also from exhibiting Christianity in its complete novelty and peculiarity in contrast to Judaism,— that was reserved for another, who had to be fitted for it in another way and by a different experience from the original apostles. But even for him that limited Jewish standpoint was, in the first place, not only unavoidable, but was the only one suited to his immediate task. This Jewish form and limitation brought the gospel close to the Jewish nation to which it was necessarily first offered; through it the primitive Church was made possible, that noble shoot on the dry stump of the Old Testament Church which has been the means of blessing to the whole world. Let us now see whether from the standpoint of the original apostles (which is the only possible historical standpoint), the meagre and fragmentary communications of the Acts of the Apostles disclose a living whole.