he was loosely involved in these grave clothes, which hindering all free action, yet did not hinder motion altogether; or, it may be, that, in accordance with the Egyptian fashion, every limb was wrapped round with these stripes by itself: in the mummies each separate finger has sometimes its own wrapping.

St. John here breaks off the narrative of the miracle itself, leaving us to imagine their joy, who thus beyond all expectation received back their dead from the grave; a joy, which was well nigh theirs alone, among all the mourners of all times,

"Who to the verge have followed that they love,
And on the insuperable threshold stand,
With cherished names its speechless calm reprove,
And stretch in the abyss their ungrasped hand."

He leaves this, and passes on to show us the historic significance of this miracle in the development of the Lord's earthly history, the permitted link which it formed in the chain of those events, which were to end, according to the determinate decree and counsel of God, in the atoning death of the Son of God upon the cross.

What the purpose was of these Jews that "went their ways to the Pharisees, and told them what things Jesus had done," has been diversely conceived. By some, as by Origen, it has been supposed that they went with a good intention, thinking to tell them that which even they could no longer resist, which would make them also acknowledge that this was the Christ. Yet the place which this intimation occupies in the narrative seems decisively to contradict this meaning. Many, observes St. John, believed on him, but some, not of those that believed, but of the Jews, went and told the Pharisees. What else can this mean save that these were persons who did not believe; who on one or another plea refused to be convinced by this miracle, (Luke xvi. 31,) and went to the professed enemies of the Lord to show them what had been done, to irritate them yet more against the doer,* to warn them also of the instant need of more earnestly counter-working him who had done,

good authority: yet there is one circumstance of these traditions worthy of record, although not for its historic worth,—that the first question he asked the Lord after he was come back from the grave, was whether he should have to die again, and learning that it must needs be so, that he never smiled any more. Lazarus, as a revenant, is often used by the religious romance-writers of the middle ages as a vehicle for their conceptions of the lower world. He is made to relate what he has seen and known, just as the Pamphylian that revived, is used by Plato in the Republic for the same purposes. (WRIGHT's St. Patrick's Purgatory, p. 167-169.)

* Euthymius: Οὐχ ὡς θαυμάζοντες, ἀλλὰ διαβάλλοντες ὡς γόητα.

or seemed to do, so great a sign? and it is observable that St. John joins immediately with their report to the Pharisees the increased activity in the hostile machinations of these against the Lord.

And they are indeed now seriously alarmed; they anticipate the effects which this greatest miracle that Christ did would have upon the people, which we know historically that it actually had; (John xii. 10, 11, 17-19;) and they gather in council together against the Lord and against his Anointed. They stop not to inquire whether the man, "this man," as they contemptuously call him, who, even according to their own confession, is doing many miracles, may not be doing them in the power of God, whether he may not be indeed the promised King of Israel. The question of the truth or falsehood of his claims seems never to enter into their minds, but only how the acknowledgment of these claims will bear on the worldly fortunes of their order, and this they contemplate under a somewhat novel aspect: "If we let him thus alone, all men will believe on him: and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and nation."

For at first sight it seems difficult to understand how they necessarily connected together the recognition of Jesus for the Christ, and the collision with the Roman power. It was probably in this way. "The people will acknowledge him for the Messiah; he will set himself at their head, or they by compulsion will place him there, making him their king; (John vi. 15;) then will follow the vain attempt to throw off the foreign yoke, to be crushed presently by the superior power of the Roman legions; and then these will not distinguish the innocent from the guilty, but will make a general sweep, taking away from us wholly whatsoever survives of our power and independence, our place* and our nation." Or without presuming an actual insurrection, they may have supposed that the mere fact of the acknowledging a Messiah would awaken the suspicions of the Romans, would by them be accounted as an act of rebellion, to be visited with these extremest penalties. We see how on a later occasion the Roman governor instantly

* Toν TÓпOν. Does this signify their city or their temple? A comparison with 2 Macc. v. 19 makes one certainly incline to the latter view. (Cf. Acts vi. 13, 14; xxi. 28.) The temple, round which all their hopes gathered, would naturally be uppermost in the minds of these members of the Sanhedrim. We nowhere find the same exaggerated importance attributed to the city as to it. Yet there are many who make Toν TÓTоv=TÌν Tóλiv jμ☎v. So Chrysostom, who in quoting the passage, substitutes, apparently unconsciously, óv for Tónov. So likewise Theophylact, Olshausen.

Corn. à Lapide: Si omnes credant Jesum esse Messiam, regem Judæorum irritabuntur contra nos Romani Judææ domini, quod nobis novum regem et Messiam, putà Jesum, creaverimus, ac à Cæsare Tiberio ad eum defecerimus; quare armati

comes to this point; his first question is, "Art thou the King of the Jews?" (John xviii. 33.) Augustine understands it somewhat differently, that they were already meditating, as no doubt they were, the great revolt of a later time, and felt how all the nerves of it would be cut by the spread of the doctrines of this Prince of peace: for where should they find instruments for their purpose? All resistance to the Roman power would become impossible; and whensoever these chose, they would come and rob them of all which remained of their national existence. He is, however, I believe, single in maintaining this view, and the other is far the more natural. The question will still remain, whether they who said this, did truly feel the dread which they professed, or whether they only pretended to fear these consequences from the suffering Christ's ministry to remain uninterrupted, on account of a party in the Sanhedrim, for such there was, more or less well affected to Jesus, (see John ix. 16,) and who could only thus, by this plea of the consequences to them and to the whole nation, be won over to the extreme measures now meditated against him. Chrysostom, and most of the Greek expositors, suppose they did but feign to fear, yet I cannot but think that they were sincere in their alarm.

Probably many half measures had been proposed by one member and another of the Sanhedrim for arresting the growing inclination of the people to recognize Jesus as the Christ, and had been debated backward and forward, such as hindering them from hearing him, proclaiming anew, as had been done before, that any should be excommunicated who should confess him to be Christ. (John ix. 22.) But these measures had already been proved to be insufficient; and in that "Ye know nothing at all" of Caiaphas, we hear the voice of the bold bad man, silencing, with ill-suppressed contempt, his weak and vacillating colleagues, who could see the common danger which threatened them, and yet shrunk, though from no righteous principle, from applying the effectual remedy. This man, who threatens to imperil the whole nation, and, whether willingly or not, to compromise it with the Roman power, must be taken out of the way: "It is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not." Caiaphas, who dares thus to come to the point, and to speak the unuttered thought of many in that assembly, was a Sadducee, (Acts v. 17,) and held the office of the high priesthood for ten successive years, which makes some

venient et vastabunt et perdent Hierosolymam et Judæam, cum totâ Judæorum gente et republicâ.

In Ev. Joh., Tract. 49: Hoc autem timuerunt, ne si omnes in Christum crederent, nemo remaneret, qui adversus Romanos civitatem Dei templumque defenderet.

thing of a difficulty here; for St. John's description of him as "being the high priest that same year," might appear to imply that he esteemed the high priesthood as a yearly office and elective, whereas it was in truth for life and hereditary.*

Now, though it is quite true, that, through the tyranny of the Romans, the high priesthood was as vilely prostituted as, under very similar circumstances, the patriarch's throne at Constantinople is now by the Turks, and shifted so rapidly from one to another, as sometimes to remain with one occupier even for less than this time, yet according to its idea it was for the life of the holder, and, in the present case, it was held by this one man, if not for life, yet at least much more than a single year. The expression has sometimes been explained as if St. John would say that Caiaphas was high priest for that year, that ever-memorable year "when vision and prophecy should be sealed," and in which the Son of God should die upon the cross. But it seems easier to suppose that all which St. John meant to express was, that Caiaphas was high priest then; whether he was also such before or after was nothing to his present purpose. He desires to bring out that he was high priest at the time when these words were uttered, because this gave a weight and significance to the words which else they would not have possessed; and what significance this was, and why his words should have had it, he explains in what follows.

"This spake he not of himself; but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus should die for that nation." It is clear that the Evangelist sees here an inner connection between the words spoken and the office which the speaker filled, and herein lies the real knot of the passage, which has to be untied: for that a bad man should have uttered words which were so overruled by God as to become prophetic, would be no difficulty. God, the same who used a Balaam to declare how there should come a Star out of Jacob and a Sceptre out of Israel, (Num. xxiv. 17,) might have used Caiaphas to foreannounce other truths of his kingdom. Nor is there any difficulty in such unconscious prophecies as this evidently is.§ How many projes of the like kind,

* Augustine (In Ev. Joh., Tract. 49) notes the difficulty, though he has a singular accumulation of mistakes in his explanation. Among others, that Zacharias, the father of the Baptist, was high priest; a mistake continually re-appearing in the middle ages. It grew out of an inaccurate understanding of Luke i. 9.

Lightfoot, Sermon on Judg. xx. 27. (Pitman's edit., v. 6, p. 280.)

Augustine adducing this prophecy, exclaims (Serm. 315, c. 1): Magna vis est veritatis. Oderunt veritatem homines, et veritatem prophetant nescientes. Non agunt, sed agitur de illis.

§ It exactly answers as such to the omina of Roman superstition, in which words

-most of them, it is true, rather in act than in word, meet us in the whole history of the crucifixion! What was the title over our blessed Lord, "Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews," but another such a scornful and contemptuous, yet most veritable, prophecy? Or what again the robe and the homage, the sceptre and the crown? And in the typical rehearsals of the great and final catastrophe in the drama of God's providence, how many Nimrods and Pharaohs, antichrists that do not quite come to the birth, have prophetic parts allotted to them, which they play out, unknowing what they do; for such is the divine irony; so, in a very deep sense of the words,

Ludit in humanis divina potentia rebus.*

But the perplexing circumstance is the attributing to Caiaphas, as high priest, these prophetic words, for prophetic the Evangelist pronounces them plainly to be, and all attempts to get rid of this as his intention, and to destroy the antithesis between "speaking of himself” and "prophesying," are idle. There is no need, however, to suppose, (and this greatly lightens the difficulty,) that he meant to affirm this to have been a power which always went along with the high priesthood; that the high priest, as such, must prophecy; but only that God, the extorter of those unwilling, or even unconscious, prophecies from wicked men, ordained this further, that he who was the head of the theocratic

spoken by one person in a lower meaning are taken up by another in a higher, and by him claimed to be prophetic of that. Cicero (De Divin., 1. 1, c. 46) gives examples; these, too, resting on the faith that men's words are ruled by a higher power than their own.

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* We have an example of this, in this very name Caiaphas, which is only another form of Cephas, being derived from the same Hebrew word. He was meant to be the Rock;" here, too, as in names like Stephen, (orépavos, the first winner of the martyr's crown,) the nomen et omen was to have held good. And such, had he been true to his position, had the Jewish economy passed easily and without a struggle into that for which it was the preparation, he would naturally have been; the first in the one would have been first in the other. But as it was, he bore this name but in mockery; he was the rock indeed, but the rock on which, not the Church of Christ, but the synagogue of Satan, was built.

For examples of these, see WOLF's Cura (in loc.) It has likewise been proposed to put a stop after πроɛþýτεvσev, and to find here a device on the part of Caiaphas for silencing opposition, and for making his own opinion to carry the day: This he spake, not as though he was giving his own opinion, (ouk dợ kavrov,) but taking advantage of the old faith, that on great emergent occasions the high priest would be endowed with oracular power, he professed now to be uttering that which was directly given him by the inspiration of God. And then or μɛ22ɛv, к. T. 2. are words of the Evangelist: He did this, and succeeded in so getting the decree of death to be passed, for Jesus was about to die for the people.