II. BOOK utter incongruity with their preconceived notions, rather than confirmed it by its accordance with his own predictions; and in this perplexed and darkling state the resurrection came upon them not less strangely at issue with their conceptions of the manner in which the Messiah would return to the world. When Jesus had alluded with more or less prophetic distinctness to that event, their minds had, no doubt, reverted to their rooted opinions on the subject, and moulded up the plain sense of his words with some vague and confused interpretation framed out of their own traditions; the latter so far predominating, that their memory retained scarcely a vestige of the simpler truth, until it was forcibly re-awakened by its complete fulfilment in the resurrection of their Lord. Return of the Apos tles to Ga lilee. Excepting among the immediate disciples, the intelligence of the resurrection remained, it is probable, a profound secret, or, at all events, little more than vague and feeble rumours would reach the ear of the Sanhedrin. For though Christ had taken the first step to re-organise his religion, by his solemn commission to the Apostles at his first appearance in their assembly, it was not till after the return to Galilee, more particularly during one interview near the Lake of Gennesareth, that he invested Peter, and with him the rest of the Apostles, with the pastoral charge over his new community. For, according to their custom, the Galilean Apostles had returned to their homes during the interval between the Passover and the Pentecost, and there, among the former scenes of his beneficent labours, on more than one occasion, the living Jesus had appeared, and conversed familiarly with CHAP. them.* I. Judæa. Forty days after the crucifixion, and ten before Apostles in the Pentecost, the Apostles were again assembled at their usual place of resort, in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, the village of Bethany. It was here, on the slope of the Mount of Olives, that, in the language of St. Luke, "he was parted from them; "he was taken up, and a cloud received him out of their sight."+ During the interval between the Ascension and the day of Pentecost, the Apostles of Jesus regularly performed their devotions in the Temple, but they * Matt. xxviii. 16-20.; John, xxi. 1-23. Mark, in his brief and summary account, omits the journey to Galilee. Luke, xxiv. 49. seems to intimate the contrary, as if he had known nothing of this retreat. This verse, how ever, may be a kind of continuation of verse 47. and is not to be taken in this strict sense, so as positively to exclude an intermediate journey to Galilee. † Neander has closed his life of Christ with some forcible observations on the Ascension, to which it has been objected, that St. Luke alone, though in two places, Gosp. xxiv. 50-51.; Acts, i. 9— 11. mentions this most extraordinary event. "How could the resurrection of Christ have been to the disciples the groundwork of their belief in everlasting life, if it had been again followed by his death? With the death of Christ the faith, especially in his resurrection and reappearance, must again, of necessity, have sunk away. Christ would again have appeared to them an ordinary man, their belief in him, as the Messiah, would have suffered a violent shock. How in this manner could that conviction of the exaltation of Christ have formed itself within them, which we find expressed in their writings with so much force and precision. Though the fact of his ascension, as visible to the senses, is witnessed expressly only by St. Luke, the language of St. John concerning his ascent to the Father, the declarations of all the apostles concerning his exaltation to heaven (see especially the strong expression of St. Mark, xvi. 19. H. M.), presuppose their conviction of his supernatural elevation from the earth, since the notion of his departure from this earthly life in the ordinary manner is thereby altogether excluded. Even if none of the apostolic writers had mentioned this visible and real fact, we might have safely inferred from all which they say of Christ, that in some form or other they presupposed a supernatural exaltation of Christ from this visible earthly world. Leben Jesu, p. 656. Ascension. BOOK II. may have been lost and unobserved among the thousands who either returned to Jerusalem for the second great annual festival, or if from more remote parts, remained, as was customary, in the capital from the Passover to the Pentecost. The election of a new apostle to fill the mysterious number of twelve, a number hallowed to Jewish feeling as that of the tribes of their ancestors, shows that they now looked upon themselves again as a permanent body, united by a federal principle, and destined for some ulterior purpose; and it is possible that they might look with eager hope to the feast of Pentecost, the celebration of the delivery of the law on Mount Election of Sinai*; the birthday as it were of the religious a new Apos- constitution of the Jews, as an epoch peculiarly suited for the reorganisation and reconstruction of the new kingdom of the Messiah. tle. The Sanhedrin doubtless expected any thing rather than the revival of the religion of Jesus. The guards, who had fled from the sepulchre, had been bribed to counteract any rumour of the resurrection, by charging the disciples with the clandestine removal of the body. The city had been restored to peace, as if no extraordinary event had taken place. The Galileans, the followers of Jesus among the rest, had retired to their native province. In the popular estimation the claims of Jesus to the Messiahship were altogether extinguished by his death. The attempt to reinstate him who had been condemned by the Sanhedrin, and crucified by the Romans, in public reverence and belief, as the pro * See the traditions on this subject in Meuschen N. T., a Talmude illustratum, p. 740. I. mised Redeemer, might have appeared a proceed- CHAP. ing so desperate, as could not enter into the most enthusiastic mind. The character of the disciples of Jesus was as little calculated to awaken apprehension. The few richer or more influential persons who had been inclined to embrace his cause, even during his lifetime, had maintained their obnoxious opinions in secret. The ostensible leaders were men of low birth, humble occupations, deficient education, and-no unimportant objection in the mind of the Jews-Galileans. Never indeed was sect so completely centered in the person of its founder the whole rested on his personal authority, emanated from his personal teaching; and however it might be thought, that some of his sayings might be treasured in the minds of his blind and infatuated adherents; however they might refuse to abandon the hope that he would appear again, as the Messiah; all this delusion would gradually die away, from the want of any leader qualified to take up and maintain a cause so lost and hopeless. Great must have been their astonishment at the intelligence, that the religion of Jesus had reappeared, in a new, in a more attractive form; Reappearthat on the feast day which next followed their total religion of dispersion, those humble, ignorant, and despised Jesus. Galileans were making converts by thousands, at the very gates, even perhaps within the precincts of the Temple. The more visible circumstances of the miracle which took place on the day of Pentecost, the descent of the Holy Ghost, under the appearance of fiery tongues, in the private assembly ance of the BOOK 11. of the Christians, might not reach their ears; but they could not long remain ignorant of this strange and alarming fact, that these uneducated men, apparently re-organised, and acting with the most fearless freedom, were familiarly conversing with, and inculcating the belief in the resurrection of Jesus, on strangers from every quarter of the world, in all their various languages, or dialects.* The Jews whose families had been long domiciliated in the different provinces of the Roman and the Parthian dominions, gradually lost, or had never learned, the vernacular tongue of Palestine; they adopted the language of the surrounding people. The original sacred Hebrew was understood only by the learned. How far, on one side the Greek, on the other the Babylonian Chaldaic, which was nearly allied to the vernacular Aramaic, were admitted into the religious services of the synagogue, appears uncertain; but the different synagogues in Jerusalem were appropriated to the different races of Jews. Those from Alexandria, from Cyrene, the Libertines, descended from freed slaves at Rome, perhaps therefore speaking Latin, the Cilicians and Asiatics, had their separate places of assemblyt: so, probably, those who came from more remote quarters, where Greek, the universal medium of communication in great part of the Roman empire, was less known, as in Arabia, Mesopotamia, and beyond the Euphrates. The scene of this extraordinary incident must *Kuinoël (in loc. Act.) gives a lucid view of the various rationalist and anti-rationalist interpretations of this miracle. † Acts, vi. |