Jerusalem begins soon after the opening of his ministry, and is never again interrupted; successive feasts constantly take him up to it; and we should naturally infer from the order of the narrative, that his time was almost equally divided between Galilee and Jerusalem. From the first, too, in John, we find him invested with the same high prophetic character. There is no perceptible growth in his fame and influence. From the day of his baptism he stands on the same elevated ground; assumes and exercises the same great authority; and disputes in the same calm and lofty tone of conscious dignity, with the cavillers of the Temple and the Sanhedrim.* Between narratives constructed on such opposite principles, it is vain to look for a chronological harmony; and why Ewald should have laboured to make it out, even to the extent that he has attempted it, we are unable to comprehend, except it be that the most eminent interpreters of the Life of Jesus before him, had abandoned the effort as hopeless.

We do not indeed suppose, that all which John has recorded of Christ's sayings and doings at Jerusalem, previous to his visit at the last Passover, is totally devoid of historical truth, through a complete failure or dislocation of memory. The three first evangelists clearly make the opening of Christ's public ministry coincide with the cessation of that of John; † but before the way was in a measure cleared for his own mission by that event, and before he felt himself called upon openly to avow and exercise his prophetic office, he may have passed much time in Jerusalem and its surrounding district, while the conviction of his high function under Providence was ripening in his mind. The preaching of John had attracted him southward from Galilee, and he would naturally linger in the neighbourhood which afforded him frequent opportunity of attending on his earnest and awakening ministry. Jerusalem being so near at hand, he would of course be regularly present at its oft-recurring festivals, eager to receive and impart all that was of the deepest religious interest in that anxious and exciting time. His baptism by John, as yet the most solemn event of his life, had kindled to the highest pitch all his religious sympathies and aspirations, and awakening the dim consciousness of his Messianic destination, had already perhaps stirred into incipient action those mysterious gifts of healing and of

It may be noticed, that the prohibition so constantly enjoined by Jesus on the subjects of his miraculous healing, to tell no man of it, is limited to the first of the two periods included in the narrative of the synoptical gospels, and occurs nowhere in John.

Compare Matthew iv. 12, 17; Mark i. 14; Luke iii. 20; vii. 19 (Matthew xi. 2); ix. 7.

command over physical laws, which were latent in his wonderfully endowed nature. It was during this period, when he first became aware of the vast powers which had been entrusted to him, that we may suppose those proofs and trials of his faithfulness to have occurred, of which we have a condensed summary in the symbolical narrative of the Temptation. Ewald himself interprets the transaction in this way, as a representation, under that dramatic form, of what must always take place in the mind at the commencement of any great enterprise where large discretion and high responsibility are involved.* All this time, while his mind was agitated by unformed plans and by all the doubts and fears which accompany the imperfect recognition of a great end, slowly shaping itself before the mental eye, as he mingled with the worshippers in the synagogue, or encountered friends and acquaintance in the streets of the Holy City, or paced the sacred porticoes of the Temple in high converse with the doctors of the law, he must have been often engaged in discussions respecting the Messianic hope of his time, which brought him to see more clearly day by day, in conflict with spiritual dulness and worldly pride, the one eternal truth of the kingdom of God. These experiences of his early life-these memories of grateful and solemn hours passed in the hallowed shade of the national sanctuary, amidst the songs and sacrifices of time-honoured festivals, when he felt the first breathings of prophetic inspiration, and first ventured tremblingly on the exercise of the mysterious powers which attended it were doubtless among the confidential communications vouchsafed to the beloved disciple, though unknown perhaps to those who only undertook to record the events of his public ministry. As John looked back in advanced age on that wonderful life, the dim line of separation between incipient and full Messiahship vanished to his ken; he recalled his revered Lord from the first, as only the Christ; under the fervid glow of admiring love, all recollections were fused down into one common quality; the word of heavenly wisdom and love, the act of benignant power, stood out distinctly to the remembrance, but the minuter particulars of time, perhaps even of place, were overlooked and forgotten :-and thus the whole of that grand and awful retrospect was stamped from beginning to end with the same clear and definite characters of high Messianic authority. This supposition, that the por

* Geschichte Christus, pp. 244-47.

The intervening experience of a long life may colour with the hues of later years, an individual's reminiscences of his own youth. "When Goethe," says Kästner, "presented us at a subsequent period with the picture of his life, as 'Truth and Fiction,' he thereby himself expressed a

tion of Christ's life which elapsed between his baptism and the imprisonment of the Baptist, was incipient and preparatory, and as such did not enter into the narrative of the three first evangelists, while John, viewing it from afar, after an interval of half a century, no longer clearly distinguished it from the period which followed, and has therefore unwittingly assigned to it some events which belong to a later time-removes some difficulties from the history which might else appear insuperable, and yet makes no great demand on our critical forbearance; and while it leaves the good faith of the authors of both narratives unchallenged, places in at least an intelligible light the relation subsisting between them. But Ewald goes beyond this: he supposes John to exhibit the real order of events, and to place Christ's ministry in its true light from the time of his baptism, and thus to furnish a standard by which the statements of the other evangelists may be controlled. In pursuit of this harmony, he finds a chronological coincidence, and traces the same incident under another form, in the cure of the nobleman's son (John iv. 46–54) and the healing of the centurion's servant (Matthew viii. 5-13, and Luke vii. 1-10). This unqualified assumption of the historical authority of John compels him to admit, against all probability, as it seems to us, that Christ opened his ministry on a large scale and with very high pretensions in Judea and Jerusalem, and afterwards, on withdrawing into Galilee, reduced it within narrower limits, and confined his instructions to a more select body of followers.* Ewald's explanation is, that a reformer, in the first

doubt whether, in the nebulous dimness of the past, it was the actual which appeared to him, or only the idea of the poet (das Geschehene oder die Idee des Dichters); whether his aged eye was still able to recognize in the young man the colours of youth." (Goethe und Werther. Briefe Goethe's aus seiner Jugendzeit, von A. Kästner, p. 2.) Yet from such an intermingling of idea and fact in the biographical retrospect, we obtain a more adequate conception of the whole man-of the living mind which formed and inspired other minds-than from the most exact chronicling of outward events according to time and place. We take in the bud and the fully developed flower

at one view.

* Ewald remarks that twelve was of yore a holy number in Israel; and that the twelve apostles formed the basis of a new congregation, which was to supersede the old. The tradition of seventy missionaries is limited to Luke x. 1, where their relation to the twelve, previously mentioned vi. 13, is indicated by the words kai érépovs. Ewald has distributed the apostles into three groups of four each, with the observation, that, in all the evangelical narratives, the same name invariably stands at the head of each group, though the arrangement under it slightly varies: Simon Peter at the head of the first; Philip, of the second; James, the son of Alpheus, of the third. p. 283. The author of a recent learned, but exceedingly wild and fanciful work (Jasher. Fragment. Archet. Carm. Hebr. auctore J. G. Donaldson, 1854), has ingeniously endeavoured to show, that in the two first of these

outburst of enthusiasm for a noble object, always aims at too much, but taught by experience, contracts his field of action and pursues fewer objects. But we reply, that such conduct is utterly at variance with the calm and sober wisdom that enters into the very heart of the character of Jesus. It is opposed, moreover, to the plainest indications of the three first evangelists, who have given a radically false impression of Christ's ministry, if this view be correct; and it is certainly very remarkable, to us perfectly inexplicable, that this alleged contraction of the Messianic activity of Christ should have coincided in time, on our author's own showing, with the cessation of the ministry of the Baptist, which, according to the other gospels, was the immediate occasion of its assuming a more avowed publicity and a wider extent. In perfect consistency with these views, Ewald not only defends the historical occurrence of the scourging of the traffickers out of the Temple, where it is placed by John, at the commencement of our Lord's ministry, but even argues that it was a more probable event than at a later period.† To us such an event appears little less than an impossibility at that early time, when as yet there was no development of popular enthusiasm to sustain this violent exertion of prophetic authority; and we may observe, that it is placed, with every evidence of probability, by the synoptical evangelists, in the height of Christ's Galilean fame, just after he had been conducted in triumph by multitudes, chanting the Benedictus as they went, from the Mount of Olives to Jerusalem.‡

Ewald's supposition, that Jesus entered on the full exercise of his Messianic functions in Jerusalem immediately after his baptism, and from the first was unhesitatingly recognized by John the Baptist as the Christ-is difficult to reconcile with some unmistakable indications of the relation between Jesus and his forerunner, scattered over the evangelists. That John's disciples and those of Jesus should have continued to baptize together in the same neighbourhood (John iii. 22-24), and that the Baptist should have retained, apparently to the last, his doubts respecting the true character of Christ (Matthew groups of the apostles, we have four pairs of brothers, and in the last, two pairs of father and son; and that this explains, why Jesus sent them forth "by two and two." (Mark vi. 7, àñoσтéλλew dúo dúo.) p. 9.

Gesch. Christ. p. 247.

Yet Ewald admits (p. 229, note), that Mark's is the earlier account. Ewald calls the jubilant acclaim which accompanied the Saviour's entrance into Jerusalem, a little Messianic song suddenly improvised in the enthusiasm of the moment,-" das Urlied der neuen Gemeinde," which there is every reason, he says, to believe was constantly sung in the earlier ages of the church, p. 383.

xi. 3; Luke vii. 19, 20), is scarcely reconcilable with the attestation of Messiahship borne to him by John, on the evidence, by implication, of all the evangelists, but most distinctly and emphatically on that of the fourth (Matthew iii. 14; Mark i. 7-11; Luke iii. 15-17; John i. 15, 26, 27, 29, 34, 36), at the time of the baptism.* Herod's apprehension, when he first heard of the mighty works of Jesus, that it was John the Baptist, whom he had beheaded, but who was risen from the dead, is inconsistent with the fact, assumed by Ewald, of Christ's having previously acquired a great prophetic name in Judea and Jerusalem, and of his having been publicly acknowledged as Messiah in the presence of multitudes by the martyred Baptist; but is quite intelligible on the supposition, that the interval between the baptism of Jesus and the imprisonment of John, which Ewald calculates could not have exceeded a year,† was, as we have before intimated, incipient and preparatory; and that the former did not enter on the full exercise of his ministry, nor avow the whole extent of his claims, till the retirement of the latter from public view. The evangelist John, reverently contemplating the whole life of his Master and Lord, at a time when its divine character had been completely displayed, and when its true relation to that of the Baptist, as his appointed forerunner, was clearly discernedhas let the profound earnestness of his own personal conviction modify-it may have been, quite unconsciously-his remembrance of those earlier incidents in the lives of the two prophets, when the Messiahship of Jesus was as yet only in the bud and not fully disclosed, and John impressed with the wonderful promise of the young novitiate, and convinced that Messiah was shortly to appear, could not finally make up his mind whether Jesus of Nazareth was he or not: and the same feeling, we think, must be admitted to have influenced, though in a less degree, the representations of the three first evange lists, in order to introduce perfect consistency between the earlier and later statements of the gospel narrative. Ewald has noticed, what is in itself remarkable and significant, that the fourth gospel does not mention the death of the Baptist, and passes over without comment the doubts which in the other three are said to have preceded it. Of this fact he offers the following explanation:

It should be noticed as an indication of the relation of the fourth gospel to the three first, that while the latter clearly affirm the baptism of Jesus by John, their testimony is not so distinct to the recognition of his Messiahship by the Baptist; on the other hand, while the evidence of the fourth gospel on this point is most explicit, it does not contain one passage which plainly asserts that Jesus was baptized by John.

Gesch. Christ. p. 215.