The passion week

Front matter

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PRINCETON ° NEW JERSEY

Scene II. Gethsemane

VIll.. GOOD FRIDAY . 155 Scene III. The Jewish Trial

IX . GOOD FRIDAY . 173 Scene IV. The Roman Trial

X .GOOD FRIDAY - 191 Scene V. The Crucifixion

EPILOGUE - 215 The Easter Adversative

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PREF ACE

OL ans Bonk is not intended as a substitute for a study of the New Testament story of the passion week. On the contrary, its plan and purpose is to promote an actual study of the Gospel passages concerned. It offers itself simply as a first handbook to guide the general reader in such study. At the beginning of each chapter there is a clear and orderly outline of the Gospel passages which should be read and studied in connection with the running comments here presented.

This book does not pretend to state or to solve the critical problems that arise out of the Gospel accounts of the passion week. The professional student is acquainted with the scholarly contributions in this field; he knows the problems and has perhaps his own solutions. Many matters, major and minor, of interest to the critical student are here simply passed over. The general reader is not interested in such academic matters, but he may find profit in a simpler study such as this handbook seeks to offer.

The interest here does not center in any of the many theological interpretations of the words and incidents in the closing scenes and days. Its quest of meanings is more simple — namely, to apprehend and appreciate the human, dramatic and religious elements that have gone into the making of the story. The passion narrative is a very human story; it brings a particular life to a close. The whole account has its dramatic qualities; it is moving, engaging, full of action and interest, tense in its emotions and tragic in its events. The drama is religious: a prophet of God and his kingdom, a holy city, a sacred festival, a pious pilgrimage, devout people, priestly opponents. In it we seek very simply for a clear comprehension of the actual human tragedy that was enacted in Jerusalem around 30 A.D.

W. E. B.

GREENCASTLE, INDIANA

MARCH I, 1930

SOSSSS

THE PASSION WEEK SSSSSS

“4 I SR) a er the very beginnings of Christianity no section of the story of Jesus has commanded so much and such intense interest as the passion week. ,There is something growing and gripping in the account of the Jerusalem events which climax in Jesus’ suffering and death. This is clear in the letters of Paul whose thought centers on the dramatic outcome rather than on what preceded and led up to it. Paul may have been thoroughly familiar with other sections of the story of Jesus — the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, the Lord’s Prayer, the Golden Rule, the parables, the Galilean conflicts, the ministry of healing —he probably was, but he never makes specific reference toany of them. His Christian hope and faith center upon the cross and the resurrection, upon the religious significance which he and the earliest Christians generally have discovered in them. From the first century down to the present these two things, the cross and the resurrection, have constituted the paradoxical poles of Christian piety.

This predominant interest in the closing days and scenes is equally clear in the Gospels themselves. Five of the fifteen chapters (11-15) which Mark devotes to the public life of Jesus deal with the events of the passion week

I

THe Passtlon WEEK

— approximately one third of his Gospel. Luke’s account of these last days is fully as extensive as that of Mark. The passion narratives of Matthew and the Fourth Gospel are even more elaborate.

In our study of the passion week, however, we may not sever it entirely from what has gone before, for it is a natural and integral part of the whole. Although we cannot trace exactly all the chronological bonds and causal connections that lead up to it, nevertheless the passion week is simply the climax of the drama that began in Galilee and that culminated in Jerusalem. The passion week must be regarded as the natural culmination of Jesus’ religious life and mission. The Jesus who dies in the Holy City is the same Jesus that wrought and taught in Galilee. There is really no substantial change in him or in what he seeks to accomplish. The Jerusalem message is not altered in theme; it is the same imminent kingdom of God. Only the tone of his utterances becomes a bit sharper —a perfectly natural thing in view of the circumstances of bitter opposition and the prospect of impending catastrophe. His original religious faith and feeling, hope and outlook, hold him fast to the very end.

The Jerusalem days with their dramatic developments enrich and enhance much that has gone before. In Jerusalem we see that Jesus is ready to die, and does die, for the cause of God of which he has been and is the champion. In the last scenes he makes final declarations of the faith that has held him from the first. A new and glorious light falls over his personality and character. We realize fully the utter seriousness with which Jesus takes the - things he has been teaching about what matters most in the sight of God and in the lives of men — faith, loyalty, love, obedience, hope, forgiveness, confidence and trust in adversity. We learn that for him all these things are more than moral and religious maxims. The Galilean teachings on prayer, for example, take on a new and deeper meaning when in Gethsemane and on the cross we hear Jesus praying and petitioning God in the bitterest hours of his life.

Mark’s story of Jesus’ public activity, which furnishes the framework for the more elaborate accounts of Matthew and Luke, is relatively simple in its plan and development. Jesus’ public life falls into two principal periods according to the scene in which he works — the Galilean period and the Judean period. Jesus begins his work in Galilee, the northern province of Palestine, and his public life ends with his death in Jerusalem. Thus there is just one chief shift in the scene of the story — from Galilee to Jerusalem.

THE GALILEAN Prrtop consumes by far the greater portion of Jesus’ time in public — a number of months, approximately a year. The principal center of activity is the Sea of Galilee, especially its northwestern shore with headquarters in Capernaum. No sharp division can be made within the Galilean story, but Mark 7:24 seems to bring

Tue Pass1on WEEK a turning-point. What precedes (1:2~7:23) may be called the earlier Galilean days; what follows (7:24-9:50), the later Galilean days.

The earlier Galilean days are filled with great publicity and popularity. Almost constantly Jesus is surrounded by great multitudes eager to hear his words or to witness his cures of the sick and afflicted. In this period we find conflicts with the religious authorities, especially the Pharisees. The issues have to do with Jesus’ teaching and conduct, his failure to conform to tradition and convention in both. These conflicts are not serious in the sense that Jesus’ life is endangered. During this period, too, we get the first hint of pressing personal problems which Jesus faces; they remain, however, more in the background. In the foreground of Jesus’ thought and work is his message and mission as the called and commissioned prophet of the kingdom of God. He spends these earlier Galilean days in the presence of a large public, announcing his great message. The majority of his cures fall in this early period.

The later Galilean days open with Jesus taking an un- © expected step — the journey to the north beyond the borders of his native land (Mark 7:24-30). During this period Jesus is still popular with the multitudes; he is still — opposed by the Pharisees. He still announces his public message and effects some cures. But these outstanding features of the earlier Galilean days fall more into the background. There is less publicity. Jesus often seeks to avoid the multitudes or to escape them entirely. He is more in retirement, more alone with the twelve. The most important of his utterances are reserved for them in private. It is a period of restlessness with Jesus almost constantly on the move — to the region of Tyre and. Sidon, to Mount Hermon, back and forth across the Sea of Galilee. During these last days in the northern province Jesus’ personal problems come more to the front. Toward the close, if we may trust the representation of the first three Gospels, Jesus’ thought develops out into a new direction; his words to the twelve in private take on a new tragic tone; for the first time the thought of a fatal outcome seems to lodge itself in his mind, yet with the approach of the Passover festival he determines to go up to the Holy City.

THE JUDEAN PEriop might just as well be called the Jerusalem period for, with the exception of the things said and done on the way to the Holy City (Mark 10), all else transpires in Jerusalem and its immediate vicinity. This period is very brief in comparison with the Galilean period. It includes at most only the last few weeks of Jesus’ life — the time necessary for the journey to Jerusalem and the six brief days of the passion week. During these last weeks Jesus continues to announce his message of the imminent kingdom. It, too, is a period of continued popularity with the people. In Jerusalem, however, Jesus strikes a new, more powerful and bitter opposition — the chief priests who oppose him for very different reasons than did the Pharisees in Galilee. They bring about Jesus’ death within less than a week. During this period the a former ministry of healing is all but gone. According to Mark, there is just one cure on the way to the Holy City, the blind man at the gates of Jericho, and no cures in Jerusalem itself. Jesus’ personal problems now become struggles of soul; their nature is clearer than ever, and they reach their climax in Gethsemane. In Mark, Jesus dies in the throes of terrific inner conflict with a cry of distress, a prayer of protest, on his lips.

The Judean period opens with the journey to Jerusalem. It is an eventful journey; Mark devotes the whole of chapter ten to the account of it. Why did Jesus go to Jerusalem? Why did he venture upon this fatal step?

The Gospel writers very clearly present Jesus’ purpose in the light of the outcome: he went to Jerusalem to die (Mark 8:31; 9:31; 10:32). Besides these formal forecasts of death ahead, other utterances of Jesus during the journey have a tragic note. There is the passion path for the disciples, renunciation of this world in view of rewards in the new order to come, the words on service and sacrifice. But this tragic note seems to have come from later Christian sentiment which interpreted Jesus’ purpose in the light of the fact that the journey did result in his death. Further, this interpretation of Jesus’ purpose had a spontaneous source in the religious meaning of the cross and the early Christian understanding of the divine plan of which it was the culmination. Jesus may have approached the Holy City with the thought of a fatal outcome in his mind, for in coming to Jerusalem he was entering the stronghold of an organized religion that had never been friendly to the prophets from the provinces. But there is no reason to suppose that the Jerusalem authorities were prepared for his coming or that they were on the lookout for him (John 7:11; 11:56-57). There is no indication that Jesus anticipated their bitter hostility. In the first days of the passion week the depressed mood that dominates the words on the way to Jerusalem fails to appear. Further, the conflict that resulted in his death did not antedate his appearance at the festival. It seems to have originated and matured on Jerusalem ground.

Others think that Jesus went to Jerusalem to continue the same sort of work that he had been doing in Galilee. It marked simply a shift in the scene of his ministry. There is considerable basis for this idea in the passion story itself. Once he is in the Holy City, Jesus speaks and acts with the old confidence and assurance, announcing his message of the kingdom, disputing with his opponents, all the while carried along by the enthusiasm of the people for what he says and does.

There seems to be, however, a more simple and natural reason for the journey to the Holy City. The passion story itself seems to disclose it. Jesus goes up at the time of the Passover; it is prepared for him; he says that he has anticipated it with great desire, and on the last night he celebrates it with his chosen group. Whether any special thing figured in Jesus’ actual motives — death or a continuation of his work — we have no way of knowing. But i in its simplest sense the journey seems to have been a pilgrimage to the Passover, and Jesus, like thousands of pious Jews, is a pilgrim to the most sacred of his people’s religious festivals. The journey climaxes in the Bethany demonstration — an ovation, it seems, by the Galea Passover pilgrims : in his honor.

The passion week itself includes only six days — Sunday to Friday. This is the extent of Jesus’ Jerusalem ministry in the first three Gospels — an amazingly short space of time. But in spite of its brevity the Gospel writers treat it with equally surprising fulness and detail. The first three days (Sunday, Monday, Tuesday) are spent in pub-

lic; the second three days are in private (Wednesday, _ Thursday, Friday), the closing scenes becoming public with Jesus no longer a free but condemned man.

The account of this last week is reallya drama. There is a general gist and plot running through the whole: on Palm Sunday comes the Bethany demonstration; on Monday, the cleansing of the temple; on Tuesday, the conflicts and discourses; on Wednesday, the anointing in Bethany and Judas’ betrayal; on Thursday, the preparation of the Passover; on the Jewish Friday, beginning with our Thursday evening, the supper scene, the Gethsemane struggle, the arrest, trials and crucifixion. The story is told with remarkable simplicity and dignity. There is throughout a delicateness of sentiment, a fascinating fineness of feeling; a deep pathos pervades the whole.

Only in Mark can we follow Jesus day by day. Matthew and Luke do not make a careful division into days in each case. An event that Mark assigns to a particular day Matthew or Luke, or both, may include on another or on no special day. In all of the first three Gospels the passion week opens with Jesus’ arrival in the Holy City and the Bethany demonstration. Mark (11:1) brings this first day to a definite close in 11:11. He notes the beginning of the second day in 11:12; of the third in 11:20; of the fourth in 14:1; of the fifth in 14:12; and the sixth in 14:17. Matthew, like Mark, brings the first day (21:1) to a definite close in 21:17 and the beginning of the second day he notes in 21:18. The second and third days (21:18-25: 46) he does not separate the one from the other. The fourth day opens with 26:1-2; the fifth with 26:17; the sixth with 26:20. In his parallels to Mark’s first three days Luke (19:29-21:36) notes no beginnings or endings of particular days; in 21:37-38 he characterizes the Jerusalem activity thus far as teaching every day in the temple with the nights spent outside the city on the Mount of Olivet. _Luke’s last three days are clear although he is not numbering them. In Luke 22:1 we are parallel with the beginning of Mark’s fourth day; in 22:7 with the fifth; and in 22:14 with the sixth. In the Fourth Gospel the calendar of the passion week disappears entirely. In 12:1 we are six days before the Passover; in 12:13 we are on the morrow; and in 13:1 on the last night of Jesus’ life. A number of scholars are skeptical about Mark’s clear- _cut division into six days. They find his calendar scheme to be a superficial and artificial arrangement; for them, it appears as a later and secondary addition forced upon the materials.. The fact that Luke shows no interest in a definite chronology, they think, demonstrates this. They find the Jerusalem period too short, a total of six days with only three in public, and these far too crowded.

Whether Mark’s chronological scheme has any historical value we cannot say definitely. We may not be sure | of particular incidents falling on particular days. We may not be sure even that all the things reported as a part of the passion week actually belonged to it. The anointing of Jesus is a striking example. Matthew and Mark assign it to Wednesday of this last week, but Luke includes it as a part of his Galilean story (7:36-50). In the Fourth Gospel it precedes the Passover by six days (12:1-8) instead of by two days as in Matthew and Mark. Even the date of Jesus’ death is uncertain. In the midst of all sorts of historical difficulties and other improbabilities the first three Gospels have Jesus die on the most sacred feast day in the Jewish calendar, on the first day of the feast of unleavened bread — the fifteenth of the Jewish month of Nisan. The Fourth Gospel, however, dates Jesus’ death twenty-four hours earlier, on the fourteenth of Nisan —a date that is not burdened with all the difficulties and improbabilities that beset the fifteenth. |

All of these problems admit of a great deal of scholarly speculation, but as yet there is no definite solution. About the best we can do is to take the conflicting chronology as

IO we find it, noting all along the problems that confront it. The most crowded day of the six is Tuesday. Otherwise, the problem has to do not so much with the crowded character of the days as with such important and far-reaching events falling within the brief space of six days.

The question of the general historical reliability of the Gospel reports of the passion week is not essentially different from the bearing this question has on the whole of the Gospel story. There are fewer traces perhaps of personal memory than appear at certain points in the Galilean account. The eyewitness theory for these closing scenes must be definitely abandoned sooner or later, for the marks of personal reminiscence have been effaced in a wide and vigorous circulation. Those fresh, first-hand features that suggest actual participation in the events are missing.

In the passion story we have to do with a social or group product, the story as commonly known and generally circulated among the early Christian communities. _ At no point in the Gospel story are the primitive Christian interests and interpretations more prominent. The whole is conceived and presented from the community point of view; not a few passages reflect very clearly primitive Christian cult and practices. Certain features and phases of the story appear as secondary and acquired. There are some legendary accretions. Very seldom do we find matter wholly free from later Christian revision.

Our general historical orientation for the study of the

II passion week is the same that holds for the study of the life of Jesus as a whole. Jesus is a Jewish prophet working among his Jewish contemporaries on Jewish soil. We must think, then, of the passion week in Jewish terms, just as Jewish as possible. The whole of the passion week, with its drama and its tragedy, develops around a Jewish festival and its celebration. Jesus, his disciples and the Galilean crowds generally are pilgrims to the Passover. The scene and setting, the actors in the story, the issues involved — all are Jewish.”

4 For highly valuable comments on the passion week from the modern Jewish point of view, liberal and orthodox, see: Montefiore, The Synoptic Gospels (2d edition, New York: Macmillan, 1927); Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth (New York: Macmillan, 1925). An ultra-liberal Jewish picture of Jesus is Enelow’s A Jewish View of Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1920).

Chapter I Palm Sunday

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BE first day of the passion week is set off clearly in both Matthew (21:1-17) and Mark (11:1-11). In 11:11 Mark tells us that it is evening and that Jesus returns to Bethany with the twelve. Matthew (21:17). notes the return to Bethany and in 21:18 we are on the morning of the second day. Luke, however, does not note the close of the first day nor the beginning of the second. Nevertheless, he seems to depict the events in 19:29-46 as following in rapid succession and without intervening nights or retreats from the city. Certainly Luke presents the cleansing as coming on the first day on the first visit to the temple. - | A glance at the outline of events for this first day (opposite page) shows that it is considerably more eventful in Matthew and Luke than it isin Mark. This is due to the ~ fact that the first and third Evangelists each has his own special materials which he assigns to this day. Further, both report the cleansing of the temple on Palm Sunday which, in Mark, is the principal event of the second day.

1. THE BETHANY DEMONSTRATION.

Palm Sunday opens in all of the first three Gospels -. with one and the same incident — the Bethany demonstra-

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Tue Passlon WEEK tion. It is the principal event of the day, the one from which it gets its name, and the only one which all three writers agree in assigning to this particular day. The date of the Bethany demonstration is not so clear in the Fourth Gospel (12:12-19). It comes on the day following (12 12) the anointing in Bethany (12:1-8) which is dated as six days before the Passover. |

In the first three Gospels the Bethany demonstration is vitally associated with what precedes. It is the climax of the eventful journey to Jerusalem.” Jesus and his disciples have come up from Galilee by the way of Jericho for the first and only visit to the Holy City during his public career. They are approaching the Mount of Olives, over which (II Samuel 15:30) the road from Jericho to Jeru- — salem led and from which the pilgrims were wont to catch the first view of Zion and its sacred walls.

In the Fourth Gospel, however, the Bethany demonstration is not associated with a journey from Galilee to the Holy City. Although the Fourth Evangelist has Jesus go up from Galilee to Jerusalem three different times (2:13; 5:1; 7:10) during His public life, there is no eventful journey to the Holy City in his account, no pilgrimage culminating in the ovation on the Mount of Olives. According to the Fourth Gospel Jesus came out from the Holy City to Bethany only the day before (12:1), and he is leaving Bethany for the Holy City again when the demonstration takes place (12:12).

-Paum SUNDAY

The account opens in the first three Gospels with Jesus nearing the Holy City, a dramatic moment in the experience of any pilgrim, with the villages of Bethphage and Bethany just ahead. According to all three, too, he sends two of his disciples to the villages ahead to fetch a colt. It is at this point that Matthew makes his principal departure from the accounts of Mark and Luke.

Matthew gives Jesus’ instructions for the finding and bringing of the colt, but in Mark and Luke his words are not of the nature of instructions but of detailed predictions concerning what the disciples will find, what will be said to them and what they in turn shall reply. Thus, Mark and Luke introduce a mysterious, miraculous element and both emphasize the fact that the disciples found everything just as Jesus had said that they would —a miracle of omniscience.

Matthew, however, eliminates this miraculous element. He omits the detailed fulfilment of the predictions in Mark 11:5-6. Instead, he emphasizes the fact that “ the disciples went and did even as Jesus appointed them.” (Matt. 21:6.) Thus, the account of the incident in the first Gospel becomes less mysterious and baffling. Matthew has another interest in this preliminary stage not evident in Mark or Luke: the finding of the colt is a fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy — Isaiah 62:11 and Zechariah 9:9.

This preliminary stage in the Bethany incident leaves - an unfavorable impression. How can Jesus know and predict all of these complicated details when, according to all of the first three Gospels, this is his first visit to Jerusalem during his public career? In the Fourth Gospel, in which Jesus has been almost constantly in and about Jerusalem and only the day before has come out to Bethany, this sending for the colt with specific instructions would not be surprising. But the Fourth Evangelist omits this preliminary stage entirely and has Jesus himself find the colt (12:14), however, only after the demonstration has taken place (12:12-13) —a sort of anticlimax.

All of the first three Gospels leave with us the impression that Jesus himself sets the stage for the Bethany demonstration. He conceives it, plans it and enlists two of his disciples in its preparation. A prompt skepticism, based on all that we know of Jesus, confronts this clear impres- ‘sion coming straight from the accounts as they now stand. We cannot fit such a picture and purpose into the total temper of his personality. It is difficult to imagine Jesus staging anything, particularly a demonstration in his own honor.

The fetching of the colt appears to be secondary and ac- © quired, a later outgrowth of the story that would enhance the miraculous element. The original demonstration was unplanned, unprepared, by Jesus or others. It was one of those things that are born of the moment, that cannot be foreseen. A definite plan in advance would contradict the spontaneous nature of the ovation that follows. The original account was probably more simple and may have read somewhat as follows:

“And when they drew nigh unto Jerusalem, unto Bethphage and Bethany, at the Mount of Olives, . . . they found a colt (at the door without in the open street); and they loose him. .. . And they bring the colt unto Jesus, and cast on him their garments; and he sat upon him. And many spread their garments upon the way; and others branches, which they had cut from the fields. And they that went before, and they that followed, cried, Hosanna; Blessed zs he that cometh in the name of the Lord: Blessed zs the kingdom that cometh, the kingdom of our father David: Hosanna in the highest.”

This more simple account preserves better what must have been the original spontaneous character of the incident. The fetching of the colt appears as a later embellishment derived perhaps from a subsequent Markan incident — the preparation of the Passover.? The two preparations are really parallel companion pieces, not only in their mysterious character but in their details.

In the demonstration itself we get the impression of a triumphal procession. Matthew (21:9) and Mark (11:9) seem to have a formation in mind — Jesus mounted in the center of the column, some of the crowd going before

him, others following. In Luke the demonstration goes through two definite stages: the spreading of the garments in the way,’ with the shouts of the crowd bursting forth only at the descent of the Mount of Olives when the city comes into view (19:37). In Matthew and Mark the spreading of the garments and the branches in the way and the cries of the crowd are simultaneous.

It is these festal features that the Christian imagination has always associated with Palm Sunday. It is interesting to note, however, that the palms are mentioned only in the Fourth Gospel (12:13). In Jewish practice,the palms were displayed at the feast of Tabernacles, not at the Passover. In our ecclesiastical calendar the palms have always symbolized the triumphant element which the Christian mind has discovered not only in this incident but in the whole of the life and work of Jesus. The spreading of garments in a hero’s path is a characteristic act of oriental homage. (II Kings 9:13.) In fact, the attitude, actions and utterances of the crowd suggest the reception of a congquering hero. |

What is the meaning ae this incident? How shall we interpret this enthusiastic outburst?

The great difficulty that confronts us in interpreting the Bethany demonstration is the fact that it is already interpreted by the Gospel writers. All of them quite plainly regard it as messianic for all involved. The people are publicly acclaiming Jesus as the Messiah. There is the messianic mount of prophecy (Zech. 9:9), the acts of