340

Destroy this Temple; " and the imperaneither, but " tive had but been addressed, hypothetically, to them. They were to be the destroyers; He had but promised to rebuild. It was just one of those perjuries which was all the more perjured, because it bore some distant semblance to the truth; and by just giving a different nuance to His actual words they had, with the ingenuity of slander, reversed their meaning, and hoped to found upon them a charge of constructive blasphemy. But even this semblable perjury utterly broke down, and Jesus listened in silence while His disunited enemies hopelessly confuted each other's testimony. Guilt often breaks into excuses where perfect innocence is dumb. He simply suffered His false accusers and their false listeners to entangle themselves in the hideous coil of their own malignant lies, and the silence of the innocent Jesus atoned for the excuses of the guilty Adam.

But that majestic silence troubled, thwarted, confounded, maddened them. It weighed them down for the moment with an incubus of intolerable self-condemnation. They felt, before that silence, as if they were the culprits, He the judge. And as every poisoned arrow of their carefully-provided perjuries fell harmless at His feet, as though blunted on the diamond shield of His white innocence, they began to fear lest, after all, their thirst for His blood would go unslaked, and their whole plot fail. Were they thus to be conquered by the feebleness of their own weapons, without His Was this stirring a finger, or uttering a word? Prophet of Nazareth to prevail against them, merely for Was His life charmed lack of a few consistent lies?

even against calumny confirmed by oaths? It was

intolerable.

ADJURATION OF CAIAPHAS.

341

Then Caiaphas was overcome with a paroxysm of fear and anger. Starting up from his judgment-seat, and striding into the midst1-with what a voice, with what an attitude we may well imagine!" Answerest Thou NOTHING?" he exclaimed. "What is it that

these witness against Thee ?" Had not Jesus been aware that these His judges were wilfully feeding on ashes and seeking lies, He might have answered; but now His awful silence remained unbroken.

Then, reduced to utter despair and fury, this false High Priest-with marvellous inconsistency, with disgraceful illegality-still standing as it were with a threatening attitude over his prisoner, exclaimed, “I adjure Thee by the living God to tell us what? whether Thou art a malefactor? whether Thou hast secretly taught sedition? whether Thou hast openly uttered blasphemy ?-no, but (and surely the question showed the dread misgiving which lay under all their deadly conspiracy against Him)-" WHETHER THOU ART THE CHRIST, THE SON OF GOD?"

Strange question to a bound, defenceless, condemned criminal; and strange question from such a questioner-a High Priest of His people! Strange question from the judge who was hounding on his false witnesses against the prisoner! Yet so adjured, and to such a question, Jesus could not be silent; on such a point He could not leave Himself open to misinterpretation. In the days of His happier ministry, when they would have taken Him

...

1 Mark xiv. 60, àvaoràs εἰς μέσον. The Sanhedrin sat on opposite divans of a circular hall; the Nasi, or President, who was usually the High Priest, sat in the middle at the farther end, with the Ab Beth Dîn, or Father of the House of Judgment, on his right, and the Chakam, or Wise Man, on his left. The accused was placed opposite to him. (See Jos. Bell. Jud. iv. 5, § 4; Keim, III. ii. 328.)

by force to make Him a King-in the days when to claim the Messiahship in their sense would have been to meet all their passionate prejudices half way, and to place Himself upon the topmost pinnacle of their adoring homage-in those days He had kept His title of Messiah utterly in the background: but now, at this awful decisive moment, when death was near-when, humanly speaking, nothing could be gained, everything must be lost, by the avowal-there thrilled through all the ages thrilled through that Eternity, which is the synchronism of all the future, and all the present, and all the past the solemn answer, "I AM;1 and ye shall see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming with the clouds of heaven."2 In that answer the thunder rolled-a thunder louder than at Sinai, though the ears of the cynic and the Sadducee heard it not then, nor hear it now. In overacted and ill-omened horror, the unjust judge who had thus supplemented the failure of the perjuries which he had vainly sought -the false High Priest rending his linen robes before the True3-demanded of the assembly His instant condemnation.

1 In Matt. xxvi. 64, Zù elmas. Alford refers to John xii. 49.

Dan. vii. 13: "I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of Man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of Days, and they brought him near before him." Hence the hybrid term, Bar-vepén, "Son of a cloud," applied to the Messiah in Sanhedr. 96, 6.

This was forbidden to the High Priest in cases of mourning (Lev. x. 6; xxi. 10); but the Jewish Halacha considered it lawful in cases of blasphemy (, gidduph) (1 Macc. xi. 71; Jos. B. J. ii. 15, § 4). As to Joseph Caiaphas the Talmud is absolutely silent; but the general conception which it gives of the priests of this epoch agrees entirely with the Gospels. It tells how since the days of Valerius Gratus the office had constantly been bought and sold; how the widow Martha, daughter of Boethus, gave Agrippa II. two bushels of gold denarii to buy it for Joshua Ben Gamala, her betrothed; how it was disgraced by cringing meanness and supple sycophancy; how there were more than eighty of these High Priests of the second Temple

CONDEMNED BY CAIAPHAS.

343

"BLASPHEMY!" he exclaimed; "what further need have we of witnesses? See, now ye heard his blasphemy! What is your decision ?" And with the

confused tumultuous cry, "He is ish maveth," "A man of death," "Guilty of death," the dark conclave was broken up, and the second stage of the trial of Jesus was over.1

(which they quoted in illustration of Prov. x. 27), whereas there were only eighteen of the first Temple (Frankl, Monatsschrift, Dec. 1852, p. 588; Raphall, Hist. of Jews, ii. 368); and many other disgraces and enormities. 1 Cf. Numb. xxxv. 31.

CHAPTER LIX.

THE INTERVAL BETWEEN THE TRIALS.

"I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting."-ISA. l. 6.

AND this was how the Jews at last received their promised Messiah-longed for with passionate hopes during two thousand years; since then regretted in bitter agony for well-nigh two thousar d more! From this moment He was regarded1 by all te apparitors of the Jewish Court as a heretic, liable to death by stoning; and was only remanded into custody to be kept till break of day, because by daylight only, and in the Lishcat Haggazzith, or Hall of Judgment, and only by a full session of the entire Sanhedrin, could He be legally condemned. And since now they looked upon Him as a "fit person to be insulted with impunity, He was haled through the court-yard to the guard-room with blows and curses, in which it may be that not only the attendant menials, but even the cold but now infuriated Sadducees took their share. It was now long past midnight, and the spring air was then most chilly. In the centre of

1 "Millionen gebrochener Herzen und Augen haben seinen Tod nch nicht abgebüsst" (Grätz, iii. 245). On the whole of this trial, see the powerful and noble remarks of Lange (iv. 309) and Keim (ubi supra).