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| Other Incidents of the Passion Minutely Compared with Prophecy. Pilate and Herod. Barabbas Preferred to Jesus. Details of the Crucifixion. The Earthquake and the Mid-Day Darkness. All Wonderfully Foretold in the Scriptures of the Creator. Christ's Giving Up the Ghost No Evidence of Marcion's Docetic Opinions. In His Sepulture There is a Refutation Thereof.
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Chapter
XLII.—Other Incidents of the Passion Minutely Compared with
Prophecy. Pilate and Herod. Barabbas Preferred to Jesus. Details of the
Crucifixion. The Earthquake and the Mid-Day Darkness. All Wonderfully
Foretold in the Scriptures of the Creator. Christ’s Giving Up the
Ghost No Evidence of Marcion’s Docetic Opinions. In His Sepulture
There is a Refutation Thereof.
For when He was brought before Pilate, they
proceeded to urge Him with the serious charge5121
,
of declaring Himself to be Christ the King;5122
that is, undoubtedly, as the Son of God, who
was to sit at God’s right hand. They would, however, have
burdened Him5123
with some other
title, if they had been uncertain whether He had called Himself the
Son of God—if He had not pronounced the words, “Ye say
that I am,” so as (to admit) that He was that which they said He
was. Likewise, when Pirate asked Him, “Art thou Christ (the
King)?” He answered, as He had before (to the Jewish
council)5124
“Thou sayest
that I am”5125
in order that He
might not seem to have been driven by a fear of his power to give him a
fuller answer. “And so the Lord hath stood on His
trial.”5126
| 5126 Constitutus est in
judicio. The Septuagint is καταστήσεται
εἰς κρίσιν,
“shall stand on His trial.” | And he placed His
people on their trial. The Lord Himself comes to a trial with
“the elders and rulers of the people,” as Isaiah
predicted.5127
And then He
fulfilled all that had been written of His passion. At that time
“the heathen raged, and the people imagined vain things; the
kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers gathered themselves
together against the Lord and against His Christ.”5128
The heathen were Pilate and the
Romans; the people were the tribes of Israel; the kings
were represented in Herod, and the rulers in the chief priests.
When, indeed, He was sent to Herod gratuitously5129
| 5129 Velut munus.
This is a definition, in fact, of the xenium in the verse from
Hosea. This ξένιον was the Roman
lautia, “a state entertainment to distinguished foreigners
in the city.” | by
Pilate,5130
the words of Hosea
were accomplished, for he had prophesied of Christ: “And they
shall carry Him bound as a present to the king.”5131
Herod was “exceeding glad” when
he saw Jesus, but he heard not a word from Him.5132
For, “as a lamb before the shearer is dumb, so He opened not His
mouth,”5133
because “the
Lord had given to Him a disciplined tongue, that he might know how and
when it behoved Him to speak”5134
—even
that “tongue which clove to His jaws,” as the
Psalm5135
said it should, through His not
speaking. Then Barabbas, the most abandoned criminal, is
released, as if he were the innocent man; while the most righteous
Christ is delivered to be put to death, as if he were the
murderer.5136
Moreover two
malefactors are crucified around Him, in order that He might be
reckoned amongst the transgressors.5137
| 5137 Comp. Luke xxiii. 33 with Isa. liii. 12. | Although His
raiment was, without doubt, parted among the soldiers, and partly
distributed by lot, yet Marcion has erased it all (from his
Gospel),5138
| 5138 This remarkable
suppression was made to escape the wonderful minuteness of the
prophetic evidence to the details of Christ’s
death. | for he had his eye
upon the Psalm: “They parted my garments amongst them, and cast
lots upon my vesture.”5139
You may as well
take away the cross itself! But even then the Psalm is not silent
concerning it: “They pierced my hands and my
feet.”5140
Indeed, the details
of the whole event are therein read: “Dogs compassed me
about; the assembly of
the wicked enclosed me around. All that looked upon me laughed me to
scorn; they did shoot out their lips and shake their heads, (saying,)
He hoped in God, let Him deliver Him.”5141
Of
what use now is (your tampering with) the testimony of His garments? If
you take it as a booty for your false Christ, still all the Psalm
(compensates) the vesture of Christ.5142
| 5142 We append the original
of these obscure sentences: “Quo jam testimonium vestimentorum?
Habe falsi tui prædam; totus psalmus vestimenta sunt
Christi.” The general sense is apparent. If Marcion does suppress
the details about Christ’s garments at the cross, to escape the
inconvenient proof they afford that Christ is the object of prophecies,
yet there are so many other points of agreement between this wonderful
Psalm and St. Luke’s history of the crucifixion (not expunged, as
it would seem, by the heretic), that they quite compensate for the loss
of this passage about the garments (Oehler). | But, behold,
the very elements are shaken. For their Lord was suffering. If,
however, it was their enemy to whom all this injury was done, the
heaven would have gleamed with light, the sun would have been even more
radiant, and the day would have prolonged its course5143
—gladly gazing at Marcion’s
Christ suspended on his gibbet! These proofs5144
would still have been suitable for me, even if they had not been the
subject of prophecy. Isaiah says: “I will clothe the heavens with
blackness.”5145
This will be the
day, concerning which Amos also writes: And it shall come to pass in
that day, saith the Lord, that the sun shall go down at noon and the
earth shall be dark in the clear day.”5146
(At noon)5147
| 5147 Here you have the
meaning of the sixth hour. | the veil of the
temple was rent”5148
by the escape of
the cherubim,5149
which “left
the daughter of Sion as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden
of cucumbers.”5150
With what constancy
has He also, in Psalm xxx., laboured to present to us the very Christ!
He calls with a loud voice to the Father, “Into Thine hands I
commend my spirit,”5151
| 5151 Comp. Luke
xxiii. 46 with Ps. xxxi. 5. | that even when
dying He might expend His last breath in fulfilling the prophets.
Having said this, He gave up the ghost.”5152
Who? Did the spirit5153
give itself up; or
the flesh the spirit? But the spirit could not have breathed
itself out. That which breathes is one thing, that which is breathed is
another. If the spirit is breathed it must needs be breathed by
another. If, however, there had been nothing there but spirit, it
would be said to have departed rather than
expired.5154
| 5154 Expirasse:
considered actively, “breathed out,” in reference to
the “expiravit” of the verse
46 above. | What, however,
breathes out spirit but the flesh, which both breathes the
spirit whilst it has it, and breathes it out when it loses it?
Indeed, if it was not flesh (upon the cross), but a phantom5155
| 5155 A sharp rebuke
of Marcion’s Docetism here follows. | of flesh (and5156
a
phantom is but spirit, and5157
so the spirit
breathed its own self out, and departed as it did so), no doubt the
phantom departed, when the spirit which was the phantom departed: and
so the phantom and the spirit disappeared together, and were nowhere to
be seen.5158
| 5158 Nusquam comparuit
phantasma cum spiritu. | Nothing therefore
remained upon the cross, nothing hung there, after “the giving up
of the ghost;”5159
there was nothing
to beg of Pilate, nothing to take down from the cross, nothing to wrap
in the linen, nothing to lay in the new sepulchre.5160
Still it was not nothing5161
| 5161 Non nihil: “a
something.” | that was there. What was there, then? If a
phantom Christ was yet there. If Christ had departed, He had taken away
the phantom also. The only shift left to the impudence of the heretics,
is to admit that what remained there was the phantom of a phantom! But
what if Joseph knew that it was a body which he treated with so much
piety?5162
| 5162 This argument is also
used by Epiphanius to prove the reality of Christ’s body,
Hæres. xl. Confut. 74. The same writer also
employs for the same purpose the incident of the women returning
from the sepulchre, which Tertullian is going to adduce in his next
chapter, Confut. 75 (Oehler). | That same Joseph
“who had not consented” with the Jews in their
crime?5163
The “happy
man who walked not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way
of sinners, nor sat in the seat of the scornful.”5164
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