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| Of the Birth of John, and of His Alleged Identity with Elijah. Of the Doctrine of Transcorporation.
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7. Of
the Birth of John, and of His Alleged Identity with Elijah. Of
the Doctrine of Transcorporation.
“And4840
they asked him,
What then? Art thou Elijah? and he said, I am not.”
No one can fail to remember in this connection what Jesus says of
John,4841
“If ye will receive it, this is Elijah
which is to come.” How, then, does John come to say to
those who ask him, “Art thou Elijah?”—“I am
not.” And how can it be true at the same time that John is
Elijah who is to come, according to the words of Malachi,4842
“And behold I send unto you Elijah the
Tishbite, before the great and notable day of the Lord come, who shall
restore the heart of the father to the son, and the heart of a man to
his neighbour, lest I come, and utterly smite the earth.”
The words of the angel of the Lord, too, who appeared to Zacharias, as
he stood at the right hand of the altar of incense, are somewhat to the
same effect as the prophecy of Malachi: “And4843
thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son,
and thou shalt call his name John.” And a little further
on:4844
“And he shall go before His face
in the spirit and power of Elijah to turn the hearts of the fathers to
the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make
ready for the Lord a people prepared for Him.” As for the
first point, one might say that John did not know that he was
Elijah. This will be the explanation of those who find in our
passage a support for their doctrine of transcorporation, as if the
soul clothed itself in a fresh body and did not quite remember its
former lives. These thinkers will also point out that some of the
Jews assented to this doctrine when they spoke about the Saviour as if
He was one of the old prophets, and had risen not from the tomb but
from His birth. His mother Mary was well known, and Joseph the
carpenter was supposed to be His father, and it could readily be
supposed that He was one of the old prophets risen from the dead.
The same person will adduce the
text in Genesis,4845
“I will
destroy the whole resurrection,” and will thereby reduce those
who give themselves to finding in Scripture solutions of false
probabilities to a great difficulty in respect of this doctrine.
Another, however, a churchman, who repudiates the doctrine of
transcorporation as a false one, and does not admit that the soul of
John ever was Elijah, may appeal to the above-quoted words of the
angel, and point out that it is not the soul of Elijah that is spoken
of at John’s birth, but the spirit and power of Elijah.
“He shall go before him,” it is said, “in the spirit
and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the
children.” Now it can be shown from thousands of texts that
the spirit is a different thing from the soul, and that what is called
the power is a different thing from both the soul and the spirit.
On these points I cannot now enlarge; this work must not be unduly
expanded. To establish the fact that power is different from
spirit, it will be enough to cite the text,4846
“The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the
Highest shall overshadow thee.” As for the spirits of the
prophets, these are given to them by God, and are spoken of as being in
a manner their property (slaves), as “The spirits of the prophets
are subject to the prophets,”4847
and “The
spirit of Elijah rested upon Elisha.”4848
Thus, it is said, there is nothing
absurd in supposing that John, “in the spirit and power of
Elijah,” turned the hearts of the fathers to the children, and
that it was on account of this spirit that he was called “Elijah
who was to come.” And to reinforce this view it may be
argued that if the God of the universe identified Himself with His
saints to such an extent as to be called the God of Abraham and the God
of Isaac and the God of Jacob, much more might the Holy Spirit so
identify Himself with the prophets as to be called their spirit, so
that when the spirit is spoken of it might be the spirit of Elijah or
the spirit of Isaiah. Our churchman, to go on with his views, may
further say that those who supposed Jesus to be one of the prophets
risen from the dead were probably misled, partly by the doctrine above
mentioned, and partly by supposing Him to be one of the prophets, and
that as for this misconception that He was one of the prophets, these
persons probably fell into their error from not knowing about
Jesus’ supposed father and actual mother, and considering that He
had risen from the tombs. As for the text in Genesis about the
resurrection, the churchman will rejoin with a text to an opposite
effect, “God hath raised up for me another seed in place of Abel
whom Cain slew;”4849
showing that the
resurrection occurs in Genesis. As for the first difficulty which
was raised, our churchman will meet the view of the believers in
transcorporation by saying that John is no doubt, in a certain sense,
as he has already shown, Elijah who is to come; and that the reason why
he met the enquiry of the priests and levites with “I am
not,” was that he divined the object they had in view in making
it. For the enquiry laid before John by the priests and levites
was not intended to bring out whether the same spirit was in both, but
whether John was that very Elijah who was taken up, and who now
appeared according to the expectation of the Jews without being born
(for the emissaries, perhaps, did not know about John’s birth);
and to such all enquiry he naturally answered, “I am not;”
for he who was called John was not Elijah who was taken up, and had not
changed his body for his present appearance. Our first scholar,
whose view of transcorporation we have seen based upon our passage, may
go on with a close examination of the text, and urge against his
antagonist, that if John was the son of such a man as the priest
Zacharias, and if he was born when his parents were both aged, contrary
to all human expectation, then it is not likely that so many Jews at
Jerusalem would be so ignorant about him, or that the priests and
levites whom they sent would not be acquainted with the facts of his
birth. Does not Luke declare4850
that
“fear came upon all those who lived round
about,”—clearly round about Zacharias and
Elisabeth—and that “all these things were noised abroad
throughout the whole hill country of Judæa”? And if
John’s birth from Zacharias was a matter of common knowledge, and
the Jews of Jerusalem yet sent priests and levites to ask, “Art
thou Elijah?” then it is clear that in saying this they assumed
the doctrine of transcorporation to be true, and that it was a current
doctrine of their country, and not foreign to their secret
teaching. John therefore says, I am not Elijah, because he does
not know about his own former life. These thinkers, accordingly,
entertain an opinion which is by no means to be despised. Our
churchman, however, may return to the charge, and ask if it is worthy
of a prophet, who is enlightened by
the Holy Spirit, who is predicted by Isaiah, and whose birth was
foretold before it took place by so great an angel, one who has
received of the fulness of Christ, who shares in such a grace, who
knows truth to have come through Jesus Christ, and has taught such deep
things about God and about the only-begotten, who is in the bosom of
the Father, is it worthy of such a one to lie, or even to hesitate, out
of ignorance of what he was. For with respect to what was
obscure, he ought to have refrained from confessing, and to have
neither affirmed nor denied the proposition put before him. If
the doctrine in question really was widely current, ought not John to
have hesitated to pronounce upon it, lest his soul had actually been in
Elijah? And here our churchman will appeal to history, and will
bid his antagonists ask experts of the secret doctrines of the Hebrews,
if they do really entertain such a belief. For if it should
appear that they do not, then the argument based on that supposition is
shown to be quite baseless. Our churchman, however, is still free
to have recourse to the solution given before, and to insist that
attention be paid to the meaning with which the question was put.
For if, as I showed, the senders knew John to be the child of Zacharias
and Elisabeth, and if the messengers still more, being men of priestly
race, could not possibly be ignorant of the remarkable manner in which
their kinsman Zacharias had received his son, then what could be the
meaning of their question, “Art thou Elijah?” Had
they not read that Elijah had been taken up into heaven, and did they
not expect him to appear? Then, as they expect Elijah to come at
the consummation before Christ, and Christ to follow him, perhaps their
question was meant less in a literal than in a tropical sense:
Are you he who announces beforehand the word which is to come before
Christ, at the consummation? To this he very properly answers,
“I am not.” The adversary, however, tries to show
that the priests could not be ignorant that the birth of John had taken
place in so remarkable a manner, because “all these things had
been much spoken of in the hill country of Judæa;” and the
churchman has to meet this. He does so by showing that a similar
mistake was widely current about the Saviour Himself; for “some
said that He was John the Baptist, others Elijah, others Jeremiah or
one of the prophets.”4851
So the
disciples told the Lord when He was in the parts of Cæsarea
Philippi, and questioned them on that subject. And Herod, too,
said,4852
“John whom I beheaded, he is risen
from the dead;” so that he appears not to have known what was
said about Christ, as reported in the Gospel,4853
“Is not this the son of the carpenter, is not His mother called
Mary, and His brothers James, and Joseph, and Simon, and Judas?
And His sisters, are they not all with us?” Thus in the
case of the Saviour, while many knew of His birth from Mary, others
were under a mistake about Him; and so in the case of John, there is no
wonder if, while some knew of his birth from Zacharias, others were in
doubt whether the expected Elijah had appeared in him or not.
There was not more room for doubt about John, whether he was Elijah,
than about the Saviour, whether He was John. Of the two, the
question of the outward form of Elijah could be disposed of from the
words of Scripture, though not from actual observation, for we
read,4854
“He was a hairy man, and girt with a
leather girdle about his loins.” John’s outward
appearance, on the contrary, was well known, and was not like that of
Jesus; and yet there were those who surmised that John had risen from
the dead, and taken the name of Jesus. As for the change of name,
a thing which reminds us of mysteries, I do not know how the Hebrews
came to tell about Phinehas, son of Eleazar, who admittedly prolonged
his life to the time of many of the judges, as we read in the Book of
Judges,4855
to tell about him
what I now mention. They say that he was Elijah, because he had
been promised immortality (in Numbers4856
),
on account of the covenant of peace granted to him because he was
jealous with a divine jealousy, and in a passion of anger pierced the
Midianitish woman and the Israelite, and stayed the wrath of God as it
is called, as it is written, “Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, the
son of Aaron, hath turned my wrath away from the children of Israel, in
that he was jealous with my jealousy among them.” No
wonder, then, if those who conceived Phinehas and Elijah to be the same
person, whether they judged soundly in this or not, for that is not now
the question, considered John and Jesus also to be the same.
This, then, they doubted, and desired to know if John and Elijah were
the same. At another time than this, the point would certainly
call for a careful enquiry, and the
argument would have to be well weighed as to the essence of the soul,
as to the principle of her composition, and as to her entering into
this body of earth. We should also have to enquire into the
distributions of the life of each soul, and as to her departure from
this life, and whether it is possible for her to enter into a second
life in a body or not, and whether that takes place at the same period,
and after the same arrangement in each case, or not; and whether she
enters the same body, or a different one, and if the same, whether the
subject remains the same while the qualities are changed, or if both
subject and qualities remain the same, and if the soul will always make
use of the same body or will change it. Along with these
questions, it would also be necessary to ask what transcorporation is,
and how it differs from incorporation, and if he who holds
transcorporation must necessarily hold the world to be eternal.
The views of these scholars must also be taken into account, who
consider that, according to the Scriptures, the soul is sown along with
the body, and the consequences of such a view must also be looked
at. In fact the subject of the soul is a wide one, and hard to be
unravelled, and it has to be picked out of scattered expressions of
Scripture. It requires, therefore, separate treatment. The
brief consideration we have been led to give to the problem in
connection with Elijah and John may now suffice; we go on to what
follows in the Gospel.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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