Category: Bible History

Recently, Gretchen Passantino-Coburn posted an interesting piece on whether Jesus was trying to avoid the Cross when he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane.

The piece very correctly points out that Jesus knew it was his Father’s will for him to die on the Cross and that he lived his life in complete submission to the Father’s will (thus also setting an example for us).

As a result, there was never any conflict between his will and the Father’s, properly speaking.

What are we to make, then, of his prayer, “Not my will by yours be done”?

The article makes a striking proposal:

[W]e argue below that it was not death on the cross that Christ was longing to avoid, but death in the Garden before the cross; and that Christ’s will was not different than the Father’s will, but in harmony with the Fathers’ will. We argue below that Christ, in danger of expiring in the Garden, cried out to the Father for the necessary power either to remain alive through his Garden experience, or, if he expired in the Garden, to be revived by the Father so that he would be alive for his coming crucifixion.

I have a different understanding of this passage, and Gretchen has very graciously invited me to do a follow-up piece for purposes of discussion.

The First Question

The first question we need to address is whether Jesus was about to expire in the garden of Gethsemane. According to the article,

Jesus was in danger of dying in the Garden. Luke says, “And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground” (Luke 22:44). Matthew and Mark affirm, “he began to be sorrowful and troubled. Then he said to them, ‘My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me” (Matt. 26:37-38, cf. Mark 14:33-34).

[Theologian J. Oliver] Buswell notes that profuse perspiration is a medical sign of life-threatening shock, when the body is so traumatized that it cannot control basic life sustaining functions and instead “shuts down” preparatory to death.

What should we make of this argument?

“I Could Die”

The statement that he is sorrowful “to the point of death” is generally understood as hyperbole (exaggeration to make a point). This is a common mode of expression in the Bible and one that Jesus uses in the Gospels.

We even have similar sayings in English where the possibility of death is raised without it being meant literally (e.g., “I’m so embarrassed I could die”).

The possibility (probability) of hyperbole is so significant in this case that Jesus’ statement about being sorrowful “to the point of death” can’t be relied upon as proof he was literally about to die in the garden.

The argument for the claim thus depends critically on Jesus’ sweat becoming like blood and this being an indication of imminent death.

Is the Text Original?

The statement that his sweat became like blood is found only in Luke 22:44. It is not in Matthew, Mark, or John.

However, there are significant reasons to question whether this material was originally in the text of Luke. Most modern Bibles will carry a footnote on verses 43 and 44, like this one from the New American Bible:

These verses, though very ancient, were probably not part of the original text of Luke. They are absent from the oldest papyrus manuscripts of Luke and from manuscripts of wide geographical distribution.

It is risky to make a dramatic interpretive claim (Jesus was about to die in the garden barring divine intervention) concerning an event found in all three of the Synoptics if the key detail is found only in one Gospel and there is strong reason to think it was not in the original.

Is Bloody Sweat a Sign of Imminent Death?

If we assume that the statement was in the original, there is still a problem, because Buswell appears to have been mistaken about the nature of this phenomenon.

While rare, bloody sweat is a known medical condition. Referred to as hematidrosis (Greek, “blood-sweat”), it is caused when the capillaries rupture into the sweat glands.

When it does occur, hematidrosis frequently is the result of anxiety, and it has been successfully treated with beta-blockers such as propranolol, which are used (among other things) to treat anxiety.

However, it does not appear that hematidrosis is “a medical sign of life-threatening shock, when the body is so traumatized that it cannot control basic life sustaining functions and instead ‘shuts down’ preparatory to death.”

The condition is not on that order of magnitude. While often produced by anxiety, the condition is a dermatological one that involves the capillaries leaking into the sweat glands, not a sign of overall systemic shutdown.

I did a quick review of online medical literature and turned up many cases where hematidrosis was not a sign of impending death. (See, for example, here, where patients are noted to have had repeated instances of hematidrosis.)

Buswell, writing in the early 1960s, may have had less access to medical information about hematidrosis. In fact, the condition is rare enough that it had not been studied as much then as it has been now. As a result, it could be understandable for Buswell to draw inaccurate conclusions.

A Clearer Indication? An Explanation?

It also strikes me that, if the Evangelists meant us to understand that Jesus was about to die on the spot, in contravention of God’s plan for him to die on the Cross, they would have signaled this to the readers in a clearer way.

They also likely would have provided some explanation for why this last-minute crisis was occurring.

For example, was it a final attempt by Satan to foil God’s plan?

If so, how do we explain the Gospels’ insistence that it was Satan who prompted Judas to betray Jesus? Furthermore, Jesus himself describes his arrest (not the agony in the garden) as “the hour of darkness” (Luke 22:53), suggesting that Satan was behind it.

But if it wasn’t the devil that tried to bring about Jesus’ death in the garden, what did? It wasn’t the Father’s plan for him to die there, and so it wouldn’t have been the Father.

That would leave us with either an accident that seems to threaten God’s Providence or Jesus simply having a panic attack so severe that it threatened his life.

Personally, I’d be inclined to resist either of those suggestions.

An Alternative Theory

As an alternative theory of the event, I would propose that Jesus knew in advance that he would die on the Cross and that he was resolute toward this goal. However, it is one thing when death is remote and another when it is staring one in the face.

Thus Christ was able to deal serenely with the prospect of Lazarus’s death—and even remark on how it would bring glory to God—when he was still in Galilee (John 11:1-4), but he nevertheless wept when he was standing at Lazarus’s tomb (John 11:35-36).

This response is rooted in the death aversion that is part of human nature. Being in proximity to death causes aversive feelings in humans (fear, sorrow, revulsion), and that’s a good thing. It is part of God’s plan, and it leads us to try to preserve life.

By virtue of his human nature, Jesus had death aversion also, and—as with the rest of us—it manifested with particular intensity when the hour of his death drew close.

Nevertheless, he was resolute to go through with the climax of his mission.

“Not My Will But Yours Be Done”

Jesus statement “Not my will but yours be done” does not indicate an actual opposition of wills. Indeed, it indicates the opposite—that he is completely submissive to the Father’s will.

The paradoxical nature of this statement is to be understood along the lines of similar paradoxical statements that Jesus’ makes—e.g., “He who saves his life will lose it,” “The first will be last.”

These statements rely on ambiguity of language for their solution (i.e., they rely on the fact that terms like “saving” and “losing” and “first” and “last” can be taken in different senses).

In this case, the term that is subject to ambiguity is “will.” This can indicate a determination, decision, or choice—or it can indicate a wish, preference, desire, or similar emotional rather than volitional state.

One can even recognize that one’s wish is not going to be fulfilled, but still give voice to it as a way of expressing one’s feelings.

That ambiguity seems to be in play here. By making his statement, Jesus is expressing his fundamental submission to the Father’s will while giving voice to the fact that he is experiencing death aversion. His statement could be paraphrased, less paradoxically, as “Not what I might wish, but may what you determine be done.”

Feelings vs. Resolve

This does not imply that Jesus’ will is not united to the Father’s. Indeed, he indicates that it is united to the Father’s.

Rather, it implies that Jesus is feeling something different than what he wills. What he wills is to do what the Father has determined, but he is experiencing the feelings of aversion that are normal for human beings in the presence of their own, imminent demise.

His giving voice to those feelings allows him to achieve an emotional release—just as when he wept or when he cried out in anguish—but his will is still in submission to the Father’s.

This incident thus highlights the dynamics of Jesus’ experience as a man. We also find ourselves in situations, particularly when we are suffering or preparing to die, where we need to say what we’re feeling as part of dealing with our emotions—even though we are resolved in our wills to a particular course of action.

By way of conclusion, I’d like to thank Gretchen and Bob Passantino for defending the fact that Jesus was always resolved to do the Father’s will, and I’d like to thank Gretchen for her gracious invitation to do this post.

The four Gospels all mention the empty tomb of Christ, which has become a mainstay of modern apologetics.

But some argue that the idea of the empty tomb was a late development in early Christianity—that it only arose decades after the Crucifixion, and that early Christians thought Jesus had been “spiritually” raised from the dead, not literally.

It was only with the passage of time that this spiritual resurrection was interpreted as a literal one, leading to the idea of the empty tomb.

In arguing for this view, advocates of this view might ask why earlier documents of the New Testament don’t mention the empty tomb.

This is, in fact, something that Philip Jenkins is wondering about . . .

Jenkins on the Empty Tomb

Over at his blog, Dr. Jenkins writes:

Let me pose the problem. From the time of Mark’s gospel, around 70, the empty tomb became central to the Resurrection narrative, so central in fact that Jews evolve rival stories to account for the absence of Jesus’s body (Matt. 28. 11-15). The story evidently mattered in religious polemic. Over the next thirty years or so, the story is repeated in various forms in three other gospels. Yet even Luke, who knows the story, makes no use of it in Acts. Before the 90s, moreover, (the time of Matthew and Luke), the one account that we do have of the empty tomb does not refer to visions of a bodily risen Jesus at or near the site.

Where is the empty tomb story before 70?

Suppose I face an atheist critic, who makes the following argument. Yes, he says, early Christians believed that they encountered the risen Jesus, that they had visions, but these visions had no objective reality. They just arose from the hopes and expectations of superstitious disciples. Even then, Christians saw that Resurrection in spiritual, pneumatic, terms. Only after a lengthy period, some forty years in fact, did the church invent stories to give a material, bodily basis to that phenomenon, and the empty tomb was the best known example.

How can I respond? Help me.

Some have already responded in his combox, but I’d like to provide a fuller response, so let’s go.

Challenging a Premise

My first response to an atheist critic would be that I don’t accept one of the premises—that the Gospels were written at such late dates.

The book of Acts suddenly stops, without resolving the story of Paul’s trial and imprisonment, in A.D. 60. Whether Paul was exonerated or executed, either would have been a fitting ending to Acts, and the best explanation for why Luke stopped writing without finishing the story is that those events simply had not happened yet. In other words, Acts was written in A.D. 60.

Since Acts is the sequel to the Gospel of Luke, that means Luke was written no later than A.D. 60 and possibly quite a bit earlier.

Depending on your theory of the order in which the Gospels were composed, either Matthew or Mark (or both) were written before Luke, and that would push them into at least the A.D. 50s, which is the same period that most of Paul’s epistles were being written.

Indeed, in 2 Corinthians 8:18, written in the mid A.D. 50s, Paul tells the readers that he is sending them “the brother whose praise is in the Gospel.” This may be a reference to either Mark or Luke, both sometime travelling companions of Paul and both authors of Gospels.

Even John shows signs of being written in the A.D. 60s. He refers to things in Jerusalem as still standing that would have been devastated in A.D. 70 (cf. John 5:2), and in the literal Greek of John 21:19 he speaks of Peter’s death—which took place in A.D. 67—as still in the future (“This he said to show by what death he [Peter] will glorify God”—future tense in the Greek). (There’s also the fact that John expressly claims to be written by an eyewitness of the empty tomb itself.)

So, despite the dates you commonly hear assigned to the Gospels, the evidence is that they were actually written quite a bit earlier, and their composition overlapped the period in which the epistles were written (see John A. T. Robinson, Redating the New Testament for more).

Challenging a Second Premise

KEEP READING.

In Galatians, St. Paul says at one point:

But when Cephas came to Antioch I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned.

For before certain men came from James, he ate with the Gentiles; but when they came he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party.

And with him the rest of the Jews acted insincerely, so that even Barnabas was carried away by their insincerity.

But when I saw that they were not straightforward about the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?” [Gal. 2:11-14].

What are we to make of this?

Some among the Church Fathers thought that this was a fake disagreement that Paul and Peter engaged in for teaching purposes.

For example, in his Commentary on Galatians, St. Jerome states:

Now, if anyone thinks that Paul really opposed Peter and fearlessly insulted his predecessor in defense of evangelical truth, he will not be moved by the fact that Paul acted as a Jew among fellow Jews in order to win them for Christ. What is more, Paul would have been guilty of the same kind of dissimulation on other occasions, such as when he shared his head in Cenchrea, when he made an offering in Jerusalem after doing this, when he circumcised Timothy and went barefoot-all of which are clearly aspects of Jewish religious ritual.

Later, he writes:

Just as people who walk normally but pretend to limp do not have a problem with their feet, though there is a reason why they [pretend to] limp, so also Peter, aware that neither circumcision nor uncircumcision matters but only keeping the commandments of God, ate beforehand with Gentiles but for a time withdrew from them to avoid alienating the Jews from their faith in Christ. Paul likewise employed the same pretense as Peter and confronted him and spoke in front of everyone, not so much to rebuke Peter as to correct those for whose sake Peter had engaged in simulation. Now, if anyone is not convinced by this interpretation, that Peter was not in error and Paul did not rashly rebuke his elder, he must account for why Paul criticized another for doing the same thing he had done.

St. John Chrysostom has the same interpretation here, and Jerome reports that Origen held it as well, though it does not appear in his surviving writings.

The Church Fathers were far from unanimous in this opinion, however, and it seems that Jerome and the others were in the minority.

The majority view, represented by St. Augustine, was that the two apostles had a real difference of opinion about the appropriateness of Peter’s actions. St. Augustine, in particular, points out that Jerome’s theory would involve the two apostles in lying.

A while back, I was reading one of Pope Benedict XVI’s audiences, where he weighed in on the subject:

Here the other epicenter of Mosaic observance emerges: the distinction between clean and unclean foods which deeply separated practicing Jews from Gentiles. At the outset Cephas, Peter, shared meals with both; but with the arrival of certain Christians associated with James, “the Lord’s brother” (Gal 1: 19), Peter began to avoid contact with Gentiles at table in order not to shock those who were continuing to observe the laws governing the cleanliness of food and his decision was shared by Barnabas.

This decision profoundly divided the Christians who had come from circumcision and the Christians who came from paganism.

This behavior, that was a real threat to the unity and freedom of the Church, provoked a passionate reaction in Paul who even accused Peter and the others of hypocrisy: “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?” (Gal 2: 14).

In fact, the thought of Paul on the one hand, and of Peter and Barnabas on the other, were different: for the latter the separation from the Gentiles was a way to safeguard and not to shock believers who came from Judaism; on the contrary, for Paul it constituted the danger of a misunderstanding of the universal salvation in Christ, offered both to Gentiles and Jews.

If justification is only achieved by virtue of faith in Christ, of conformity with him, regardless of any effect of the Law, what is the point of continuing to observe the cleanliness of foods at shared meals? In all likelihood the approaches of Peter and Paul were different: the former did not want to lose the Jews who had adhered to the Gospel, and the latter did not want to diminish the saving value of Christ’s death for all believers.

It has been noted that the fact that, after describing his rebuke of Peter, Paul does not immediately say, “And I won, and Peter agreed with me!” is a sign that he actually lost the argument.

If so, it may have given him cause for further reflection, which may have led him to consider situations in which some accommodation to Jewish practices was warranted–even if the situation in Antioch was not one of them. Pope Benedict noted:

It is strange to say but in writing to the Christians of Rome a few years later (in about the middle of the 50s A.D.), Paul was to find himself facing a similar situation and asked the strong not to eat unclean foods in order not to lose or scandalize the weak: “it is right not to eat meat or drink wine or do anything that makes your brother stumble” (Rm 14: 21).

The incident at Antioch thus proved to be as much of a lesson for Peter as it was for Paul.

Only sincere dialogue, open to the truth of the Gospel, could guide the Church on her journey: “For the kingdom of God does not mean food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Rm 14: 17).

It is a lesson that we too must learn: with the different charisms entrusted to Peter and to Paul, let us all allow ourselves to be guided by the Spirit, seeking to live in the freedom that is guided by faith in Christ and expressed in service to the brethren [General Audience, Oct. 1, 2008].

Thus Paul might have regarded Peter as wrong in the Antioch incident but have been led to more closely consider situations in which accommodating Jewish practices was permissible and even needed.

That could explain Jerome’s question about Paul later did similar things himself.

It’s obvious that the four Gospels agree on the main facts about Jesus’ life:

• He lived in first century Palestine.
• He travelled through Galilee and Judea.
• He worked miracles.
• He taught.
• He was crucified in Jerusalem at the time of Passover during the administration of Pontius Pilate.
• He rose from the dead.
• And so on.

All that’s obvious.

Contradictions Among the Gospels?

Critics of the Gospels therefore tend to focus on lesser matters—various differences among the Gospels on matters of detail.

The charges of contradictions among the Gospels tend to vanish, however, if one reads the texts carefully and if one understands the way ancient narrative texts worked and the freedom that authors had in how they presented their material.

They were, for example, free to paraphrase, they were free to place events in non-chronological order for literary effect, they were permitted to simplify and streamline events to just the main facts, and they were free to draw out different implications.

Rehearsed Witnesses?

Defenders of the Gospels sometimes point out that these kinds of differences are what we would expect of Gospels written by eyewitnesses or based on eyewitness testimony.

After all, in a courtroom you expect eyewitnesses to see things from different perspectives, to not all say exactly the same things, to paraphrase, and to alternately overlap and omit detail.

If the witnesses have too much harmony in their testimony—if they all say exactly the same things in exactly the same words, with no variation of detail—then it’s a sign that the witnesses have been rehearsed and their testimony becomes suspect.

They may be colluding with each other instead of telling what they really experienced.

Signs of Credibility

When evaluating testimony, lawyers (and juries!) look for signs of credibility in the testimony of the witnesses.

One sign of credibility is when tiny details do line up, but they’re the kind of details that the witnesses would not have thought to conspire about.

At first, these details don’t leap out at you. They’re hidden until you do a closer study of the testimony.

But when they harmonize, they give added evidence that you’re hearing the truth.

Are there such hidden harmonies among the Gospels?

Yes!

A Question for Philip

Here’s a hidden harmony between the material recorded in John’s Gospel and Luke’s Gospel.

KEEP READING.