Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (804 page)

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MIRACLES-CURSING THE BAEBEN FIG-TREE.fruits at the time in which they are wont to be ripe, it cannot be said that it is the wrong season for fruit; on the contrary, the idea of a bad year might be at once conveyed by the statement, that when the time for fruit came, ore fjhOev b naipb^ ru>v Kap-rruv, there was none to be found. In any case, if the whole course of the year were unfavourable to figs, a fruit so abundant in Palestine, Jesus must almost as necessarily have known this, as that it was the wrong season; so that the enigma remains, how Jesus could be so indignant that the tree was in a condition which, owing to circumstances known to him, was inevitable.
But let us only remember who it is, to whom we owe that addition. It is Mark, who, in his efforts after the explanatory and the picturesque, so frequently draws on his own imagination; and in doing this, as it has been long ago perceived, and as we also have had sufficient opportunities of observing on our way, he does not always go to work in the most considerate manner. Thus, here, he is arrested by the first striking particular that presents itself, namely, that the tree was without fruit, and hastens to furnish the explanation, that it was not the time for figs, not observing that while he accounts physically for the barrenness of the tree, he makes the conduct of Jesus morally inexplicable. Again, the above-mentioned divergency from Matthew in relation to the time within which the tree withered, far from evincing more authentic information,* or a tendency to the natural explanation of the marvellous on the part of Mark, is only another product of the same dramatising effort as that which gave birth to the above addition. The idea of a tree suddenly withering at a word, is difficult for the imagination perfectly to fashion; whereas it cannot be called a bad dramatic contrivance, to lay the process of withering behind the scenes, and to make the result be first noticed by the subsequent passers by. For the rest, in the assertion that it was then, (a few clays before Easter), no time for figs, Mark is so far right, as it regards the conditions of climate in Palestine, that at so early a time of the year the new figs of the season were not yet ripe, for the early fig or boccore is not ripe until the middle or towards the end of June; while the proper fig, the kcrmus, ripens only in the month of August. On the other hand, there might about Easter still be met with here and there, hanging on the tree, the third fruit of the fig-tree, the late kermus, which had remained from the previous autumn, and through the winter ;f as we read in Josephus that a part of Palestine (the shores of the Galilean sea, more fruitful, certainly, than the country around Jerusalem, where the history in question occurred,) ^produces figs uninterruptedly daring ten months of the year, OVK.OV 6ina \it\alv ttwa^eirrrwf ^op^yet.t But even when we have thus set. aside this perplexing addition * As Sieffcrt thinks, iiber den Urapr. S. 113 ff. Compare my reviews, in the Ch»-rakteristiken and Kritiken, S. 272. f Vid. Paulus, ut sup. S. 168 f.; Winer, b. Reahv.
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FT*THE LIFE OF JESUS.
of Mark’s, that tlie tree was not really defective, but only appeared so to Jesus in consequence of an erroneous expectation: there still subsists, even according to Matthew, the incongruity that Jesus appears to have destroyed a natural object on account of a deficiency which might possibly be merely temporary. He cannot have been prompted to this by economical considerations, since he was not the owner of the tree;still less can he have been actuated by moral views, in relation to an inanimate object of nature; hence the expedient has been adopted of substituting the disciples as the proper object on which Jesus here intended to act, and of regarding the tree and what Jesus does to it, as a mere means to his ultimate design. This is the symbolical interpretation, by which first the fathers of the church and of late’the majority of orthodox theologians among the moderns, have thought to free Jesus from the charge of an unsuitable action. According to them, anger towards the tree which presented nothing to appease his hunger, was not the feeling of Jesus, in performing this action; his object, not simply the extermination of the unfruitful plant:on the contrary, he judiciously availed himself of the occasion of finding a barren tree, in order to impress a truth on his disciples more vividly and indelibly than by words. This truth may either be conceived under a special form, namely, that the Jewish nation which persisted in rendering no pleasing fruit to God and to the Messiah, would be destroyed; or under the general form, that every one who was as destitute of good works as this tree was of fruit, had to look forward to a similar
 
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with reason maintain, that if Jesus had had such an end in view in the action, he must in some way have explained himself on the subject; for it an elucidation was necessary when he delivered a parable, it was the more indispensable when he performed a symbolical action, in proportion as this, without such an indication of an object lying beyond itself, was more likely to be mistaken for an object in itself ;t it is true that, here as well as elsewhere, it might be supposed, that Jesus probably enlarged 011 what he had done, for the instruction of his disciples, but that the narrators, content with the miracle, have omitted the illustrative discourse. If however Jesus gave au interpretation of his act in the alleged symbolical sense, the evangelists have not merely been silent concerning this discourse, but have inserted a false one in its place ; for they represent Jesus, after his procedure with respect to the tree, not as being silent, but as giving, in answer to an expression of astonishment on the part ot his disciples, an explanation which is not the above symbolical one, but a different, nay, an opposite one.For when Jesus says to them that they need not wonder at the withering of the fig-tree, since with “ ‘ ‘ n•” 1
 
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only a little faith they will be able to effect yet greater things, lie * Ullmann, uber die Unsundllchkeit Jesu, in his Studien, 1, S. 60 ; Sieffcrt, ut sup.
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MIRACLES-CtJBSING THE BARREN FIG-TEEE.lays the chief stress on his agency in the matter, not on the condition and the fate of the tree as a symbol: therefore, if his design turned upon the latter, he would have spoken to his disciples so as to contravene that design; or rather, if he so spoke, that cannot have been his design. For the same reason, falls also Sieffert’s totally unsupported hypothesis, that Jesus, not indeed after, but before that act, when on the way to the fig-tree, had held a conversation with his disciples on the actual condition and future lot of the Jewish nation, and that to this conversation the symbolical cursing of the tree was a mere key-stone, which explained itself: for all comprehension of the act in question which that introduction might have facilitated, must, especially in that age when there was so stronf a bias towards the miraculous, have been again obliterated by the subsequent declaration of Jesus, which regarded only the miraculous side of the fact. Hence Ullmann has judged rightly in preferring to the symbolical interpretation, although he considers it admissible, another which had previously been advanced :* namely, that Jesus by this miracle intended to give his followers a new proof of his perfect power, in order to strengthen their confidence in him under the approaching perils. Or rather, as a special reference to coming trial is nowhere exhibited, and as the words of Jesus contain nothing which he had not already said at an earlier period (Matth. xvii. 20; Luke xvii. 6), Fritzsche is more correct in expressing the view of the evangelists quite generally, thus: Jesus used his displeasure at the unfruitfulness of the tree, as an occasion for performing a miracle, the object of which was merely the- general one of all his miracles, namely, to attest his Messiahship.t Hence Euthymius speaks entirely in the spirit of the narrators, as described by Fritzscne.J when he forbids all investigation into the special end of the action, and exhorts the reader only to look at it in general as a miracle.§ But it by no means follows from hence that we too should refrain from all reflection on the subject, and believ-ingly receive the miracle without further question; on the contrary, we cannot avoid observing, that the particular miracle which we have now before us, docs not admit of being explained as a real act of Jesus, either upon the general ground of performing miracles, or from any peculiar object or motive whatever. Far from this, it is in every respect opposed both to his theory and his prevailing practice, and on this account, even apart from the question of its physical possibility, must be pronounced more decidedly than any other, to be such a miracle as Jesus cannot really have performed.
* Ileydenreich, in the Theol. Nachrichten, 1SU, Mai, S. 121 ff. f Comra. iu Matt. p. 637. t Comm. in Marc. p. 481: Male-vv. dd. in eo hceserunt, quod Jesus sine ratione innocentem ficum aridam reddidisse videretur, mirisque argutiis usi sunt, ut aliquod kujus ret consil’mm fuisse ostenderent. Nimirum apostoli, evangelistic et omnes primi temporis Christian^ qua erani ingeniorum simplicitate, quid quantmnque Jesus portentose fecisse di-ceretur, cururunt tantummodo, non quod Jesu. in edendo miraculo consil’mm fuel-it, subtiliter ft argute (/Ufptirermit. 3 M?7 aKpiilo^oyov Atari TCT/uuoVTai TO tivrbv. uvairiov ov uA/luTHE LIFE OF JESUS.
It is incumbent on us, however, to adduce positive proof of the existence of such causes as, even without historical foundation, might give rise to a narrative of this kind. Now in our usual source, the Old Testament, we do, indeed, find many figurative discourses and narratives about trees, and fig-trees in particular; but none which has so specific an affinity to our narrative, that we could say the latter is an imitation of it.But we need not search long in the New Testament, before we find, first in the mouth of the Baptist (Matt, iii. 10.), then in that of Jesus (vii. 19.), the apothegm of the tree, which, because it bears no good fruit, is cut down and cast into the fire; and farther on (Luke xiii. 6 ff.) this theme is dilated into the fictitious history of a man who for three years in vain seeks for fruit on a fig-tree in his vineyard, and on this account determines to cut it down, but that the gardener intercedes for another year’s respite. It was already an idea of some Fathers of the church, that the cursing of the fig-tree was only the parable of the barren fig-tree carried out into action.*It is true that they held this opinion in the sense of the explanation before cited, namely, that Jesus himself, as he had previously exhibited the actual condition and the approaching catastrophe of the Jewish people in a figurative discourse, intended on the occasion in question to represent them by a symbolical action; which, as we have seen, is inconceivable.Nevertheless, we cannot help conjecturing, that we have before us one and the same theme under three different modifications: first, in the most concentrated form, as an apothegm; then expanded into a parable; and lastly realized as a history.But we do not suppose that Avhat Jesus twice described in words, he at length represented by an action; in our opinion, it was tradition which converted what it met with as an apothegm and a parable, into a real incident. That in the real history the end of the tree is somewhat different from that threatened in the apothegm and parable, namely, withering instead of being cut down, need not amount to a difficulty. For had the parable once become a real history, with Jesus for its subject, and consequently its whole didactic and symbolical significance passed into the external act, then must this, if it were to have any weight and interest, take the form of a miracle, and the natural destruction of the tree by means of the axe, must be transformed into an immediate withering on the word of Jesus. It is true that there seems to be the very same objection to this conception of the narrative which allows its inmost kernel to be symbolical, as to the one above considered; namely, that it is contravened by the words of Jesus which are appended to the narrative. But on our view of the gospel histories we are warranted to say, that with the transformation of the parable into a history, its original sense also was lost, and as the miracle began to be regarded as constituting the pith of the matter, that discourse on miraculous power and faith, was ei-roneously annexed <-~ if
 
Ty tlie root, and be thou planted in the sea. Hence the cursing of the fig-tree, so soon as its Avithering was conceived to be an effect of the miraculous power of Jesus, brought to mind the tree or the mountain which was to be transported by the miraculous power of faith, and this saying became appended to that fact. Thus, in this instance, praise is due to the third gospel for having preserved to us the parable of the barren CVKTJ, and the apothegm of the ovnd\uvoq to be transplanted by faith, distinct and pure, each in its original form and significance; while the two other synoptists have transformed the parable into a history, and have misapplied the apothegm (in a somewhat altered form) to a false explanation of that pretended history.*

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