building must have commenced in the autumn of the year 734-35. But it has already been explained that, in Jewish reckoning, the beginning of a new year was reckoned as a year. Thus if, according to universal opinion (comp. Wieseler, Chronolog. Synopse, pp. 165, 166), the Temple-building began in Kislev 734, forty-nine years after it would bring us to the autumn 779, and the Passover of 780, or 27 A.D., would be regarded and spoken of as 'forty and six years.' If a Jew had calculated the time at the Passover 781, he would not have said 'forty-six' but 'forty- seven years' 'was this Temple in building.' The mistake of writers lies in forgetting that a fresh year had begun after the autumn, or at any rate at the Passover. It may here be added, that the Temple was not finally completed till 63 A.D.] but of whose spiritual character and upbuilding they have no knowledge nor thought. And thus, as to that generation, so to all which have followed, this is stil the 'sign,' if they understand it, the only sign, the Great Miracle, which, as they only calculate from the visible and to them ascertained, these 'despiser behold, and wonder, and perish,' for He worketh 'a work in their days, a work which they shall in no wise believe, [a Acts xiii. 41.]
THE ASCENT: FROM THE RIVER JORDAN TO THE MOUNT OF TRANSFIGURATION. THE TEACHER COME FROM GOD AND THE TEACHER FROM JERUSALEM JESUS AND NICODEMUS. CHAPTER VI
(St. Johniii. 1-21.)
But there were those who beheld, and heard His words, and did in some measure understand them. Even before Jesus had spoken to the Temple-officials, His disciples, as silently they watched Him, saw an old Scripture- saying kindled into light by the halo of His glory. It was that of the suffering, self-forgetful, God-dedicated Servant of Jehovah, as His figure stood out against the Old Testament sky, realising in a hostile world only this, as the deepest element of His being and calling: entire inward and outward consecration to God, a burnt-offering, such as Isaac would have been. Within their minds sprang up unbidden, as when the light of the Urim and Thummim fell on the letter graven on the precious stones of the High-Priest's breastplate, those words of old: 'The zeal of Thine house eateth me up. [a Ps. lxix. 9.] Thus, even in those days of their early learning, Jesus purging the Temple in view of a hostile rulership was the full realisation of that picture, which must be prophetic, since no mere man ever bore those lineaments: that of the ideal Nazarite, whom the zeal of God's house was consuming. And then long afterwards, after His Passion and Death, after those dark days of loneliness and doubt, after the misty dawn of the first recognition, this word, which He had spoken to the rulers at the first, came to them, with all the convincing power of prediction fulfilled by fact, as an assured conviction, which in its strong grasp held not only the past, but the present, because the present is ever the fulfilment of the past: 'When therefore He was risen from the dead, His disciples remembered that He had said this unto them; and they believed the Scripture, and the word which Jesus had said.'
Again, as we think of the meaning of His refusing 'a sign' to the rulers of Israel, or rather think of the only 'sign' which He did give them, we see nothing incompatible with it in the fact that, at the same feast, He did many 'signs' [1 Although our A.V. translates in ver. 18 'sign' and in ver. 23 'miracles,' the Greek word is the same in both cases, and means a 'sign.'] in sight of the people. For it was only the rulers who had entered on that conflict, of which, from the character and aims of the two parties engaged, the beginning involved the terrible end as its logical sequence. In presence of such a foe only one 'sign' could be given: that of reading their inmost hearts, and in them their real motives and final action, and again of setting forth His own final triumph, a predictive description, a 'no sign' that was, and is, a sign to all time. But neither challenge nor hostile demand for a sign had been addressed to Him by the people. Indeed even at the last, when incited by their rulers, and blindly following them, 'they knew not what they did.' And it was to them that Jesus now, on the morning of His Work, spoke by 'signs.'
The Feast of the Passover commenced on the 15th Nisan, dating it, of course, from the preceding evening. But before that, before the slaying of the Paschal Lamb, on the afternoon of the 14th Nisan, the visitor to the Temple would mark something peculiar. [2 We reserve a detailed account of the Paschal celebration for our account of the last Passover of Jesus.] On the evening of the 13th Nisan, with which the 14th, or 'preparation-day,' commenced, the head of each household would, with lighted candle and in solemn silence, search out all leaven in his house, prefacing his search with solemn thanksgiving and appeal to God, and closing it by an equally solemn declaration that he had accomplished it, so far as within his knowledge, and disavowing responsibility for what lay beyond it. And as the worshippers went to the Temple, they would see prominently exposed, on a bench in one of the porches, two desecrated cakes of some thankoffering, indicating that it was still lawful to eat of that which was leavened. At ten, or at latest eleven o'clock, one of those cakes was removed, and then they knew that it was no longer lawful to eat of it. At twelve o'clock the second cake was removed, and this was the signal for
solemnly burning all the leaven that had been gathered. Was it on the eve of the 14th, when each head of a house sought for and put aside the leaven, or else as the people watched these two cakes, and then the removal of the last of them, which marked that all leaven was to be 'purged out,' that Jesus, in real fulfilment of its national meaning, 'cleansed' the Temple of its leaven?
We can only suggest the question. But the 'cleansing of the Temple' undoubtedly preceded the actual festive Paschal week, [a St. John ii.] To those who were in Jerusalem it was a week such as had never been before, a week when 'they saw the signs which He did,' and when, stirred by a strange impulse, 'they believed in His Name' as the Messiah. 'A milk-faith,' as Luther pithily calls it, which fed on, and required for its sustenance, 'signs.' And like a vision it passed with the thing seen. Not a faith to which the sign was only the fingerpost, but a faith of which the sign, not the thing signified, was the substance; a faith which dazzled the mental sight, but reached not down to the heart. And Jesus, Who with heart-searching glance saw what was in man, Who needed not any to tell Him, but with immediateness knew all, did not commit Himself to them. They were not like His first Galilean disciples, true of heart and in heart. The Messiah Whom these found, and He Whom those saw, met different conceptions. The faith of the Jerusalem sign-seers would not have compassed what the Galileans experienced; it would not have understood nor endured, had He committed Himself to them. And yet He did, in wondrous love, condescend and speak to them in the only language they could understand, in that of'signs.' Nor was it all in vain.
Unrecorded as these miracles are, because the words they spoke were not recorded on many hearts, it was not only here and there, by this or that miracle, that their power was felt. Their grand general effect was, to make the more spiritually minded and thoughtful feel that Jesus was indeed 'a teacher come from God.' In thinking of the miracles of Jesus, and generally of the miraculous in the New Testament, we are too apt to overlook the principal consideration in the matter. We regard it from our present circumstances, not from those of the Jews and people of that time; we judge it from our standpoint, not from theirs. And yet the main gist of the matter lies here. We would not expect to be convinced of the truth of religion, nor converted to it, by outward miracles; we would not expect them at all. Not but that, if a notable miracle really did occur, its impression and effect would be overwhelming; although, unless a miracle submitted itself to the strictest scientific tests, when in the nature of things it would cease to be a miracle, it would scarcely find general credence. Hence, truth to say, the miraculous in the New Testament constitutes to modern thought not its strong, but its weak point; not its convincing evidence, but its point of attack and difficulty. Accordingly, treating of, or contemplating the miracles of the New Testament, it is always their moral, not their natural (or supranatural), aspect which has its chief influence upon us. But what is this but to say that ours is modern, not ancient thought, and that the evidential power of Christ's miracles has given place to the age and dispensation of the Holy Ghost? With us the process is the reverse of what it was with them of old. They approached the moral and spiritual through the miraculous; we the miraculous through the moral and spiritual. His Presence, that one grand Presence is, indeed, ever the same. But God always adapts His teaching to our learning; else it were not teaching at all, least of all Divine teaching. Only what carries it now to us is not the same as what carried it to them of old: it is no more the fingerpost of 'signs,' but the finger of the Spirit. To them the miraculous was the expected, that miraculous which to us also is so truly and Divinely miraculous, just because it applies to all time, since it carries to us the moral, as to them the physical, aspect of the miracle; in each case, Divine reality Divinely
conveyed. It may therefore safely be asserted, that to the men of that time no teaching of the new faith would have been real without the evidence of miracles.
In those days, when the idea of the miraculous was, so to speak, fluid, passing from the natural into the supernatural, and men regarded all that was above their view-point of nature as supernatural, the idea of the miraculous would, by its constant recurrence, always and prominently suggest itself. Other teachers also, among
