THE TRIAL OF JESUS CHRIST. 



471 



hath spoken blasphemy ; what further need have 

 we of witnesses ? Behold, now ye have heard his 

 blasphemy. What think ye?" And they an 

 swered and said, " He is Ish Maveth— a man of 

 death." ..." Then they all condemned him to 

 be guilty of death." 



So passed that great condemnation. There 

 are very few points with regard to it which re- 

 main to be noticed. One relates to the lawful- 

 ness of the high-priest's adjuration, and to the 

 judicial use of the confession of the accused. 1 

 Nothing can be clearer than the Talmudists on 

 this. " Our law," says Maimonides, " condemns 

 no one to death upon his own confession." '•' It 

 is a fundamental principle with us," says Barte- 

 nora, " that no one can damage himself by what j 

 he says in judgment." 2 Putting the question to 

 the accused was therefore the last violation of 

 formal justice. Still, the question has been put, 

 and the answer has been given. Quid juris ? 

 Assuming that the claim made by Jesus had 

 come in the same form, but lawfully, before the 

 Sanhedrim, were they shut up to this condemna- 

 tion ? In answering this we have first to remem- 

 ber the distinctions already taken between blas- 

 phemy, in its simple meaning of profanity or in- 

 sult to God, and blasphemy as equivalent to trea- 

 son, overt or constructive, against the theocracy. 

 In the former sense there was no case here. The 

 words of the great accused were full of filial rev- 

 erence for the Father. 3 We have, therefore, to 

 go on to the latter sense, and to face the grave 

 question, Was it high treason in a Jew to claim to 

 be the Messias, the Son of God ? Most certainly 

 it was — unless it was true. And if blasphemy 

 was the proper word by which to designate so 

 tremendously audacious a claim, then was such 

 a false claim also blasphemous. But what if it 

 were true? In such a case the falsehood was 

 of the essence of the crime, and had to be 

 proved or assumed before the judicial conclu- 

 sion could be reached. The mere claim to be the 

 Messiah was no crime. "Art thou the Christ?" 

 was asked continually, of John, of Jesus, of 



1 The adjuration was of course equivalent to patting 

 the accused upon oath, and indeed seems to have been the 

 usual way in which that was done, tee Seidell's chapter 

 " De Jurnmentis " in his book on Sanhedrims, and the 

 other treatises on the same subject in vol. xxvi. of Ugo- 

 linus's Thesaur is. 



2 Mishna, De Synedriis, vi., 2, note. So Cocceius : " Ita 

 tenent Magistri, neminem ex propria confessione aut pro- 

 phetas vaticinio esse neci dandum." And even Salvador: 

 '■ Notre loi ne condamne jamais sur le simple aveu de 

 raccuse." 



3 Of blasphemy in this proper sense, the cautious rule 

 of the Mishna must be understood : " Nemo tenetur blas- 

 phemus, nisi expressit nomen."— Be Synedriis, vii., 5, 



every reformer, and of every prophet ; though an 

 answer in the affirmative was held to be the most 

 daring claim that human lips could frame. What 

 relation indeed the Messiah of the Jews was sup- 

 posed to have to their unseen King, and how far 

 the dignity, not unknown to that age, of " Son of 

 God," could freely be applied to the expected 

 Christ, are questions on which vast learning has 

 been expended. We shall equally err if we sup- 

 pose that these words had in their ears all the 

 meaning with which subsequent theology has in- 

 vested them, or if we forget that the purpose and 

 bearing of the accused gave them, on this last as 

 on previous occasions, a unique and divine sig- 

 nificance. But the twofold claim — made seem- 

 ingly in response to the grouping of the two ideas 

 (Art thou " the Christ, the Son of God ? ") by the 

 high-priest himself — could never release a He 

 brew tribunal from the duty of weighing a claim 

 to Messiahship. The proper response of an un- 

 believing judge, like Caiaphas, when his adjura- 

 tion was answered by confession, was, " What 

 sign shewest thou then, that we may sec and be- 

 lieve thee ? " And when instead he rent his 

 clothes, with the words, " What need ye further 

 witnesses ? " it was either the preconcerted plan 

 by which to terminate the whole semblance of 

 judicial procedure, or, perhaps, a sudden inspira- 

 tion of evil, spoken a second time not wholly of 

 himself, in a moment when the cold, hard, cruel 

 thoughts, which had so long smouldered in the 

 unjust judge, blazed up at the touch of confront- 

 ing righteousness into final and murderous par- 

 oxysm. 



We pass next to the Roman tribunal. But 

 our conclusion on the question of Hebrew law 

 must be this : that a process begun, continued, 

 and apparently finished, in the course of one 

 night ; with witnesses against the accused who 

 were sought for by the judges, but whose evidence 

 was not sustained even by them ; commencing 

 with interrogatories which Hebrew law does not 

 sanction, and ending with a demand for confes- 

 sion which its doctors expressly forbid ; all fol- 

 lowed, twenty-four hours too soon, by a sentence 

 which described a claim to be the fulfiller of the 

 hopes of Israel as blasphemy — that such a pro- 

 cess had neither the form nor the fairness of a 

 judicial trial. But though it wanted judicial 

 fairness and form, it may nevertheless have been 

 a real and important transaction. There is no 

 reason to think that the council mistook the 

 claim of Jesus. And there is every reason to be- 

 lieve that their condemnation truly expressed the 

 nation's rejection of his claim. — Contemporary 

 Review. 



