ascending scale-"the judgement . . . . the council. . . . the Gehenna of fire." By "the judgement" is meant the local Jewish court established in every important town, of which mention is made in Deut. 16:18. Josephus says that it consisted of seven persons.' "The council" signifies here the great senate and supreme court of the nation, which was called the Sanhedrin. The offenses mentioned by Jesus do not seem to form a scale with a climax, for the difference between calling a man "Raca" (an expression of contempt) and "Fool" seems not very great; nor is the utterance of either much more criminal than the harboring of inarticulate anger. The movement upward in phases of jurisdiction is, therefore, a literary advance, it appears, rather than a necessity of the thought. But there is such a movement, and since the prerogative of “the judgement" was death by the sword, and that of "the council" death by stoning, further degradation than the form of death imposed by the latter must involve additional desecration of the body. Nothing more despicable in this regard can well be imagined than the assign-x ment of the body to a place with the carcasses of dead animals in the depository of the city offal, the valley of Hinnom. The right to pronounce this dread sentence was reserved, it may be, as the special prerogative of the president of the Sanhedrin, who, according to the testimony of Josephus and the New Testament, was the high-priest of the nation. No doubt consignment to Gehenna was confined to those guilty of the most serious offenses. And under the division of jurisdiction between the Romans and the Jews in Palestine in the time of Jesus, the Sanhedrin naturally gave itself more and more to moral and religious prosecution. Apparently it is against religio-social acts of criminality in connection with their propaganda that Jesus warns his disciples in the final discourse on the future: DOCUMENT P 820 And I say unto you my friends, Be not afraid of them which kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will warn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, which after he hath killed hath authority to cast into Gehenna; yea, I say unto you, Fear him. By reference to what precedes these words in the instructions, it will be seen that Jesus had just enjoined the disciples to speak subsequently with unreserved freedom of those truths which he had bidden 1 Antiquities, iv, 8, §15; War, ii, 20, §5. them to keep during his lifetime as their private possession. The content of those truths was, it seems from previous studies, the statement of the messianic vocation of Jesus and "the mystery of the kingdom." Henceforth there is to be "nothing covered up that shall not be revealed, and hid that shall not be known." But this does not involve the entire absence of discretion. While they are not to fear the death of the body at the hands of persecutors, they ought to pursue a course, even in their freedom of speech, which will avoid all unnecessary precipitation of action by the courts, especially to shun conduct in deed and speech which will make them liable to the most opprobrious treatment during and after death. The prerogative of assignment to the valley of Hinnom is regarded as lodged in the hands of one man-"him which hath authority to cast into Gehenna." They are to act in the mission with a wisdom which will keep them out of the hands of the high-priest, though violent death in the normal course of the prosecution of their propaganda is not to be feared or shunned. No doubt the above saying of Jesus about Gehenna would become much clearer to the reader of today did we know more precisely the nature of those breaches of Jewish law which were referred to "the council," the Sanhedrin, especially of those to which there was attached the extreme penalty of consignment of the body to Gehenna. In the absence of external testimony there can be conjecture only. It seems probable also that certain phrasing in the report of the saying as above preserved, by which it may have been more or less changed from the form given it by Jesus, are the outcome of that same tendency which is seen at the full in the Matthaean P report of the same saying: MATTHAEAN P $20 And be not afraid of them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. Here the words "but are not able to kill the soul" have taken the place of the original "and after that have no more that they can do." Instead of the natural words "Fear him which after he hath killed hath authority to cast into Gehenna," the Matthaean hand has inserted "Fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in Gehenna." These changes give an entirely different content to the thought of the saying. The Matthaean contrast is between "body" and "soul;" in the Lukan P the opposition is that of the mere death of the body to its death followed by desecration. There is, it seems, no mention or thought of "the soul" in the Lukan P report. With the Lukan P, the body is to be "cast into Gehenna"-a natural description of the carrying-out of the judicial sentence. But by the Matthaean changes this procedure is supplanted by something of another nature, "to destroy both soul and body in Gehenna. In brief, the Matthaean terms, as usual, have carried the whole thought over into the eschatological region. The illuminative phrase of the original, "which after he hath killed hath authority to cast into Gehenna," is lost in the assignment to the evil one of the power to destroy "the soul." In order to reach the thought of Jesus in this saying, there is need that it be clearly perceived that the original antithesis is apparently not that of "body" and "soul," but of two differing fates for the body. It seems to be again the body, and the body only, that is in the mind of Jesus when he sets one member of the body over against the whole body in his notable saying about the act of adultery through one member, the eye or the hand: DOCUMENT M 85 Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt not commit adultery: but I say unto you, that every one that looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart. And if thy right eye causeth thee to stumble, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not thy whole body be cast into Gehenna. And if thy right hand causeth thee to stumble, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not thy whole body go into Gehenna. The issue that Jesus places before his hearer is the choice between the total loss of that member of the body which leads into the sin of adultery with the resultant freedom from adultery on the one hand, and, on the other, the retention of the offending member with consequent indulgence in adultery and the inevitable ultimate degeneracy and ruin of the body through indulgence. This ultimate debilitation and practical dissolution of the body he likens to that process of corruptive decay which was most loathingly brought to the mind by the putrefaction of bodies of criminals and carcasses of animals in the valley of Hinnom. It is better, he urges, to pluck out the eye or cut off the hand than to retain them at the cost of the wreck of the body a wreck comparable only to that wrought in connection with the casting of the body into the valley of Hinnom. It is not improbable that adultery under certain circumstances, or the social evil in certain forms, was punishable in the time of Jesus by judicial committment of the criminal to the opprobrium of desecration through assignment of the body after death to the valley of Hinnom. Whatever the choice of the individual, it is here the body only that is involved by the words of Jesus; he raises the question as to the wisdom of the sacrifice of "the whole body" when ruthless and immediate dealing with "one of the members" will save the whole from desecration. But there is a strong movement away from this forceful, clear, simple, and searching thought in that report of these sayings which has found a place in document MK as below, a movement like that seen in the Matthaean account of the document P $20 saying previously examined, that is, an eschatological recasting of the sayings so that the original sense is wholly obscured: A B DOCUMENT MK 9:42-48 And whosoever shall cause one of these little ones that believe on me to stumble, it were better for him if a great millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea. And if thine eye cause C And if thy hand cause thee The portion A under document MK will recall the setting given these sayings in that document; and when compared with portion A under document M will give weighty reasons for the conviction that document M, not document MK, has reported these words about eye and hand in their historical context. The evangelist Matthew had both documents, and therefore had the sayings before him in two very different connections. He retained them in both, reducing the statement in portion C of document MK by combining "thy hand" with "thy foot." No doubt the attentive reader will be able to trace some possible minor influences of the document M report in the gospel MT transcription of document MK. It ought to be observed that, for purposes of comparison, the document MK and gospel MT order has been conformed above to that of document M, their actual sequence of sayings being A, C, B, D. Except for a single instance, the uniform phrase of document MK and gospel MT is "enter into life;" no doubt the "enter into the kingdom of God" of portion B in document MK was originally "enter into life;" that seems established by the testimony of the Matthaean copy of it in portion B of gospel MT. The document MK contrast, followed by gospel MT, is set forth in the opposed fates, "to enter into life" and "to be cast into Gehenna." Gehenna is defined further as "the unquenchable fire" or "the eternal fire," and is described as a place "where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched." That is to say, it is an eschatological fate of endless duration; against it there stands by contrast the blessedness of the righteous, to "enter into life." Thus the contrast as set forth in document M has been lost; it is no longer an alternative between "thy right eye" and "thy whole body," but between "enter into life" and "be cast into Gehenna." Instead of two possible fates for the part or the whole of the body in the present life, there has been substituted two possible states of the body, mutilated or unmutilated, in the future life. By some simple and probably unconscious changes in transmission, the saying as preserved in document MK has departed widely from the original thought of Jesus as recorded in document M. And it is not alone by the transfer of the whole to the future life that the mind of Jesus as expressed in these sayings has been obscured. There is given to the term Gehenna a new content; it becomes "the Gehenna of fire," X "the unquenchable fire," "the eternal fire," the place "where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched." None of these things are said of it in the document M report; there it is simply Gehenna, that is, the valley of Hinnom. It is important to recall at this point the fact that Gehenna is nowhere used in the Old Testament except either in the topographical sense strictly speaking, or in reference to the valley of Hinnom as the region of idolatrous |