In the first period Jesus' thoughts concerning His own sufferings were included in the more general thought 01 the sufferings which formed part of the mystery of the Kingdom of God. The exhortations to hold steadfastly to Him in the time of trial, and not to lose faith in Him certainly tended to suggest that He thought of Himself as the central point amid these conflicts and confusions, and reckoned on the possibility of His own death as much as on that of others. Upon this point nothing more definite can be said, since the mystery of Jesus' own sufferings does not detach itself from the mystery of the sufferings connected with the Kingdom of God until after the Messianic secret is made known at Caesarea Philippi. What is certain is that, for Him, suffering was always associated with the Messianic secret, since He placed His Parousia at the end of the pre-Messianic tribulations in which He was to have His part.
The suffering, death, and resurrection of which the secret was revealed at Caesarea Philippi are not therefore in themselves new or surprising. [1] The novelty lies in the form in which they are conceived. The tribulation, so far as Jesus is concerned, is now connected with an historic event: He will go to Jerusalem, there to suffer death at the hands of the authorities.
For the future, however, He no longer speaks of the general tribulation which He is to bring upon the earth, nor of the sufferings which await His followers, nor of the sufferings in which they must rally round Him. In the predictions of the passion there is no word of that; at Jerusalem there is no word of that. This thought disappears once for all.
In the secret of His passion which Jesus reveals to the disciples at Caesarea Philippi the pre-Messianic tribulation is for others set aside, abolished, concentrated upon Himself alone, and that in the
- ↑ Difficult problems are involved in the prediction of the resurrection in Mark xiv. 28. Jesus there promises His disciples that He will "go before them" into Galilee. That cannot mean that He will go alone into Galilee before them, and that they shall there meet with Him, their risen Master; what He contemplates is that He shall return with them, at their head, from Jerusalem to Galilee. Was it that the manifestation of the Son of Man and of the Judgment should take place there? So much is clear: the saying, far from directing the disciples to go away to Galilee, chains them to Jerusalem, there to await Him who should lead them home. It should not therefore be claimed as supporting the tradition of the Galilaean appearances. We find it "corrected" by the saying of the "young man" at the grave, who gays to the women, "Go, tell His disciples and Peter that He goeth before you into Galilee. There shall ye see Him as He said unto you." Here then the idea of following in point of time is foisted upon the words "he goeth before you," whereas in the original the word has a purely local sense, corresponding to the cai hn proagwn autouV o IhsouV in Mark x. 32. But the correction is itself meaningless since the visions took place in Jerusalem. We have therefore in this passage a more detailed indication of the way in which Jesus thought of the events subsequent to His Resurrection. The interpretation of this unfulfilled saying is, however, wholly impossible for us: it was net less so for the earliest tradition, as is shown by the attempt to give it a meaning by the "correction."
