he received the body; he washed it, anointed it with spices, and laid it on a bed of moss in the rock-hewn grave. From the blood which was still flowing from the wound in the side, he ventured to draw a hopeful augury, and sent word to the Essene Brethren. They had a hold close by, and promised to watch over the body. In the first four-and-twenty hours no movement of life showed itself. Then came the earthquake. In the midst of the terrible commotion a Brother, in the white robes of the Order, was making his way to the grave by a secret path. When he, illumined by a flash of lightning, suddenly appeared above the grave, and at the same moment the earth shook violently, panic seized the watch, and they fled. In the morning the Brother hears a sound from the grave: Jesus is moving. The whole Order hastens to the spot, and Jesus is removed to their Lodge. Two brethren remain at the grave—these were the "angels" whom the women saw later. Jesus, in the dress of a gardener, is afterwards recognised by Mary Magdalene. Later, He comes out at intervals ficm the hiding-place, where He is kept by the Brethren, and appears to the disciples. After forty days He took His leave of them: His strength was exhausted. The farewell scene gave rise to the mistaken impression of His Ascension.
From the historical point of view these lives are not such contemptible performances as might be supposed. There is much penetrating observation in them. Bahrdt and Venturini are right in feeling that the connexion of events in the life of Jesus has to be discovered; the Gospels give only a series of occurrences, and offer no explanation why they happened just as they did. And if, in making Jesus subservient to the plans of a secret society, they represented Him as not acting with perfect freedom, but as showing a certain passivity, this assumption of theirs was to be brilliantly vindicated, a hundred years later, by the eschatological school, which asserts the same remarkable passivity on the part of Jesus, in that He allows His actions to be determined, not indeed by a secret society, but by the eschatological plan of God. Bahrdt and Venturini were the first to see that, of all Jesus' acts, His death was most distinctively His own, because it was by this that He purposed to found the kingdom.
Venturini's "Non-supernatural History of the Great Prophet of Nazareth" may almost be said to be reissued annually down to the present day, for all the fictitious "Lives" go back directly or indirectly to the type which he created. It is plagiarised more freely than any other Life of Jesus, although practically unknown by name.
