The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (4th ed.)

The anecdote of the fig-tree which Jesus caused to wither by his word, because when he was hungry he found no fruit on it, is peculiar to the two first gospels (Matt. xxi. 18 ff.; Mark xi. 12 ff.), but is narrated by them with divergencies which must affect our view of the fact. One of these divergencies of Mark from Matthew, appears so favourable to the natural explanation, that, chiefly in consideration of it, a tendency towards the natural view of the miracles of Jesus has been of late ascribed to this Evangelist; and for the sake of this one favourable divergency, he has been defended in relation to the other rather inconvenient one, which is found in the narrative before us.

If we were restricted to the manner in which the first Evangelist states the consequence of the curse of Jesus: and immediately the fig-tree withered away καὶ ἐξηράνθη παραχρῆμα ἡ συκῆ, it would be difficult here to carry out a natural explanation; for even the forced interpretation of Paulus, which makes the word παραχρῆμα (immediately) only exclude further human accession to the fact, and not a longer space of time, rests only on an unwarranted transference of Mark’s particulars into the narrative of Matthew. In Mark, Jesus curses the fig-tree on the morning after His entrance into Jerusalem, and not till the following morning the disciples remark, in passing, that the tree is withered. Through this interim, which Mark leaves open between the declaration of Jesus and the withering of the tree, the natural explanation of the whole narrative insinuates itself, taking its stand on the possibility, that in this interval the tree might have withered from natural causes. Accordingly, Jesus is supposed to have remarked in the tree, besides the lack of fruit, a condition from which he prognosticated that it would soon wither away, and to have uttered this prediction in the words: No one will ever again gather fruit from thee.

The heat of the day having realized the prediction of Jesus with unexpected rapidity, and the disciples remarking this the next morning, they then first connected this result with the words of Jesus on the previous morning, and began to regard them as a curse: an interpretation which, indeed, Jesus does not confirm, but impresses on the disciples, that if they have only some self-reliance, they will be able, not only to predict such physiologically evident results, but also to know and effect things far more difficult.345 But even admitting Mark’s statement to be the correct one, the natural explanation [528]still remains impossible. For the words of Jesus in Mark (v. 14): μηκέτι ἐκ σοῦ εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα μηδεὶς καρπὸν φάγοι, No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever, if they had been meant to imply a mere conjecture as to what would probably happen, must necessarily have had a potential signification given to them by the addition of ἂν; and in the expression of Matthew: μηκέτι ἐκ σοῦ καρπὸς γένηται, Let no fruit grow on thee henceforward for ever, the command is not to be mistaken, although Paulus would only find in this also the expression of a possibility. Moreover the circumstance that Jesus addresses the tree itself, as also the solemn εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα, for ever, which he adds, speaks against the idea of a mere prediction, and in favour of a curse;

Paulus perceives this fully, and hence with unwarrantable violence he interprets the words λέγει αὐτῇ he saith to it, as if they introduced a saying merely in reference to the tree, while he depreciates the expression εἰς τὸν αἰωνα, by the translation: in time to come. But even if we grant that the Evangelists, owing to their erroneous conception of the incident, may have somewhat altered the words of Jesus, and that he in reality only prognosticated the withering of the tree; still, when the prediction was fulfilled, Jesus did nevertheless ascribe the result to his own supernatural influence. For in speaking of what he has done in relation to the fig-tree, he uses the verb ποιεῖν (v. 21 Matt.); which cannot except by a forced interpretation, be referred to a mere prediction. But more than this, he compares what he has done in relation to the fig-tree, with the removal of mountains; and hence, as this, according to every possible interpretation, is an act of causation, so the other must be regarded as an influence on the tree. In any case, when Peter spoke of the fig-tree as having been cursed by Jesus (v. 21 Mark), either the latter must have contradicted the construction thus put on his words, or his silence must have implied his acquiescence.

If then Jesus in the issue ascribes the withering of the tree to his influence, he either by his address to it designed to produce an effect, or he ambitiously misused the accidental result for the sake of deluding his disciples; a dilemma, in which the words of Jesus, as they are given by the Evangelists, decidedly direct us to the former alternative.

Thus we are inexorably thrown back from the naturalistic attempt at an explanation, to the conception of the supranaturalists, pre-eminently difficult as this is in the history before us. We pass over what might be said against the physical possibility of such an influence as is there presupposed; not, indeed, because, with Hase, we could comprehend it through the medium of natural magic,346 but because another difficulty beforehand excludes the inquiry, and does not allow us to come to the consideration of the physical possibility. This decisive difficulty relates to the moral possibility of such an act on the part of Jesus. The miracle he here performs is of a punitive character. Another example of the kind is not found in the canonical accounts of the life of Jesus; the apocryphal gospels alone, as has been above remarked, are full of such miracles. In one of the synoptical gospels there is, on the contrary, a passage often quoted already (Luke ix. 55 f.), in which it is declared, as the profound conviction of Jesus, that the employment of miraculous power in order to execute punishment or to take vengeance, is contrary to the spirit of his vocation; and the same sentiment is attributed to Jesus by the Evangelist, when he applies to him the words of Isaiah: He shall not break a bruised reed, etc. (Matt. xii. 20).

Agreeably to this principle, and to his prevalent mode of action, Jesus must rather have given new life to a withered tree, than have made a green one wither; and in order to comprehend his conduct on this occasion, we must be able to show reasons which [529]he might possibly have had, for departing in this instance from the above principle, which has no mark of unauthenticity. The occasion on which he enunciated that principle was when, on the refusal of a Samaritan village to exercise hospitality towards Jesus and his disciples, the sons of Zebedee asked him whether they should not rain down fire on the village, after the example of Elijah. Jesus replied by reminding them of the nature of the spirit to which they belonged, a spirit with which so destructive an act was incompatible. In our present case Jesus had not to deal with men who had treated him with injustice, but with a tree which he happened not to find in the desired state. Now, there is here no special reason for departing from the above rule; on the contrary, the chief reason which in the first case might possibly have moved Jesus to determine on a judicial miracle, is not present in the second.

The moral end of punishment, namely, to bring the punished person to a conviction and acknowledgment of his error, can have no existence in relation to a tree; and even punishment in the light of retribution is out of the question when we are treating of natural objects destitute of volition.347 For one to be irritated against an inanimate object, which does not happen to be found just in the desired state, is with reason pronounced to be a proof of an uncultivated mind; to carry such indignation to the destruction of the object is regarded as barbarous, and unworthy of a reasonable being; and hence Woolston is not wrong in maintaining, that in any other person than Jesus, such an act would be severely blamed.348 It is true that when a natural object is intrinsically and habitually defective, it may very well happen, that it may be removed out of the way, in order to put a better in its place; a measure, however, for which, in every case, only the owner has the adequate motive and authority (comp. Luke xiii. 7). But that this tree, because just at that time it presented no fruit, would not have borne any in succeeding years, was by no means self-evident:—nay, the contrary is implied in the narrative, since the form in which the curse of Jesus is expressed, that fruit shall never more grow on the tree, presupposes, that without this curse the tree might yet have been fruitful.

Thus the evil condition of the tree was not habitual but temporary; still further, if we follow Mark, it was not even objective, or existing intrinsically in the tree, but purely subjective, that is, a result of the accidental relation of the tree to the momentary wish and want of Jesus. For according to an addition which forms the second feature peculiar to Mark in this narrative, it was not then the time of figs (v. 13); it was not therefore a defect, but, on the contrary, quite in due order, that this tree, as well as others, had no figs on it, and Jesus (in whom it is already enough to excite surprise that he expected to find figs on the tree so out of season) might at least have reflected, when he found none, on the groundlessness of his expectation, and have forborne so wholly unjust an act as the cursing of the tree. Even some of the fathers stumbled at this addition of Mark’s and felt that it rendered the conduct of Jesus enigmatical;349 and to descend to later times, Woolston’s [530]ridicule is not unfounded, when he says that if a Kentish countryman were to seek for fruit in his garden in spring, and were to cut down the trees which had none, he would be a common laughing-stock. Expositors have attempted to free themselves from the difficulty which this addition introduces, by a motley series of conjectures and interpretations.

On the one hand, the wish that the perplexing words did not stand in the text, has been turned into the hypothesis that they may probably be a subsequent gloss.350 On the other hand, as, if an addition of this kind must stand there, the contrary statement, namely, that it was then the time of figs, were rather to be desired, in order to render intelligible the expectation of Jesus, and his displeasure when he found it deceived; it has been attempted in various ways to remove the negative out of the proposition. One expedient is altogether violent, οὗ being read instead of οὐ, a point inserted after ἦν, and a second ἦν supplied after σύκων, so that the translation runs thus: ubi enim tum versabatur (Jesus), tempus ficuum erat;351 another expedient, the transformation of the sentence into an interrogatory one, nonne enim, etc., is absurd.352 A third expedient is to understand the words καιρὸς σύκων as implying the time of the fig-gathering, and thus to take Mark’s addition as a statement that the figs were not yet gathered, i.e. were still on the trees,353 in support of which interpretation, appeal is made to the phrase καιρὸς τῶν καρπῶν (Matt. xxi. 34).

But this expression strictly refers only to the antecedent of the harvest, the existence of the fruits in the fields or on the trees; when it stands in an affirmative proposition, it can only be understood as referring to the consequent, namely, the possible gathering of the fruit, in so far as it also includes the antecedent, the existence of the fruits in the field: hence ἔστι καιρὸς καρπῶν can only mean thus much: the (ripe) fruits stand in the fields, and are therefore ready to be gathered. In like manner, when the above expression stands in a negative proposition, the antecedent, the existence of the fruits in the field, on the trees, etc., is primarily denied, that of the consequent only secondarily and by implication; thus οὐκ ἔστι καιρὸς σύκων, means: the figs are not on the trees, and therefore not ready to be gathered; by no means the reverse: they are not yet gathered, and therefore are still on the trees. But this unexampled figure of speech, by which, while according to the words the antecedent is denied, according to the sense only the consequent is denied, and the antecedent affirmed, is not all which the above explanation entails upon us; it also requires the admission of another figure which is sometimes called synchisis, sometimes hyperbaton.

For, as a statement that the figs were then still on the trees, the addition in question does not show the reason why Jesus found none on that tree, but why he expected the contrary; it ought therefore, say the advocates of this explanation, to stand, not after he found nothing but leaves, but after he came, if haply he might find any thing thereon; a transposition, however, which only proves that this whole explanation runs counter to the text. Convinced, on the one hand, that the addition of Mark denies the prevalence of circumstances favourable to the existence of figs on that tree, but, on the other hand, still labouring to justify the expectation of Jesus, other expositors have sought to give to that negation, instead of the general sense, that it was not the right season of the year for figs, a fact of which Jesus must unavoidably have been aware, the particular sense, that special circumstances only not necessarily known to Jesus, hindered the fruitfulness of the tree.

It would have been a hindrance altogether special, [531]if the soil in which the tree was rooted had been an unfruitful one; hence, according to some, the words καιρὸς σύκων actually signify a soil favourable to figs.354 Others with more regard to the verbal meaning of καιρὸς, adhere it is true to the interpretation of it as favourable time, but instead of understanding the statement of Mark universally, as referring to a regular, annual season, in which figs were not to be obtained, they maintain it to mean that that particular year was from some incidental causes unfavourable to figs.355 But the immediate signification of καιρὸς is the right, in opposition to the wrong season, not a favourable season as opposed to an unfavourable one. Now, when any one, even in an unproductive year, seeks for fruits at the time in which they are wont to be ripe, it cannot be said that it is the wrong season for fruit; on the contrary, the idea of a bad year might be at once conveyed by the statement, that when the time for fruit came, ὅτε ἦλθεν ὁ καιρὸς τῶν καρπῶν, there was none to be found. In any case, if the whole course of the year were unfavourable to figs, a fruit so abundant in Palestine, Jesus must almost as necessarily have known this as that it was the wrong season; so that the enigma remains, how Jesus could be so indignant that the tree was in a condition which, owing to circumstances known to him, was inevitable.

But let us only remember who it is to whom we owe that addition. It is Mark, who, in his efforts after the explanatory and the picturesque, so frequently draws on his own imagination; and in doing this, as it has been long ago perceived, and as we also have had sufficient opportunities of observing on our way, he does not always go to work in the most considerate manner. Thus, here, he is arrested by the first striking particular that presents itself, namely, that the tree was without fruit, and hastens to furnish the explanation, that it was not the time for figs, not observing that while he accounts physically for the barrenness of the tree, he makes the conduct of Jesus morally inexplicable. Again, the above-mentioned divergency from Matthew in relation to the time within which the tree withered, far from evincing more authentic information,356 or a tendency to the natural explanation of the marvellous on the part of Mark, is only another product of the same dramatising effort as that which gave birth to the above addition. The idea of a tree suddenly withering at a word, is difficult for the imagination perfectly to fashion; whereas it cannot be called a bad dramatic contrivance, to lay the process of withering behind the scenes, and to make the result be first noticed by the subsequent passers by.

For the rest, in the assertion that it was then (a few days before Easter) no time for figs, Mark is so far right, as it regards the conditions of climate in Palestine, that at so early a time of the year the new figs of the season were not yet ripe, for the early fig or boccore is not ripe until the middle or towards the end of June; while the proper fig, the kermus, ripens only in the month of August. On the other hand, there might about Easter still be met with here and there, hanging on the tree, the third fruit of the fig-tree, the late kermus, which had remained from the previous autumn, and through the winter:357 as we read in Josephus that a part of Palestine (the shores of the Galilean sea), more fruitful, certainly, than the country around Jerusalem, where the history in question occurred, produces figs uninterruptedly during ten months of the year, σῦκον δέκα μησὶν ἀδιαλείπτως χορηγεῖ.358 [532]

But even when we have thus set aside this perplexing addition of Mark’s, that the tree was not really defective, but only appeared so to Jesus in consequence of an erroneous expectation: there still subsists, even according to Matthew, the incongruity that Jesus appears to have destroyed a natural object on account of a deficiency which might possibly be merely temporary. He cannot have been prompted to this by economical considerations, since he was not the owner of the tree; still less can he have been actuated by moral views, in relation to an inanimate object of nature; hence the expedient has been adopted of substituting the disciples as the proper object on which Jesus here intended to act, and of regarding the tree, and what Jesus does to it, as a mere means to his ultimate design. This is the symbolical interpretation, by which first the fathers of the church, and of late the majority of orthodox theologians among the moderns, have thought to free Jesus from the charge of an unsuitable action. According to them, anger towards the tree which presented nothing to appease his hunger, was not the feeling of Jesus, in performing this action; his object not simply the extermination of the unfruitful plant: on the contrary, he judiciously availed himself of the occasion of finding a barren tree, in order to impress a truth on his disciples more vividly and indelibly than by words.

This truth may either be conceived under a special form, namely, that the Jewish nation which persisted in rendering no pleasing fruit to God and to the Messiah, would be destroyed; or under the general form, that every one who was as destitute of good works as this tree was of fruit, had to look forward to a similar condemnation.359 Other commentators however with reason maintain, that if Jesus had had such an end in view in the action, he must in some way have explained himself on the subject; for if an elucidation was necessary when he delivered a parable, it was the more indispensable when he performed a symbolical action, in proportion as this, without such an indication of an object lying beyond itself, was more likely to be mistaken for an object in itself;360 it is true that, here as well as elsewhere, it might be supposed, that Jesus probably enlarged on what he had done, for the instruction of his disciples, but that the narrators, content with the miracle, have omitted the illustrative discourse. If however Jesus gave an interpretation of his act in the alleged symbolical sense, the Evangelists have not merely been silent concerning this discourse, but have inserted a false one in its place; for they represent Jesus, after his procedure with respect to the tree, not as being silent, but as giving, in answer to an expression of astonishment on the part of his disciples, an explanation which is not the above symbolical one, but a different, nay, an opposite one.

For when Jesus says to them that they need not wonder at the withering of the fig-tree, since with only a little faith they will be able to effect yet greater things, he lays the chief stress on his agency in the matter, not on the condition and the fate of the tree as a symbol: therefore, if his design turned upon the latter, he would have spoken to his disciples so as to contravene that design; or rather, if he so spoke, that cannot have been his design. For the same reason, falls also Sieffert’s totally unsupported hypothesis, that Jesus, not indeed after, but before that act, when on the way to the fig-tree, had held a conversation with his disciples on the actual condition and future lot of the Jewish nation, and that to this conversation the symbolical cursing of the tree was a mere key-stone, which explained itself: for all comprehension of the act in question which that [533]introduction might have facilitated, must, especially in that age when there was so strong a bias towards the miraculous, have been again obliterated by the subsequent declaration of Jesus, which regarded only the miraculous side of the fact. Hence Ullmann has judged rightly in preferring to the symbolical interpretation, although he considers it admissible, another which had previously been advanced:361 namely, that Jesus by this miracle intended to give his followers a new proof of his perfect power, in order to strengthen their confidence in him under the approaching perils.

Or rather, as a special reference to coming trial is nowhere exhibited, and as the words of Jesus contain nothing which he had not already said at an earlier period (Matt. xvii. 20; Luke xvii. 6), Fritzsche is more correct in expressing the view of the Evangelists quite generally, thus: Jesus used his displeasure at the unfruitfulness of the tree, as an occasion for performing a miracle, the object of which was merely the general one of all his miracles, namely to attest his Messiahship.362 Hence Euthymius speaks entirely in the spirit of the narrators, as described by Fritzsche,363 when he forbids all investigation into the special end of the action, and exhorts the reader only to look at it in general as a miracle.364 But it by no means follows from hence that we too should refrain from all reflection on the subject, and believingly receive the miracle without further question; on the contrary, we cannot avoid observing, that the particular miracle which we have now before us, does not admit of being explained as a real act of Jesus, either upon the general ground of performing miracles, or from any peculiar object or motive whatever. Far from this, it is in every respect opposed both to his theory and his prevailing practice, and on this account, even apart from the question of its physical possibility, must be pronounced more decidedly, than any other, to be such a miracle as Jesus cannot really have performed.

It is incumbent on us, however, to adduce positive proof of the existence of such causes as, even without historical foundation, might give rise to a narrative of this kind. Now in our usual source, the Old Testament, we do, indeed, find many figurative discourses and narratives about trees, and fig-trees in particular; but none which has so specific an affinity to our narrative, that we could say the latter is an imitation of it. But we need not search long in the New Testament, before we find, first in the mouth of the Baptist (Matt. iii. 10), then in that of Jesus (vii. 19), the apothegm of the tree, which, because it bears no good fruit, is cut down and cast into the fire; and further on (Luke xiii. 6 ff.) this theme is dilated into the fictitious history of a man who for three years in vain seeks for fruit on a fig-tree in his vineyard, and on this account determines to cut it down, but that the gardener intercedes for another year’s respite. It was already an idea of some fathers of the church, that the cursing of the fig-tree was only the parable of the barren fig-tree carried out into action.365 It is true that they held this opinion in the sense of the explanation before cited, namely, that Jesus himself, as he had previously exhibited the actual condition and the approaching catastrophe [534]of the Jewish people in a figurative discourse, intended on the occasion in question to represent them by a symbolical action; which, as we have seen, is inconceivable.

Nevertheless, we cannot help conjecturing, that we have before us one and the same theme under three different modifications: first, in the most concentrated form, as an apothegm; then expanded into a parable; and lastly realized as a history. But we do not suppose that what Jesus twice described in words, he at length represented by an action; in our opinion, it was tradition which converted what it met with as an apothegm and a parable into a real incident. That in the real history the end of the tree is somewhat different from that threatened in the apothegm and parable, namely, withering instead of being cut down, need not amount to a difficulty. For had the parable once become a real history, with Jesus for its subject, and consequently its whole didactic and symbolical significance passed into the external act, then must this, if it were to have any weight and interest, take the form of a miracle, and the natural destruction of the tree by means of the axe must be transformed into an immediate withering on the word of Jesus. It is true that there seems to be the very same objection to this conception of the narrative which allows its inmost kernel to be symbolical, as to the one above considered; namely, that it is contravened by the words of Jesus which are appended to the narrative.

But on our view of the gospel histories we are warranted to say, that with the transformation of the parable into a history, its original sense also was lost, and as the miracle began to be regarded as constituting the pith of the matter, that discourse on miraculous power and faith, was erroneously annexed to it. Even the particular circumstance that led to the selection of the saying about the removal of the mountain for association with the narrative of the fig-tree, may be shown with probability. The power of faith, which is here represented by an effectual command to a mountain: Be thou removed and be thou cast into the sea, is elsewhere (Luke xvii. 6) symbolized by an equally effectual command to a species of fig-tree (συκάμινος): Be thou plucked up by the root, and be thou planted in the sea. Hence the cursing of the fig-tree, so soon as its withering was conceived to be an effect of the miraculous power of Jesus, brought to mind the tree or the mountain which was to be transported by the miraculous power of faith, and this saying became appended to that fact. Thus, in this instance, praise is due to the third gospel for having preserved to us the parable of the barren συκῆ, and the apothegm of the συκάμινος to be transplanted by faith, distinct and pure, each in its original form and significance; while the two other synoptists have transformed the parable into a history, and have misapplied the apothegm (in a somewhat altered form) to a false explanation of that pretended history.366 [535]