A New Lamb in the Flock

In my last post I tried to show that there was a pattern of literary erosion in the story of the night of Jesus’ arrest.

In the Gospel of John (c. 110 AD) the drama of the Agony is entirely gone. So is any allusion to the sacrifice of Isaac. [A funny thing about the “Agony in the Garden” is that only John calls the place a garden. But no “Agony” takes place in John!]

In the Gospel of Luke (c. 90 – 100 AD) the author recognized that the original story of the Agony had lost its meaning and its popularity. But he believed it was still worth saving if only because it was an event in Jesus’ life. So he tried to re-invigorate it by placing the scene on a mount and by adding an angel to the drama.

The Gospel of Matthew, from the same period as Luke, simply parrots Mark’s account.

In the Gospel of Mark (c. 80 AD) much of the drama of the Agony is retold as the author received it from his sources. And although there are a few points of connection between these scenes and those of Isaac’s sacrifice this author plays them down to the point that they are almost invisible.

In the Epistles of Paul (c. 60 AD) we find suggestions and open references to Isaac’s death and resurrection. I have not yet found, however, any direct connections made by Paul to those events and Jesus’ death and resurrection.

I also pointed out in my last post that the changes made to the Agony story and its eventual disappearance from Christian lore was due to the fact that the story on which it was based had been changed by Jewish authorities. They put in an angel to save Isaac’s life. And since the folklore that said Isaac had been restored to life was never a part of written Scripture there was no basis on which to protest the change. Isaac, in the new Scriptural version, did not have to be brought back to life because he hadn’t died in the first place.

This obviously made all references to Jesus’ own death and resurrection irrelevant to the new Gen. 22. There is a powerful suggestion in this action by the Jewish authorities that implies the change was made to take away one of Christianity’s most powerful arguments for Jesus’ Messiahship. I prefer to think it’s just a matter of coincidence in its timing.

So what was actually going on in the first days after Jesus’ death? And what was the reason behind the “Agony in the Garden” story?

When Jesus died it came as a complete surprise to his followers. They thought – and many of them continued to think – that Jesus was the true Messiah. But the Messiah was not supposed to die. He was supposed to conquer the world for the Jews and their God. What went wrong? Naturally the first thing they did was re-examine the Scriptures to find anything that might suggest that the Messiah would die.

No luck. There were no passages that could be made into prophecies of the Messiah’s death. They realized that they were going to have to do something quite distasteful if they were going to salvage the reputation of their Messiah. They were going to have to steal some of the ideas of their competition; the followers of John the Baptist.

Looks like another sharp turn ahead folks. Hang on.