cried out, "If thou let this man go, thou art not Cæsar's friend;" which when Pilate heard he finally brought Jesus forth, and sat down in the seat of judgment, and said to the Jews, "Behold your King: and the chief priest answered, We have no king but Cæsar: then delivered he him therefore to them to be crucified."

The whole proceeding was an evident controversy between the Roman governor and the Jewish priesthood as to the execution of a judgment; which the latter claimed to have right to pass upon a malefactor against their law, and which at last Pilate submitted to give effect to. St. Luke speaks of the sentence entirely in this way, "And Pilate gave sentence that it should be as they required" (xxiii. 24).

It is as plain as words can make it, that Pilate was a most unwilling agent in the death of our Lord, and would have excused himself from awarding the judgment he passed upon him. Whether such an obligation existed in the nature of his office to fulfil the decrees of the Jewish council, as may excuse his act before the throne of the Judge Eternal, no mortal may venture to affirm. That a certain obligation lay upon him to execute the judgments of the Jewish rulers was quite necessary, so long as the shadow of a judicial power was left to them; and by a process similar, though perhaps somewhat less formal in its kind, as happened under the writ "de comburendis hereticis" in Roman Catholic communities.

The introduction of the Roman military into the antecedent proceedings of the Jewish factions, appears then to be quite out of keeping with the prophetic type of this great event. Its whole character would be lost, if it was not the Jews themselves, but the Roman power, which cut off the Messiah in the midst of his age: his rejection could only be by those who were his own people.

It seems to us then, that the notion of our Lord's capture in the garden by a Roman military force, is an error. There is absolutely nothing in the whole of the accounts, that gives any sanction to that view, except that in one place St. John uses the word, "chiliarch," for the officer of the band that took him. That word is undoubtedly applied to military command only in its general acceptation; and it cannot be denied that it occasions great difficulty to the view here contended for: but the question is, whether its use is conclusive against many reasons for supposing it erroneously inserted. Before touching upon St. John's account, however, we will briefly refer to those of the other gospels, relating to the events of our Lord's capture in the garden.

Of these St. Matthew's and St. Mark's are the same; that "immediately while he yet spake (referring to our Lord's conversation with his apostles) came Judas, one of the twelve, and with him a great multitude (oxλos Toλus, a great crowd of people) with swords and staves, from the chief priests, and scribes, and elders of the people," Mark xiv. 43; " and Jesus said unto them, Are ye come out as against a thief, with swords and with staves to take me?" (ver. 48). We ask, can this be taken as descriptive of an organized force of military? Would Jesus have observed upon the multitude being armed, if it was a military band;—or would the narrator have called a military guard, a multitude at all? St. Luke follows pretty much in the same track. "While he yet spake, behold a multitude, and he that was called Judas, one of the twelve, went before them." The address of our Lord to this assembly is the same as given by the two preceding evangelists but St. Luke designates the parties to whom he spoke, as the "chief priests and captains of the temple," OTPATNYÈS TÕ 'Ieps. Now this expression, Schleusner informs us, is rendered in the Syriac, by what is answerable in the Latin to "Ducibus militiæ templi," "captains of the militia of the temple;" of which he shews, there was a regular establishment for watch and ward, with numerous officers; whom Josephus, no less than St. Luke, designates σтρaτnyol: a passage in the Acts, ch. v. 26, calls the subordinate body to these στρατηγοί, ὑπηρέται, or “ser vants" in some certain office or ministration. In their ministry as custodes and watchers of the temple, they were essentially the same as our disciplined police. The scripture word for soldiers is uniformly στρατιώται.

:

St. John's gospel refers to this assembly of captors in two passages; first in chap. xviii. 3, where he relates that "Judas, having received a band of men and officers from the chief priests and Pharisees, cometh with lanterns and torches and weapons:" in which the non-military character of the band is still more marked by the accompaniment of the lanterns and torches; which were very suitable to a midnight mob of city constables, but not at all to a Roman guard of soldiery. In this passage the apostle uses the word "Teîρav," which has a military signification, where soldiers are in question; but has an unmilitary meaning where otherwise employed, and signifies "a multitude" or band of people, with as indeterminate a meaning as the English word has; and so exactly answers to a company of irregular police sent upon such a mission. The word, which is englished here, "officers from the chief priests and Pharisees," is that which in the Acts denotes the general ministering body or guard of the temple, "vπηρéтas;" so that we still have the two parts

66

of such "a body" as is spoken of in the Acts; as forming the common "guard," for external duty beyond the precincts of the temple:-namely, the police force and its officers; only St. Luke describes it by the name of captains with their ministering array; and St. John, by that of "the band with its ministering officers from the chief priests;" St. Luke's captains, being select persons out of the superior authorities of the temple; and St. John's vπnρétas, being selected worthies out of the same body, exercising a command over their appointed band.

The descriptions in John xviii. 3, and Acts v. 26, appear then to apply to the very same organized domestic force of the Jewish temple, though varied in the denomination of its divisional elements; and that force exactly answers to the police of the temple, which Schleusner, under the authority of Josephus, describes as the common guard of the priesthood.

The other passage of St. John contains the exceptional word we have referred to, and occurs at ver. 12 of the same eighteenth chapter; only nine verses in fact below the first passage: "Then the band and the captain (xiiapxos), and the officers of the Jews took Jesus and bound him, and led him away to Annas." The word 'chiliarch,' is purely military, and its insertion alters the character of the history from the first account entirely; which of itself is a strong argument against its genuineness. The usual repetition of descriptive particulars so generally found in the sacred writings, and indeed in all ancient writers, where the same things or the same persons are referred to in historical narratives, is here entirely broken through; and the whole transaction is changed in its character by an unusual departure from the historical methods of the period; and this change of description is against the others' accounts of the same transaction, as well as of the antecedent statement of St. John's own account. It seems impossible to account for this except by supposing an interpolation, or some defectiveness in the original manuscript; for there is no discrepancy in the copies on this point, that we are aware of. subject is one on which conjecture only can be offered; but the words in question occur in a compass and position which might have given rise to the variation, from an accidental abrasion in a single line of the original Gospel. We can only submit the possible case, but will not venture to give an opinion upon the matter in the affirmative. The passage in the first account at verse 3 is thus written :

Καὶ ἐκ τῶν ἀρχιέρων καὶ φαρισαίων ὑπηρέτας.

The

If this description were obliterated in the second position in

ver. 12, the restorations might have deviated into its present form: thus the line being found in a mutilated state, as shewn in No. 1, its restoration might have been made by the same number of letters, wrongly as in No. 2, instead of rightly as in No. 3:

and the sentence being restored thus in situ, the words Tv 'Iedalov would have been transposed to the end of the sentence for the sake of the necessary euphony, which the restorer would find to be required in that change of the description. The hypothesis of the erroneous insertion of this word is strongly supported, by finding two subsequent references to the same party in this account of St. John; one, in the history of St. Peter's denial, where it is stated that "the servants and officers stood there, who had made a fire of coals and warmed themselves, and Peter stood with them" (xviii. 18); and secondly, where upon our Lord's reply to the high priest, to refer to those who had heard him, "one of the officers which stood by struck Jesus with the palm of his hand, saying, Answerest thou the high priest so?" (ib., 22); in both of which the same word is used as in ver. 3, to denote the leaders of the force that took our Lord—namely, the word vηpéτas; and it was clearly not a Roman military officer who could either have been with the attendants of the high priest, or have taken upon him the officious duty of correcting a supposed irreverent speech towards the Jewish high priest, by so unsoldierlike a method.

Much stress is laid by commentators upon the word oπêipa, a band, as if it necessarily meant a military division, which went by that designation. But it is plain the word was as common and indefinite in its application, as its English rendering is with ourselves; and was applied to any congregated body of persons, who were banded together for a common object. In its military use, it probably also meant what in modern use is expressed by "CORPS" or COMPANY;" and had both a specific and a general sense, as both those words also have in English. For the chiliarchs answered to our lieutenant-colonels, and were the commanders of separate divisions of a legion, consisting of about one-fourth part of its entire strength. Polybius informs us that every legion was divided into four classes, of which there was always one superior division of 600 men; which probably answered to our grenadier company. The rest of the legion was divided into three other divisions of about 1,200 or 1,400

men each; which were under the command of their proper chiliarchs. These divisions were subdivided into ten " Spira" or bands, which consequently comprised about 120 men in each, and these were commanded by the centurions: three of these spiræ constituted a cohort (Pol., lib. xi., 23). But this appears to have been a temporary formation only for occasional services. Schleusner-verb, oπeîpa-quotes Lepsius, De Militia Rom., lib. i., 4, for his authority, that this oneîpa was formed of the tenth part of a legion; whereas it was plainly the fortieth part according to Polybius,-being the tenth part of the chiliarchates, or fourth of the entire legion. But in either case the number appears out of all proportion to the occasion of such a midnight capture of our Lord amidst his apostles. It is altogether incredible besides, that if such an armament was necessary to capture our Saviour, it would not have been more necessary at his crucifixion; where the Gospel shews us very plainly, there were only four soldiers present; for the soldiers divided his garments into four parts, to each one of them a part; and for his vesture did they cast lots.

This last fact shews the non-military importance attached to the proceeding by the Roman governor; who consigned that portion of the duty to what we should call in England a common corporal's guard. And taking the whole of the evidences together, it seems to us, that the weight of authority induces a conclusion that the Roman military interfered very little with the events of our Lord's death; and not at all till Pilate, after repeated attempts to dissuade the Jews to desist from their purpose of putting him to death, delivered our Lord over to the common guard on such occasions: a mere quaternion of soldiers, with perhaps the captain of their company in attendance, charged with seeing the execution of the sentence. And this is the more probable, because the prophecy, which timed the departure of the judicial sceptre from the Jews, requires that departure to concur with the exact time, in which the Jews rejected their proper king and condemned themselves to another sceptre, which proved their destroyer. Truly in that cry, "We have no king but Cæsar;" was terribly fulfilled the former things; "that to the people, who refused the waters of Shiloah, that went softly, and rejoiced in Rezin and Remaliah's son, the Lord brought up upon them the waters of the river strong and many: even a king, whose power passed through Judah, and overflowed even unto the neck; the stretching out of whose wings filled the breadth of thy land, O Immanuel !"

H. M. G.