The Lost and Hostile Gospels: An Essay on the Toledoth Jeschu, and the Petrine and Pauline Gospels of the First Three Centuries of Which Fragments RemainBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History
The Lost and Hostile Gospels: An Essay on the Toledoth Jeschu, and the Petrine and Pauline Gospels of the First Three Centuries of Which Fragments Remain
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Apocryphal Gospels
Thus ends this wonderful composition, which carries its own condemnation
with it.
The two captures and sentences of Jeschu are apparently two forms of
Jewish legend concerning Christ’s death, which the anonymous writer has
clumsily combined.
The scene in Gethsemane is laid on the other side of Jordan. It is
manifestly imitated from the Gospels, but not directly, probably from some
mediaeval sculptured representation of the Agony in the Garden, common
outside every large church.(119) In place of an angel appearing to comfort
Christ, an evil spirit vexes him. The kiss of Judas is transformed into a
genuflexion or prostration before him, and takes place, not in the Garden
but in the Temple. The resistance of the disciples is mentioned. Jeschu is
bound to a marble pillar and scourged. Of this the Gospels say nothing;
but the pillar is an invariable feature in artistic representations of the
scourging. Two of the sayings on the Cross are correctly given. In
agreement with the account in the Talmud, Jeschu is stoned, and then, to
identify the son of Panthera with the son of Mary, is hung on a tree. The
tree breaks, and he falls to the ground. The visitor to Oberammergau
Passion Play will remember the scene of Judas hanging himself, and the
tree snapping. The Toledoth Jeschu does not say that Jeschu was crucified,
but that he was hung. The suicide of Judas was identified with the death
of Jesus. If the author of the anti‐evangel saw the scene of the breaking
bough in a miracle‐play, he would perhaps naturally transfer it to Christ.
The women seated late at night by the sepulchre, or coming early with
spices, a feature in miracle‐plays of the Passion, are transformed into
the disciples weeping above the grave. The angel who addresses them, in
the Toledoth Jeschu, becomes Judas.
In miracle‐plays, Claudia Procula, the wife of Pilate, assumes a
prominence she does not occupy in the Gospels; she may have originated the
idea in the mind of the author of Wagenseil’s Toledoth, of the Queen
Helena. That he confounded the Queen of King Jannaeus with the mother of
Constantine is not wonderful. The latter was the only historical princess
who showed sympathy with the Christians at Jerusalem, and of whose
existence the anonymous author was aware, probably through the popular
mediaeval romance of Helena, “La belle Helène.” He therefore fell without
a struggle into the gross anachronism of making the Empress Helena the
wife of Jannaeus, and contemporary with Christ.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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