in,
unless his eyes create what they see. Let any man endeavor to
discover a passage in the Hebrew Scriptures which, taken with its
context, can fairly bear such a sense. There is not a shadow of
valid evidence of any kind to support the merely traditional
notions on this subject. The only way of discerning predictions of
a death, descent, and ascent, of the Messiah, in the law and the
prophets, is by the application of Cabalistic methods of
interpretation, theories of occult types, double senses, methods
which now are not tolerable to intelligent men. That Rabbinical
interpretation which made the story of Ishmael and Isaac, the two
children borne to Abraham by Hagar and Sarah, an allegory
referring to the two covenants of Judaism and Christianity, could
easily extract any desired meaning from any given text. Bearing in
mind the prevalence of this kind of exegesis among the Jews, and
remembering also that they possessed in the times of Jesus a vast
body of oral law, to which they attributed as great authority as
to the written, there are two possible ways of honestly meeting
the difficulty before us.

First: in God's counsels it was determined that a Messiah should
afterwards arise among the Jews. The revealed hope of this stirred
the prophets and the popular heart. It became variously and
vaguely hinted in their writings, still more variously and
copiously unfolded in their traditions. The conception of him
gradually took form; and they began to look for a warrior prophet,
a national deliverer, a theocratic king. Jesus, being the true
Messiah, though a very different personage from the one meant by
the writers and understood by the people, yet being the Messiah
foreordained by God, applied these Messianic passages to himself,
and explained them according to his experience and fate. This will
satisfactorily clear up the application of some texts. And others
may be truly explained as poetical illustrations, rhetorical
accommodations, as when he applies to Judas, at the Last Supper,
the words of the Psalm, "He that eateth with me lifteth up his
heel against me;" and when he refers to Jonah's tarry in the
whale's belly as a symbol of his own destined stay beneath the
grave for a similar length of time. Or, secondly, we may conclude
that the prophecies under consideration, referred to in the New
Testament, were not derived from any sacred documents now in our
possession, but either from perished writings, or from oral
s