of execution, bid his companions (as we are told by Saint Luke; Chap. xxiii. 28.) weep not for him, but for themselves, their posterity, and their country; and who, whilst he was suspended upon the cross, prayed for his murderers, “for they know not,” said he, “what they do.”  The urgency also of his judges and his prosecutors to extort from him a defence to the accusation, and his unwillingness to make any (which was a peculiar circumstance), appears in Saint John’s account, as well as in that of the other evangelists. (See John xix. 9.  Matt. xxvii. 14.  Luke xxiii. 9.)

There are, moreover, two other correspondencies between Saint John’s history of the transaction and theirs, of a kind somewhat different from those which we have been now mentioning.

The first three evangelists record what is called our Saviour’s agony, i.e. his devotion in the garden immediately before he was apprehended; in which narrative they all make him pray “that the cup might pass from him.”  This is the particular metaphor which they all ascribe to him.  Saint Matthew adds, “O, my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done.” (Chap, xxvi. 42.) Now Saint John does not give the scene in the garden:  but when Jesus was seized, and some resistance was attempted to be made by Peter, Jesus, according to his account, checked the attempt, with this reply:  “Put up thy sword into the sheath; the cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?” (Chap. xviii. 11.) This is something more than consistency—–­it is coincidence; because it is extremely natural that Jesus, who, before he was apprehended, had been praying his Father that “that cup might pass from him,” yet with such a pious retraction of his request as to have added, “If this cup may not pass from me, thy will be done;” it was natural, I say, for the same person, when he actually was apprehended, to express the resignation to which he had already made up his thoughts, and to express it in the form of speech which he had before used, “The cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?” This is a coincidence between writers in whose narratives there is no imitation, but great diversity.

A second similar correspondency is the following:  Matthew and Mark make the charge upon which our Lord was condemned to be a threat of destroying the temple; “We heard him say, I will destroy this temple made with hands, and within three days I will build another made without hands:”  (Mark xiv. 58.) but they neither of them inform us upon what circumstance this calumny was founded.  Saint John, in the early part of the history, (Chap. ii. 19.) supplies us with this information; for he relates, that on our Lord’s first journey to Jerusalem, when the Jews asked him “What sign showest thou unto us, seeing that thou doest these things?  He answered, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”  This agreement could hardly arise from anything but the truth of the case.  From any care or design in Saint John to make his narrative tally with the narratives of other evangelists, it certainly did not arise, for no such design appears, but the absence of it.