Endnote 21 – What Really Happened at Gethsemane?

Brown says that “there was an early Christian memory or understanding that Jesus struggled with and prayed to God about his impending death” (Death of the Messiah, p. 177, cf. p. 225), but does not say where either came from. When he wrote his commentary on John 12:27–28, Brown suggested, “Since there were no witnesses to report the prayer of Jesus during the agony (the disciples were asleep at a distance), the tendency would be to fill in the skeletal framework of the Gethsemane scene with prayers and sayings uttered by Jesus at other times” (The Gospel According to John (I-XIII), Anchor Bible 29 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), p. 471.