13.7 VIEW OF CHRIST THE RISE OF CHRISTIANITY

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VIEW OF CHRIST

THE RISE OF CHRISTIANITY

In Judea the position of the Roman procurators was one of great difficulty. The Jews were the most restless of all the peoples of the empire. The most inoffensive measures wounded their religious susceptibilities. Thus the general census made by Quirinus, governor of Syria, at the command of Augustus, seemed to them a menace and a danger. Long ago, in the reign of David, a similar measure had evoked murmurs amongst them; it was worse still under foreign rule. They persuaded themselves that the object of the census was to reduce them to slavery. A certain Judas, surnamed the Gaulonite or the Galilean, stirred up a revolt, which was suppressed by the procurator, but the partisans of Judas, who were afterwards known as the Zealots, formed a sect which played an important part during the last days of Jewish history. According to them, the law forbade the Jews to recognise any sovereign except God, and it was their duty to die rather than submit to a human authority. This perpetual confounding of religion and politics was often extremely troublesome to the Romans. Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea, having brought into Jerusalem Roman ensigns adorned with the portrait of Tiberius, the Jews complained loudly at the offence, and betook themselves to Cæsarea, where the governors resided, to demand the removal of the ensigns. He surrounded the malcontents with his troops, but they offered their throats to the knife, declaring that they would rather die than endure the desecration of the Holy City. Pilate gave way, and afterwards, by the express command of Tiberius, removed the golden shields which bore in their inscriptions the names of the gods of the empire. Another time, desiring to build an aqueduct to bring water to Jerusalem, he took money from the temple treasury, and there was another riot on that score.

The rule of the Romans, like that of the Seleucidæ before them, made the Jews fall back upon their Messianic dreams. In these the Bible played the leading part. The prophets of old had merely been religious and popular tribunes; nevertheless, by the aid of fanciful interpretation they succeeded in making them soothsayers. They were made to predict the supremacy of the Jewish nation over all others; by taking some sentences of their writings apart from the context the people discovered allusions to their future deliverer, their Messiah. Like all mythological types, this ideal figure of the Messiah grew more and more clearly defined. But at the same time it assumed a loftier significance, it became purely moral in character. In face of the vastness of the Roman power, a warrior king like David would not have been enough; what was needed was rather a revealer, like Moses, to set up the kingdom of God upon earth. The Messiah, in this supernatural rôle,[169] was bound to exercise a far greater effect upon the people; but any kind of revolution, whether violent or mystical, must always inspire the ruling classes with equal abhorrence. The Jewish priesthood implored the aid of the secular arm against Jesus of Nazareth, as it had done against Judas Maccabæus. Pilate being loth to put an innocent man to death in order to gratify priestly spite, they gave him to understand that his own position would be compromised by indulgence, and he yielded for fear of losing his office. Moreover, it is likely that the death sentence caused him no great remorse; no doubt he said to himself that it was the price of maintaining order, and that in dealing with an enemy to society there was no constraining need to be just. This event, which divides the history of the world in two, passed unmarked by the generation that witnessed it. The five or six lines which we find in Josephus appear to be an interpolation. If Josephus had believed, as the passage states, that Jesus was the Messiah and that he was more than man, it is obvious that, instead of remaining a Jew, he would have become a Christian

The excerpt from Josephus is as follows: “Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works—a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles. He was (the) Christ; and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.”

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE  FAITH TO THE MESSIAH

Beyond the borders of Palestine, where they held their ancient glories in perpetual remembrance, the Jews gave less thought to their Messiah. In[170] the Greek cities whither they had been allured by commerce, at Ephesus, Cyrene, and above all, Alexandria, they tried to gain acceptance for their traditions and their monotheism under the warranty of the Sibyls; they composed apocryphal writings in somewhat tame verse, or studied Greek philosophy. The monistic theories of Plato attracted them most strongly to his school, and Philo makes amazing efforts, by dint of moral allegorising, to discover Platonic teachings in Genesis. The word, λόγος, which signifies both the reason of things and human speech, became the starting point of a kind of abstract mythology; and among the Hellenistic Jews the idea of the Word assumed an importance equal to, and a character hardly less personal than, that of the Messiah among the Jews of Palestine. From one of these groups Christian legend was destined to arise, from the other Christian philosophy. The Persian doctrine of the principle of evil, the Egyptian doctrine of the resurrection of the body, had already become familiar to the Jews; Christianity adopted them and made them the basis of a vast mythological edifice, the Fall and Redemption, the great Judgment Day of God, and the coming of His kingdom upon earth after the destruction of the world, which was placed in the immediate future. The dispersion of the Jews throughout all the eastern provinces of the empire offered a vast field to Christian propaganda, which, however, soon spread beyond the Jewish race, when once the innovating party had definitely rejected circumcision, the distinction between clean and unclean meats, and all the trivial and troublesome practices which separated Israel from other nations. The Jewish element was soon submerged by the rising tide of world-wide proselytism known as the calling of the Gentiles.

The introduction of Christianity into Greece is associated with the name of a Jew, St. Paul, just as the introduction of the Dionysiac mysteries is with that of the Thracian Orpheus. It is a divine seed come forth from the East, after an interval of fifteen centuries, and developing in the fructifying rays of the sun of Greece. But Christianity, although it represents the last phase of the progressive invasion of the West by oriental beliefs, is an original religion and not a heresy of Judaism. Far from being the supplement of the Jewish faith, we might rather call it its denial. The dominant note of Judaism is the attitude at which it places the conception of the Divine; between man and his God the distance is infinite. Christianity, on the contrary, had for its fundamental dogma the worship of the God-man. The Jewish religion, alone of all the religions of the earth, confined itself absolutely to this present life, without following man beyond the limits of his earthly destiny; to Christianity the earth is but a temporary place of trial, and life a preparation for eternity. The Jewish nation prides itself on the exclusive inheritance of the Law and casts forth the multitude of the uncircumcised from its midst; while Christianity proclaimed itself the universal religion from the beginning, and has never ceased to call men of all nations to itself. The Christians borrowed nothing from Judea but its traditions and its legends; had they rested satisfied with these, they would have been no more than a small Jewish sect that would have passed away unnoted. Judaism is one of the tributaries of the great Christian river, but it is not its principal source. In its apotheosis of humanity Christianity has a direct link with Hellenism, of which it is the legitimate successor.

The doctrines of the Fall, the Incarnation, the Redemption, the Sacrament of the Eucharist, all have their source in the most ancient beliefs of Indo-European peoples; which explains why the Jews so obstinately hold[171] aloof from it. The true heir of Jewish thought is Islamism, the modern religion of the Semitic race. By depriving Christianity of its Greek elements, by setting aside the idea of the incarnation of the Divine in humanity, which spanned the gulf between God and man, Mohammed restored Semitic monotheism to its pristine severity, tempered only by belief in the devil and in a future life, which the Jews themselves had ended by accepting.

At Rome, whither all men seeking their fortunes drifted, the Jews were very numerous, and insinuated themselves among all classes, especially among women, exploiting their credulity by interpreting dreams and selling philtres and amulets. They were generally confounded with Chaldeans and other venders of horoscopes. A lady of rank, whom they had converted to their religion, having had reason to complain of their sharp practices, Tiberius enlisted four thousand Jews, whom he sent to Sardinia. A grandson of Herod, Agrippa by name, who had squandered his fortune in profligate courses and lived by his wits, insinuated himself into the good graces of the young Caligula. During a walk which they took together, Agrippa said aloud, “When will the day come on which the death of old Tiberius will leave thee master of the empire, for my happiness and that of the world?” The words were repeated to Tiberius by a freedman, and Agrippa was put in prison. Caligula, who became emperor soon after, set him at liberty and gave him the tetrarchy of his uncle Philip (who had died shortly before), with the title of King. But the ambitious Herodias could not endure to see her brother, whom she had formerly assisted out of her bounty, win a higher rank than her husband. At her instigation Antipas proceeded to Rome to solicit the diadem. It was an evil day for him; Agrippa accused him of having laid up a store of arms and of holding communication with the Parthians; Caligula, without deigning to inquire into the matter, banished him to Lyons in Gaul, and added his tetrarchy to Agrippa’s kingdom.

The new king soon had an opportunity of rendering signal service to his co-religionists. Caligula desired to have divine honours paid him. This was no new thing; Alexander had caused himself to be worshipped, like the ancient kings of Egypt, the majority of his successors had followed his example; the Cæsars might well do as much. It was a logical result of monarchy; when one man is set above the rest, it is easy for him to fancy himself a god. The Jews alone, to their eternal honour in history, had courage to protest against this apotheosis of tyrants that disgraced the end of the Old World. When orders had been given to place the emperor’s statue in the temple of Jerusalem, the attitude of the Jews became so menacing that Petronius wrote to the emperor asking him to revoke the command, which could only be carried into effect by the extermination of the whole people. Agrippa was at Rome at the time. He gave a magnificent banquet to Caligula, and when the emperor, inflamed with wine, offered to extend his kingdom, he entreated him to respect the religious scruples of his subjects. The emperor yielded, but when he received Petronius’ letter he flew into a violent rage, accused the governor of having taken bribes from the Jews, and threatened him with the imperial vengeance. Fortunately for Petronius and the Jews, Caligula was soon afterward assassinated by Chærea, one of his officers. The Senate was desirous of restoring the republic, but the prætorian guard, composed of Germans, offered the throne to Claudius, the uncle of Caligula. According to Josephus, it was Agrippa who persuaded him to accept, and served as[172] intermediary between the Senate and the army. Chærea was put to death. Claudius had no sooner assumed possession of the empire than he added Judea, Samaria, and some districts in the Lebanon, to the kingdom of Agrippa. The principality of Chalcis was bestowed upon his brother Herod.

Agrippa, having thus become king over the whole of Palestine, proceeded to Jerusalem, and hung in the temple a golden chain which Caligula had given him when he came out of prison. Like Herod, his grandfather, he set up a great many monuments, he enlarged Jerusalem considerably, and built an amphitheatre at Berytus, where he instituted gladiatorial shows. But while Herod had never been able to win popularity, Agrippa gained the affections of the Jews by showing himself a strict observer of the Law. Munk, who takes the story from the Rabbis, tells how, at the Feast of the Tabernacles, he read the Book of Deuteronomy in public, and, coming to the passage in which the lawgiver denies a foreigner the right of reigning over Israel, he burst into tears, remembering his own Idumæan descent. But from all sides the people cried to him, “Fear not, Agrippa, thou art our brother!” It was undoubtedly to please the priests at Jerusalem that he put James, the brother of John the Evangelist, to death; for the Jews, when they were in the ascendant, were very far from allowing others the religious liberty which they everywhere claimed for themselves. Christian preaching might be attended with more or less success among the communities of Jews or Jewish proselytes settled elsewhere than in Judea; but at Jerusalem, where memories of independence still survived, no man could be acknowledged as the true Messiah who had failed to deliver his nation from foreign oppression, and the new sect could not take root in the country that had been its cradle. Moreover, the little church at Jerusalem was very inoffensive, and the Book of Acts does not tell us on what pretext James was beheaded. Simon Peter, the chief of the Apostles, whom Agrippa had cast into prison, was delivered by night, and his deliverance was ascribed to angelic agency. This miraculous deliverance of St. Peter forms the subject of one of Raphael’s finest pictures.

At Agrippa’s death, which took place a short time after, his son, also named Agrippa, was only seventeen years of age. In spite of his youth the emperor was desirous of letting the kingdom of Judea descend to him, but was unfortunately dissuaded from his purpose by his advisers. The tetrarchy of Philippi was afterward bestowed on Agrippa the Younger, but Judea fell finally under the rule of procurators. Of all the provinces of the empire it was the most difficult to govern. The others accepted Roman dominion. In exchange for their independence Rome offered civilisation to Spain and Gaul, peace and quiet to Greece and Asia, wearied as they were by centuries of war. But the Jews understood Græco-Roman civilisation no better than the Mohammedans understood our own, and as for peace, they would accept it only on the condition that they should be over all other nations: that was what they understood by the kingdom of God.

Their Messianic dreams haunted them more and more persistently. The land was full of visionaries, and they always found disciples. A prophet named Theudas induced more than four hundred persons to follow him into the wilderness by declaring that he would cause them to pass dry-shod over Jordan. Fadus, the procurator, despatched a body of horsemen, who slew him and dispersed his following. The author of the Acts, who placed the said Theudas before the time of Judas the Gaulonite, indicates the comparison generally made between the preaching of these two agitators and[173] that of the Apostles. Roman governors and Jewish lovers of order saw no great difference between men inspired and robbers. Tiberius Alexander, a renegade Jew of Alexandria, who succeeded Fadus in the government of Judea, crucified two sons of Judas the Gaulonite, who were still upholding the sect of the Zealots. As for the populace, they were well disposed to all attempts, but among innovators they liked those who adopted violent measures better than those whose methods were peaceable; thus, as the Gospel relates, Barabbas was preferred to Jesus.

 In the days of Pontius Pilate there was one who gathered together a great multitude on Mount Gerizim, promising to show them the sacred vessels which had been buried there by Moses. Pilate punished these wretched people so severely that Vitellius, governor of Syria, compelled him to go to Rome, there to exculpate himself before Tiberius. In the reign of Claudius one Simon of Gittha taught in Samaria with great success a subtle form of theology borrowed from the Judæo-Egyptian schools of Alexandria, which subsequently reappears in the mythological doctrines of Christian Gnosticism. He assigned the principal rôle in it to himself, giving himself out to be an incarnation of the great power of God, though he acknowledged the divine mission of Jesus. He averred that in him, Simon, God had revealed himself to the Samaritans in the character of the Father, as he had revealed himself to the Jews in the crucifixion of the Son, and to the Gentiles by the gift of the Holy Ghost. The doctrine of the Trinity, perhaps borrowed from Egypt, has become a part of Christianity, but Simon appears to have given a place in it to the Feminine Principle, probably represented by the Holy Ghost, that name being feminine in Hebrew. Wherever he went he took with him a very beautiful woman, whom he had bought in the market at Tyre. Her name was Helen, and Simon, identifying her with Homer’s Helen, deduced from the name a mystical scheme of redemption for the Eternal Feminine. It was the time when Christianity was first preached, and the Apostles were credited with miraculous powers of healing by the laying on of hands. A prophet ought to work miracles, and Simon was accordingly anxious to purchase their methods, and proposed that they should work together. The invincible repugnance of the Jew for the Samaritan made them repel his advances with scorn. A legend grew up in the Christian church about the name of Simon, surnamed Magus, who became the type of all charlatans, and the name of simony has since been given to all traffic in holy things

At Cæsarea there was a constant rivalry between the Jewish and the Greek or Syrian part of the population. The Jews were exempt from military service; the Greeks and Syrians, from whose ranks the legions were recruited, were jealous of this inequality. Hence arose taunts on the one side and recriminations on the other, sanguinary quarrels and riots. Finally the two parties sent agents to plead their cause before Nero, who decided against the Jews and deprived them of civil rights. Josephus says that this decree was the cause of the rebellion of the Jews; but it was only the last drop that makes the cup overflow. The rebellion had long been inevitable. It was not induced, like that of Judas Maccabæus, by religious persecution; the Romans allowed the Jews the free exercise of their religion, as they allowed it to all other nations. But the Jews were the chief people in the[175] empire who did not belong to the Indo-European race. There is an incompatibility of temper between that race and the Semitic; we perceive the fact only too clearly in Algeria. The demand for union with the empire, raised after the death of Herod, had proceeded from the Jews themselves. A procurator, even if not beyond reproach, could not possibly be worse than their native kings. Festus, who succeeded Felix, seems to have governed with firmness and prudence. Like his predecessors, he dealt severely with robbers, sicarii, and messiahs. But nothing could allay the fever that had laid hold upon Judea and worked madness in the brain; for there are epidemics in the moral as in the physical order. We cannot lay all the blame on the Romans; their rule secured the peace of the world, a boon which was doubtless worth the sacrifice of the restless and precarious autonomy of a few peoples. But we mourn for Greece, and we may be permitted to mourn for Judea. Nor must we cast a stone at this small and fiery nation, with its obstinate will to live. Depopulated Greece had died of weariness and exhaustion. Judea, overflowing with inhabitants, was about to die in a frenzy of patriotism; it is the worthier death

In spite of the Roman occupation, the Jewish theocracy found means for tyrannical action. The high priests seized upon the tithes due to the priests, the principal inhabitants of Jerusalem, espoused the cause of the inferior clergy, who were starving; there were fights in the streets, and the Roman government looked on passively, not wishing to meddle with religious matters. They were Agrippa’s affair, since the appointment of the high priests had been left to him. He, though his kingdom did not extend to the northern provinces, resided in Herod’s palace at Jerusalem. He had built a tower, from the height of which the inner court of the temple could be scanned. The priests regarded this as a profanation, and built a high wall, shutting off both the palace and the barracks of the Roman guard. Agrippa and Festus wished to demolish it, but, thanks to the support of the Empress Poppæa, who was a Jewess, or, at least, very well disposed towards the Jews, the priests gained permission from Nero that the wall should remain. After the death of Festus, and before the arrival of Ananus, the high priest convoked the Sanhedrim to sit in judgment on and condemn certain transgressors of the law, and, among others, James, the brother or cousin of Jesus. Hanan belonged to the sect of the Sadducees, which consisted entirely of wealthy people. James was greatly beloved by the poor. The epistle attributed to him, though it preached patience to the latter, contains passages little favourable to the rich. He was stoned. The sentence was illegal, for the high priest had no right to pass sentence of death in the absence of the procurator. Ananus was deposed from his office, but the death of James gave rise to great disaffection, and no doubt contributed to the separation of Christians from Jews. James was one of those who endeavoured to avoid this separation, and the church at Jerusalem, of which he was the head, showed great attachment to the practices of Judaism.

At Rome, the preaching of Christianity had begun in the reign of Claudius, and as it stirred up incessant quarrels among the Jews, which led to the disturbance of public order, the emperor had them all expelled from the city. Suetonius ascribes these scenes of disorder to Christ; it is the first time that we meet with the name in a pagan author, and the phraseology of Suetonius appears to indicate that, in his opinion, Christ was a person who lived at Rome in the time of Claudius: “Judæos, impulsore Christo assidue tumultuantes, Roma expulit.” According to Dion Cassius,[176] the Jews were not expelled from the city, but were forbidden to assemble together. The Christians were confounded with the Jews; the distinction first began to be made under Nero. “They put to the torture,” says Suetonius, “the Christians, a sort of men holding a new and noxious superstition.” A terrible fire, which destroyed more than half of Rome, gave occasion for these tortures. Rumour accused Nero of having set fire to Rome that he might rebuild it in greater beauty; it was even said that during the fire he had gone up into his theatre and sung the destruction of Troy.

“To put an end to these rumours,” says Tacitus, “he sought for guilty persons, and inflicted the most cruel tortures upon persons detested for their infamous practices, who were commonly called Christians. This name they took from Christ, who was condemned to death under Tiberius by the procurator Pontius Pilate. This pernicious superstition, suppressed for the moment, had since overflowed, not only in Judea, where was the source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all crimes and shames meet together. Those were first seized who confessed, and afterwards, on their testimony, a great number of others, who were convicted, less of having set fire to Rome than of hating the human race. Mockery was added to torture; they were wrapped in the skins of beasts to be cast to dogs to devour; they were crucified; they were set alight like torches to give light by night. Nero had offered his gardens for this spectacle, and he mingled with the people in the garb of a charioteer or driving a chariot. Thus these wretches, though deserving of exemplary punishment, inspired pity, for they were not sacrificed to the interests of the public but to the cruelty of a single man.”

It seems as though the Christians must have been safe in their obscurity from the emperor’s notice if it had not been directed to them by some special influence. Gibbon appears to believe that the beautiful Poppæa, the mistress and wife of Nero, and a Jewish comedian who had won his master’s favour, prevented the persecution from spreading to all Jews at Rome by concentrating it on a dissenting sect, in very evil odour with genuine Israelites. Renan goes farther, and thinks that the persecution directed against the Christians may have been excited by the intrigues of the Jews. He bases his opinion upon an ingenious interpretation of a very obscure passage in Clemens Romanus. Against this conjecture we may set the silence of the Apocalypse, which contains no allusion to Poppæa nor to the Neronian persecution. Now, as Renan has demonstrated by a wealth of evidence, the Apocalypse was a direct outcome of this persecution.

Nero is Antichrist and the Beast, and the number 666, which is the number of the Beast, represents the letters of his name, Νέρων Καισαρ, transcribed in Hebrew and added up according to their numerical value. Like the Book of Daniel, written at the time of the great struggle of the Jews with the kings of Syria, the Book of the Revelation is a political and religious pamphlet. The author gives his estimate of the events of his time or expounds his hopes for the future under the figure of prophetic visions and of enigmas to which he sometimes supplies the key. The Jews were extremely fond of this form of literature. The Apocalypse, i.e., the Revelation, ascribed to John, the last survivor of the Apostolic band, was written during the period of anarchy which lay between the death of Nero and the accession of Vespasian. It was the eve of the last agony of Judea; the speedy dissolution of the Roman Empire was expected. A supreme conflict between heaven and earth was about to begin, and would end by the great judgment of God and the reign of his Christ. Nor did the prophet lie; for it was in truth the end of the old world and the birth of the new