The Cradle of the Christ: A Study in Primitive Christianity

This is strong language, even shocking to minds accustomed to worship a character of ideal perfection. But it is scarcely bolder than the case warrants. The privilege to pick and choose material has its limits. We have no right to take what pleases us and leave the rest. Statements that rest on equal evidence deserve equal acceptance. If the result be not agreeable, the responsibility is not with the critic.

The only wonder is that such a person as the literal record justifies, should be accepted as the founder of a religion. How can Renan stand before his portrait of Jesus, and say, "the man here delineated merits a place at the summit of human grandeur;" "this is the supreme man; a sublime personage;" "every day he presides over the destiny of the world; to call him divine is no exaggeration; amid the columns that, in vulgar uniformity crowd the plain, there are some that point to the skies and attest a nobler destiny for man; Jesus is the loftiest of these; in him is concentred all that is highest and best in human nature." Such a conclusion is not justified by the premises. The homage is not warranted by the facts. It will not do to make out a catalogue of human weaknesses, and then urge those very weaknesses as a chief title to glory.

In the opinion of some it is wiser and kinder to confess at once that the image of Jesus has been irrecoverably lost. In the judgment of these, it is unphilosophical to set up an ideal where none is required. No doubt every effect must have a cause, but to assume the cause, or to insist on the validity of any single or special cause, is unscientific. Each event has many causes, a complexity of causes. Renan himself says: "It is undeniable that circumstances told for much, in the success of this wonderful revolution. Each stage in the development of humanity has its privileged epoch, in which it reaches perfection without effort, by a sort of spontaneous instinct. The Jewish state offered the most remarkable intellectual and moral conditions that the human race ever presented. It was one of those divine moments when a thousand hidden forces conspire to produce grand results, when fine spirits are supported by floods of admiration and sympathy."

In truth, was such a person as Jesus is presumed to have been, necessary to account for the existence of the religion afterwards called Christian? As an impelling force he was not required, for his age was throbbing and bursting with suppressed energy. The pressure of the Roman empire was required to keep it down. The Messianic hope had such vitality that it condensed into moments the moral results of ages. The common people were watching to see the heavens open, interpreted peals of thunder as angel voices, and saw divine portents in the flight of birds. Mothers dreamed that their boys would be Messiah. The wildest preacher drew a crowd. The heart of the nation swelled big with the conviction that the hour of destiny was about to strike, that the kingdom of heaven was at hand. The crown was ready for any kingly head that might dare to assume it. That in such a state of things anticipation should fulfil itself, the dream become real, the vision become solid, is not surprising. It was not the first time faith has become fact. The first generation of our era exhibited no phenomena that preceding generations had not prepared for and could not produce. No surprising original force need have been manifested. The spirit was the native spirit of the old vine growing in the old vineyard.

Jesus is not necessary to account for the ethics of the New Testament. They were as has been said, the native ethics of Judaism, unqualified. The breadth and the limitation, the ideal beauty and the practical point were alike Jewish. The gorgeous abstractions, gathered up in one discourse, look like fresh revelations of God; as autumn leaves plucked and set in a vase seem more luminous than do myriads of the same leaves covering the mountains and the meadows, their crimson and gold blending with the brown of the soil and the infinite blue of the sky. The ethics of the New Testament, like the ethics of the Old, have their root in the faith that Israel was a chosen people; in the expectation of a king in whom the faith should be crowned; in the anticipation of a judgment day, a national restoration, a celestial sun-burst, a final felicity for the faithful of Israel. The enthusiasm, the extravagance, the fanaticism, the passive trust, the active intolerance, the asceticism, the arbitrariness, bespeak in the one case as in the other, the presence of an intense but narrow spirit. They are not the ethics of this world. They are not temporal. The power of an original, creative soul should be attested by some modification of the popular code, rather than by an exaggeration of it. We should look for something new, not for a more emphatic repetition of the old. But nothing new appears. The exaggerations are exaggerated; the precepts suggested by the distant prospect of the kingdom are simply reiterated in view of its speedy establishment. Trust in Providence and faith in the Messiah are all in all; the virtues of common existence are less and less. The inhumanities that Renan ascribes to an access of fanaticism in Jesus are the humanities of an unreal Utopia.

The prodigious manifestation of mental and spiritual force that broke out in Paul requires no explanation apart from his own genius. He never saw Jesus and apparently was incurious about him. His originality was intellectual, and his system bears no trace of a foreign personality. As Renan says: "The Christ who communicates private revelations to him is a phantom of his own making;" "It is himself he listens to, while fancying that he hears Jesus." If ever man was self-motived, self-impelled, self-actuated, it was he. He needed no prompter. Hot of brain and heart, he was only too swift to move. Whether, as some think, driven by over-mastering ambition to lead a new movement, or, as others contend, constrained by inward urgency to attempt a moral reform on a speculative basis, or, according to yet a third supposition, eager to bear the glad tidings of the gospel to the gentile world, his own genius was from first to last, his guide and inspiration. There is no evidence to prove that his "conversion" added anything new to the mass of his moral nature, or changed the quality of ruling attributes, or determined the bent of his will to unpremeditated issues. He was converted to the Christ, not to Jesus; and his conversion to the Christ, was nothing absolutely unprepared for. His zeal for Israel blazed furiously against the disciples who claimed that the Christ had come, and to the end of his stormy days it still continued to burn against disciples of the narrow school who would not believe he had come to any but Jews. His zeal for Israel, sent him away by himself to meditate a grander Christ. The Christ, not Jesus, was his watch-cry. A man of ideas, intensely interested in speculative questions, keenly alive to the joy of controversy and the ecstasy of propagandism, he filled his boiler with water as he rushed along, leaving Peter and the rest to fill theirs at the nazarene spring. So little is Jesus to be credited with Paul's achievement, that it is the fashion to call his a distinct movement. Enthusiastic admirers of his genius, call him the real founder of Christianity. Severe critics of his claim accuse him of corrupting the religion of Jesus in its spirit, and diverting it from its purpose. On either supposition, he was not a disciple.

The worship of Jesus, it has been said, is the redeeming feature of Christianity. This evidently is the opinion of John Stuart Mill, who writes, confounding, as is usual, Jesus with the Christ: "The most valuable part of the effect on the character which Christianity has produced by holding up in a divine person a standard of excellence and a model for imitation, is available even to the absolute unbeliever, and can nevermore be lost to humanity. For it is Christ rather than God whom Christianity has held up to believers as the pattern of perfection for humanity. It is the God incarnate, more than the God of the Jews or of nature, who being idealized has taken so great and salutary a hold on the modern mind;" and more to the same effect, in the essay on Theism. Before Mr. Mill's intellectual eccentricities were as well understood as they are now, this testimony to the humanizing influence of christian, as distinct from philosophical theism, would have possessed great weight. As it is, it only excites our wonder that so keen and inexorable a thinker should so completely lose sight of facts. That Christendom has worshipped the Christ is true. Is it true that it has worshipped Jesus? Again we might say: Yes; – the Jesus who demanded faith in himself as the condition of salvation; the Jesus who depicted the Son of Man, sitting on a throne of judgment, summoning before him all nations, and placing the sheep on his right hand, the goats on his left; the Jesus who threatened everlasting fire, and spoke of the devil and his angels; the Jesus who made the church umpire in matters of faith and works; the Jesus who bade his friends forsake father and mother, brother and sister for his sake. But did Christendom ever deify the man of the Beatitudes, the relator of the parables of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, the friend of publicans and sinners? Is Jesus the central figure in the Nicene, or the Athanasian creed? Is he the God of Calvin, or of Luther, of Augustine, even of Borromeo, or Fénélon? Long before the dogmatical or ecclesiastical system of Christendom was formed, the image of Jesus had faded away from the minds of christians, if it ever was stamped there. That it was ever stamped there is not quite apparent. In the east there exists no trace of it after the apostolic age, or beyond the circle of his personal friends. In the west the personal influence is not distinctly visible at any distance. From the reported heroism of the early christian centuries no solid conclusion can be drawn, for the reason that the reports come from panegyrists like Tertullian, and from a period when the apostolic age had become a tradition. Writers like Neander make the most of a few recorded instances of devotion which distinguished the christians from the pagans about them; and James Martineau uses them as evidence of an original spiritual genius in the young religion. They are indeed beautiful, but they do not refer back so far as the historical Jesus for their source of inspiration. That in a community composed, with scarcely an exception, of poor people, the ordinary social distinctions should be unobserved; that slaves, among whom in early times many converts were made, should have been acknowledged as brethren in Christ; should have appeared in public religious meetings as equal with the rest before the Lord; should have partaken of the communion on the same terms, taking their place among the believers, and receiving the passionless kiss of brotherhood and of sisterhood, is not surprising, especially when it is considered that these slaves belonged to hardy, white races, that they discharged, some of them at least, the most honorable offices of labor, and were, except for the mere accident of their condition, physically as well as morally, peers of the best.

It is simply in the course of nature that poor people, grouped in communities, sharing a common and a painful lot, should help each other in times of trouble. The christians did so. At every weekly or monthly service collections were made for the relief of the poor, the sick, the infirm, the aged, widows, prisoners, and toilers in the mines. These contributions were sent to the points of greatest need, converging on occasion from many directions at centres of extreme necessity. It is recorded that about the middle of the third century several members of the church in Numidia, men and women, were carried off captive by barbarians. The Numidian churches being poor applied to the Metropolitan church at Carthage. Cyprian, the bishop there, collected more than four thousand dollars in his diocese and sent the money as ransom, with a letter full of sentiments of kindness. On another occasion a portion of the sacred vessels of the sanctuary were sold to raise funds for a similar purpose. In this there was nothing strange. The acts were done in strict conformity with a long established usage.

A more remarkable example often cited in evidence that the spirit of Jesus was alive still in the societies that worshipped him as Lord, occurred in the year 254, shortly after the Decian persecution, the most general and the most hideous to which the church had been exposed. In consequence of this persecution, which was attended with such slaughter that the unburied bodies poisoned the air, a fearful pestilence broke out in the city of Alexandria. Unhappily for the literalness of the truth, it is Lactantius who tells the story. "The plague," he says, "made its appearance with tremendous violence and desolated the city, so that, as Dionysius, the Christian bishop writes, there were not so many inhabitants left, of all ages, as heretofore could be numbered between forty and seventy. In this emergency the persecuted christians forgot all but their Lord's precept, and were unwearied in their attendance on the sick, many perishing in the performance of this duty by taking the infection. 'In this way,' says the bishop with touching simplicity, 'the best of the brethren departed this life, some ministers, and some deacons,' the heathen having abandoned their friends and relations to the care of the very persons whom they had been accustomed to call men-haters. A like noble self-devotion was shown at Carthage, when the pestilence which had desolated Alexandria made its appearance in that city, and, I quote the words of a contemporary, 'all fled in horror from the contagion, abandoning their relations and friends, as if they thought that by avoiding the plague, any one might also exclude death altogether. Meanwhile the city was strewed with the bodies or rather carcasses of the dead, which seemed to call for pity from the passers by, who might themselves so soon share the same fate; but no one cared for anything but miserable pelf; no one trembled at the consideration of what might so soon befall him in his turn; no one did for another what he would have wished others to do for him. The bishop hereupon called together his flock, and, setting before them the example and teaching of their Lord, called on them to act up to it. He said that if they took care only of their own people, they did but what the commonest feeling would dictate; the servant of Christ must do more, he must love his enemies, and pray for his persecutors; for God made his sun to rise and his rain to fall on all alike, and he who would be the child of God must imitate his Father.' The people responded to his appeal; they formed themselves into classes, and they whose poverty prevented them from doing more gave their personal attendance while those who had property aided yet further. No one quitted his post but with his life." The example shows the more gloriously against the dark background of horror that stood so near. Yet, to the misery of the persecution by which the people were educated in sympathy, patience, fortitude, and willingness to resign life, the benignant heroism must, in part, have been due. Previous to the persecution the spirit of consecration had departed from the church. Christianity had become a social and class affair. Luxury had crept in, and eaten up the heart of conviction. The alliance of church and state had been especially disastrous to the church, the mingling of secular ambition with spiritual aspiration operating fatally on the finer qualities of faith. Few could have suspected then that the spirit of Jesus had ever been with the church. The persecution purged the christian communities with fire. The surface was burned over, and only the roots and seeds were left in the ground. The persecution ended, tranquillity being restored, the roots burgeoned, the seeds sprung up, all the heroism of the two dreadful years, all the patience and fortitude turned to gentleness; and a copious rain of mercy, blessing every body, even the persecutors, was the result of the battle's thunder and flame. The suffering that had been endured softened the heart towards all suffering. The persecutors no longer active or hateful, their passive forbearance seemed, in contrast with their recent fury, a species of mercy calling for positive gratitude. Not to be hated was felt to be identical with being loved; not to kill was by sudden revulsion of emotion, accepted as a kindly saving of life. To be kind to those who had desisted from hurting was natural. Besides, the persecution was incited and pressed by the government in Rome. The populace even there were not responsible for it, and in the distant provinces simply followed the metropolitan precedent. Their infatuation had therefore its pitiable as well as its outrageous aspect. They too were victims of the imperial policy, were perishing of the contagion which that policy caused, and thus were paying a terrible penalty for their own unwitting crime. It is unnecessary to suppose that any personal contagion from the character of Jesus, stealing through the murky ages of eastern and western life, communicated its saving grace to the Carthaginian brotherhood. Uninspired human nature is sufficient to explain the beneficent display.

The conclusion is that no clearly defined traces of the personal Jesus remain on the surface or beneath the surface of Christendom. The silence of Josephus and other secular historians may be accounted for without falling back on a theory of hostility or contempt. The Christ-idea cannot be spared from Christian development, but the personal Jesus, in some measure, can be.

In some measure, not wholly; the earliest period of the church does require his presence; the first, the original, the only disciples lived under the influence of a great personalty, and were moulded by it. Their attachment to a commanding friend is avowed in the apparently authentic parts of the New Testament. If we know anything about those men, it is that they lived, moved and had their being in the memory of a great friend. Their attachment to him took hold of their heart-strings. They were haunted by him. This appears in their frequent meetings for the expression and confirmation of their feelings, in their communion suppers, memorial occasions purely and always, without a trace of mysticism or a shade of awe; in their attachment to the places he had consecrated by his presence; in their affection for each other. Ignorant they were, unintellectual, unspiritual in the moral sense of the word, rather impervious to ideas, dull, common place, simple-hearted. They were not soaring spirits, audacious, independent like Paul, but exactly the reverse, timid, self-distrustful, pusillanimous by constitution. Their ambition flew low, fluttering round sparkling jewels on the Messianic crown. Their master was not such an one as they would have chosen, had they been allowed to select. He met none of their expectations, he fulfilled none of their hopes. His rebuke was more frequent and more cordial than his praise. Their stupidity annoyed him, their selfishness grieved his heart. Instead of justifying their confidence in him as the Christ, he utterly overthrew one form of it by allowing himself to be captured, convicted and put to death. Still they clung to his memory. True, they clung to him in the conviction that he was the Christ and would have confessed themselves dupes had that conviction been dispelled. But why was it not dispelled? Why did they believe, in the face of the crushing demonstration of the cross? They anticipated his return, because he had told them he should reappear in clouds. But why did they believe him? Why did they believe, when month after month, year after year, went by and still he did not return? It was because they loved him, and trusted him in spite of evidence. When he did not return, they thought he meant to try their faith; still they met together; still they prayed and waited, imagining themselves to be in intimate communion with him in his skies.

That these men, with their unworthy conceptions of the kingdom, accepted him as their Christ, proves not only that his power over them was very great, but that he himself lived on the highest level of hebrew thought, and illustrated the highest type of hebrew character; that he was a genuine prophet and saint; all the more so, perhaps, for the completeness of his self-abnegation. Had he raised the standard of revolt, and appealed to arms, his name might have been more conspicuous in secular history. He sacrificed himself wholly; kept no shred of preëminence for his own behoof.

Hence, the person of Jesus, though it may have been immense, is indistinct. That a great character was there may be conceded; but precisely wherein the character was great, is left to our conjecture. Of the eminent persons who have swayed the spiritual destinies of mankind, none has more completely disappeared from the critical view. The ideal image which christians have, for nearly two thousand years worshipped under the name of Jesus, has no authentic, distinctly visible counterpart in history.

This conclusion will be distressing to those who have accorded to Jesus, by virtue of a perfect humanity a certain primacy over the human race, and even to those who, regarding him as the complete fulfilment and perfect type of human character have looked to him as the beacon star "guiding the nations, groping on their way." It will be welcome only to the few calm minds who feel the force of ideas, the regenerating power of principles. These will rejoice to be relieved of the last thin shadow of a supernatural authority in the past, and committed without reserve to the support and solace of simple humanity trained in the humble observance of uninterrupted law. Their gratitude for the human influence of the person is unqualified by distrust of the claims of the individual.

The Christ of the fourth Gospel – the incarnate Word – who has been asserting absolute spiritual creatorship over his disciples, calling himself the vine whereof they were branches, the door by which they must enter, the light by which they must walk, the way their steps must tread, – says to them at the critical hour: "It is expedient for you that I go away; if I go not away the Comforter cannot come to you." There was danger in his personal continuance. They were to live not in dependence on him, but in communion with the "Spirit of Truth," which, as proceeding from him and from the Father also, was to bring freshly home to them what he had said, and to guide them further on to all truth. How many times must those words be repeated, with new applications in the new exigencies of faith! How little disposition do we find in his followers to heed them! They have gone on with the process of idealization, placing him higher and higher; making his personal existence more and more essential; insisting more and more urgently on the necessity of private intercourse with him; letting the Father subside into the background as an "effluence," and the Holy Ghost lapse from individual identity into impersonal influence, in order that he might be all in all as regenerator and saviour. From age to age the personal Jesus has been made the object of an extreme adoration, till now, faith in the living Christ is the heart of the gospel; philosophy, science, culture, humanity are thrust resolutely aside, and the great teachers of the race are extinguished in order that his light may shine.

Yet from age to age the warning has been given again, the vain farewell has been spoken, "it is expedient for you that I go away." Perhaps he went, in one form; but he quickly re-appeared in another; and each new presentation had its own special kind of evil effect. The Christ of Peter, James and John retired to make room for Paul's "Lord from heaven." He withdrew in favor of the incarnate Word. The incarnate Word loses itself in the Second Person of the Trinity. The imagination of man, unable to invent further transformations rested here: Christendom for fifteen hundred years has knelt in awe before the divine image it projected on the clouds of heaven. But the work of disenchantment began early. The sublimated ideal slowly came down from the skies. The glorified Christ assumed the lineaments of a human being, from Deity became archangel, chief of all the celestial hierarchy; from archangel slipped down through the ranks of spirits, till he occupied the place of Son of God, preëxistent, and in attributes, super-human; thence he declined a step to the position of premiership over the human family, the inaugurator of a new type of man, virgin-born as indicating that he was not the natural product of the generations but was introduced into nature by an original law; a further lapse from the supreme dignity brought him to the plane of humanity, but reported him as miraculously endowed with gifts from the Holy Spirit, supernaturally graced with attributes of power and wisdom, sent on a special mission to found a church and declare a law, raised from the dead to demonstrate immortality, and lifted to the skies to establish the presence of a living Deity. To this eminent station he bids farewell to stand as the perfect man, teacher, reformer, saint, before the enthusiastic gaze of humanitarians, who made amends for the spoliation of his celestial wardrobe by the splendor with which they endowed his human soul. Here the idealists place him, still claiming for him no exceptional birth, no super-human origin, no preëxistence, no miraculous powers over nature, no superiority of wit or wisdom, no immunity from errors of opinion or mistakes of judgment, no fated sanctity of will, no moral impeccability, but ascribing to him an unerringness of spiritual insight, an even loftiness of soul, an incorruptibility of conscience, a depth and comprehensiveness of humanity which raise him far above the plane of history, and tempt them to look longingly backward, instead of directing a steady gaze forward. But this figure is now seen to be an ideal, like the rest unjustified by chronicle or by fact. The comforter, which is the spirit of truth, requires that he should go away, following his predecessors into the realm of majestic and beneficent illusion. The Christ in every guise disappears and there remain only the uneven and incomplete footprints of a son of man from which we can conclude only that a regal person at one time passed that way.