The Cradle of the Christ: A Study in Primitive Christianity

It is not affirmed here that the actual Jesus corresponded to this Messianic representation; that he filled it and no more; that it correctly and adequately reported him. It may possibly present only so much of him as the average of his contemporaries could appreciate. They may be right who are of opinion that the fourth evangelist comes nearer to the historical truth than the first. That the earliest New Testament conception of the Messiah has been correctly portrayed in the preceding sketch may be granted without prejudice to the historical Jesus. They only who assume the identity of this Hebrew Messiah with the man of Nazareth, need place him in the niche that is here made for the Messiah. There are others more noble. Let each decide for himself, on the evidence, to which he belongs. Some will decide that the first account of a wonderful person must, from the nature of the case, be the falsest; others will decide that in the nature of things it must be the truest. Whichever be the decision the literary image remains unimpaired. Whether time should be judged requisite to emancipate the living character from the associations of its environment, and bring it into full view; or whether on the other hand time should be regarded as darkening and confusing the image, for the reason that it allows the growth of legends and distorting theory, is a question that will be touched by-and-by. For the present it suffices to show what the earliest representation was, and to trace its descent from the traditions of the race. The materials are adequate for this, whether for more or not. The form of Jesus may be lost, but the form of the Messiah is distinct.

V.

THE FIRST CHRISTIANS

The death of the Messiah did not discourage his followers, as it might have done had he presented the coarser type of the anticipation illustrated by Judas of Galilee whose insurrection had been extinguished in blood some years before, yet the movement of Judas did not cease at his death, but troubled the state for sixty years. His two sons, James and John, raised the Messianic standard fifteen years or thereabouts after the crucifixion of Jesus, and were themselves crucified. Their younger brother, Menahem, renewed the attempt twenty years later, and so far succeeded that he cut his way to the throne, assumed the part of a king, went in royal state to the temple, and but for the fury of his fanaticism might have re-erected temporarily the throne of David. But this kind of Messiah, besides being savage, was monotonous. His appeal was to the lower passions; the thoughtful, imaginative, contemplative, poetic, were not drawn to him. His followers, adherents not disciples, – might, at the best, have founded a dynasty, they could not have planted a church. The pure enthusiasm of the Christ, his entire singleness of heart, the absence in him of private ambition or self-seeking, his confidence in the heavenly character of his mission, his reliance on super-human aid, his sincere persuasion that the purpose of his calling would not be thwarted by death, insured his hold on those who had trusted him. They did not lose their conviction that he was the Messiah; they anticipated his return, in glory, to complete his work; in that anticipation they waited, watched and prayed. The name "Christians" was, we are told, given, in derision, to the believers in Antioch. But if they had chosen a name for themselves, they could not have hit on a more precisely descriptive one. "Christians" they were; believers that the Christ had come, that the crucified was the Christ, that he would reappear and vindicate his claim. This was their single controlling thought, the only thought that distinguished them from their countrymen who rejected the Messiahship of their friend. They were Jews, in every respect; Jews of Jews, enthusiastic, devout, pharisaic Jews, the firmest of adherents to the Law of Moses, unqualified receivers of tradition, diligent students of the scriptures, constant attendants at the temple worship, urgent in supplication, literal in creed, and punctual in observance; acquiescent in the claims of the priesthood, scrupulous in all Hebrew etiquette. They were determined that the Master, at his coming, should find them ready.

James, "the Lord's brother," set an example of sanctity worthy of a high-priest. In fact, he assumed the position of a priest, and filled it with such austerity that he was called "the righteous." He tasted, says Hegesippus, neither wine nor strong drink; he ate nothing that had life; his hair was never shorn; his body was never anointed with oil, or bathed in water; his garments were of linen, never of wool; so perfect was he in all righteousness that, though no consecrated priest, he was permitted to enter the holy place behind the veil of the temple, and there he spent hours in intercession for the people, his knees becoming as hard as a camel's from contact with the stone pavement. To those who asked him the way to life, he replied: "Believe that Jesus is the Christ." When some dissenters protested against this declaration and asked him to retract it, he repeated it with stronger emphasis; when the malcontents who revered him, but would have none of his Messiah, raised a tumult and tried to intimidate him, he reiterated the statement, adding: "He sits in heaven, at the right hand of the Supreme power, and will come in clouds." For this testimony, says tradition, he laid down his life.

The fellow-believers of James imitated him as closely as they could. They were proud of their descent from Abraham; they were tenacious of the privileges granted to the twelve tribes; they kept up their relation with the synagogue; they had faith in forms of observance; they revered the Sabbath; their trust in the literal efficacy of prayer was implicit; they were excessively jealous of intellectual activity outside of their narrow communion; their anticipations were confined to the restoration of Israel, and never wandered into the region of social improvement or moral progress; in general ethical and social culture they were not interested.

They had no ecclesiastical establishment apart from the Jewish Church; no separate priesthood, no sacraments, no cultus, no rubric, no calendar, no liturgy. The validity of sacrifice they maintained, the doctrine of sacrifice possessing a deeper significance for them from the growing faith that their Lord was himself the paschal lamb, the shedding of whose blood purchased the remission of sins. Hence a special encouragement of the sacerdotal spirit, an exaggerated sense of the efficacy of blood, a theory of atonement more searching and absolute than had prevailed in the ancient church. The later doctrine of atonement in the christian church may have grown from this small but vital germ.

They had no dogma peculiar to themselves, the doctrines of the old Church being all they needed; they had no trinity or beginning of trinity; no christology; no doctrine of Fall; no theory of first and second Adam; no metaphysic; no philosophy of sin and salvation; no interior mystery of experience. Whatever newness of creed they avowed, was owing to their acknowledgment of the Christ, and consisted in a few very simple inferences from this tenet. Of course even slow-minded, literal, external men could not entertain a belief like that, and not be pushed by it to certain practical conclusions. The expectation of the Christ's coming would necessarily raise questions respecting the conditions of acceptance with him, the character of his dominion, the duration of it, the social changes incidental to it; but it does not appear that speculation on these subjects was carried far. A crude millenarianism developed itself early; a cloudy theory of atonement found favor; for the rest, conjecture, it was little more, dwelt contentedly within the confines of rabbinical lore.

There was nothing peculiar in their moral precepts or usages, nothing that should effect a change in the received ethics of the nation. Their essential creed involved no practical innovation on private or social moralities. The mosaic code was familiar to them from childhood. The popular commentaries on it were promulgated from week to week in the synagogues, and their validity was no more questioned by the Christians than by the most orthodox of Jews.

The daily existence of these people was retired and simple. They had frequent meetings for talk, song, mutual cheer and confirmation; full of expectation and excitement they must have been; wild with memories and hopes. For the believers lived out of themselves, in an ideal, a supernatural sphere; their hearts were in heaven with their Master, whose form filled their vision, whose voice they seemed to hear, from whom came, as they fancied, impressions, intimations, influences, unspoken but breathed messages interpreted by the soul. They were visionaries. Their life was illusion. They were transported beyond themselves at times, by the prospect of the Lord's nearness. Their minds were dazed; their feelings raised to ecstasy; in vision they saw the heavens open and fiery tongues descend. Their small upper chamber seemed to tremble and dilate in sympathy with their feelings; the ceiling appeared to lift; they were moved by an impulse which they could not account for, and regarded themselves as inspired.

In these circumstances, it is not to be wondered at that they lived in communities by themselves, preferring the society of their fellows; that they had a common purse, a common table; that they were ascetic and celibate; that they withdrew from public affairs and from private business, and approached nearly to the Essenes, with whom they had much in common, perpetuating the habit of monasticism, which became afterwards so prominent a feature in the Eastern church.

Nor is it surprising that they regarded the intimate friends of their Christ with a peculiar veneration, and ascribed to them extraordinary gifts. The basis of the future hierarchy was laid in the honor paid to these few men. They were credited with supernatural insight, and with the possession of miraculous power. Their touch was healing; their mere shadow comforted; their approval was blessing; their displeasure cursed. What they ratified was fixed; what they permitted was decreed. Their word was law; it was for them to admit and to exclude. The penalty of excommunication was in their hands, to be inflicted at their discretion. Superstition went so far as to concede to them the alternatives of life and death. The legend of Ananias and Sapphira is evidence of a credulity that set not reason only, but conscience at defiance. In their infatuation they believed that the Christ above communicated a saving spiritual grace to such as the apostles touched with their fingers.

Very singular, but very consistent and logical were the views of death entertained by the brotherhood in Christ. As their Lord delayed his coming, the elders grew old and fell asleep. There was a brotherhood of the dead as well as of the living; the living became few; the dead many. Questions arose respecting the destination of those departed. That they had perished was not to be thought of; as little to be thought of was the possibility of their forfeiting their privilege of sharing the believers' triumph. The resurrection the disciples had always believed in. That, at the coming of the Messiah there would be a general resurrection of the faithful Israelites from their graves, in field or rock, was part of their ancestral faith. But now, the matter was brought home to them with painful reality. The Christ might come at any moment; the dead were their own immediate kindred, their parents and brethren. The problem presented no difficulties to their minds however agitating it might be to their hearts. The Lord would come; of that there could be no doubt; the dead would rise, that was certain; but in what form? In what order? Would the living have precedence of them? Where would the meeting take place? How would the dead know that the time of resurrection had arrived? The answer came promptly as the question. The trumpet of the angels would proclaim the event to all creatures, visible and invisible. The elect would respond to the summons; the gates of Hades would burst asunder. In etherial forms, lighter than air, more radiant than the morning, the faithful who had died "in the Lord," would ascend; the living would exchange their terrestrial bodies for bodies celestial, and thus "changed," "in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye," would mount upward to join them, and all together would "meet the Lord in the air." For the believers the grave had no victory and death no sting.

In all this the Christians were strictly within the circle of Jewish thought. The belief in the resurrection wore different aspects in different minds; the vision of the hereafter floated many-hued before the imaginations of men. The fiery zealots who "took the kingdom of heaven by violence," dreamed of the resurrection of the body, and of tangible privileges of dominion in the terrestrial millennium. The milder enthusiasts, who could not believe that flesh and blood could inherit the kingdom of God, were constrained to invent a "spiritual world" for the accommodation of spiritual bodies. Some conjectured that the etherial forms would mount to their native seat, only at the termination of the thousand years reign; the spiritual world being brought in at the end, as a device of eschatology to dispose finally of the saints who could neither die nor remain longer on earth. Others surmised that the spiritual world would claim its own at once, there being no place on earth where the risen could live and no occupations in which they could engage. The cruder faith was the earlier.

The fanatics, as described in the second Book of Maccabees, an apocryphal writing of the second century before Christ, hoped for a corporeal resurrection and a visible supremacy. Of seven sons, who, with their mother, were barbarously executed because they refused to deny their religion by eating swines' flesh, one declares: "The King of the world shall raise us up who have died for his laws, into everlasting life;" another, holding forth his hands (to be cut off), said courageously, "These I had from heaven, and for his laws I despise them, and from him I hope to receive them again." The next shouts: "It is good being put to death by men, to look for hope from God, to be raised up again by him; as for thee, thou shalt have no resurrection to life." Finally, when all the seven have died heroically, with words of similar import on their lips, the mother is put to death, having exhorted her youngest born to faithfulness with the exhortation: "Doubtless the Creator of the world who formed the generation of man, and found out the beginning of all things, will also, of his own mercy, give you breath and life again, as ye now regard not your own selves for his laws' sake." The same book records the suicide of Razis: "One of the elders of Jerusalem, a lover of his countrymen, and a man of very good report, who for his kindness was called a Father of the Jews, for in former times he had been accused of Judaism, and did boldly jeopard his body and life with all vehemency for the religion of the Jews;" "choosing rather to die manfully than to come into the hands of the wicked, to be abused otherwise than beseemed his noble birth, he fell on his sword. Nevertheless, while there was yet breath within him, being inflamed with anger, he rose up, and though his blood gushed out like spouts of water, and his wounds were grievous, yet he ran through the midst of the throng, and, standing upon a steep rock, when as his blood was now quite gone, he plucked out his bowels, and taking them in both his hands, he cast them upon the throng, and calling upon the Lord of life and spirit to restore him those again, he thus died."

The angel of the book of Daniel calls up a fairer vision: "Many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness, as the stars for ever and ever."

Something like this, perhaps, was the anticipation of the Christ sketched in the last chapter. The personal conception is shadowy. There is nothing to indicate positively that he departed from the usual opinion of a physical resurrection and a kingdom of heaven on earth, a period of terrestrial happiness under the rule of Jehovah. The declaration to the thief on the cross: "This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise," belongs to a later tradition, corresponding to the ideas of Paul. The parable of Dives and Lazarus must be assigned to the same circle of doctrine. The saying respecting children, "Their angels always behold the face of my father in heaven," conveys no more than the belief in guardian spirits. The "angels" are not departed children, but the watchers over the lives of living ones. The reply given to the Sadducees, in Matt. XXII., "In the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven," implies that the temporal condition of the Messiah's subjects will differ in important respects from their present social estate, but does not suggest a celestial locality for its organization; and the declaration that follows: "God is not the God of the dead, but of the living," affirms merely that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are not annihilated, that they are, or will be, alive; but how, where, or when, is left undecided. The expression, "Thy kingdom come," in the paternoster, so different from the latter petition: "May we come into thy kingdom," looks towards an earthly paradise. The succeeding phrase, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven," points in the same direction. It is probable that the Christ, living and expecting to live, contemplated the establishment of his Messianic dominion in Palestine. After his death and disappearance, the thoughts of his friends turned elsewhither, and with an increasing steadiness, as his return was delayed, and the probabilities of their going to him outweighed the probabilities of his coming to them. The change of expectation was, it is likely, a gradual, silent, and unperceived one, effected slowly, and not completed till a new conception of the Christ supplanted the old one, and transformed every feature of the Messianic belief. In less than twenty-five years after the death of Jesus, this change was so far effected that it was capable of full literary expression. The writings that publish it, are the genuine letters of Paul, and other scriptures produced under the inspiration of his idea.

VI.

PAUL'S NEW DEPARTURE

There is reason to think, as we have said, that the first Messianic impulse would have spent itself ineffectually in a few years, had not a fresh impulse been given by a new conception of the Messiah. The Christ outlined in the earliest literature of the New Testament would hardly have founded a permanent church, or given his name to a distinct religion. A new conception came, in due time, from an unexpected quarter, through a man who was both Jew and Greek; Jew by parentage, nurture, training and genius; Greek by birth-place, residence and association; a man well versed in scripture, a pupil of approved rabbis, familiar with the talmud, and deeply interested in talmudical speculation; a Pharisee of the straitest sect; an enthusiast – yes, a fanatic by temperament; on the other hand, a mind somewhat expanded by intercourse with the people and the literature of other nations. Paul's feeling on the "Christ question" was always intense. He made it a personal matter, even in his comparative youth; distinguishing himself by his zeal in behalf of correct opinion on the subject. He appears, first, a young man, as a persecutor of the Jews who believed that the Christ had actually come, and who were waiting for his return in clouds. That idea seemed to him visionary and dangerous; he made it his business to exterminate it by violence, if necessary. But the fury of his demonstration proved his interest in the general idea. He was at heart a Messianic believer, though not in that style. A Messianic believer he continued to be, but to the end as little as at first, in that style. To the ordinary belief he never was "converted;" his repudiation of it was perhaps at no time less vehement than it was at the beginning; as his own thought matured, his rejection of the faith he persecuted in his youth, became it seems more deliberate, if less violent.

As he pursued one phase of the Messianic expectation, another aspect of it burst upon him with the splendor of a revelation, and determined his career. The man who had breathed fury against one type, became the apostle of another. The same fiery zeal that blasted the one, warmed the other into life. In the book of the "Acts of the Apostles," the first martyr at whose stoning Paul assisted, bore the Greek name "Stephen," whence, as well as from other indications, it has been surmised by Baur and others that he was a precursor of the future "Gentile party," pursued and slain by the "orthodox" on account of his infidelity to the cause of Hebrew national exclusiveness. If this conjecture be admitted, the deed Paul had abetted, may have been the immediate cause of his own moral revulsion of feeling. The slain over-came the slayer. The dying hand committed to the fierce bystander the torch it could carry no further. The murdered Greek raised up the apostle to the Greeks, thus avenging himself by sending his adversary to martyrdom in the same cause for which he himself bled. In religious fervors such reactions have been frequent.

For Paul was, from first to last, the same person, in no natural feature of mind or character changed. His religious belief remained essentially, even incidentally unaltered. A Pharisee he was born, and a Pharisee he continued. The pharisaic doctrine of the resurrection was the corner stone of his system, the beginning, middle and end of his faith, the starting point of his creed. His conception of God was the ordinary conception, unqualified, unmitigated, uncompromised. The divine sovereignty never suffered weakening at his hands. One can hardly open the epistle to the Jewish Christians in Rome, without coming across some tremendous assertion of the absolute supremacy of God. Read the passage in the first chapter, 20-26 verses; in the second chapter, 6-12 verses; in the ninth chapter, 14-23 verses; in the eleventh chapter, first verse and onward. Read 1 Corin., fifteenth chapter, 24-29 verses. The old fashioned Jewish conception is expressed in language simply revolting in its bald inhumanity. The views of Divine Providence set forth in some of these sentences are anthropomorphitic to a degree that is amazing in an intellectual man of his age and race. His discussions of fate and free-will betoken the sternness of a dogmatic, rather than the discernment of a philosophic, mind. His notion of history has the narrowness of the national character. His ethics are taken from the law of Moses, and not from the more benignant versions of it. The grandest ethical chapter he ever wrote, the twelfth chapter of Romans, contains no less than three instances of grave infidelity to the highest standard of morality in his own scriptures. Rabbi Hillel said: "Love peace, and pursue peace; love mankind, and bring them near the law. The moral condition of the world depends on three things, – Truth, Justice, and Peace." Paul says: "If it be possible, so much as lyeth in you, live peaceably with all men," implying clearly that it might not always be possible, and in such cases was not to be expected. The tacit proviso in the phrase "so much as lyeth in you," discharges the obligation of its imperative character; as if conscious that the duty might prove too much for the moral power, he will not impose it. It is written in the Talmud: "Thou shalt love thy neighbor; even if he be a criminal, and has forfeited his life, practise charity towards him in the last moments." Paul drops far below this when he bids his disciples, "Avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath" (make room for wrath that is wrath indeed.) "For it is written, 'vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.'" Therefore (because the Lord's vengeance will be more terrible than yours), "if thine enemy hunger, feed him: if he thirst, give him drink; for in so doing, thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head." That is, by showing kindness you will inflict on him tenfold agony!

Such a disciple would not adorn the membership of a modern Peace Society. The language ascribed to him in Ephesians bristles with military metaphor; "Fight the good fight of faith," "The helmet of salvation," "The sword of the Spirit," "Armor of light."