Curiosities of Christian History Part 5

The "Apocryphal Gospel," called the "Arabic Gospel of the Infancy," has the following (chapter x.x.xv.): "In the same place there dwelt another woman, whose son was vexed by Satan. He, Judas by name, whenever Satan seized him, bit all who approached him; and if he found no one near him, he bit his own hands and other members. Therefore the mother of this unfortunate youth, hearing the fame of Lady Mary and her Son Jesus, arose and took with her her son Judas to my Lady Mary. Meanwhile, James and Joses had taken away the Child Lord Jesus to play with other children; and after leaving home, they had sat down, and the Lord Jesus with them. Judas the demoniac came nigh, and sat down at the right of Jesus; and then, being a.s.saulted by Satan as he was wont to be, he sought to bite the Lord Jesus, but he could not; yet he struck the right side of Jesus, who for this cause began to weep. Forthwith Satan went forth out of the boy in form like a mad dog. Now, this boy who struck Jesus, and from whom Satan went out in the form of a dog, was Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Him to the Jews, and that side of Him on which Judas had smote Him the Jews pierced with a spear" (Matt. x. 4; John xix. 34).

CHAPTER III.

_CHRIST'S CONTEMPORARIES--CLIMATE AND SCENERY OF PALESTINE._

THE SAGES OF GREECE AND ROME ON CHRISTIAN PRODIGIES.

Gibbon observes that during the age of Christ, of His Apostles and their first disciples, the doctrine which they preached was confirmed by innumerable prodigies. The lame walked, the blind saw, the sick were healed, the dead were raised, demons were expelled, and the laws of Nature were frequently suspended for the benefit of the Church. But the sages of Greece and Rome turned aside from the awful spectacle, and, pursuing their ordinary occupations, were unconscious of anything extraordinary. Under the reign of Tiberius, the whole earth, or at least a celebrated province of the Roman Empire, was involved in a preternatural darkness of three hours. Yet this miraculous event pa.s.sed without notice in an age of science and history. It happened during the lifetime of Seneca and the elder Pliny, who must have experienced the immediate effects or received the earliest intelligence of the prodigy. Each of these philosophers in a laborious work has recorded all the great phenomena of Nature--earthquakes, meteors, comets, and eclipses--which his indefatigable curiosity could collect. Both the one and the other have omitted to mention the greatest phenomenon to which the mortal eye has been witness since the creation of the globe. A distinct chapter of Pliny is designed for eclipses of an extraordinary nature and unusual duration, but he contents himself with describing the singular defect of light which followed the murder of Caesar, when during the greatest part of the year the orb of the sun appeared pale and without splendour. This season of obscurity, which cannot surely be compared with the preternatural darkness of the Pa.s.sion, had been already celebrated by most of the poets and historians of that memorable age.

DEATH OF ZACHARIAS.

Jeremy Taylor says that Herod slew Zacharias between the Temple and the altar "because he refused to betray his son to the fury of that rabid bear,--though some persons, very eminent amongst the stars of the primitive Church, report a tradition that, a place being separated in the Temple for virgins, Zacharias suffered the mother of our Lord to abide there after the birth of her Holy Son, affirming her still to be a virgin; and that for this reason, not Herod, but the scribes and Pharisees, did kill Zacharias. Tertullian reports that the blood of Zacharias had so besmeared the stones of the pavement, which was the altar on which the good old priest was sacrificed, that no art or industry could wash the tincture out, the dye and guilt being both indelible; as if, because G.o.d did intend to exact of that nation 'all the blood of righteous persons, from Abel to Zacharias,' who was the last of the martyrs of the synagogue, He would leave a character of their guilt in their eyes to upbraid their irreligion, cruelty, and infidelity. Some there are who affirm these words of our Saviour not to relate to any Zacharias who had been already slain, but to be a prophecy of the last of all the martyrs of the Jews who should be slain immediately before the destruction of the last Temple and the dissolution of the nation. Certain it is that such a Zacharias, the son of Baruch (if we may believe Josephus), was slain in the middle of the Temple a little before it was destroyed; and it is agreeable to the nature of the prophecy and reproof here made by our Saviour that 'from Abel to Zacharias' should take in 'all the righteous blood' from first to last till the iniquity was complete, and it is not imaginable that the blood of our Lord and of St. James their bishop (for whose death many of themselves thought G.o.d destroyed their city) should be left out of the account, which certainly would be if any other Zacharias should be meant. In reference to this, Cyprian de Valera expounds that which we read in the past tense to signify the future: 'Ye slew'--_i.e._, shall slay."

CHILDHOOD OF JOHN THE BAPTIST.

Elizabeth fled with her son John the Baptist when he was about eighteen months old into the wilderness, where after forty days she died. His father Zacharias, at the time of his ministration, which happened about this time, was killed in the court of the Temple. According to the tradition of the Greeks, G.o.d deputed an angel to be his guardian and nourisher, as he had formerly done to Ishmael and Elias.

DEATH OF JOHN THE BAPTIST.

The Jews ascribed to the murder of John the Baptist the fate that befell Herod and Salome. Herod, in journeying to Rome four years after Christ's death, was deprived of his tetrarchate and banished along with Herodias to Gaul, and they died in great misery at Lyons or in Spain. Salome in crossing the ice in winter fell into the water; and the ice, after parting, joined again, and decapitated her. John the Baptist's disciples honourably buried his body. It was said the Pagans rifled the tomb and burned the body in the reign of Julian the Apostate; but some of the bones were sent to St. Athanasius at Alexandria. In 396 Theodosius built a great church in that city in honour of the Baptist, and there the holy relics were deposited. The head of the Baptist was discovered in 453, and in 800 it was conveyed to Constantinople; in 1203 the lower jaw was taken to France, and is preserved to this day. Part of the head is in St.

Sylvester's Church at Rome.

BURIAL OF JOHN THE BAPTIST.

Jeremy Taylor says that John was imprisoned in the castle of Macheruns, where Herod sent for him and caused him to be beheaded. His head Herodias buried in her own palace, thinking to secure it against a reunion, lest it should again disturb her unlawful l.u.s.ts and disquiet Herod's conscience.

But the body the disciples of John gathered up, and carried it with honour and sorrow, and buried it in Sebaste, in the confines of Samaria, making his grave between the bodies of Elizeus and Abdias the prophets. And about this time was the Pa.s.sover of the Jews.

CHURCHES DEDICATED TO THE BAPTIST.

Temples were dedicated to John the Baptist in the first ages of Christianity, the earliest and most celebrated being that known at Rome as St. John Lateran. The next most celebrated church dedicated to St. John is the Baptistery at Florence, dedicated by the Princess Theodolunda about 589. In this baptistery every child born in Florence of the Roman Catholic faith must by law be baptised. This renowned church is decorated both inside and without with miracles of art.

PONTIUS PILATE.

Pilate, after ten years of service, was disgraced and called to Rome. One of that cloud of false witnesses who sprang up every year told the people of Samaria that he knew where the sacred vessels lay hid, and fixed a day when they should meet him in thousands on Gerizim to dig them up. Hearing of this movement, Pilate sent troops into the highways and villages round Shechem; and these soldiers, setting upon the people, slew the innocent with the guilty, and put the whole body of Samaritans to flight. A great cry for vengeance arose in Samaria; the Senate sent an emba.s.sy to Antioch; and Vitellius, a man of craft and policy, wishing to stand well with the Jews, put the government of Samaria and Judaea into fresh hands, and commanded Pilate to report himself in Rome. Here we lose sight of him.

Legends make him a suicide--some in a Roman prison, others in Gaul, and others again near the Lake of Lucerne, on the summit of the mountain which bears the name of Mount Pilatus.

THE DOINGS OF HEROD THE GREAT.

About sixty years B.C., Herod, misnamed the Great, had partly by bribery prevailed on Antony and Augustus to make him king of the Jews, and Josephus describes his visit to Rome on that appointment. Herod has always been a monster of cruelty. He married a beautiful woman named Mariamne, whom he put to death after being the mother of several of his children.

Then he had a fit of remorse, and frantically called her by name, and ordered his servants to do so. Then he next slew the grandfather and brother of Mariamne, the latter being ordered to be suffocated while his servants were engaged in a bathing frolic. In his old age he was seized with a sudden suspicion against two sons, whom he accused of a plot against him, and after some wavering caused them to be strangled, and some three hundred who sympathised with them to be stoned to death. After these symptoms of madness, a year before his death, being alarmed by the reports of the visits of the Magi, and the prophecies of the birth of Christ, he ordered the ma.s.sacre of the innocents. He died a year after, at the age of seventy-one, of a disgusting disease, accompanied with horrible tortures, having reigned thirty-five years. In order that he should not die without being lamented, he had ordered a large number of the chief inhabitants of Jerusalem, as soon as he was dead, to be slain by his soldiers. He died enormously rich, and even Horace refers to his vast palm groves. There was a lengthened litigation and appeal to Rome about the division of his estates and governments. The son who succeeded him so misconducted himself that after nine years he was banished by Augustus and his wealth confiscated.

MARY MAGDALENE.

There were three Marys--Mary of Bethania, Mary the sister of Lazarus, and Mary Magdalene; and some think they were all one person. Most of the early writers say that she and Lazarus and Martha left Galilee and settled at Bethany, and there Christ often visited them. The penitent woman and she are by some treated as the same person; but it is at best only a conjecture. It is a popular tradition that Mary and Lazarus, and Martha or Mary their sister, were expelled after the Ascension, and put to sea, and reached Ma.r.s.eilles, and founded a Church there, of which Lazarus was the first bishop. The relics of these saints were alleged to be discovered in Provence in the thirteenth century, and Mary Magdalene's were at St.

Maximius, near Ma.r.s.eilles, where a convent now stands. Her festival is kept July 22nd, and once was a holiday in England.

MARY MAGDALENE PREACHING.

A Provencal legend states that after the Ascension Lazarus, with his two sisters Martha and Mary, Maximius and seventy-two disciples, also Cedon the blind man whom our Saviour restored to sight, and Marcella the handmaiden were put by the heathen in a vessel and set adrift; but, guided by Providence, it landed at Ma.r.s.eilles in France. The people were then Pagans, and refused to give the pilgrims food or shelter, so that they were fain to take refuge under the porch of a temple. And Mary Magdalene preached to the people, reproaching them for their senseless worship of dumb idols. And though at first they refused to listen, yet they were after a time convinced by her eloquence, and by the miracles she and her sister performed; and they were all converted and baptised. These things being accomplished, Mary Magdalene retired to a desert near the city, where there were only rocks and caves, and she devoted herself to solitary penance for thirty years, weeping and bewailing for the past. She fasted rigorously, and must have perished, but the angels came down from heaven every day and carried her up in their arms into regions where her ears were ravished with the sounds of heavenly melody, and where she beheld the glory and the joy prepared for the penitent sinner. One day, a hermit, having wandered near the spot, beheld this wondrous vision of the angels carrying the Magdalene up to heaven in their arms, and singing songs of triumph; and after recovering from his amazement, he returned to the city of Ma.r.s.eilles and reported what he had seen. Fra Angelico has a most interesting picture of the Magdalene preaching from the steps of a building to an audience composed mostly of nuns, who are in rapt attention.

ACCOUNT OF ST. MARTHA.

St. Martha, the sister of Lazarus and Mary, was a favourite member of that family whom Christ often visited, staying a night on His visits. On the first visit, Martha attended to the practical details of hospitality, while Mary was intensely absorbed in the spiritual charm of the conversation, and did nothing but listen, and yet was commended for this, as if each was ent.i.tled to follow her own way of displaying her affection.

The message sent at a later date to Christ by the two sisters was simply this--"He whom Thou lovest is sick": they knew it was enough to say that one word. On the last visit of Christ, Mary poured costly ointment on Christ's feet, which Judas Iscariot said was a shocking extravagance. St.

Martha seems to have been present at the Crucifixion. After Christ's ascension, she, as stated under the head of Mary Magdalene, went to Ma.r.s.eilles, and her body is deposited in a vault under the church at Tarascon. King Louis XI. gave a rich bust of gold, in which the saint's head is kept.

ST. VERONICA AND HER HANDKERCHIEF.

St. Veronica was the woman who was healed by touching the hem of Christ's garment. She greatly longed for a portrait of Christ, and brought a cloth to Luke, who was a painter, to make one. But he tried three times to make a good portrait and failed. And Veronica being distressed, Christ told her He would help her if she would go home and prepare a meal, which He would take with her. She prepared the meal, and Christ went at the time appointed; and on receiving from her a cloth to wipe His face after washing it, He pressed it to His face, and it received a miraculous portrait of His features. This He gave to her, and it performed afterwards many miracles. The Emperor hearing of these miracles, sent for Veronica to show him the portrait. She went to Rome with it, and was received with great honour, and showed it to the Emperor, who, on seeing it, was immediately cured. Others say that Veronica was a compa.s.sionate woman, who, seeing the drops of agony on the brow of Christ, as He was bearing the cross to Calvary, wiped His face with a napkin, or with her veil, and then she found His likeness miraculously stamped upon the cloth. She afterwards came to Europe in the same vessel with Lazarus and Mary Magdalene, and suffered martyrdom in Provence or Aquitaine.

HILLEL RELATED TO JESUS.

Of the Great College which inspired and guided Jewish thought, the chief luminary had been Hillel, surnamed the Great. Hillel was a Babylonian Jew by birth, though in blood (on his mother's side at least) he belonged, like Joseph of Bethlehem, to the royal line. Hence he was of kin to Mary and Jesus. Like Joseph, too, he was a craftsman in one of the n.o.ble trades. When he left the Farther East for Syria, he was already forty years of age; when he came to Jerusalem and entered himself a student in the school of Menachem the Essene and Shammai the Pharisee, he had to labour for his college fees and daily bread. He sat under Sammias and Pollion. Each of these eminent scholars had risen by his virtues and learning to the high rank of rector of the Great College. Under him the college made a new start for fame. He invented the seven rules. A thousand pupils entered his cla.s.ses: eighty are said to have become famous as men of letters, doctors, and scribes. He lived to the age of a hundred and twenty, and died when Jesus was fourteen years of age (in the tenth year of our era). He may have been one of the doctors with whom Christ talked in the Temple. Simeon succeeded his father in the rectorship, and was still alive when Jesus began to preach, and died two years after the Crucifixion.

THE SANHEDRIM AT JERUSALEM.

The Sanhedrim's strength had been reduced first by Herod the Great, afterwards by the Roman governors of Judaea. Herod, on capturing Jerusalem, had seized the whole body of the Sanhedrim, thrown them into prison, and, with two ill.u.s.trious exceptions, put them all to death. Around Hillel and Shammai, the men whom Herod had spared, a new council had been formed; but the prestige of the Sanhedrim could never be restored. Pilate abridged their rights, taking from them more particularly the power of life and death; yet even after they had lost the right to torture prisoners and stone offenders, they still exercised a vast authority in Jerusalem, and in every other Jewish city. Pilate could not dispute their jurisdiction over Jews, however, in whatever land they dwelt, so long as they did not encroach on the civil powers. The Sanhedrim comprised three cla.s.ses--priests, Levites, and ordinary Jews. The priestly element was strong. Caiaphas, being the official high priest, had a right to preside.

In his absence the chair was filled by Simeon, rector of the Great College. Whoever filled the chair was considered as sitting in the place of Moses.

THE WORKING MAN IN CHRIST'S TIME.

No handicraft could be followed by a slave, and none but a freeman could learn a trade. Some trades were indeed less eminent than others--to wit, the art of a tanner was condemned as noisome; the arts of a barber, a weaver, a fuller, a perfumer, were all considered mean; and no man following these crafts could be allowed on any pretence to serve in the sacred office. A tanner, like Jose of Sephoris, might become a rabbi; he could never be made high priest. Not so with the craft of carpenter--a craft which had a part of its functions in the synagogue and Temple, which was often adopted as a profession by men of n.o.ble birth, and which enjoyed the same sort of repute among the Jews that is given in England to the Church, the Army, and the Bar.

THE PHARISAIC NICETIES.

The Pharisees were so rigid that, according to Buxtorf ("Syn. Judaica"), if an ox or other animal fell into a pit, it was deemed lawful to draw it out only when leaving it till Sabbath would involve risk to life. When delay was not dangerous, the rule was to give the beast food sufficient for the day; and if there were water in the bottom of the pit, to place straw and bolsters below it that it might not be drowned. The same author states that it was a breach of the law to let a c.o.c.k wear a piece of ribbon round its leg on Sabbath, for it was making it bear something. It was also forbidden to walk through a stream on stilts, because, though the stilts appear to bear you, you really carry the stilts. While scrupulously observing the law which prohibited the cooking of food on Sabbath, they did not by any means make the holy day a day of fasting.

THE SIEGES OF JERUSALEM.