The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire Part 18

What was written in the Gospels of the life and death of Jesus, might by now be ancient history, if the Gospels had told the whole story.

But they did not tell the whole story; and they neither were, nor are, the source of the Christian movement, great as their influence is and has been. The Jesus who has impressed himself upon mankind is not a character, however strong and beautiful, that is to be read about in a book. Before the Gospels were written, men spoke of the "Spirit of Jesus" as an active force amongst them. We may criticize their phrase and their psychology as we like, but they were speaking of something they knew, something they had seen {140} and felt, and it is that "something" which changed the course of history. Jesus lives for us in the pages of the Gospels, but we are not his followers on that account, nor were the Christians of the first century. They, like ourselves, followed him under the irresistible attraction of his character repeating itself in the lives of men and women whom they knew. The Son of G.o.d, they said, revealed himself in men, and it was true. Of his immediate followers we know almost nothing, but it was they who pa.s.sed him on to the next generation, consciously in their preaching, which was not always very good; and unconsciously in their lives, which he had transformed, and which had gained from him something of the power of his own life. The church was a nexus of quickened and redeemed personalities,--men and women in whom Christ lived. So Paul wrote of it. A century later another nameless Christian spoke of Christ being "new born every day over again in the hearts of believers," and it would be hard to correct the statement. If we are to give a true account of such men as Alexander and Caesar, we consider them in the light of the centuries through which their ideas lived and worked. In the same way, the life, the mind and the personality of Jesus will not be understood till we have realized by some intimate experience something of the worth and beauty of the countless souls that in every century have found and still find in him the Alpha and Omega of their being. For the Gospels are not four but "ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands," and the last word of every one of them is "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world."

Chapter IV Footnotes:

[1] Justin, _Apology_, i, 66.

[2] Quoted by Origen, _contra Celsum_, ii, 26, 27.

[3] Cf. Mr F. C. Conybeare's article on the remodelling of the baptismal formula in Matthew xxviii after the Council of Nicaea, _Hibbert Journal_, Oct. 1902.

[4] Origen, _c. Cels._ vii, 58, _agroikoteron_.

[5] Xen. _Mem_, i, 2, 37. Cf. Plato, _Symp._ 221 E. Gorgias, 491 A.

See Forbes, _Socrates_, 128; Adam, _Religious Teachers of Greece_, i, 338.

[6] Plato, _Philebus_, 50 B.

[7] On "playfulness" in the words of Jesus, see Burkitt, the _Gospel History_, p. 142. See also _Life of Abp Temple_, ii. 681 (letter to his son 18 Dec. 1896), on the "beam in the eye" and the "eye of the needle"--"that faint touch of fun which all Oriental teachers delight in."

[8] Luke iv, 22, _ethaumazon ep tois logois tes charitos_.

[9] George Adam Smith, _Historical Geography of the Holy Land, ad loc._

[10] Matthew xiii, 56 says _pasai_, and Mark uses a plural.

[11] Luke xi, 5.

[12] Mark ix, 36, _enagkalisamenos_.

[13] _Gospel History_, p. 285.

[14] I believe that the allusion to dogs has been thrown back into Jesus' words from the woman's reply, and that she was the first to mention them. Note Mark's emphatic phrase _dia touton tn logon_; vii, 29.

[15] _Gospel History_, p. 93 f. (with map).

[16] The steady gaze and the pause are mentioned by the Gospels, in more than one place, as preceding utterance. There are of course great variations in the accounts of the last supper.

[17] xxii, 28.

[18] The author of _Rab and his Friends_.

[19] ix, 36.

[20] Cf. _ad Diognetum_, cited on p. 177.

[21] I quote this from a friend to whom a Jew said as much; of course every general statement requires modification. Still the predominantly tribal character of Judaism implies contempt for the spiritual life of the Gentile Christian and pagan. If the knowledge of G.o.d was or is of value to the Jew, he has made little effort to share it.

[22] _e.g._ Mark x, 24.

[23] t.i.tus iii, 4.

[24] _Second Clement_ (so-called), 6, 7.

[25] Tert. _de Or._ 1 (end). Cf. also c. 4, on the prayer in the Garden; and _de fuga_, 8.

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CHAPTER V

THE FOLLOWERS OF JESUS

Two things stand out, when we study the character of the early church--its great complexity and variety, and its unity in the personality of Jesus of Nazareth. In spite of the general levelling which Greek culture and Roman government had made all over the Mediterranean world, the age-long influences of race and climate and cult were still at work. Everywhere there was a varnish of Greek literature; everywhere a tendency to uniformity in government, very carefully managed with great tenderness for local susceptibilities, but none the less a fixed object of the Emperors; everywhere cult was blended with cult with the lavish hospitality of polytheism; and yet, apart from denationalized men of letters, artists and dilettanti, the old types remained and reproduced themselves. And when men looked at the Christian community, it was as various as the Empire--"Thou wast slain," runs the hymn in the Apocalypse, "and thou hast redeemed us to G.o.d by thy blood out of every kindred and tongue and people and nation." There soon appeared that desire for uniformity which animated the secular government, and which appears to be an ineradicable instinct of the human mind. Yet for the first two centuries--the period under our discussion--the movement toward uniformity had not grown strong enough to overcome the race-marks and the place-marks.

There are great areas over which in Christian life and thought the same general characteristics are to be seen, which were manifested in other ways before the Christian era. There is the great West of Italy, Gaul and Africa, Latin in outlook, but with strong local variations. There is the region of Asia Minor and Greece,--where the church is h.e.l.lenistic in every sense of the word, very Greek upon the surface and less Greek underneath, again with marked contrasts due to geography and race-distribution. Again there is the Christian South--Alexandria, with its Christian community, Greek and {142} Jewish, and a little known hinterland, where Christian thought spread, we do not know how.

There was Palestine with a group of Jewish Christians, very clearly differentiated. And Eastward there rose a Syrian Christendom, which as late as the fourth century kept a character of its own.[1]

Into all these great divisions of the world came men eager to tell "good news"--generally quite commonplace and unimportant people with a "treasure in earthen vessels." Their message they put in various ways, with the aphasia of ill-educated men, who have something to tell that is far too big for any words at their command. It was made out at last that they meant a new relation to G.o.d in virtue of Jesus Christ. From a philosophic point of view they talked "foolishness," and they lapsed now and then, under the pressure of what was within them, into inarticulate and unintelligible talk, from which they might emerge into utterance quite beyond their ordinary range. Such symptoms were familiar enough, but these people were not like the usual exponents of "theolepsy" and "enthusiasm." They were astonishingly upright, pure and honest; they were serious; and they had in themselves inexplicable reserves of moral force and a happiness far beyond anything that the world knew. They were men transfigured, as they owned. Some would confess to wasted and evil lives, but something had happened,[2] which they connected with Jesus or a holy spirit, but everything in the long run turned upon Jesus.

Clearer heads came about them, and then, as they put it, the holy spirit fell upon them also. These men of education and ideas were "converted," and began at once to a.n.a.lyse their experience, using naturally the language with which they were familiar. It was these men who gave the tone to the groups of believers in their various regions, and that tone varied with the colour of thought in which the more reflective converts had grown up. A great deal, of course, was common to all regions of the world,--the new story and the new experience, an unphilosophized group of facts, which now, under the stimulus of man's unconquerable habit of speculation, began to be interpreted {143} and to be related in all sorts of ways to the general experience of men.

No wonder there was diversity. It took centuries to achieve a uniform account of the Christian faith.

The unity of the early church lay in the reconciliation with G.o.d, in the holy spirit, and Jesus Christ,--a unity soon felt and treasured.

"There is one body and one spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one G.o.d and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in you all."[3] The whole body of Christians was conscious of its unity, of its distinctness and its separation. It was a "peculiar people"[4]--G.o.d's own; a "third race," as the heathen said.[5]

[Sidenote: The recruits]

To go further into detail we may consider the recruits and their experience, their explanations of this experience, and the new life in the world.

The recruits came, as the Christians very soon saw, from every race of mankind, and they brought with them much that was of value in national preconceptions and characteristics. The presence of Jew, Greek, Roman, Syrian and Phrygian, made it impossible for the church to be anything but universal; and if at times her methods of reconciling somewhat incompatible contributions were unscientific, still in practice she achieved the task and gained accordingly. Where the Empire failed in imposing unity by decree, the church produced it instinctively.

It was on Jewish ground that Christianity began, and it was from its native soil and air that it drew, trans.m.u.ting as it drew them, its pa.s.sionate faith in One G.o.d, its high moral standard and its lofty hopes of a Messianic age to come. For no other race of the Mediterranean world was the moral law based on the "categoric imperative." Nowhere else was that law written in the inward parts, in the very hearts of the people,[6] and nowhere was it observed so loyally. The absurdity and scrupulosity which the Greek ridiculed in the Jew, were the outcome of his devotion to the law of the Lord; and, when once the law was reinterpreted and taken to a higher plane by Jesus, the {144} old pa.s.sion turned naturally to the new morality. It was the Jew who brought to the common Christian stock the conception of Sin, and the significance of this is immense in the history of the religion. It differentiated Christianity from all the religious and philosophical systems of the ancient world.

'Tis the faith that launched point-blank her dart At the head of a lie--taught Original Sin, The Corruption of Man's Heart.

Seneca and the Stoics played with the fancy of man's being equal, or in some points superior, to G.o.d--a folly impossible for a Jewish mind. It was the Jews who gave the world the "oracles of G.o.d" in the Old Testament, who invested Christianity for the moment with the dignity of an ancient history and endowed it for all time with a unique inheritance of religious experience. Nor is it only the Old Testament that the church owes to the Jew; for the Gospels are also his gift--anchors in the actual that have saved Christianity from all kinds of intellectual, spiritual and ecclesiastical perils. And, further, at the difficult moment of transition, when Christian ideas pa.s.sed from the Jewish to the Gentile world, there were Jews of the h.e.l.lenistic type ready to mediate the change. They of all men stood most clearly at the universal point of view; they knew the grandeur and the weakness of the law; they understood at once the Jewish and the Greek mind. It is hard to exaggerate what Christianity owes to men of this school--to Paul and to "John," and to a host of others, Christian Jews of the Dispersion, students of Philo, and followers of Jesus. On Jewish soil the new faith died; it was transplantation alone that made Christianity possible; for it was the true outcome of the teaching of Jesus, that the new faith should be universal.

The chief contribution of the Greek was his demand for this very thing--that Christianity must be universal. He made no secret of his contempt for Judaism, and he was emphatic in insisting on a larger outlook than the Jewish. No man could seem more naturally unlikely to welcome the thoughts of Jesus than the "little Greek" (_Graaeculus_) of the Roman world; yet he was won; and then by making it impossible for Christianity to remain an amalgam of the ideas of Jesus and of Jewish law, {145} the Greek really secured the triumph of Jesus. He eliminated the tribal and the temporary in the Gospel as it came from purely Jewish teachers, and, with all his irregularities of conduct and his flightiness of thought, he nevertheless set Jesus before the world as the central figure of all history and of all existence.[7] Even the faults of the Greek have indirectly served the church; for the Gospels gained their place in men's minds and hearts, because they were the real refuge from the vagaries of Greek speculation, and offered the ultimate means of verifying every hypothesis. The historic Jesus is never of such consequence to us as when the great intellects tell us that the true and only heaven is Nephelococcygia. For Aristophanes was right--it was the real Paradise of the Greek mind. What relief the plain matter-of-fact Gospel must have brought men in a world, where nothing throve like these cities of the clouds, would be inconceivable, if we did not know its value still. While we recognize the real contribution of the Greek Christians, it is good to see what Christianity meant to men who were not Greeks.

[Sidenote: Tatian]

There was one Christian of some note in the second century, whose att.i.tude toward everything Greek is original and interesting. Tatian was "born in the land of the a.s.syrians."[8] He travelled widely in the Graeco-Roman world,[9] and studied rhetoric like a Greek; he gave attention to the great collections of Greek art in Rome--monuments of shame, he called them. He was admitted to the mysteries, but he became shocked at the cruelty and licentiousness tolerated and encouraged by paganism. While in this mind, seeking for the truth, "it befel that I lit upon some barbarian writings, older than the dogmata of the Greeks, divine in their contrast with Greek error; and it befel too that I was convinced by them, because, their style was simple, because there was an absence of artifice in the speakers, because the structure of the whole was intelligible, and also because of the fore-knowledge of future {146} events, the excellence of the precepts and the subordination of the whole universe to One Ruler (_t ton holon monarchikon_). My soul was taught of G.o.d, and I understood that while Greek literature (_ta men_) leads to condemnation, this ends our slavery in the world and rescues us from rulers manifold and ten thousand tyrants."[10] He now repudiated the Greeks and all their works, the grammarians who "set the letters of the alphabet to quarrel among themselves,"[11] the philosophers with their long hair and long nails and vanity,[12] the actors, poets and legislators; and "saying good-bye to Roman pride and Attic pedantry (_psychrologia_) I laid hold of our barbarian philosophy."[13] He made the first harmony of the Gospels--an early witness to the power of their sheer simplicity in a world of literary affectations.

Another famous Syrian of the century was Ignatius of Antioch, whose story is collected from seven letters he wrote, in haste and excitement, as he travelled to Rome to be thrown to the beasts in the arena--his guards in the meantime being as fierce as any leopards. The burden of them all is that Jesus Christ _truly_ suffered on the cross.

Men around him spoke of a phantom crucified by the deluded soldiers amid the deluded Jews.--No! cries Ignatius, over and over, he _truly_ suffered, he _truly_ rose, ate and drank, and was no daemon without a body (_daimonion asomaton_)--none of it is _seeming_, it is all truly, truly, truly.[14] He has been called hysterical, and his position might make any nervous man hysterical--death before him, his Lord's reality denied, and only time for one word--_Truly_. Before we pa.s.s him by, let us take a quieter saying of his to ill.u.s.trate the deepest thought of himself and his age--"He that hath the word of Jesus truly can hear his silence also."[15]