The Life of Jesus Part 6

[Footnote 3: Book iii., 97-817.]

[Footnote 4: Esther vi. 13, vii. 10, viii. 7, 11-17, ix. 1-22; and in the apocryphal parts, ix. 10, 11, xiv. 13, and following, xvi. 20, 24.]

[Footnote 5: Eccl. i. 11, ii. 16, 18-24, iii. 19-22, iv. 8, 15, 16, v.

17, 18, vi. 3, 6, viii. 15, ix. 9, 10.]

A gigantic dream haunted for centuries the Jewish people, constantly renewing its youth in its decrepitude. A stranger to the theory of individual recompense, which Greece diffused under the name of the immortality of the soul, Judea concentrated all its power of love and desire upon the national future. She thought she possessed divine promises of a boundless future; and as the bitter reality, from the ninth century before our era, gave more and more the dominion of the world to physical force, and brutally crushed these aspirations, she took refuge in the union of the most impossible ideas, and attempted the strangest gyrations. Before the captivity, when all the earthly hopes of the nation had become weakened by the separation of the northern tribes, they dreamt of the restoration of the house of David, the reconciliation of the two divisions of the people, and the triumph of theocracy and the worship of Jehovah over idolatry. At the epoch of the captivity, a poet, full of harmony, saw the splendor of a future Jerusalem, of which the peoples and the distant isles should be tributaries, under colors so charming, that one might say a glimpse of the visions of Jesus had reached him at a distance of six centuries.[1]

[Footnote 1: Isaiah lx. &c.]

The victory of Cyrus seemed at one time to realize all that had been hoped. The grave disciples of the Avesta and the adorers of Jehovah believed themselves brothers. Persia had begun by banishing the multiple _devas_, and by transforming them into demons (_divs_), to draw from the old Arian imaginations (essentially naturalistic) a species of Monotheism. The prophetic tone of many of the teachings of Iran had much a.n.a.logy with certain compositions of Hosea and Isaiah.

Israel reposed under the Achemenidae,[1] and under Xerxes (Ahasuerus) made itself feared by the Iranians themselves. But the triumphal and often cruel entry of Greek and Roman civilization into Asia, threw it back upon its dreams. More than ever it invoked the Messiah as judge and avenger of the people. A complete renovation, a revolution which should shake the world to its very foundation, was necessary in order to satisfy the enormous thirst of vengeance excited in it by the sense of its superiority, and by the sight of its humiliation.[2]

[Footnote 1: The whole book of Esther breathes a great attachment to this dynasty.]

[Footnote 2: Apocryphal letter of Baruch, in Fabricius, _Cod. pseud., V.T._, ii. p. 147, and following.]

If Israel had possessed the spiritualistic doctrine, which divides man in two parts--the body and the soul--and finds it quite natural that while the body decays, the soul should survive, this paroxysm of rage and of energetic protestation would have had no existence. But such a doctrine, proceeding from the Grecian philosophy, was not in the traditions of the Jewish mind. The ancient Hebrew writings contain no trace of future rewards or punishments. Whilst the idea of the solidarity of the tribe existed, it was natural that a strict retribution according to individual merits should not be thought of.

So much the worse for the pious man who happened to live in an epoch of impiety; he suffered, like the rest, the public misfortunes consequent on the general irreligion. This doctrine, bequeathed by the sages of the patriarchal era, constantly produced unsustainable contradictions. Already at the time of Job it was much shaken; the old men of Teman who professed it were considered behind the age, and the young Elihu, who intervened in order to combat them, dared to utter as his first word this essentially revolutionary sentiment, "Great men are not always wise; neither do the aged understand judgment."[1]

With the complications which had taken place in the world since the time of Alexander, the old Temanite and Mosaic principle became still more intolerable.[2] Never had Israel been more faithful to the Law, and yet it was subjected to the atrocious persecution of Antiochus.

Only a declaimer, accustomed to repeat old phrases denuded of meaning, would dare to a.s.sert that these evils proceeded from the unfaithfulness of the people.[3] What! these victims who died for their faith, these heroic Maccabees, this mother with her seven sons, will Jehovah forget them eternally? Will he abandon them to the corruption of the grave?[4] Worldly and incredulous Sadduceeism might possibly not recoil before such a consequence, and a consummate sage, like Antigonus of Soco,[5] might indeed maintain that we must not practise virtue like a slave in expectation of a recompense, that we must be virtuous without hope. But the ma.s.s of the people could not be contented with that. Some, attaching themselves to the principle of philosophical immortality, imagined the righteous living in the memory of G.o.d, glorious forever in the remembrance of men, and judging the wicked who had persecuted them.[6] "They live in the sight of G.o.d; ...

they are known of G.o.d."[7] That was their reward. Others, especially the Pharisees, had recourse to the doctrine of the resurrection.[8]

The righteous will live again in order to partic.i.p.ate in the Messianic reign. They will live again in the flesh, and for a world of which they will be the kings and the judges; they will be present at the triumph of their ideas and at the humiliation of their enemies.

[Footnote 1: Job x.x.xiii. 9.]

[Footnote 2: It is nevertheless remarkable that Jesus, son of Sirach, adheres to it strictly (chap. xvii. 26-28, xxii. 10, 11, x.x.x. 4, and following, xli. 1, 2, xliv. 9). The author of the book of _Wisdom_ holds quite opposite opinions (iv. 1, Greek text).]

[Footnote 3: Esth. xiv. 6, 7 (apocr.); the apocryphal Epistle of Baruch (Fabricius, _Cod. pseud., V.T._, ii. p. 147, and following).]

[Footnote 4: 2 _Macc._ vii.]

[Footnote 5: _Pirke Aboth._, i. 3.]

[Footnote 6: _Wisdom_, ii.-vi.; _De Rationis Imperio_, attributed to Josephus, 8, 13, 16, 18. Still we must remark that the author of this last treatise estimates the motive of personal recompense in a secondary degree. The primary impulse of martyrs is the pure love of the Law, the advantage which their death will procure to the people, and the glory which will attach to their name. Comp. _Wisdom_, iv. 1, and following; _Eccl._ xliv., and following; Jos., _B.J._, II. viii.

10, III. viii. 5.]

[Footnote 7: _Wisdom_, iv. 1; _De Rat. Imp._, 16, 18.]

[Footnote 8: 2 _Macc._, vii. 9, 14, xii. 43, 44.]

We find among the ancient people of Israel only very indecisive traces of this fundamental dogma. The Sadducee, who did not believe it, was in reality faithful to the old Jewish doctrine; it was the Pharisee, the believer in the resurrection, who was the innovator. But in religion it is always the zealous sect which innovates, which progresses, and which has influence. Besides this, the resurrection, an idea totally different from that of the immortality of the soul, proceeded very naturally from the anterior doctrines and from the position of the people. Perhaps Persia also furnished some of its elements.[1] In any case, combining with the belief in the Messiah, and with the doctrine of a speedy renewal of all things, it formed those apocalyptic theories which, without being articles of faith (the orthodox Sanhedrim of Jerusalem does not seem to have adopted them), pervaded all imaginations, and produced an extreme fermentation from one end of the Jewish world to the other. The total absence of dogmatic rigor caused very contradictory notions to be admitted at one time, even upon so primary a point Sometimes the righteous were to await the resurrection;[2] sometimes they were to be received at the moment of death into Abraham's bosom;[3] sometimes the resurrection was to be general;[4] sometimes it was to be reserved only for the faithful;[5] sometimes it supposed a renewed earth and a new Jerusalem; sometimes it implied a previous annihilation of the universe.

[Footnote 1: Theopompus, in _Diog. Laert._, Proem, 9. _Boundehesch_, x.x.xi. The traces of the doctrine of the resurrection in the Avesta are very doubtful.]

[Footnote 2: John xi. 24.]

[Footnote 3: Luke xvi. 22. Cf. _De Rationis Imp._, 13, 16, 18.]

[Footnote 4: Dan. xii. 2.]

[Footnote 5: 2 _Macc._ vii. 14.]

Jesus, as soon as he began to think, entered into the burning atmosphere which was created in Palestine by the ideas we have just stated. These ideas were taught in no school; but they were in the very air, and his soul was early penetrated by them. Our hesitations and our doubts never reached him. On this summit of the mountain of Nazareth, where no man can sit to-day without an uneasy, though it may be a frivolous, feeling about his destiny, Jesus sat often untroubled by a doubt. Free from selfishness--that source of our troubles, which makes us seek with eagerness a reward for virtue beyond the tomb--he thought only of his work, of his race, and of humanity. Those mountains, that sea, that azure sky, those high plains in the horizon, were for him not the melancholy vision of a soul which interrogates Nature upon her fate, but the certain symbol, the transparent shadow, of an invisible world, and of a new heaven.

He never attached much importance to the political events of his time, and he probably knew little about them. The court of the Herods formed a world so different to his, that he doubtless knew it only by name.

Herod the Great died about the year in which Jesus was born, leaving imperishable remembrances--monuments which must compel the most malevolent posterity to a.s.sociate his name with that of Solomon; nevertheless, his work was incomplete, and could not be continued.

Profanely ambitious, and lost in a maze of religious controversies, this astute Idumean had the advantage which coolness and judgment, stripped of morality, give over pa.s.sionate fanatics. But his idea of a secular kingdom of Israel, even if it had not been an anachronism in the state of the world in which it was conceived, would inevitably have miscarried, like the similar project which Solomon formed, owing to the difficulties proceeding from the character of the nation. His three sons were only lieutenants of the Romans, a.n.a.logous to the rajahs of India under the English dominion. Antipater, or Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and of Peraea, of whom Jesus was a subject all his life, was an idle and useless prince,[1] a favorite and flatterer of Tiberius,[2] and too often misled by the bad influence of his second wife, Herodias.[3] Philip, tetrarch of Gaulonitis and Batanea, into whose dominions Jesus made frequent journeys, was a much better sovereign.[4] As to Archelaus, ethnarch of Jerusalem, Jesus could not know him, for he was about ten years old when this man, who was weak and without character, though sometimes violent, was deposed by Augustus.[5] The last trace of self-government was thus lost to Jerusalem. United to Samaria and Idumea, Judea formed a kind of dependency of the province of Syria, in which the senator Publius Sulpicius Quirinus, well known as consul,[6] was the imperial legate.

A series of Roman procurators, subordinate in important matters to the imperial legate of Syria--Coponius, Marcus Ambivius, Annius Rufus, Valerius Gratus, and lastly (in the twenty-sixth year of our era), Pontius Pilate[7]--followed each other, and were constantly occupied in extinguishing the volcano which was seething beneath their feet.

[Footnote 1: Jos., _Ant._, VIII. v. 1, vii. 1 and 2; Luke iii. 19.]

[Footnote 2: Ibid., XVIII. ii. 3, iv. 5, v. 1.]

[Footnote 3: Ibid., XVIII. vii. 2.]

[Footnote 4: Ibid., XVIII. iv. 6.]

[Footnote 5: Ibid., XVII. xii. 2; and _B.J._, II. vii. 3.]

[Footnote 6: Orelli, _Inscr. Lat._, No. 3693; Henzen, _Suppl._, No.

7041; _Fasti praenestini_, on the 6th of March, and on the 28th of April (in the _Corpus Inscr. Lat._, i. 314, 317); Borghesi, _Fastes Consulaires_ (yet unedited), in the year 742; R. Bergmann, _De Inscr.

Lat. ad. P.S. Quirinium, ut videtur, referenda_ (Berlin, 1851). Cf.

Tac., _Ann._, ii. 30, iii. 48; Strabo, XII. vi. 5.]

[Footnote 7: Jos., _Ant._, l. XVIII.]

Continual seditions, excited by the zealots of Mosaism, did not cease, in fact, to agitate Jerusalem during all this time.[1] The death of the seditious was certain; but death, when the integrity of the Law was in question, was sought with avidity. To overturn the Roman eagle, to destroy the works of art raised by the Herods, in which the Mosaic regulations were not always respected[2]--to rise up against the votive escutcheons put up by the procurators, the inscriptions of which appeared tainted with idolatry[3]--were perpetual temptations to fanatics, who had reached that degree of exaltation which removes all care for life. Judas, son of Sariphea, Matthias, son of Margaloth, two very celebrated doctors of the law, formed against the established order a boldly aggressive party, which continued after their execution.[4] The Samaritans were agitated by movements of a similar nature.[5] The Law had never counted a greater number of impa.s.sioned disciples than at this time, when he already lived who, by the full authority of his genius and of his great soul, was about to abrogate it. The "Zelotes" (Kenam), or "Sicarii," pious a.s.sa.s.sins, who imposed on themselves the task of killing whoever in their estimation broke the Law, began to appear.[6] Representatives of a totally different spirit, the Thaumaturges, considered as in some sort divine, obtained credence in consequence of the imperious want which the age experienced for the supernatural and the divine.[7]

[Footnote 1: Ibid., the books XVI. and XVIII. entirely, and _B.J._, books I. and II.]

[Footnote 2: Jos., _Ant._, XV. x. 4. Compare Book of Enoch, xcvii. 13, 14.]

[Footnote 3: Philo, _Leg. ad Caium_, -- 38.]

[Footnote 4: Jos., _Ant._, XVII. vi. 2, and following; _B.J._, I.

x.x.xiii. 3, and following.]

[Footnote 5: Jos., _Ant._, XVIII. iv. 1, and following.]

[Footnote 6: Mishnah, _Sanhedrim_, ix. 6; John xvi. 2; Jos., _B.J._, book IV., and following.]

[Footnote 7: _Acts_ viii. 9. Verse 11 leads us to suppose that Simon the magician was already famous in the time of Jesus.]

A movement which had much more influence upon Jesus was that of Judas the Gaulonite, or Galilean. Of all the exactions to which the country newly conquered by Rome was subjected, the census was the most unpopular.[1] This measure, which always astonishes people unaccustomed to the requirements of great central administrations, was particularly odious to the Jews. We see that already, under David, a numbering of the people provoked violent recriminations, and the menaces of the prophets.[2] The census, in fact, was the basis of taxation; now taxation, to a pure theocracy, was almost an impiety.

G.o.d being the sole Master whom man ought to recognize, to pay t.i.the to a secular sovereign was, in a manner, to put him in the place of G.o.d.

Completely ignorant of the idea of the State, the Jewish theocracy only acted up to its logical induction--the negation of civil society and of all government. The money of the public treasury was accounted stolen money.[3] The census ordered by Quirinus (in the year 6 of the Christian era) powerfully reawakened these ideas, and caused a great fermentation. An insurrection broke out in the northern provinces. One Judas, of the town of Gamala, upon the eastern sh.o.r.e of the Lake of Tiberias, and a Pharisee named Sadoc, by denying the lawfulness of the tax, created a numerous party, which soon broke out in open revolt.[4]

The fundamental maxims of this party were--that they ought to call no man "master," this t.i.tle belonging to G.o.d alone; and that liberty was better than life. Judas had, doubtless, many other principles, which Josephus, always careful not to compromise his co-religionists, designedly suppresses; for it is impossible to understand how, for so simple an idea, the Jewish historian should give him a place among the philosophers of his nation, and should regard him as the founder of a fourth school, equal to those of the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes. Judas was evidently the chief of a Galilean sect, deeply imbued with the Messianic idea, and which became a political movement.

The procurator, Coponius, crushed the sedition of the Gaulonite; but the school remained, and preserved its chiefs. Under the leadership of Menahem, son of the founder, and of a certain Eleazar, his relative, we find them again very active in the last contests of the Jews against the Romans.[5] Perhaps Jesus saw this Judas, whose idea of the Jewish revolution was so different from his own; at all events, he knew his school, and it was probably to avoid his error that he p.r.o.nounced the axiom upon the penny of Caesar. Jesus, more wise, and far removed from all sedition, profited by the fault of his predecessor, and dreamed of another kingdom and another deliverance.